Semicolon Spring 2019

Spring 2019

AN ARTS AND HUMANITIES STUDENTS’ COUNCIL PUBLICATION

Semicolon VOLUME 6

ISSUE 2

SPRING 2019

Copyrights remain with the artists and authors. The responsibility for the content in this publication remains with the artists and authors. The content does not reflect the opinions of the Arts and Humanities Students’ Council (AHSC) or the University Students’ Council (USC). The AHSC and USC assume no liability for any errors, inaccuracies, or omissions contained in this publication.

LET TER FROM THE EDITOR As famed American poet and imagist William Carlos Williams once wrote: so much depends upon an empty microsoft word document graced by filtered language combinations of art and theory (Haha.) …Well perhaps that isn’t exactly how it goes, but nevertheless I hope you enjoy the provocative, imaginative, and well-crafted pieces published in this semester’s issue of Semicolon. It has truly been a pleasure serving as Editor-in-Chief this academic year and reading all of the excellent work produced by the students in our faculty. I am, once again, incredibly grateful to the Arts & Humanities Students Council, and to our very own Publications Team, for their tireless work in seeing these journals to fruition. We hope you enjoy.

Camille Intson Publications Editor-in-Chief

W HAT W E ’ R E A B O U T Semicolon is published bi-annually by the Arts and Humanities Students’ Council of the University of Western Ontario. Semicolon is generously funded by the Arts and Humanities Student Donation Fund. The Publications Team would like to thank the Donation Fund Committee, the students who submitted their creative works, and the rest of the Publications Committee who volunteered for the essay review board.

Semicolon accepts A-grade essays from any Arts and Humanities undergraduate student within the University of Western Ontario. To view previous editions or for more information about Symposium, please contact the Arts and Humanities Students’ Council in Room 2135 in University College.

SPECIAL THANKS TO THE PUBLICATIONS COMMITTEE: Editor-in-Chief VP Communications Academic Managing Editor Creative Managing Editor Copy Editor Layout Editor

Camille Intson Alicia Johnson Roshana Ghaedi Aislyn Higgins James Gagnon Megan Levine

Table of Contents 1 Taking the Citizen from Citizenship: The Collective Voice that is Stripped from Black Bodies in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

by James Gagnon 5 Ascending Reason: The Necessarily Existent One

by Ahsif Khair Mohammad 9 Forsaking the Good Citizen: Control Over Mind and Body in Between the World and Me

by Nara Monteiro 14 Melodrama and the Eccentric in In Memoriam and Jude the Obscure: Paving the Way for Gender Erasure

by Caitlyn Dubé 20 Christian Mysticism and Self-Surrender in Pursuit of Grace in T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” and Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace

by Camille Intson

27 The Cyclical Nature of Eros

by Abbey Horner 30 “All the lond schuld of hym speke”: Reputation and Masculinity in Chestre’s Sir Launfal

by Alina Kleinsasser 34 Throwing Stones at Glass Houses: The Madness of Healing in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing

by Erin Anderson 36 Trauma, Photography, and Fragmentation in Timothy Findley’s The Wars

by Rose Ghaedi 42 “Who’s Your Daddy”: How Pull Ups’ “Cool Alert” “Gavin” Commercial will Corner Gen X New-Mothers Market by Playing off of Target’s Insecure Attachment with own Boomer Parents

by Julia Sebastien

Taking the Citizen from Citizenship: The Collective Voice that is Stripped from Black Bodies in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen James Gagnon

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Microaggressions and the erasure of Black Bodies is abundantly laced in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American Lyric (2014). The trauma for Rankine is something that affects the everyday life of Black Americans. She states that, “The past is a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow” (71). This is to say that the racist structures in America are an inescapable ‘life sentence.’ Rankine’s use of ‘blunt instrument’ holds a sort of double meaning.

In one instance, ‘blunt’ could be referring to the instrument being used so much that it has become worn over time, or it could be referring to something being straightforward.

In other words, the past is an institution of imprisonment that consistently repeats itself as a straightforward notion. Citizen, explores the same themes and motifs in modern day America that were also explored by Claude McKay in the early twentieth century, specifically drawing attention to “The Lynching” and “Outcast” comparable to modern day asphyxia and alienation. In this regard, Rankine’s Citizen assumes the traumatised collective voice of Black Bodies in America. It is a commentary on how racial tension in the United States has not dissipated since the birth of the country, and through microaggressions and the erasure of Black Bodies, echoes the history of trauma.

To understand Rankine’s work, microaggressions must first be defined and understood.

A microaggression is defined as “brief and commonplace daily, verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color” (Esfandiari 9).

These aggressions are part of a much larger issue surrounding racist structures in America.

As Rankine observes, “certain moments send adrenaline to the heart, dry out the tongue, and clog the lungs” (Rankine 14). In Negar Esfandiari’s article “The Devil is in the Details,” she discusses how American society suppresses Black culture, “People’s unwillingness to understand the context, pronunciation, and importance of my name had coached me into a silence that physically affected me” (Esfandiari 7). Microaggressions in this regard have a physical impact on the bodies of Black Americans. Esfandiari further goes on to explain that, “I had panic attacks during attendance … Every new person I met, I had to prepare to explain myself ” (7). From this, there is an anxiety that directly relates to sacrificing Black culture and submitting to White America. When encountered with a microaggression, Esfandiari equates it to “death by 1,000 cuts” (9). With that in mind, understanding academic scholar, Cathy Caruth, and her premise in Unclaimed Experience, that “Trauma has confronted us not only with a simple pathology but also with a fundamental enigma concerning the psyche’s relation to reality” (Caruth 194). This is to say that historic and modern trauma for Black Americans has a great effect on their psyche. More on the idea of the ‘death by 1,000 cuts,’ Rankine illustrates that microaggressions are like rain. Rankine explains, “Yes, and it’s raining.

Each moment is like this – before it can be known, categorised as similar to another thing

and dismissed, it has to be experienced, it has to be seen” (Rankine 16). Each microaggression is like a raindrop, though they may not do much to make something wet on their own, an abundance of them results in a soaking. Rankine continues, “And as light as the rain seems, it still rains down on you” (16). This reiterates the fact that despite microaggressions seeming small, the volume of them creates a trauma. Rain, like microaggressions, are seemingly invisible.

Invisibility through microaggressions is a primary topic discussed in Rankine’s work.

The first image in Citizen is of a street in a suburban neighbourhood called “Jim Crow Rd” (Rankine 12). In this image, the houses are white and the only car is the image is white. This image emphasises the absence of blackness within suburbia. It is important to note that the panning of suburbs and white flight is the planning of inner-cities, it provides a feeling of supposed safety. This is because the suburbs were meant to be an escape for White Americans from Black Americans. (Kraayenbrink). Furthermore, Rankine includes an obvious instance of microaggressions that make Black Americans invisibile. In line at a drugstore, a man cuts in front of the narrator, “The cashier says, Sir, she was next. When he turns to you he is truly surprised. Oh my God I didn’t see you. You must be in a hurry, you offer. No, no, no, I really didn’t see you” (Rankine 87). In this regard, the narrator offers the chance for a redemption of sorts to the line-cutter, yet he is so insistent on establishing her invisibility that he rejects this and uses it as an opportunity to reassert his position. Another instance of invisibility is brought about when a woman mistakes the narrator’s name for the name of another woman.

She writes that “and in your mail the apology note appears referring to ‘our mistake’” (53).

The use of ‘our’ implies the ‘us versus them’ mentality, a failure of recognising individual fault.

This illustrates that the Black Body is being erased through language. Rankine comments on this saying that, “Apparently your own invisibility is the real problem causing her confusion” (53). It is the instance of invisibility in Citizen that Claude McKay’s “Outcast” is highlighted.

McKay writes that “I must walk the way of life a ghost” (“Outcast” 11). For one, the title, “Outcast” already implies that there is alienation, and this notion of alienation is accented by title of ghost. To think of ghosts is to think of death, and death is a trauma that is beyond lived experience. So when McKay refers to his narrator as a ghost, the implication is that the narrator is living as the embodiment of trauma. Moreover, ghosts are often thought of to be invisible, therefore there is this double meaning in which the Black Body is one that is traumatised so much so that it has become an invisible entity, as demonstrated by the microaggressions in Citizen and in McKay’s “Outcast.” There is a repetition of history, which as the past was discussed earlier by Rankine as “a life sentence, a blunt instrument aimed at tomorrow” (Rankine 71). This repetition is important because it is symbolic of a cycle of trauma. As Caruth writes, “Repetition, in other words, is not simply the attempt to grasp that one has almost died but, more fundamentally and enigmatically, the very attempt to claim one’s own survival” (Caruth 139). The notion of survival is further exemplified in “Outcast” when McKay writes, “Something in me is lost, forever lost, forever lost, / Some vital thing has gone out of my heart” (“Outcast” 9-10). Like the subjects in Citizen, the narrator in “Outcast” 2

has lost something vital, alienation forces the individual to lose that sense of individuality. It is of note that from lines 9 to 14 in “Outcast” there are not any periods to conclude a sentence until after line 14, “Under the white man’s menace, out of time” (14). It is here that there is a sense of breathlessness, a desperate attempt to finish what the narrator is trying to say and this is emphasised when the narrator says ‘out of time.’

Microaggressions are furthermore, a state of asphyxiation. Academic scholar, Shermaine M. Jones explains in her article, “‘I CAN’T BREATHE!,’” that microaggressions are attributed to an adrenaline rush, “Adrenaline is typically released during times of great anger, excitement, or fear and is usually associated with the heart racing, sweating, and the body’s fight-or-flight response to perceived danger” (Jones 2). For Jones, microaggressions in Citizen are a form of what she calls “affective asphyxia” (2). Affective asphyxia is used to describe the “expectation that black people must choke down the rage, fear, grief, and other emotions that arise when confronted with racism and racial microaggressions” (2). This is examined in Rankine’s work when she discusses the case of Serena Williams. There is an “explosive behavior of Serna Williams … she decides finally to respond to all of it with a string of incentives … Oh my God, she’s gone crazy, you say to no one” (Rankine 32-3). The racial structure present in this instance is that Black Bodies need to be policed and restricted as means to control their anger and their behaviour. Along the lines of suppression and asphyxiation, microaggressions in relation to affective asphyxia are comparable to a modernday lynching. In Claude McKay’s “The Lynching,” states that a lynching is “the cruelest way of pain” (“The Lynching” 2). A lynch is a barbaric form of murder, and is death by asphyxiation.

In Citizen, as Jones comments, “the violence is to the larynx. Commonly referred to as the voicebox, this hollow organ, which forms an air passage to the lungs and holds the vocal cords, it is vical for respiratory function (breathing) and sound production (speaking)” (Jones 3). Moreover, the images of a modern lynching, or asphyxiation, is presented in the front cover of Citizen, “a black hoodie … suspended in and against the white space of the book cover … [the hoodie] is cut off at the throat. There is violence to the larynx, air passage, and voicebox” (3). Similarily, in McKay’s poem, the lynch victim is “Hung pitifully o’er the swinging char” (“The Lynching” 8). The image that McKay describes is gruesome, and juxtaposes the image on the cover of Citizen where the body is removed. The empty hoodie alludes to the erasure of Black Bodies as discussed before; racist institutions in America aim to erase the Black Body. Jones comments on the image of lynching as well, “the hanging or suspension of the hoodie in space also recalls the haunting legacy of lynching; hanging frequently results in death by suffocation” (3). In addition to the topic of lynching, the final couplet in “The Lynching” paints the normalcy, the spectacle of this act of murder, “And little lads, lynchers that were to be, / Danced round the dreadful thing in fiendish glee” (“The Lynching 13-4). There is a disturbing image of children not understanding the gravity of the lynching. In Citizen this same lack of understanding is demonstrated by the so called ‘friends’ of the narrator, “You are rushing to meet a friend in a distant neighborhood of Santa Monica.

This friend says, as you walk toward her, You are late, you nappy-headed ho” (Rankine 51).

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There is a lack of understanding on behalf of the friend. Rankine continues, “she keeps insisting [this] is a joke, a joke stuck in her throat (52). Referencing the microaggression as a joke distracts from the fact that it is an act of racism and additionally distracts from the gravity of the situation. Racist institutions, as well as social, prevent the narrator from reacting with anger as a means to preserve peace, in a sense. The historical racist connotations between Rankine and McKay is a commentary on how the past has not change from the present and that the collective trauma of Black Americans echoes this trauma.

Overall, through microaggressions and the erasure of Black Bodies, Rankine’s Citizen is the traumatised collective voice of Black Americans as racist institutions in the United States have not been dismantled. There is a history of trauma as the United States was built on a slave economy. Through the examination of Claudia Rankine’s work and the poems by Claude McKay, it is plain to see that there is still an abundance of racist structures in America.

Though, not as obvious, the structures simply evolved. Negar Esfandiari states that “Agency … starts with simple acts of validation” (Esfandiari 12). Rankine, however, does not intend for this to be a defeatist view like McKay. McKay had a fatalist view in which Black Americans would never reach a state of equality. Rankine, on the other hand, only hopes to draw attention to the work that still needs to be done, to provide agency for Black Americans.

Works Cited Caruth, Cathy. Unclaimed Experience: Trauma, Narrative and History. The Johns Hopkins University Press,

1996. iBooks.

Esfandiari, Negar. “The Devil is in the Details: Microaggressions are a Public Health Issue.”

Women’s Health Activist, Summer 2018, p. 8. Business Collection, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/ doc/A557705137/GPS?u=oakv28633&sid=GPS&xid=7258b3d0.

Jones, Shermaine M. “’I CAN’T BREATHE!’ Affective Asphyxia in Claudia Rankine’s Citizen: An American

Lyric.” South: A Scholarly Journal, vol. 50, no. 1, 2017, p. 37+. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup. com/apps/doc/A553114690/GPS?u=oakv28633&sid=GPS&xid=e689bca0.

Kraayenbrink, Taylor. “Claudia Rankine’s Citizen, An American Lyric.” US Literature and Civil Rights. 29 November 2018, Western University, London, ON. Lecture.

McKay, Claude. “The Lynching”. US Literature and Civil Rights. Compiled by Taylor Kraayenbrink.

2018. 64.

McKay, Claude. “Outcast”. US Literature and Civil Rights. Compiled by Taylor Kraayenbrink. 2018. 65.

Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Greywolf Press, 2014. iBooks.

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Ascending Reason: The Necessarily Existent One Ahsif Khair Mohammad

Ibn Tufayl’s Hayy Ibn Yaqzan, a 12th century Islamic philosophical allegory, presents an extrapolation of human reason that leads to one singular axiom: ‘The Necessarily Existent One’. Tufayl’s main character Hayy grows up on his own away from human contact. Gifted with powers of deduction and intellect, Hayy gains insight and knowledge throughout his life, that can be described as ascending reason. According to Tufayl, one must embark on a personal journey of introspection to enable the ascension of reason and for it to culminate in a realization of the Necessarily Existent One. Throughout the story, Tufayl repeatedly mentions that the ideas he is trying to communicate are elusive by nature and cannot be reconciled with human comprehension through reading and reasoning alone. Nevertheless, Tufayl uses reason itself, more specifically: the natural paradox within reason, in his explanation of The Necessarily Existent One. It is a confusing read that comes across as somewhat contradictory, but it is the contradiction that ultimately makes the argument. Paradoxically, it is the breakdown of reason, which is brought about by a reasonable argument; Tufayl’s is a simultaneously reasonable and unreasonable argument.

Hayy first encounters metaphysics when he begins to reason that different entities, or bodies, have qualitative tendencies, or predicates, that are specific to them. Hayy “searched for some one characteristic common to all objects, animate and inanimate, but the only thing he could find in all physical objects was extension in three dimensions” (70). He searched for something that exhibited extension (taking up space) exclusively and had no other quality.

He found that bodies taking up physical space could only exist in conjunction to some other predicate, and vice versa. Tufayl employs clay as a metaphor for matter in this experiment of Hayy’s:

He found that if he molded clay into some shape, for example into a ball, it had length, width, and depth in a certain ratio; if he then took his ball and worked it into a cube or egg shape, it’s length, width, and depth took on different proportions. But it was still the same clay; and, no matter what the ratio it could not be divested of length, breadth, and depth. The fact that one proportion could replace another made it apparent to him that the dimensions were a factor in their own right, distinct from the clay itself. But the fact that the clay was never totally void of dimensions made it plain to him that they were part of its being. (71)

Tufayl is asserting that certain qualities cannot exist physically within bodies but still must exist somehow. In the example above: the clay, whether in a ball or cube, is the same clay. The clay changes in what it is physically as it is shaped externally; it can be described as a ball or a cube when in those shapes but the ‘cubeness’ of the cube is not existent within the clay it is 5

made up of. When the clay is reshaped the cubeness is destroyed and cannot be found within the clay at all. Even as a cube, nothing about or in the clay itself save for its dimensions can be said to have cube form. The clay must take on some shape if it takes up space, for consistency consider it as a cube. Simultaneously, the cube cannot exist unless it is made of something, in this case clay. The clay cube cannot exist only as a cube or only as clay, it must be both. Yet, these are indeed separate things as discussed above with regards to cubeness. Therefore, the cube form, and any predicates, must be non-physical and expressed as attributes of the clay.

These predicates are what make bodies out of matter. The clay, a metaphor for matter, is a medium for non-physical predicates. Not just in their shape but in any other quality that is not extension: giving matter shape or tendency to act one way or another. The only physically existing quality of bodies is pure matter. Tufayl explains the relationship of a body’s tendencies to its physicality:

heavy objects have no buoyancy, and light ones no gravity; yet they remain bodies all the same. Thus over and above physicality has its own differentiating factor.

Clearly the substantiality of objects both heavy and light was compounded of two factors, the physicality they have in common, and linked with it either gravity or buoyancy—that is what moves them either upwards or downwards and makes them different. (64)

Pure matter with no tendencies or qualities (predicates) of temperature, movement, weight, shape, et cetera does not exist. As illustrated with cube form and clay, any existing body must have physical extension as well as non-physical features.

Hayy’s realization of physical extension and non-physical predicates as distinct is critical in understanding Tufayl’s ascension of reason. It is important to note that physical extension or any non-physical predicates on their own are not available to humans: either they are imperceptible or do not exist. However, Tufayl’s ascension of reason is better explained with a step that precedes it: the paradox inherent within reason. Any self-proving deduction is inherently paradoxical. For instance, consider this logical procession that attempts to reconcile one’s inability to know any truth certainly:

I know that I know nothing. But, to know that I know nothing means I must know something. And if I must know that I know nothing, how can I know nothing?

The first assertion disproves itself and presents yet another paradox. Further, it brings to attention another element that reason cannot reconcile: absolutely nothing. Unironically, nothing is something, in that non-existence itself is an existing notion. Yet, this deduction concerning the existence of the non-existent is based on an assertion that is self-contradictory in the first place. It is an extrapolation of what is technically untrue, in that one cannot know 6

that they know nothing if in fact they truly know nothing. The argument is based on reason, and is deduced reasonably, which requires it to be based on true prepositions. However, the argument’s conclusion proves its own prepositions wrong. If a reasonable argument is based on a true preposition, that leads to a reasonable deduction that the originally true preposition is in fact untrue, then the argument itself must be untrue. In which case, the argument’s conclusion that the preposition is untrue is also untrue because the argument itself is based on an untruth. Therefore, the preposition may not be untrue, and if it is not then untrue it must be true leading to the same implosive deduction … ad infinitum.

It is in this space beyond human fathom that Tufayl offers The Necessarily Existent One. Tufayl’s argument is logically unique in that it is reasonable and unreasonable simultaneously.

The Necessarily Existent One is impossible to consider physically. It is neither inside nor outside of human ability; it is beyond, above, within, and around existence as humans understand it. It is and is not all of these things because the only way it can be explained is with predicates which it ‘transcends’:

Thus the world must have a non-corporeal Cause. Since He is not a physical being there is no way of perceiving Him through the senses, as the five senses can grasp only physical objects and their attributes. … Furthermore, if He is not a material body, then it is impossible to apply to him any of the predicates of physical things. …

Being neither in contact with matter nor cut off from it, neither within nor outside it—for all these terms, ‘contact’ and ‘discontinuity’, ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ are merely predicates of the very physical things which He transcends. (83, 86)

Consider the previous conundrum of the true preposition that proves itself untrue, and by proving itself untrue falsifies the argument that proves it untrue and re-proves itself true: it seems to be either simultaneously true and untrue or simultaneously neither true nor untrue.

In this scenario, the universe of elements is considered in the context of two sets: true or not true—existent or not existent. Reason necessitates that any element exists in one of the two sets but not in both at once, and not outside of both sets at once. It seems to defeat reason when some element insists on being both or neither. This realization of reason’s limitation to consider any imperceptible set or the universe in different terms, is assisted by reason itself.

Finally, it becomes apparent how Tufayl transcends reason. The Necessarily Existent One is neither physical or non-physical, it is not in existence or out of existence. It is existence itself, and it is necessarily so because non-existence is existent as a notion. Perhaps, there is some property of the universe imperceptible to us that would make sense of the paradoxical nature of reason and existence as we know it. Tufayl’s teaching offers a sort of faith. He offers this idea of The Necessarily Existent One instead of the conventionally accepted and unexamined God. Tufayl shows that reason need not be thrown aside for one to have faith, and that in fact reason is necessary for faith. Through reason one can learn to understand the 7

nature of the universe and existence, and eventually come to understand the nature of reason itself and the place of faith within reason. Resulting in an understanding kind of faith that is far less corruptible and purer than any blindly accepted faith.

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Forsaking the Good Citizen: Control Over Mind and Body in Between the World and Me Nara Monteiro

Centuries old traditions in African American civil rights literature extend into contemporary writing, for civil rights itself—whether by letter of the law or by enforcement of that law—is an ongoing struggle. Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Between the World and Me engages with the concept of double consciousness, which W.E.B. DuBois outlines in The Souls of Black Folk, describing the experience viscerally and tying it to his ideas of embodiment. Coates also examines the policing of black bodies, and thus of black consciousness, in the tradition of Richard Wright’s Black Boy, and he follows in the footsteps of authors like Claude McKay in questioning the state as an effective provider of civil rights to African Americans at all.

Between the World and Me exposes how relying on a white nationalist state as a purveyor of civil rights requires buying into and performing ideals of a deracialized ‘good citizen’—a concept that is intricately connected to respectability politics and validates state sanctioned policing of black bodies that do not perform this behaviour. In Coates’ phenomenology of the body, the black body is inextricable from black consciousness, and thus even today, the pursuit of civil rights in a white state both polices the black body and stifles African American consciousness.

In “The Body and Citizenship in Social Movement Research: Embodied Performances and the Deracialized Self in the Black Civil Rights Movement,” Randolph Hohle explains that in order for African Americans to achieve civil rights from a white state, they must perform a deracialized ideal of a ‘good citizen’ (284). In researching the Southern Christian Leadership Conference’s (SCLC) Citizenship Schools and the Student Non-Violent Coordinating Committee’s (SNCC) Community Centers, Hohle found that African Americans were taught to change their posture, body language, speech patterns, and other behaviors to effectively partake in the civil rights movement and vote. Hohle says that “the embodied performances fixated idealized citizenship into the deracialized black body through good handwriting and word pronunciation, and the style, tone, pace, and exchange of speech in public discourse… deracializing the black self by disassociating black stereotypes from black citizenship” (291292). On one hand, this deracialized good citizen is a challenge to then-normative standards in that it attempts to separate good citizenship from whiteness. On the other hand, “this cemented the deracialized black self with black citizenship and the passage of federal policy, and, in essence, homogenizes the black population by masking differences on the national level. Since the idea of the good black citizen was implicit in the new legislation, there is an ethical obligation to deracialize political action” (Hohle 302). The need to deracialize the body to qualify for or deserve civil rights resembles modern-day respectability politics, in which one attacks someone’s moral character in an attempt to undermine their rights (Kraayenbrink). Hohle explains that at the time that the SCLC and the SNCC were operating the schools and centers, “whites used mispronounced words as an indication that blacks were

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not ready and did not deserve rights” (291). The construction of the deracialized ‘good citizen,’ and their codification into the passing of laws as described by Hohle, structurally justifies the denial of civil rights to African Americans who do not perform to this ideal. The deracialized ‘good citizen’ requires African Americans to perform to a standard set by whites to access civil rights, which validates the policing and incarceration of black bodies that do not conform to this standard, as they are not seen as a ‘good citizens’ and thus “are not ready and [do] not deserve rights” (Hohle 291).

Ta-Nehisi Coates engages with the dangers of the ‘good citizen’ ideal in Between the World and Me when he asserts, “I was not an innocent… and feeling that I was as human as anyone, this must be true for other humans. If I was not innocent, then they were not innocent” (30). No one is innocent, and thus civil rights cannot be predicated on innocence.

He also examines the increased pressure on African Americans to perform ‘good citizenship’ and ascribe to respectability politics due to the higher risks of reprisal. He says to his son, “the price of violence is higher for you than it is for your countrymen, and so that America might justify itself, the story of a black body’s destruction must always begin with his or her error, real or imagined… our errors always cost us more” (Coates, 96-97). Mistakes are more damaging for African Americans because they are being held to the standard of the derazialized ‘good citizen’ in order to be granted civil rights, even if those rights already exist.

This leads to a disregard for or outright punishment of African Americans who do not meet this heightened moral standard.

Thus, control of the black body is required for African Americans to be granted civil rights. Hohle’s examination of the SCLC’s and SNCC’s tactics shows how this restraint is internalized and reproduced by African Americans themselves in the pursuit of civil rights, at times to extreme levels. He explains that “a successful performance required bodily mastery over all possible elements because of the need to maintain civic order while ensuring that civil rights protesters were always in control of the performance” (Hohle 295). Coates observes the control and restraint Hohle describes in the videos of non-violent civil rights protesters he recounts being forced to watch for Black History Month each school year (32). This is a re-projection of the control over the black body required to access civil rights and a constant reinstatement of the myth of the deracialized ‘good citizen.’ This control is also exhibited in the way classes were taught to Coates: “Algebra, Biology, and English were not subjects so much as opportunities to better discipline the body” (25-26). As Coates watched these videos and experienced control-based education, the systems first put in place by conditioning for protests were reproduced in a new generation—to do well in school, one must first conform to the physical behavioral characteristics of a ‘good student,’ which primarily involve restraint and following orders. This discipline is thus codified into the contemporary public education system and continued from the civil rights era.

Coates’s phenomenology of the body further complicates the control of the black body 10

in pursuit of African American civil rights by intrinsically tying consciousness to the body and destabilizing race as a natural entity. For Coates, “the spirit and the soul are the body and the brain, which are destructible—that is precisely why they are so precious” (103). This emphasis on the physical rebukes the spiritual idea of the eternal soul that will be redeemed by earthly suffering and demands improvements in material quality of life now, rather than immaterial salvation or the promise of gains in an unknown future. He advises his son to “always remember that the sociology, the history, the economics, the graphs, the charts, the regressions all land, with great violence, upon the body” (Coates 10). Coates does not allow history, economics or sociology, to remain abstract and intellectual matters separate from their visceral effects on the human body. He embodies the experience of knowledge acquisition, research, and intellectual understanding by stressing the importance of remaining connected to real-world impact of these intellectual concepts on bodies—and vice versa, of the body’s impact on abstract ideas. The body, mind, and soul are one to Coates, and thus violence against the black body is multiplied in its transgression as direct violence against the African American soul. Coates also examines race as a social construct, “on the one hand, invented, and on the other, no less real” (56). Race is for Coates in Between the World and Me as it is for Laura Doyle in Faulkner’s own phenomenology of race: “an empty category, undefinable and unverifiable, projected onto the ‘‘coloured’’ or ‘‘white’’ body from outside” (Doyle 340). It is not a fact of history, as it is made out to be, yet it exists because it has been made to exist. Because the body is consciousness, violence that the body experiences in the name of race is internalized and that notion of race is given fruition. It is important to Coates that race and racial identity remain only an aspect of the system of oppression; even as he celebrates the achievements of African Americans as “fashioned like diamonds under the weight of the dream,” he emphasizes that “to call that feeling racial is to hand over all those diamonds, fashioned by our ancestors, to the plunderer” (119-120). Race is only meaningful insofar as racism still affects African Americans. Thus, for Coates the body is the self, and it is the embodied experience of racism that causes the understanding of the self, physical and mental, as a racial being.

Laura Doyle’s conception of Faulkner’s phenomenology of race provides a framework to understand how the experience of the double consciousness as explained by W.E.B. Dubois enters Coates’ own phenomenology of the body. As consciousness is the body, so double consciousness is a phenomenological experience. Doyle quotes “Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenological description, [in which] ‘The body… is not itself a thing, an interstitial matter, a connective tissue, but a sensible for itself ’” (342). The body’s sensing of itself provides a point of entry for the external world: “because the hands are sensible as well as sentient, and because the two touch but never quite meet, corporeal self-relation is a circle with a loop-hole, and that loophole is the outsideness of oneself that belongs to the world: interpellation enters here” (Doyle 344). This is the entry point of the white gaze that doubles the consciousness: the point at which the body becomes sensible of itself. The eyes of others mar the body’s own perception of itself, causing “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes 11

of others” (Dubois 8). Coates’s experience of double consciousness is perhaps most apparent in the absence of one of its key components. In France, Coates is not free from double consciousness, but he is free from the specific white American gaze that created it in the first place:

In America I was part of an equation—even if it wasn’t a part I relished… I was not just a father but the father of a black boy. I was not just a spouse but the husband of a black woman… But sitting in that garden, for the first time I was an alien, I was a sailor—landless and disconnected. And I was sorry that I had never felt this particular loneliness before—that I had never felt myself so far outside of someone else’s dream. (124).

When he perceives himself, when he is a sensible of himself, the eyes of others are not present in the same intrusive and racial way as they are in America. DuBois’s double consciousness emerges in Coates as the entry point for the external, oppressive construction of race and its codification into the body and identity.

Other examples of double consciousness in Between the World and Me more directly lead the experience of being racialized to the violence of racism. Coates also describes the experience of double consciousness clearly in Prince Jones’s mother, when she discusses her beliefs about the American justice system and the simultaneous knowledge that it will fail her: “she spoke like an American, with the same expectations of fairness, even fairness belated and begrudged, that she took into medical school all those years ago. And she spoke like a black woman, with all the pain that undercuts those exact feelings” (114). The “two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings” of the African American—the African, the American— come through in Dr. Jones’s expectations of and experience with the justice system (Du Bois). The consciousness of the self as black is intricately tied to the violence the black body experiences, as with Dr. Jones and her son. James B. Haile III explains in “Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Phenomenology of the Body” that “America, then, from this reading, is not merely a historic(al) place but a man-made reality in which the black body is destroyed; it is a set of human practices circulated by a set of mythologies and reinforced by language itself ” (Haile 500). Racism creates race, which through the body as a sensible for itself, creates the racialized body, and thus the awareness of oneself as a black body is produced by violence.

The externally racialized African American body and mind are inextricable from each other, and, to return to Hohle, the pursuit of civil rights in a white state—and the eventual access of any civil rights that have been granted—requires the shaping of the black body into an idealized and deracialized ‘good citizen.’ Between the World and Me shows how the pursuit of civil rights in a white state controls and stifles African American consciousness through manipulation of the body. Ta-Nehisi Coates has been accused of pessimism, to which he replies that focusing on the struggle over hope is an emphasis on what one can control— 12

actions, not outcomes (Clayton and Nigatu). “For marginalized groups, the only real sense of power is command and ownership of one’s body,” (Hohle 283), and so perhaps in a state where civil rights must be a product of external control over the mind and body, this is the most optimistic resistance: the daily decisions that defy this control, like wearing a hoodie, playing one’s music, and openly and fearlessly being oneself (Coates, 113).

Works Cited Clayton, Tracy and Heben Nigatu, hosts. “Episode 29: What’s On Your Reparations Tab? With Ta-Nehisi Coates.” Another Round, Apple Podcasts, 19 October 2015.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi. Between the World and Me. New York, Random House, 2015.

Doyle, Laura. “The Body against Itself in Faulkner’s Phenomenology of Race.” American Literature, vol. 73 no.

2, 2001, pp. 339-364.

Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. New York, Oxford University Press, 2008.

Haile III, James B. “Ta-Nehisi Coates’s Phenomenology of the Body.” The Journal of Speculative Philosophy,

vol. 31, no. 3, 2017, pp. 493-503.

Hohle, Randolph. “The Body and Citizenship in Social Movement Research: Embodied Performances and the

Deracialized Self in the Black Civil Rights Movement 1961-1965” The Sociological Quarterly, vol. 50,

no. 2, 2009, pp 283-307.

Kraayenbrink, Taylor. Ballots and Bullets: US Literature and Civil Rights, 27 November 2018, Western

University, London ON. Lecture.

13

Melodrama and the Eccentric in In Memoriam and Jude the Obscure: Paving the Way for Gender Erasure Caitlyn Dubé

While Tennyson’s In Memoriam and Hardy’s Jude the Obscure differ in form, both offer insight to the shifting ideologies of the English people from the middle of the nineteenth century to its nearing end. As a response to Victorian repression, the emergence of the eccentric character in both poetic and literary works allows writers Tennyson and Hardy to break from the conformity of gender. By this, I refer to way in which a person’s clothing, mannerisms, behaviour, community actions and how one spent their free time were firmly separated into categories of what was acceptable for the gentleman and what was permitted for the lady. To be eccentric was anyone who could not play their assigned and gendered role. These gender binaries are only one form of Victorian repression among others: rules of religion, “penal law,” and the nation’s economic and social caste systems (Foucault 4). In his introduction to the History of Sexuality, Foucault touches on the restrictions of Victorian repression and suggests that “if repression has indeed been the fundamental link between power, knowledge, and sexuality since the classical age” then to break from that conformity takes “nothing less than a transgression of laws, a lifting of prohibitions, an irruption of speech…” (4). And, yet, Tennyson and Hardy provide “nothing less” than transgressive works through which the eccentric character breaks from Victorian rigidity and gender norms. First, both writers establish melodramatic characters who neither regulate their emotion nor subdue their passions. Instead, they expose liberated feelings through addresses made to inanimate objects and invisible forces as if they were real. Secondly, it is this freedom of emotion— eccentricity— that opens the space for the two writers to challenge Victorian gender binaries through role reversals (taking on the feminine) and blurring gender distinctions. For In Memoriam, Tennyson’s speaker plays the role of male-lover while Hardy’s Jude the Obscure compares Jude’s masculinity to the femininity of Arabella and Sue.

It is important to note that while both Tennyson’s and Hardy’s work offer characters that portray the eccentric, Tennyson’s speaker is more subdued in his character than Jude Fawley due to In Memoriam’s already-poetic form. To apostrophize outside forces as if real is a common poetic device, but the excessive aspect of these outside addresses lies in their numerous repetitions. It is Freud who suggests that eccentricity may be a result of one’s “compulsion to repeat” personal traumas in order to master them or turn a passive situation into one of agency (Freud 13). For Tennyson, In Memoriam’s frequent use of personification and apostrophizing invisible forces is the writer’s way of controlling his grief, but the repetitive “excess of emotion” remains evident in the text (“melodramatic, adj.”). In Tennyson’s poem In Memoriam, he addresses the “Old Yew” four times; this is one example:

Old Yew, which graspest at the stones 14

That name the under-lying dead,

Thy fibres net the dreamless head,

Thy roots are wrapt about the bones. (Tennyson II 1-4)

The “under-lying dead” beneath the tree suggests the “stones” are not rocks but gravestones which lie near the bottom of the tree’s roots. This helps to personify the “Old Yew” as a watcher of death. The tree is later called the “warder of these buried bones,” again implying how the yew appears to the poet as guardian figure over both the dead and their decaying bodies (XXXIX 1). In his grief, the poet speaks to the tree and other images of death, but does not internalize the intense emotional lamentation he has for his friend Hallam. Instead, Tennyson’s mourning is external which is why abstractions are made real—corporeal—with roots for wrapping and branches that “dippest toward” headstones (XXXIX 5). The poet’s overfilling emotion manifests in the outside world, personifying these natural objects as if human. As well, the speaker mentions his seeing death once more as the “Shadow” figure: “There sat the Shadow fear’d of man… / And spread his mantle dark and cold, / And wrapt thee formless in the fold” (XXII 12-15). The word “wrapt” (XXII 15) echoes the death imagery from the previous yew tree whose “roots are wrapt about the bones” (II 4), proposing that such thoughts of irrepressible sorrow have wrapped their images around the poet’s mind. And, so, the shadow figure is further linked to the yew tree, “…with an awful sense / Of one mute Shadow watching all…”, where the shadow watches the living “man” (a synecdoche for all mortal men) just as the yew tree watches the dead in the graveyard (XXX 7-8). This is, perhaps, more foreboding to the speaker who is haunted by the apostrophe of “Shadow” as the motif appears seventeen times throughout the whole of In Memoriam (Lanestedt). Linking the image of the yew tree and the shadow—their symbolizing sorrow and death at the heart of their connotations—builds the repeated emotional grief. The speaker’s obsession with his friend’s death creates a character that one might consider eccentric by his melodramatic tendencies: the need to repeatedly address that which does not exist.

In Hardy’s Jude the Obscure, Jude’s character is defined by the novel’s title. He is odd, obscure to the darkening world around him to which he passes through life almost unseen.

Jude’s obscurity leads him to develop an eccentric and melodramatic character early on.

And, while Tennyson’s speaker appears to develop the melodrama as a by-product of grief ’s repetition, Jude Fawley’s develops through his loneliness and insatiable thirst for knowledge.

At one point in the novel, he “found himself speaking out loud, holding conversations with them as it were, like an actor in a melodrama, who apostrophizes the audience on the other side of the footlights” (Hardy 74-75). Here, Tennyson’s covert eccentricity is dwarfed by Hardy’s overt and reflexive mention of the figurative device. However, instead of demonstrating the act of apostrophizing through the speaker (as Tennyson does), it is Jude’s character and actions that play out how one might address something that is inanimate as he “holds conversations” with them. Jude’s melodrama comes about through his imagining and speaking with various ghosts and illusory “souls” (73). He believes or acts as though he 15

is in the presence of poets, philosophers, politicians, and other great men from his readings.

While Jude is able to acknowledge his eccentricity— “he suddenly ceased with a start at his absurdity” (75)—Tennyson’s emotions are consumed by his grief and makes him blind to his own melodramatic nature. As both Hardy and Tennyson draw attention to the strangeness of their narrative characters and poetic speaker, the two writers make room to push against Victorian firmness through more than just overwhelming feeling but by swapping emotions, qualities, and roles set to one gender over the other.

Tennyson’s work—being at its height in the mid-nineteenth century— often credits him as a poet with the ability “to conform to popular taste”: upholding Victorian values through his themes and subject matter (Everett); however, this is not without contradiction as Tennyson thwarts the sexual repression of Victorian gender binaries by placing his male speaker in the position to take on the feminine role of the lover. Outright, the full title of the poem—In Memoriam A. H. H.—dedicates the entirety of the piece to Tennyson’s friend Arthur Henry Hallam. The poem starts with the line “Strong Son of God, immortal Love” which imbues the beginning with both affection and love for the Christian faith (Tennyson, preface 1). Yet, it also implies a devotional love towards Hallam. As the speaker elaborates on his love of God, he then juxtaposes the unwavering faith with doubt by asking for forgiveness:

Forgive my grief for one removed,

Thy creature, whom I found so fair.

I trust he lives in thee, and there

I find him worthier to be loved. (preface 33-36)

In this, Tennyson equates his love for Christian faith to the love he bears for his friend in a way that surpasses what may be argued as brotherly or familial tenderness. By placing the tenth stanza (focused on Hallam) among connotations of aching spirituality, he treats his friend as a Petrarchan love object by calling him “creature” and mimicking the typical sonnet blazon by describing physical aspects of Hallam as “fair”. Again, the importance placed on Hallam’s care— “I find him worthier to be loved”—suggests that the poem’s grieving tone is not only sorrow for the death of a friend but simulates sorrow for the lost love of a man (to which Tennyson takes on the female role in this poetic form).

In extending the subject of love between men, Sarah Rose Cole in her essay “The Recovery of Friendship: Male Love and Developmental Narrative in Tennyson’s In Memoriam” explains how “[n]o other Victorian text has had quite the dual life of In Memoriam, a poem that came to be read—and continues to be read in modern criticism—as both a ritual text of Victorian household piety and the most extended English poem on male same-sex love” (44).

What she refers to is the way Tennyson’s “piety” (a reference to his career as a clergyman) is established through the poem’s treatment of Hallam as a Christ-like figure. He does this through the biblical allusions to Lazarus (Tennyson XXXI 1-4), Milton’s Paradise Lost (I 5-8), 16

and his word choice and imagery concerning faith and religion. At the same time, the pious grief dedicated to Hallam is underlined, not by the heterosexual love for a woman, but by the passionate loss of love for a man—by a man.

While gender binaries are subtly crossed in Tennyson’s poem, Hardy is more explicit in his playing with the characters of men and women in Jude the Obscure. When Jude Fawley is first introduced to the novel, he “blush[es] at the sound of his own voice” (Hardy 3) and is described as an awkward and “[s]lender” eleven-year old child (7). Alone, these qualities appear juvenile (results of Jude’s young age), but Hardy uses the next few pages to emphasize his excessive sensitivities to the animals and natures around him. From his plights in attempting not to step on earthworms to his feeling nervous about discovering a misplaced bird’s nest, Jude’s behavior borders on the feminine (11). In turn, these feminine sensitives are what result in Jude’s trouble with Farmer Troutham, who subjects young Jude to a beating. As Troutham demonstrates repression by the masculine hand, maleness begins to associate itself with violence and other negative undertones. The narrator highlights this sentiment in the phrase, “He did not want to be a man” (11). For Jude, manliness seems to derive from unfairness and “cruelty” and from a masculine responsibility that centers on one’s brute strength and dominion over another rather than treating all things in nature as equals (12). This equality eventually works its way into Jude’s adult character when he meets Sue Bridehead, finding in her his personal equal.

Jude’s passive masculinity is further represented in the illustration by William Hatherell who depicts the “initial meeting of Arabella Donn and Jude Fawley” across the stream from each other in Marygreen (Allingham). While Jude appears to take up most of the left side of the illustration, he is counterbalanced by the three young women on the right side. Had Hatherell wanted to stress Jude’s male dominance in the artwork, his height could have been emphasized over the females; however, Arabella (the figure in the middle) reaches the same height as Jude which suggests they are equals in youth, gender withstanding. Notably, Jude’s peering over and through the bush, making eye contact with the dark-eyed Arabella, implies a connective line-of-sight between them. She takes in his male gaze and simultaneously asserts her own in his direction. Between Jude Fawley’s narrative introduction and the image offered

by Hatherell, the two set up further examples of gender erasure when comparing Jude to the females around him.

As the novel progresses from Jude and Arabella’s meeting to his meeting with Sue Bridehead, his passive masculinity or “weakness of character” is compensated by Sue’s performance as the fearless, “free woman” of agency (Hardy 11; Blake 706). One image in particular blurs the gender boundaries in the novel when Sue looks to Jude for a place to stay dry after having run-away from the Melchester Normal School. He offers her his clothes and comes back to see Sue “[s]itting in his only arm-chair…a slim and fragile being masquerading as himself on a Sunday…” (Hardy 138). Being cousins, Hardy pokes fun at their likeness to 17

one another when Sue wears his outfit, but her ability to “masquerade” as Jude is less about the physical similarity between their bodies. Her ability to wear his clothes symbolizes her capacity to act as a man, to think like one with the same “modern intelligence” as Jude or Phillotson (qtd. in Blake 705): “Only you don’t talk quite like a girl –well, a girl who has had no advantages” (Hardy 141). Jude’s comment refers to her masculine qualities, those of independent thought that come from a higher education than young women like Sue were often allotted. Just as Jude’s sensitivities suggest his blurring gender binaries (masculine into feminine), Sue’s intelligence and critical thinking blends the feminine into the masculine. It is Mr. Phillotson who further aids in explaining their oneness: “between the pair…[t]hey seem to be one person split in two!” (221). As Phillotson suggests, it’s as if Jude and Sue are two sides of the same coin, sharing in their “extraordinary sympathy” and their “emotions, and fancies, and dreams” (223). By linking Mr. Phillotson’s dialogue to the previous image of Sue and Jude as physical equals, Hardy implies that the only valued difference between his male protagonist and Jude’s great love interest lies in their clothes, in the “sexless cloth and linen” that hide their eccentric genderless natures, rather than the gender roles that Victorian society wish they conform to.

To embody the eccentric, the melodramatic, and the over-emotional is to be antiVictorian. It is to break away from restrictions and rigidity in order to make room for new ways of understanding and this is what Tennyson and Hardy demonstrate best in their compelling works. Whether it be obsessive grief and homoerotic love in poetry or passive masculinity and female agency in prose, the eccentric pushes against the Victorian “injunction to silence” by offering a voice for those changing times within these writers’ prospective pieces. They reveal the restrictive nature of the nineteenth century as a system with an end, one that required literary transgression above all else. It is as if Tennyson knew better than anyone just how fleeting the repressive powers of a gendered Victorian society could be, how ephemeral: “Our little systems have their day;/ They have their day and cease to be…”

(Tennyson, preface 17).

18

Works Cited Allingham, Philip V. “commentary on William Hatherell’s illustration in”. The Victorian Web, 9 Aug. 2002,

www.victorianweb.org/art/illustration/hatherell/1.html. Accessed 20 Nov. 2018.

Blake, Kathleen. “Sue Bridehead, ‘The Woman of the Feminist Movement’”. Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 18, no. 4, 1978, pp. 703-726. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/450200. Accessed 23 Nov. 2018.

Cole, Sarah Rose. “The Recovery of Friendship: Male Love and Developmental Narrative in Tennyson’s

In Memoriam”. Victorian Poetry, vol. 50, no. 1, Spring 2012, pp. 43-66. EBSCOhost,gsearch.

ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=73742816&site=ehost-live. Accessed 21 Nov. 2018.

Everett, Glenn. “Tennyson and Victorianism”. The Victorian Web, 1988, www.victorianweb.org/victorian /

vn/victor1.html. Accessed 19 Nov. 2018.

Foucault, Michel. History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction. Random House, 1978.

Freud, Sigmund. Beyond the Pleasure Principle. Norton, 1961.

Hardy, Thomas. Jude the Obscure. Oxford University Press, 1895.

Hatherell, William. On the far side of the stream three women were kneeling. Harper’s New Monthly Magazine, vol. XC, Dec. 1894, pp. 2.

Lanestedt, Jon. “In Memoriam—Image, Symbol, and Motif: Shadow”. The Victorian Web, 20 Feb. 2010, www.

victorianweb.org/victorian/authors/tennyson/im/shadow.html. Accessed 19 Nov. 2018.

“melodramatic, adj.” OED Online, Oxford University Press, July 2018,

www.oed.com/viewdictionaryentry/Entry/116227. Accessed 22 Nov. 2018.

Tennyson, Alfred. In Memoriam. New York Macmillan, 1906.

19

Christian Mysticism and Self-Surrender in Pursuit of Grace in T.S. Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” and Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace Camille Intson

The writings of T.S. Eliot and Simone Weil are, in theory and in poetic practice, heavily informed by a heightening affinity to the tradition of Christian mysticism. Eliot’s Four Quartets, published in 1941, ethicized the rejection of material and temporal dimensions of existence in pursuit of divine grace; this tenet was philosophized years later with the 1947 publication of Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace. Eric Springsted notes that both thinkers saw religion as “the goal at which the members of a society are to aim” for the reason that it gives “purpose to [society’s] overall unity… [and] to individual lives” (Springsted 108). As a result of this creed, both works are wholly concerned with the ways in which one might encounter the absolute. Weil and Eliot heavily share a poetics of self-surrender, arguing that in order to contemplate or to reconcile with God, one must be fully willing to renounce the self, or the power to say “I.” The two authors are strongly indebted to Heraclitean philosophy for its use of paradox, which is frequently used to imitate the breakage point in human language and logic produced through contact with the divine. This paper will trace a poetics of self-renunciation through T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets as read alongside selections of Weil’s Gravity and Grace, ultimately arguing that the space of divine contemplation or “grace” must be one where the self is made fully absent and where the material dimensions of reality are void.

Both Eliot and Weil were heavily influenced by religious philosophers who made frequent use of the paradox as the highest recognition of the divine. Felix Schmelzer writes that, at the turn of the 6th century, Pseudo-Denys wrote of the paradox as being a “consequence of God’s ineffability” in his Mystical Theology and, ever since, it has become an important literary trope of mysticism (Schmelzer 56). The main idea here is that “to understand God, we have to consider his positive attributes… [and their] negation”, that the complimentary ways of affirmation and negation can “set up the human mind for the perception of the divine reality, which reveals itself — if the soul receives this divine grace — in a paradoxical manner, as a “ray of darkness” (Schmelzer 56-7). The assertion here is not that God in and of himself is a paradox, but that contradiction is a consequence of human beings’ limited perceptions of divinity. We are brought closer to God through a breakage point made by the paradox, and we are left to contemplate multiple realities and truths as an effect of the real.

Weil and Eliot engage with paradox through Heraclitean philosophy, early known as “The Obscure.” For Weil, Heraclitus and his harmony of contraries is one of the most important aspects of Greek genius. For Heraclitus, as J.P. Littele notes, “creation itself is conflict [and] contains within itself a fundamental contradiction”, the absurdity of which is felt “within ourselves as a conflict of a aims, a hiatus between what we desire and the practical consequences of attaining that desire” (Littele 73). For Heraclitus, as for Weil and Eliot, God is

20

both personal and impersonal, existent and non-existent.

Simone Weil frequently employs contradictory language to explain how Grace and purification can be obtained. She writes, for example, that one method of purification is “to pray to God, not only in secret as far as men are concerned, but with the thought that God does not exist” (Weil 20). What she means by this is that to be truly selfless, and to love God in and of himself and not through what he can do for us, we must pray to a God that we do not believe exists. This cyclical logic at first seems redundant, however it is meant to challenge the dimensions of our thought by forcing us to contemplate illogic as a facet of divine space.

She also writes that “Grace fills empty spaces but it can only enter where there is a void to receive it, and it is grace itself which makes this void” as a further exemplification of paradox (Weil 10). These statements reveal language to be limited insofar as it tries to encounter God, pointing also to the shortcomings in human thought which inhibit us from selflessly conceptualizing divinity.

The epigraph of T.S. Eliot’s Four Quartets begins with two quotations from Heraclitus, the first reading “although logos is common to all, most people live as if they had a wisdom of their own” (Schmeizer 57). Felix Schmeizer defines “logos” as the “collective law governing the entire universe” and writes that Four Quartets seeks “the knowledge of this law and, more importantly, of its transcendent source” (Schmeizer 58). This series of poems is concerned with the universe’s structure and order. Eliot’s poetry attempts to contemplate logos’s divine origins by suggesting that our own individualized sense of the world may not be as rich as that which we share. By moving past our singular selves, as Eliot suggests, we may find grace in a unified conception of the universe by contemplating divinity. The epigraph’s second statement reads “the way up and the way down is one and the same”, which is meant to at first seem illogical and incomprehensible. Heraclitus’s contradictory statement showcases language at its limits, or at its breaking point, through repetition and paradox. Paradox can be both negative and positive, according to Schmeizer; negative paradox “excludes the Absolute from all that can be expressed in words… [creating] a linguistic limit” whereas positive paradox “asserts the unity of mutual exclusive concepts and… disturbs categorical thought” (Schmeizer 58). Heraclitus’s statement is one example of positive paradox whereas Eliot’s repetitions of “Neither… nor” in “Burnt Norton” exemplify this simultaneous limit and freedom (Eliot 179). In both examples of paradox, contradictory words and phrases are juxtaposed by their inherent difference, however we as readers are to accept both sides as true. Heraclitean paradox breaks down the logic of binary by forcing us to encounter our own limited perceptions.

The first quartet, “Burnt Norton”, attempts as Schmeizer writes “to overcome the categories of space and time in order to contemplate God” (Schmeizer 57). The poem officially begins with a contemplative mediation on time and possibility space as Eliot claims that “Time present and time past / Are both perhaps present in time future, / And time 21

future contained in time past”, declaring that “If all time is eternally present / All time is unredeemable” (Eliot 177). In this verse of the poem, we are not meant to see past, present, and future as things radically separate from one-another but, instead, as complementary and reciprocal. The narrator in “Burnt Norton” enters a space of possibility “Down the passage which we did not take / Towards the door we never opened” in a mythic, Edenic garden (Eliot 177). The verse ends with the claim that “human kind / Cannot bear very much reality”, which evokes the epigraph in that it shows the individual necessity for spiritual contemplation that logos can provide (Eliot 178).

For Weil, as for Eliot, grace requires a complete renunciation of materiality. Weil encourages us to “empty ourselves of the world [and] take the form of a slave. To reduce ourselves to the point we occupy in space and time—that is to say, to nothing” (Weil 12).

Her instruction is to take a stance of complete submission to the divine and to renounce all material attachments. She offers two possible ways for us to do this: “To give [material things] up with a view to some spiritual advantage, [and to] conceive of them and feel them as conducive to spiritual” (Weil 12). For Weil, materiality is antithetical to Grace; material entities can only get between the soul and God. She explains in the book’s first section that “all the natural movements of the soul are controlled by laws analogous to those of physical gravity. Grace is the only exception,” asking “How gain deliverance from a force which is like gravity?” (Weil 1, 5) If we are to reconcile with the divine, we must “give up everything which is not grace and not even desire grace” (Weil 13). All that which is not grace is that which encompasses gravity, that is to say all material, spatial, and temporal entities. We must therefore surrender all of our instrumental possessions to be able to contemplate, or to achieve, grace.

The second section of Eliot’s “Burnt Norton” begins with a list of material entities that must be discarded, or left behind, in order to ascend upwards into God’s space. In its first stanza, the narrator observes “Garlic and sapphires in the mud / [Clotting] the bedded axletree” and “trilling wire in the blood / [singing] below inveterate scars” (Eliot 178). This list of material entities, combined with natural phenomena and bodily metaphors, symbolizes the tangible, symbolic realm from which we perceive reality. The poem moves from mention of these things to an ascending plane where “The dance along the artery / The circulation of the lymph / Are figured in the drift of stars / Ascend to summer in the tree” (Eliot 178). Here, we can see the narrator moving upwards by renouncing physical entities; he is able to achieve grace by surrendering that which constitutes gravity. The narrator is gaining deliverance from the force of gravity through renunciation. In this stanza, Eliot’s narrator experiences what Schmelzer calls a “reconciliation of creation” which brings him closer to the space of God (Schmelzer 62).

Eliot’s narrator can only contemplate and encounter God by displacing the force of gravity and, only then, can the revelation of divine mystery take place. It is only after 22

things have been experienced “in [the] formal pattern” of Eliot’s mythic garden that we

can disregard these structures to enter into grace’s realm (Eliot 178).

In the renunciation of the physical dimension of existence is the self-sacrifice which is crucial to the admittance of grace into the soul. Weil believes that we “possess nothing in the world — a mere chance can strip us of everything — except the power to say ‘I’. That is what we have to give to God—in other words, to destroy” (Weil 26). For her, the only thing that we own, in this universe, is the self; this is to say we can only own the ability to say “I.” The destruction of the “I” is therefore the only free thing we can give to God. She writes that “we cannot offer anything but the ‘I’, and all we call an offering is merely a label attached to a compensatory assertion of the ‘I’” (Weil 26). The self is the only thing we truly possess, and it is therein the only real thing we can offer God. By leaving the self behind, and by sacrificing it for a higher religious purpose, we can enter the space of the divine.

This space of grace, and of God, exists “at the still point of the turning world” (Eliot 179). This space is characterized by the following description:

“Neither flesh nor fleshless;

Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,

But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,

Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,

Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,

There would be no dance, and there is only the dance” (Eliot 179).

Eliot’s “still point” is “neither flesh nor fleshless”, and this demonstration of negative paradox asserts that the space of contact with divinity lies outside of things reached by language, or understood in the instrumental fashions of our logic (Eliot 179). This line also suggests that the space is neither embodied nor completely disembodied. It can not be thought of in the usual spatial terms of our physical selves. The still point is not fixed, as Eliot specifies, but rather it exists outside of our presupposed ideas of movement “from [and] towards, / [ascending] and [declining]” (Eliot 179). The still point is the space of God, and this space cannot be encountered directly through language; it can only be referred to as something which it is not. Herein lies the Heraclitean paradox: the contradictions bring one closer to the truth of the thing, and therefore closer to the divine.

This space of divinity also exists outside of our presuppositions of time, with which the poem is largely concerned. In the next few lines, Eliot writes, “I can only say, there we have been: but I cannot say where / And I cannot say, how log, for that is to place it in time” (Eliot 179). This space cannot be thought of in terms of material spatiality, nor can it be directed to a specific place in time. God is atemporal and fixed in his infinitude. In these few lines, the continuous eruption of paradox is meant to bring us closer to Eliot’s, and to Weil’s, divine.

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Paradoxes come again and again, overlapping and collapsing on one-another. This is also to symbolize the non-singularity of the moment of divine contact.

Eliot’s contradictions are undoubtedly impossible for human beings to rationalize insofar as they are thinking instrumentally. J.P. Littele writes that “man’s natural tendency is to escape the dilemma of contradiction, to act as if the individual instinct of the moment were representative of absolute truth” (Littele 74). While contradiction may produce anxiety in man, and while this anxiety may heighten as man attempts to structure it into the logic of binaries that language upholds and produces, man is best served by accepting both statements of contradiction as truth. Littele further suggests that the “necessity of taking into consideration the opposing term of every proposition is painful for man, and he takes refuge in what is essentially a lie” (Littele 74). As Weil and Eliot discuss either explicitly or implicitly, self-erasure is a harsh difficulty, perhaps even an impossibility, for man. By succumbing himself to the truth of one statement, and by ignoring the other, he is lying to himself and shutting off the passage to God through paradox. Weil claims that the only way to “[escape] legitimately from the dilemma of contradiction” is to “[assume] the full reality [through the] unity of the terms of the contradiction” (Weil 75). To Weil and Eliot, there is significant unity in the acceptance of paradoxical claims, again, as it represents our breaking points as human beings and subjects of language, and as it brings us closer to logos.

Furthermore, Eliot’s encounter with the divine is contingent on the separation of “the inner freedom from the practical desire, / The release from action and suffering, release from the inner / And the outer compulsion” (Eliot 179). This ties directly back to Simone Weil’s “void”; instead of seeking out compensation for suffering, she suggests we learn to accept the space made through trauma, learn to detach from material possessions, renounce time, and “desire without an object” (Weil 22). Weil’s void both fills and creates grace; it is a paradox in and of itself which allows for God. By confronting trauma directly, we are confronting the void within ourselves which inhabits grace. We are released from suffering through contact with the void, and through its acceptance.

Eliot directly uses what would become Weil’s term for logos, “grace”, by calling this contact with divinity “a grace of sense” by which outer compulsions are surrounded (Eliot 179). He describes the force as “a white light still and moving…

Erhebung without motion, concentration

Without elimination, both a new world

And the old made explicit, understood

In the completion of its partial ecstasy,

The resolution of its partial horror” (Eliot 179).

Hericlitean paradox is still very present in these lines in the description of grace, calling 24

once again back to the breakage that the human mind experiences in contact with God.

Eliot then continues to juxtapose this space of grace with the tangible realities of the material world, noting that the “enchainment of past and future / Woven in the weakness of the changing body / Protects mankind from heaven and damnation / Which flesh cannot endure” (Eliot 179). To speak of past and present as “enchained” in the physical body once again speaks to our limited perceptions as human beings. Our physical bodies incline us towards realities that are solely material. It is difficult for us to contemplate heaven and hell because they are things which exist outside of visual reality. These are things that “flesh cannot endure”, which is to say concepts that the physical human self can never fully realize (Eliot 179). The implications of time’s infinitude and the presence of God and grace are also things we can never fully understand as beings tied to material entities. This is why, as Eliot and Weil state, we must renounce the self to enter the space of God.

How, then, are we to process grace? Heraclitus, Eliot, and Weil all theorize grace as a dually ascending and descending movement. Weil’s philosophy asserts that grace is “the law of the descending movement”, that its ultimate aim is to descend without gravity (Weil 4). She urges us to “lower [ourselves to] rise in the domain of moral gravity”, which is exactly what Heraclitus and Eliot preach in Four Quartets (Weil 4). “Burnt Norton” ends with the following instruction from Eliot, which speaks directly to this downwards motion:

“Descend lower, descend only

Into the world of perpetual solitude,

World not world, but that which is not world,

Internal darkness, deprivation

And destitution of all property,

Desiccation of the world of sense,

Evacuation of the world of fancy,

Inoperancy of the world of spirit…” (Eliot 181).

After one ascends towards grace, one carries the contemplation of God back with them into the physical world. One can then descend into “perpetual solitude” where all property, sense, logic, fancy, and narcissism are renounced (Eliot 181). Once the “imaginary royalty of the world” has been “[stripped]” away, as Weil states, we achieve “Absolute solitude. Then we possess the truth of the world” (Weil 12). This truth can be tied directly back to logos, to Heraclitus, and to Eliot’s epigraph. This is the aim of Four Quartets, specifically “Burnt Norton” and Gravity and Grace: to bring one closer to divine knowledge, albeit selflessly, to possess the absolute truth of God.

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Works Cited Eliot, T.S. Collected Poems 1909-1962. Faber, 2017.

Littele, J.P. “Heraclitus and Simone Weil: The Harmony of Opposites.” Forum for Modern

Language Studies, vol. 5, no. 1, pp. 72-79.

Schmelzer, Felix. “T.S. Eliot and the Tradition of Christian Mysticism: The Spatial Paradox in

Burnt Norton.” Teoliterária, vol. 7, no. 14, pp. 55-69.

Springsted, Eric O. “The Religious Basis of Culture: T.S. Eliot and Simone Weil.” Religious Studies, vol. 25, no. 1, pp. 105-116.

Weil, Simone. Gravity and Grace. Routledge, 2003.

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The Cyclical Nature of Eros Abbey Horner

In the collection of lyric poems, If Not, Winter, Sappho portrays eros as the cause of a range of emotions that evoke both pain and joy. She continues to repeatedly endure this pain, however, due to its intertwinement with joy. Sappho employs a peculiar approach to these complex emotions by using sensual imagery that suggests physical love, that denies any distinction between love and lust. By her own definition, eros is bittersweet: it is a source of happiness and desire, as well as a source of frustration, loneliness, jealousy, and pain. Eros is also cyclical because its pleasurable aspects incite one to continue the pursuit of love, despite the many undesirable effects. It is through her multifaceted perspective on eros as simultaneously painful and pleasurable, which is intensified by the ambiguous nature of her prose, that eros emerges as cyclical. She is not concerned with reciprocation or fulfilment which makes up the end of the cycle but rather the bitter and the sweet which make up the cycle itself.

Sappho’s diction discusses being engulfed by sensation as her depiction of eros is concerned with feelings so intense that they produce physical results. The ardent Sappho writes, “chest on wings,” alluding to the ‘sweet’ part of eros (fr. 31). She addresses her lover’s power to make her feel so deeply when she writes that, “when I look at you... no speaking is left in me,” and she can only “listen close to your sweet speaking” as “drumming fills ears” (fr. 31). Here, as Sappho looks at and listens to the woman she is observing her, the physical and emotional attraction meld: “drumming fills ears” is followed by “fire racing under skin and in eyes no sight” (fr. 31). It is unclear as to whether these overwhelming feelings are painful or pleasurable. Although caused by infatuation, these feelings of intense passion are discussed alongside feverish expressions of sickness and darkness within the same fragment.

She writes that, “cold sweat holds me and shaking grips me all” (fr. 31). All of these emotions are discussed within fragment 31, illustrating Sappho’s decision to discuss both aspects of eros simultaneously.

The painful and pleasurable aspects of eros are overwhelming. Although Aphrodite is the goddess of love and beauty, she has not only the power to ignite this fervent passion, but also has the ability to take it away. Following the rejection of a lover, for example, Sappho writes, “I simply want to be dead” (fr. 94). This extreme diction through the use of the term ‘dead’ conveys how she is paralyzed by her pain. The bitter part of eros, the paralyzing pain, is the opposite of her overwhelmingly positive feelings when the ‘sweet’ passion of eros is present and her “chest on wings” (fr. 31). Thus, eros has two extremes, both of which are so overwhelming they evoke physical responses.

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Sappho’s longing is not limited to wanting another to reciprocate her feelings, however;

she wants to feel the ‘sweet’ part of eros, even if it cannot be returned. This sense of longing is evident in fragment 1; although Sappho acknowledges how she has “suffered,” she is “calling out” to the goddess of love, Aphrodite. She desires to experience the intoxicating feelings of eros, the “feelings of [her] chest on wings is “what [she] want[s] to happen most of all in [her] crazy heart” (fr. 1). Sappho directly acknowledges the suffering she has experienced, alluding to the depth of her pain in the rest of her fragment. Ironically, however, she continues to seek out eros, the source of her pain, as with it, comes the source of her pleasure. Her natural sense of longing continues to propel the cycle.

Sappho depicts the intersection of the bittersweet aspects of eros in her threeword fragment: “you burn me” (fr. 38). This use of diction has connotations with both the pleasurable and painful aspects of relationships and Sappho uses this ambiguity to present eros as all-encompassing. The term ‘burn’ connotes fire, which in turn, connotes desire, which adds to the invigorating nature of her feelings. The fragment “you burn me” implies desire, pain, and scarring, all aspects of eros (fr. 38). It is important to note, however, that it the word burn written in present tense - ‘burn’ instead of ‘burned.’ Say why

Sappho’s emphasis on the present moment is evident in the ambiguity of her writing style and its fragmentation. Each poem discusses a present moment, a present word or phrase at face value, in all of its ambiguity. Due to its fragmentation and range of emotions, her poetry cannot be narrativized; it simply has to be read and felt. Some of her fragments are just one or two lines. For example, when she writes “Eros shook my/mind like a mountain wind falling on oak trees,” these words have connotations that evoke an overall sense of being weighed down (fr. 47). The notion of a ‘mountain wind’ seems to connote the wind coming from a place above, potentially from Mount Olympus. Oak trees also connote strength; wind blowing through a robust material implies that eros is powerful enough to shake even the most resilient of objects. Sappho, and translator Anne Carson’s, deliberate choice to utilize the name of a tree that connotes strength illustrates the meaning of each word. The use of effective diction is especially important in a fragment where complete phrases and sentences cannot be understood, and words must be taken at face value. There are also a limited number of words and choosing to have some repeat further emphasizes them.

In Sappho’s address to Aphrodite, the phrase “now again” is repeated in parentheses (fr. 1). By repeating the phrase “now again,” Sappho emphasizes the repetitive and cyclical nature of eros (fr. 1). She writes, “Now again I have suffered” and “now again I am calling out,” discussing how she has suffered repeatedly, yet she continues to seek out eros (fr. 1) Sappho longs to fall in love repeatedly because she longs for the benefits bestowed by eros. Her lover says “Sappho, I swear, against my will I leave you,” and Sappho “answered her/Rejoice, go and/remember me” (fr. 94). In this fragment, Sappho does not see rejection as painful, but rather the relationship as pleasurable She emphasizes the importance of remembering their relationship, writing: “for we in our youth did these things, yes many beautiful things “(fr.

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24). Sappho’s rejection of the pain of eros allow her to focus on remembering. Remembering is bittersweet in itself - there are negative feelings associated with losing a lover, but also with re-living the pleasurable aspects of a relationship. This remembrance is the bittersweet aspect of eros that she chooses to focus on.

Eros, the intersection of love and lust, can evoke emotions of both pleasure and pain.

Sappho, however, promotes eros because its pleasurable aspects are enough to inspire her to continue to pursue love, despite some of its undesirable effects. Through the ambiguity of Sappho’s writing style, as well as the nature of fragmentation, she discusses the intertwined nature of the bittersweet emotions associated with eros. Eros is cycle of pain and pleasure, based on the cycling of reciprocation. None of the poems reach a sense of fulfilment, the sweet aspect is not the end of the cycle. Sappho gives her feelings to someone else and they either return them or not. If the other person does not return those feelings, then she experiences pain, and if they do, she experiences joy. Sappho argues that this is dynamic intertwinement of pain and pleasure is the nature of longing and eros itself.

Works Cited Sappho, , and Anne Carson. If Not, Winter: Fragments of Sappho. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2002. Print.

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“All the lond schuld of hym speke”: Reputation and Masculinity in Chestre’s Sir Launfal Alina Kleinsasser

In Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal, an indirect adaption of Marie de France’s Lai de Lanval, the impoverished, disgraced Arthurian knight Sir Launfal meets a fairy queen, Dame Tryamour, who proclaims her love for him and offers him protection and riches. She insists, however, that he keep her existence a secret, saying, “But of o thyng, syr knyght, I warne the, / That thou make no bost of me— / For no kennes mede!” (Chestre 361-63).

While this seems an odd request, it is actually related to one of Launfal and the Arthurian court’s main concerns: reputation. By denying Launfal the chance to use her to improve his reputation (except indirectly through her gifts), Tryamour challenges the material, courtly world’s preoccupation with reputation and its relationship to masculinity. In Sir Launfal, masculinity is an outer, surface quality rather than an inner virtue. It is not a quality that a knight possesses, but rather an appearance which he assumes based on his reputation. It can be granted or rescinded based on what the court and broader society think of a knight.

Masculinity is a shield that Launfal uses to survive in the world of the Arthurian court. It is only in the world of the fairy court, where nurturing femininity rules, that this show of masculinity becomes irrelevant.

Launfal’s masculinity depends in part on his wealth, but he is less concerned with having wealth for its own sake than he is with making displays of that wealth to keep up his reputation. Launfal continually mismanages his funds to finance displays of largesse. When Launfal is introduced, the first thing the narrator relates about him is that “He gaf gyftys largelyche— / Gold and sylver and clothes ryche—” (Chestre 28-29). After leaving Arthur’s court for Caerleon, Launfal spends all of the money that Arthur gave him in under a year (132). The narrator says that “So savagelych hys good he besette / That he ward yn greet dette” (131). The word “savagelych,” meaning “wildly,” implies great irresponsibility and showiness (Chestre 130, Shepherd 194). When King Arthur’s nephews, Sir Hugh and Sir John, who had accompanied Launfal to Caerleon to serve him during his self-imposed exile, finally leave him because he can no longer afford to support them, all that Launfal asks of them is that they protect his reputation. He says, “Tellyth no man of my poverté, / For the love of God almyght” (Chestre 143-44).

Launfal is also very concerned with his physical appearance. When explaining to the mayor of Caerleon’s daughter why he declined her offer to dine with her in her father’s hall, he says, “Today to cherche I wolde have gon, / But me fawtede hosyn and schon, / Clenly brech and scherte— / And for defawte of clothynge / Ne myght I yn wyth the peple thrynge...”

(Chestre 199-203). Launfal’s appearance has become so dishevelled that he avoids social interaction in order to protect his reputation. He does not even attend church, because he would be humiliated to go there in his ragged clothes.

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The poem presents public humiliation as one of the worst possible things that could happen to a knight. After the mayor’s daughter lends Launfal a horse, he rides away to a park, intending to enjoy solitude in nature to distract himself from his misfortunes. However, as he is leaving the town, he embarrasses himself in front of the townspeople when his horse trips and, bringing Launfal down with him, falls into a pile of mud and waste. The narrator treats the moment with solemnity, saying, “Hys hors slod and fel yn the fen, / Wherfore hym scornede many men / Abowte hym fer and wyde” (Chestre 214-16). Launfal is not miserable because the fall hurt or because he got dirty; he is miserable because this unfortunate and conspicuous egress from the town has harmed his reputation.

Launfal’s obsession with how others perceive him should not be viewed entirely as a character flaw. In many ways it is forced upon him by virtue of his belonging to the upper class. When he loses his money, invitations to dinners cease. When “A feste of greet solempnité” is hosted in Caerleon, all of the upper-class people in the area are invited (Chestre 182, 184-6). Launfal, however, “for hys poverté / Was not bede to that semblé” (187-88).

When, after returning to Caerleon from his first meeting with his fairy lover Dame Tryamour, riders arrive in town with riches she sent for him, the boy whom the riders ask for directions insults Launfal, saying, “Nys he but a wrecche; / What thar any man of hym recche?” (394-95).

Even children understand Launfal to be useless because of his reputation for poverty.

While possessing great wealth is a typical requirement for knightly masculinity, another focus of a knight’s masculinity is his capacity for violence. One of the episodes in Sir Launfal that has received critical attention for its implications to Launfal’s masculinity is the fight with Sir Valentyne. Stephen Guy-Bray claims that Launfal’s dependence on Gyfre during the fight undermines Launfal’s masculinity (Guy-Bray 41). James T. Stewart argues against him, saying that the aid Launfal receives from others both in this fight and throughout the poem is actually evidence of Launfal’s nobility and masculinity, since, Stewart says, in medieval England “a nobleman’s reputation for chivalry depend[ed] in part on the work of those who support[ed] and surround[ed]” him (Stewart 112-13). However, Launfal’s actual masculinity here is not the issue; merely it is that he adds to his reputation for prowess in battle through the fight, regardless of the help he receives from Gyfre. Launfal is only invited back to Arthur’s court once Arthur receives “tydying” of Launfal’s “noblesse” in his fight with Sir Valentyne (Chestre 613, 615). Yet the restoration of Launfal’s reputation and his place in Arthur’s court is only temporary; soon after, Queen Guinevere ruins it.

Part of what Guinevere represents is the dark side of courtly manners: she judges people based solely on their reputation. When Launfal is in Caerleon, Guinevere hears good news of him and wishes he were ill instead (Chestre 180). Yet when Launfal becomes the darling of Arthur’s court, she professes her love to him; a love that the audience knows is false because she claims to have, despite her earlier dislike of him, loved him for seven years (677-78).

When Launfal rejects her advances, saying, “I nell be traytour [to King Arthur], day ne nyght,” 31

she accuses him of not being sexually interested in women, saying, “Thou lovyst no woman, ne no woman the” (683, 689). For a medieval audience, this implication of homosexuality would have been a harsh attack on Launfal’s masculinity. As well, after walking away from Launfal, Guinevere swears that she will “of Launfal be so awreke / That all the lond schuld of hym speke, / Wythinne the dayes fyfe” (706-08). It is not so much Launfal that she wants to harm as much as his reputation. By defeating Guinevere in the ensuing trial, Tryamour symbolically defeats the forces of gossip and the courtly obsession with reputation, freeing Launfal from worry about reputation.

Already upon her first meeting with Launfal, Tryamour had provided this respite from courtly ties of reputation to masculinity. The section of the text where Launfal first encounters the fairy court is free from concerns about Launfal’s reputation. Upon first seeing the ladies Tryamour sends to bring him to her, Launfal knows how to act the gentleman; he is “curteys” and follows them “curteyslyche” (Chestre 251, 259). He is at ease in the fairy court in a way that he is not in the ordinary world, where he has to keep up a constant show of masculinity to protect his reputation. While Launfal does display masculine power in the fairy court, even though the scene reads to modern audiences like a ridiculous male fantasy, the masculinity Launfal evinces during his stay at the fairy court is actually a genuine masculinity rather than the performative version of it that he employs in the ordinary world. His love for his lady is genuine: the narrator says that “All hys love yn her was lyghth,” and this is meant to be taken at face value (305). Launfal sleeps with Tryamour, evidencing his virility, arguably a more inherent form of masculinity than the displays he puts on in Caerleon and Arthur’s court (349). Yet, at the same time, his masculinity is not as important in the fairy court, because it is Tryamour who seduces him—she orders him brought to her court and greets him there “uncovert” (291). Here, free from the intricacies of courtly gossip and reputation of the Arthurian court, masculinity and femininity coexist in harmony.

In Sir Launfal, Launfal’s masculinity is not an inherent, earned thing, but rather a performance he uses to maintain his reputation and standing in the world of the Arthurian court. Chestre seems at times to mock this and at others to subscribe to this version of masculinity. However, by undermining this system of masculinity whenever Launfal interacts with the fairy court, Chestre ultimately critiques aristocratic ideas of masculinity as dependent on a knight’s reputation.

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Works Cited Chestre, Thomas. “Sir Launfal.” Middle English Romances: Authoritative Texts, Sources and Backgrounds, Criticism. Edited by Stephen H.A. Shepherd. W.W. Norton & Company, 1995, pp. 190-218.

Guy-Bray, Stephen. “Male Trouble: Sir Launfal and the Trials of Masculinity.” English Studies in Canada, vol.

34, no. 2-3, 2008, pp. 31-48.

Stewart, James T. “Thomas Chestre’s Sir Launfal and the Knight in Need.” Arthuriana, vol. 25, no. 2, 2015, pp.

111-28.

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Throwing Stones at Glass Houses: The Madness of Healing in Margaret Atwood’s Surfacing Erin Anderson Margaret Atwood’s second novel, Surfacing, deals with themes of identity and loss.

Nature echoes the narrator’s transition from detached human to wild animal, pregnant with carnal sensations. She returns to her past to find her missing father, but ultimately begins to uncover the passageway to healing. She initially blames herself for abandoning her husband and child, but later reveals her inability to feel or express emotions as a coping mechanism for reality—her “husband”, merely an affair, had forced her to abort their unborn “child”.

For the narrator, nature represents the healing from past trauma as well as her descent into madness. Atwood uses various recurring images to symbolize the ways in which the narrator’s terminated pregnancy shapes her present identity: glass, eggs, and the dead heron. Glass is a symbol for her distorted memories. The discovery of the heron awakens something within the narrator; she equates the senselessness of killing an innocent and defenseless animal to her own complicity in the death of her fetus. Eggs are linked to human gestation, but also the eggs that a female heron would lay, underlying the narrator’s connection to and identification with nature, which proves to be both her salvation and her undoing.

According to the Corning Museum of Glass, “Glass is created when a molten material cools so rapidly that there is not enough time for a crystalline structure to form…In a glass, the atoms are held rigidly in place so it cannot flow. But they have not had time to arrange themselves in a perfectly ordered lattice. Neither a solid nor a liquid, glass is often called a rigid liquid.” Like her bifurcated upbringing, the narrator feels torn between artificiality and immersion in nature; her constant references to glass symbolize her vacillation and the distortion that trauma causes. Searching for her father in cliff paintings that do not exist, the narrator attempts to construct a visual for something she had never seen: “[I]t was in a bottle curled up…I couldn’t let it out, it was dead already… I had been furious with them, I knocked it off the table, my life on the floor, glass egg and shattered blood, nothing could be done” (148). The abortion procedure, as sudden as the process of glass formation, did not allow the narrator to digest what was being done to her. Just like atoms in glass, she had become rigid and unable flow.

The idea of fluidity is not only limited to glass, but also water. The canoe trip in search of her father symbolizes the narrator’s stirring up of the past, and the decay which she uncovers after having repressed the memories. “When the paddles hit bottom on the way across, gas bubbles from decomposing vegetation rose and burst with a stench of rotten eggs or farts” (119). Almost immediately, the crew discovers the mutilated heron—the epitome of disregard for the sanctity of nature: “I smelled it before I saw it…I turned around and it was hanging upside down…looped over a tree branch…It looked at me with its mashed eye” (119). The sight of this beautiful creature, a victim of circumstance like her would-be baby,

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triggers the resurgence of the narrator’s traumatic memories, releasing her from the rigidity of her self-imposed penance. While she still does not feel absolved of her guilt, the very act of remembering is the key to restoring her ability to experience emotion.

The image of the heron evokes in her what are, she realizes, fabricated memories of the amphibious specimen staring at her in the doctor’s office. Her “glass egg” (148), not unlike the eggs that herons lay. Remembering she had been sedated during the medical procedure that terminated her pregnancy, she retracts the image— “That was wrong, I never saw it. They scraped it into a bucket and threw it wherever they throw them” (148)— recounting all the ways in which her memories were counterfeit. “A faked album, the memories of fraudulent as passports; but a paper house was better than none and I could almost live in it, I’d lived in it until now” (149). This revelation sparks a hunger, which can only be satiated by producing a new egg. As her and Joe copulate, “[she] can feel my lost child surfacing within [her], forgiving [her], rising from the lake where it has been prisoned for so long” (171). By rejecting societal constructions, she gives herself over to the visceral powers of nature: “This time I will do it by myself, squatting, on old newspapers and in a corner alone; or on leaves…The baby will slip out easily as an egg…and I’ll lick it off and bite the cord, the blood returning to the ground where it belongs” (171). The heron, an embodiment of her dissolved fetus, becomes a symbol for fertility and animal instincts—a chance to face her traumatic past and begin to heal.

In Surfacing, the narrator’s identity is rooted in nature, and her return to the landscape of her past triggers an awakening, characterized by both the broken glass and newly formed egg; a sense of clarity skewed by a rejection of the vulnerability of being human. “That is the real danger now, the hospital or the zoo, where we are put, species and individual, when we can no longer cope” (202). She no longer must feign cold-blood to retain her power. She becomes the heron, until the time comes when she can reclaim her human form and rejoin civilization.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. Surfacing. Emblem Editions, 2010.

“Corning Museum of Glass.” All About Glass | Corning Museum of Glass, www.cmog.org/collection/galleries/glass-in-nature.

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Trauma, Photography, and Fragmentation in Timothy Findley’s The Wars Rose Ghaedi

Timothy Findley’s 1977 novel The Wars uses a frame narrative to explore the life of a young Canadian officer during the First World War through the efforts of a researcher who posthumously pieces together the meaning of his actions. The novel has a unique, highly imagistic style that uses techniques of alienation, disruption, and ambiguity to foreground the constructed nature of the narrative and model the narrative disruption of trauma in a way that allows readers a limited experience of Robert Ross’s trauma while still maintaining critical distance.

The Wars is constructed around a frame narrative in which Robert Ross’s story is told through the archeological efforts of an unnamed narrator to put together Ross’s personality and the reasons for his actions. Findley creates a mystery around Ross’s motivations and thought processes, essentially writing not a whodunnit but a whydunnit, where the driving force is the narrator’s need to make sense of Ross’s actions. This investigative approach can be seen throughout the novel in the narrator’s recourse to photographic evidence, the firstperson interviews which take on a testimonial quality, and the clear delineations between what is known, what is unknown, and what is unknowable. By combining this fragmented investigative focus with the direct invocation of the reader using the second-person point of view, Findley involves the reader in the process of parsing the text and the “evidence” provided and encourages their involvement in the meaning-creation process.

Findley problematizes this meaning-creation process by withholding vital information from the reader which is available to characters and by creating jarring transitions between the frame narrative and Robert’s journey. Such tactics serve to undercut simplistic and overlycertain readings of the narrative, and to remind the reader of the narrative’s artifice and construction. The novel also uses intertextuality not just to foreground the construction of the narrative, but also to defer meaning onto outside sources and to place the novel within a larger already-existing aesthetic discourse. As evidenced by Captain Ord’s assertion that “since he was going to do a boy’s work he must read the ‘stuff of which boys were are made’” (Findley 55), Findley treats existing narrative structures as immature representations of the world. Here, for example, Captain Ord refers to the G.A. Henty’s colonialist boys’ adventure novels, which Findley connects to simplistic fictions to the ultimately insufficient official metanarratives that attempt to explain and justify the wars of society. By frequently citing other works, including Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Lady Juliet’s favourite books The Turn of the Screw and The Picture of Dorian Gray; and the works of G.A. Henty, Findley creates a corpus against which his work can be contextualized and compared.

Even as Findley cites traditional war narratives, he subverts and challenges their unproblematized simplistic representations. This resistance to typical linear narratives follows 36

the philosophy of what Luckhurst refers to as a trauma narrative, that is, a narrative that tries to model in its structure the ways that traumatic events are experienced by those involved.

Luckhurst argues that trauma cannot be represented in traditional ways, stating that:

The relationship between trauma as a devastating disruption and the subsequent at

tempts to translate or assimilate this disturbance is a fundamental tension

between interruption and flow, blockage and movement. Trauma, in effect, issues

a challenge to the capacities of narrative knowledge. In its shock impact trauma is anti-

narrative, but it also generates the manic production of retrospective narratives that

seek to explicate the trauma. (Luckhurst 79)

Here, Luckhurst touches upon the underlying tension of the novel: there can be no clear, positivist understanding of the narrative because trauma functions as an anti-narrative force that disrupts the lives of victims by destroying conventional understandings of causality and important narrative distinctions such as past/present and here/there. In some ways, this theory makes the phrase “traumatic history” an oxymoron, since for traumatized individuals, the trauma is always, in every sense of the word, present.

Findley uses a variety of methods to represent the tension between the disruption of trauma and the human need for explanatory narratives. For example, in the climax of the novel, when Robert and the horses are surrounded by the army, Findley juxtaposes the statement that “nobody knows what happened” against sentences, only a few lines later, describing “what in fact happened” (194). This passage models the exact pattern of traumatic disruption and narrative assimilation: first it states that we do not and cannot know what happened, then continues on to provide a clearly constructed image necessary to satisfy the requirements of traditional narrative. The narrator also acknowledges that the central (if imagined) image of the novel, that of Robert’s fiery flight on the horse, will “obtrude again and again until you find its meaning” (11), or, until we can assimilate it through narrative explanation. Findley further models the confusion of temporality by including jarring jumps between the frame narrative and Robert’s more personal and immediate accounts of his actions. Moreover, the story is not told chronologically; rather, it is organized by thematic repetitions which circle around the central question of Robert’s motivations. Repetition is also a symptom of a trauma unhealed, or, a signal of its continued effects in search of healing.

The traumatic technique of fragmentation appears not only in the fragmented narrative, but also in the fragmentation of thought process and the breakdown of reason in the face of trauma. While struggling with being forced to kill an injured horse, Robert describes his mind as following a rhythm of “stop, stop–forward–stop” (Findley 59), showing the stuttering attempts of his mind to process what is essentially unthinkable for Robert. Findley returns to this pattern during a bombing barrage by the Germans, where Robert once again haltingly attempts to mentally process the traumatic event: “When the mines went up the earth swayed.

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Forward. Back. Forward. Half-back. Then was a sort of glottal stop–halfway to nowhere” (111). Thus Findley implies that the traumas of war, and trauma in general, are not just unrepresentable and inaccessible to modern readers, but also inherently resistant to being processed, even (or perhaps especially) by those directly involved. Diana Brydon argues that these stuttering thought patterns are meant to suggest that “the mind moves more naturally in this rocking motion round a fixed point than in straight lines of historical or narrative progression” (66), but Luckhurst’s theory of trauma narratives would suggest that a mind not under duress would, in fact, interpret the world through narrative, even though that narrative does not have an indexical relation to reality. Instead, this fragmented narration reflects a breakdown of Robert’s ability to process the traumatic events through conventional (narrative, cause-effect, before-after) methods.

The breakdown of reason in the face of trauma is not exclusive to Robert’s own psyche, but occurs regularly throughout the novel, beginning with the killing of the rabbits after Rowena’s death. Despite Robert’s urgent questioning, no explanation is given for the Ross family’s insistence on killing the rabbits, a decision which “can’t possibly make any sense” (Findley 20). The narrator needs a motive to create causality and to fulfill the necessities of narrative, and so suggests that the killings were motivated by “revenge” , but there is no true reason given, other than irrationality in the face of the pain of losing a family member.

Later in the novel, Robert is ordered by a superior to place guns in a location that will almost certainly lead to the death of him and his contingent. Corporal Bates asserts that “the greatest terror of war [is] what you didn’t know about the men who told you what to do. What if they were mad – or stupid?” (121). The soldiers have no choice but to follow orders without understanding the reasoning, if indeed there is any, behind the orders that will decide their lives. The irrational orders nearly cause the death of the entire detachment, and lead to Robert killing an enemy sniper in panic. When this happens a third time, with Captain Leather ordering Robert to condemn a barnful of horses to a cruel and meaningless death, Robert finally decides to act against the order and to rescue the animals, ultimately at the expense of his own life. In each instance, the narrator attempts to retroactively explain the reasoning behind the seemingly meaningless actions, but if we understand Robert’s trajectory into and during war to result from the trauma generated by Rowena’s death, then turning to trauma theory may provide an explanation. Luckhurst argues that such attempts are inherently doomed, as “trauma marks the disjunction between the event and the forever belated, incomplete understanding of the event” (6).

This loss of reason and breakdown of narrative also coincides with the loss of identity.

For Taffler, a famous soldier, the loss of his arms (and thus his fighting capacity) leads to a major disruption of his identity and worldview. Robert also follows this pattern of identity loss: early in the novel he loses his Canadian identity when a French civilian asserts that anglophones are all the same; he loses his identity as a soldier as he slowly loses faith in the narratives that explain the war and the role of the military, a loss of faith compounded 38

when he is raped by his own colleagues; and finally he loses even his human identity when his choice to identify with humans over animals (Findley 193) leads to him being severely injured, disfigured past recognition, and unable to move independently or speak his thoughts.

Characters in The Wars lose more than just their identity and their connection to the overly-simplistic master narratives that they begin to realize do not represent their lived experience; they also lose their ability to understand and communicate these experiences as well. Mrs. Ross, who begins to feel increasingly alienated from her community after the (both figurative and literal) loss of her children, eventually entirely loses her eyesight. Robert, who struggles throughout the novel to express himself and act according to his desires, eventually loses both the ability to speak and to move. The image of a soldier who has lost the ability to speak is repeated throughout the novel, with its final iteration being Robert himself. This repetition of silenced soldiers reflects the assumed connection of rationality to language: when narratives of rationality are no longer sufficient to describe wartime traumas, language also becomes inaccessible and unhelpful.

Although certain characters begin to recognize the shortcomings of these simplistic narratives, and their inability to explain or represent their traumas, the ultimate fates of these characters (blindness, muteness, death) show that recognition does not necessarily lead to escaping from these narratives. While it is true that the novel demonstrates the failure of the metanarratives that structure society, it also demonstrates that they are necessary. As Brydon argues: “Mirrors, photographs, water jugs, watches, words–all frame, define, and so cage the flow of life, but they also enable us to make sense of our experience. Without them, it becomes unseeable and so unsayable” (76).

Because Robert’s own experience is thus both unseeable and unsayable, Findley often relies on the archivist narrator and their photographic evidence to progress the plot. Although some would argue the photograph is positioned closer to reality than the written word, as it displays specific concrete images, we are also encouraged to doubt the evidentiary value of the photographs presented to us because “every photograph reveals only one angle of vision” (Brydon 66). Early in the novel, the narrator considers a small photograph of the ocean with a small dot in the middle. The photograph is labelled “WHAT IS THIS” (Findley 15), and the narrator suggests that the dot is the tip of an iceberg. This passage serves to indicate to the reader Findley’s attitude towards the meaning-creation process: as in the case of an iceberg, what is most important (and most dangerous) is what cannot be seen. In fact, Jill Bennett suggests that in trauma narratives, scrutinising that which is presented in the narrative “does not yield forensic enlightenment so much as a sense that we are still not seeing the event, which just is not there in the bare matter. The event is somewhere inside what occurs, in its concatenation – in the forces (visible or otherwise) that link components” (140). Thus, like the last photographs seen in the novel, Robert holding an animal’s skull (bringing together the binaries life/death and human/animal) and an image of Robert and Rowena, both now dead 39

but appearing so alive that the narrator can “see [their] breath” (Findley 200), the photography of history is haunted by the inaccessible Real, its unseeable meanings. [very nice!]

Williams argues that photography causes “the cyclical experience of daily or yearly time or the linear sense of time as historical continuity, [to give] way to an atomized sense of time where distance, difference, death, delay, danger, and discontinuity become the rule”. In this way photography is used as a haunted medium to create a sense of tension and fragmentation that alienates the reader from the narrative. The narrator also uses photography to distance Robert from not only the reader, but also his own time frame, “freeing him to come riding down the light rays, in cinematic fashion, into our age” (Williams). Later, Marian Turner will state that “nowadays so many people – young people especially – might’ve known what he was all about” (Findley 10), thus, highlighting Robert’s sense of alienation and externalizing his traumainspired loss of temporal sense by literally divorcing him from his own time period.

Despite providing one of the most reliable sources of information about Robert Ross’ character and motivations, Juliet d’Orsey nonetheless issues a warning to the narrator, saying: “You can not know these things. You live when you live. No one else can ever live your life and no one else will ever know what you know. Then was then. Unique” (Findley 114). Robert Ross’s mindset and motivations are that which “could not be told” (Findley 7); they are inaccessible to the reader and not even fully intelligible to Robert himself. As Findley’s narrator states, “there is no good picture of this except the one you can make in your mind” (71) – our interactions with the past, and with the traumas therein, can only be highly mediated by mimetic structures that represent partial and distorted images of reality, but which nonetheless provide a picture of reality, enough to breathe life into the memory of Robert Ross.

Yet Brydon suggests that the confusion and disjunction explored in The Wars are not the singular occurrences of wartime trauma, but actually reflect the tensions underlying society as a whole. These tensions are brought to light by the extremity of the traumatic experience, which gives voice to “the violence and the irrationality that always existed in repressed and in institutionalized forms, now given free rein. ‘The wars’ that compose our civilization reveal themselves most starkly through war, but they are always there” (Brydon 70), and only remain hidden because of the societal metanarratives that smooth over underlying tensions.

Using these techniques of alienation, fragmentation, and distancing, Findley’s 1977 novel The Wars is a masterful work that foregrounds its own status as a narrative construction, draws into question the metanarratives that lead to war, and models its protagonist’s trauma in a way that balances narrative requirements with a respect for the inherent inaccessibility of traumatic history. The Wars deftly combines complex ethical and political concerns with an awareness of its role as an aesthetic object to create a reading experience that challenges readers to actively participate in the meaning-creation process and engage with the traumatic histories that have formed their society.

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Works Cited Bennett, Jill. Practical aesthetics: events, affects and art after 9/11. I.B. Tauris, 2012.

Brydon, Diana. “‘It Could Not Be Told:’ Making Meaning in Timothy Findley’ s The Wars.” The

Journal of Commonwealth Literature, vol. 21, no. 1, 1986, pp. 62–79. Scholars Portal Journals, doi:10.1177/002198948602100111.

Findley, Timothy. The Wars. Irving & Company, 1977.

Luckhurst, Roger. The Trauma Question. Routledge Taylor and Francis Group, 2013.

Williams, David. “A Force of Interruption: The Photography of History in Timothy Findley’s The Wars.”

Canadi an Literature, no. 194, Autumn 2007, pp. 54-73, 200.

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“Who’s Your Daddy”: How Pull Ups’ “Cool Alert” “Gavin” Commercial will Corner Gen X New-Mothers Market by Playing off of Target’s Insecure Attachment with own Boomer Parents Julia Sebastien

Our “Cool Alert” Pull-Ups advertisers are targeting Generation X (“Gen X”) young mothers who, in this year, 2006, still buy the most children’s diapers (Seldin)1. We2 know that Gen X were neglected by their “boomer” parents as children (Wiedmer)3, and that adult Gen X have high separation/divorce-rates4 and are hands-on, warm parents (McGuire)5. Initially, our “Cool Alert” product seems if anything to alienate our anxiously attached parental target: why would a parent with an insecure attachment to their own parents6 gravitate towards a product that, in helping children handle their own bathroom cues without parental assistance, accelerates the child’s maturation and their inevitable outgrowing and abandonment of the home and the parent as the child enters the “school” environment?7 Recalling Edward Bernays’ theory that our campaign “must appeal to … [and] activat[e] [the public’s] both conscious and subconscious … force of desires” (Bernays), we deliberately trigger our target’s insecure attachment anxiety toward her parent8 then relieve her anxiety with a cathartic onscreen parent-child reunion event that should lead to brand affinity (Brand Toolbox)9. To aid our target’s regression to her anxious, childlike state, we must first help our target project her father onto “Gavin” and herself onto “mother”. Then, we will have a separation event between “Gavin” and “mother” to trigger our target’s separation anxiety.10 Finally, we will relieve both anxieties11 with an on-screen reunion episode12 to ensure our vulnerable target associates positive affect with our product.

1 We are recalling, of course, Edward Bernays’ call for specific demographic research for targeting (Bernays).

2 despite not having nearly as much information on this generation as neo-Digital and Digital (millennial) generations (Manolis et al).

3 Gen X is known for being ignored, latchkey generation, overlooked by their adult-oriented, working Baby Boomer parents (Wiedmer).

4 possibly as result of their anxious attachment style, as engendered by their own “broken families and absentee” parents (Wiedmer).

5 likely to compensate for their own abandonment and satisfy their own rejected need for intimacy with their parents (Wiedmer) 6 leading to an anxious attachment style, separation anxiety and a fear of abandonment 7 just as their own neglectful parent abandoned them when entering the “work” environment (Wiedmer) 8 Likely a single parent (McGuire), so we chose father to enable us to capitalize on Freudian angles to the insecure attachment.

9 This is the customer’s belief that they and a brand share common values, which leads to a deeper form of brand loyalty (Brand Toolbox).

10 I.e. fear of abandonment caused by her father, though we may extend her separation anxiety to the conscious realm as a mother.

11 ending our commercial on a warm, satisfying note 12 and other case-specific elements

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To relive her childhood attachment anxiety, our target must first project her father onto “Gavin”13 and herself onto “mother”. 14 To do the former, we adultify “Gavin”, the child, characterizing him as a sophisticated, mature, authoritative, male adult. We suggest Gavin’s sophistication and maturity by playing classical piano music in the background, dressing him in stiff, adult clothing (a plaid, button down shirt), and depicting him as precociously wellgroomed15 and well-mannered. 16 Selecting a formal, old fashioned name such as “Gavin”17 also characterizes Gavin as mature, sophisticated and adultlike, easing his resemblance to our target’s father. We further adultify Gavin by depicting him playing chess--an intellectual, rule-bound cerebral activity--especially against an adult opponent. A camera pan from the chess pieces to Gavin’s face further helps us reinforce Gavin as an adult male in our target’s mind, since the chess set--which no children’s toy, but rather an elegant, carved wooden set, depicting armed and angry Roman soldiers--will suggest to our target that Gavin, too, is a little soldier. Positioning the Roman Centurion piece before him, in his hands, subliminally establishes Gavin as the alpha male. True to his adultified image, we often film “Gavin” from his eye level18 and show Gavin taking command19 throughout the commercial: without parental assistance, Gavin introduces himself to the camera, ventures off to the bathroom, and washes his own hands. 20 While transforming Gavin into our target’s distant, boomer father, we infantilize the “mother” character, our target’s onscreen model and conduit for self-projection. To infantilize the “mother”, we dress her in soft, pastel purple,21 and style her hair in long curls, pinned away from her face.22 We also made the “home” set modern and minimalist23 to resemble the typical Gen X’s orderly and sterile childhood home environment and facilitate our target’s regression. The parent/child chess match, a calm and unemotional activity24 also retrieves our target’s emotionally distant relationship to her boomer parent.

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13 the onscreen little boy 14 The onscreen adult female in the commercial.

15 his appearance is immaculately neat and tidy, and he washes his hands after using the restroom 16 the boy apparently does not mess up the house’s modern, industrial interior as a typical child might be expected to, and even lowers the toilet seat after use, which shows an awareness, thoughtfulness and neatness superior even to most adult males.

17 An old-fashioned, formal name, without any short form, childish nickname or term of endearment 18 especially when he introduces himself, returns triumphantly to his mother, and announces “I’m a big kid now” at the end. That triumphant call helps associate Gavin’s pleasurable genital experience with adultness and sexual maturation since it recalls the adage that a boy allegedly becomes a man after losing his virginity.

19 and exercising his agency 20 at an adult-height sink, somehow (we suggest he might have used a stool without showing it overtly, since that would weaken our adultifying efforts) 21 Evocative of the soft, pastel colours used in nurseries 22 Which, must more closely resembles a little girl’s hairstyle than the classic, short, fuss-free ‘mom haircut” typical of young mothers.

23 unlike the warm and free-spirited household environment that typical Gen X parents create for their child (Johnson) 24 during which the two sit on opposite sides of the table, with physical distance

Our decision to make Gavin male25 lets us draw upon Jung’s “Electra complex”26 , and27 use subliminal sexual imagery to trigger our target’s sexual desire for her “father” (Jung).28 We foster subconscious, sexualized perceptions of Gavin with a close-up on his tittelated face as his “Cool-Alert” diaper stimulates his genitals,29 suggestive of orgasm, and with Gavin’s direction to fondle a phallic-shaped chess piece.30 Lastly, we sexualize our adultified Gavin in the restroom, filming his toes’ upward curl in pleasure, before cutting to a wonderfully suggestive animation of a phallic thermometer31 that fills with a blue fluid, splashes the diaper, then becomes depleted. To ensure we’ve aroused our target’s subconscious sexual desire for her father’s penis, our female narrator says this suggestive clause, “to help [Gavin] feel cool within seconds of becoming wet”.

Role-reversal achieved,32 we next stage an onscreen separation event between “Gavin”as-father and “mother”-as-target to trigger separation anxiety in our target. When Gavin leaves to the bathroom, we film him from behind, and at his eye-level to recall to our target’s mind her boomer father leaving her for work.33 To trigger a second, conscious anxiety that her child will soon mature and leave her to go to school, we also film Gavin’s departure from a high angle. Having established now two sources of separation anxiety in our target, as both consciously, mom, and subconsciously, lustful daughter, we use camerawork to sharpen the sexual frustration dimension of their separation: Following Gavin into the bathroom, the camera hints at his nudity34 but keeps everything from his upper thigh upwards out of frame, denying both his “mother”’s35 and our target’s 36 viewing pleasure. By frustrating our target’s desire for viewing pleasure, our separation episode ramps up our target’s unconscious sexual 25 Also strategic and intentional 26 According to which, young girls desire their father sexualy (Jung). (We recognize, of course, that the exact act for the electra complex (3-6 years old) (Jung) does not match up with Gen X feelings of being forever twelve years old with their parents (Manolis et al), but we believe it will be effective for our target either way).

27 keeping everything legal and family-friendly, of course 28 We are playing off of the assumption that for many our target viewers at home, this desire is, of course, unresolved since adult, female Gen X rarely have lasting marriages through which they can replace their fathers with their husbands (McGuire).

29 eyes wide, mouth ajar 30 which, in addition to being light-coloured to match his pale skin and the Roman Centurion piece--the most masculine, “alpha male” leader piece in the set--this piece is also the biggest, standing erect at nearly 6 inches tall.

31 bulbous at the base, and long and thin to its top 32 Whereby the target may now project her father onto Gavin, the son, and herself as our onscreen “mom” 33 An angle that elongates his body and aims to portray Gavin as an adult, who perhaps is leaving home to go to work 34 by showing Gavin’s bare legs dangling over on the toilet with his diaper around his ankles 35 who cranes her neck to watch Gavin as he leaves 36 who may strain to see beyond the frame

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frustration and separation anxiety from Gavin-as-father.37

After intensifying our target’s subconscious separation anxiety and sexual frustration to its limit, we assuage her separation anxiety38 with a reunion event: Gavin’s return to “mother” from the bathroom. Since our product is first and foremost a maturational tool, our first priority with this reunion is relieving our target’s unwanted fear that buying our product will hasten her child’s maturation and departure. 39 Thus, we remind the target that Gavin is still very young and disarm our product’s adultifying capabilities by using a “shaky cam”40 to film our product, and by verbalizing our target’s biggest conscious anxiety41 in messy, childlike typeface, and in a childlike, high-pitched singing voice.42 In this way, our finale reunites parent with child, defuses our target’s separation anxiety, 43 and disarms our product’s adultifying capacities.44 We eagerly anticipate cornering the Gen X new-mom market in future parent-child commercials.45 While other brands simply trigger targets’ anxieties, our on-screen reunion/catharsis endings distinguish us for the family brand we are.

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37 Which will gratify the target’s both conscious and subconscious self-identifications as parent and lustful daughter.

38 And lustful frustration 39 Still, of course, we address the underlying sexual dimension to the reunion, as we did with the separation: to appease our target’s anxiety at being separated from and sexually frustrated by her father, we add a physical affectionate element to the reunion episode that is subliminally sexual: upon finishing in the bathroom, “Gavin”, shot from eye-level to continue the fatherly-adultifying angle, hugs the onscreen mother and smiles up at her. The subliminally sexual element to this embrace is that not only does Gavin press his face into the mother’s vagina, but also, since the clip is shot from Gavin’s eye level, the onscreen mother has no visible face and so Gavin appears to be gazing upwards, adoringly into her breasts. This fantasy of sexual gratification should temporarily satisfy the Freudian, subconscious, libidinal urges and frustration our commercial plays upon, and engender in our target feelings of relief and pleasure in association with the product.

40 at the end of the commercial, the camera wobbles while filming the products on the toilet, as if to mimic Gavin’s youthful teetering balance and walk, and, even more subtly, to retroactively trivialize his previously anxiety-inducing departure to the bathroom 41 that her child will be “a big kid now” and outgrow then abandon her 42 The subconsciously sensitive target viewer might even realize that the chess game should not be taken too seriously as a symbol of her child’s adultification (and future abandonment), since Gavin hardly makes a play, and the pieces themselves are in an impossible position!

43 Which we strategically and deliberately caused 44 Hopefully to increase sales 45 via triggering, planting additional, then satisfying generation-specific anxieties and unconscious desires

Works Cited Bernays, Edward L., and Howard Cutler. The Engineering of Consent. Univ. of

Oklahoma Press, 1969.

Brand Tool Box. “Brand Affinity: Don’t Squander It.” Brand Tool Box, Brand Tool Box,

Ltd., 2017, www.brandtoolbox.com/contact-us/.

Huggies Pull-Ups Cool Alert, Huggies. Advertisement. NBC. 05 Sep. 2006. Television.

Johnson, Amy. “Adulting Is Hard: Anxiety and Insecurity in the Millennial Generation’s

Coming of Age Process.” Honors Thesis Collection, Wellesley College, 2017, repository.wellesley.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1547&context=thesiscollection.

Jung, C. G., and Anthony Storr. The Essential Jung. Princeton University Press, 2013.

Manolis, Chris, et al. “A Generation X Scale: Creation and Validation.” Journal of

Research in Crime and Delinquency, SAGE Publications Inc, 1997, journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/0013164497057004011.

McGuire, Kate. “Millennials’ Perceptions of How Their Capacity for Romantic Love

Developed and Manifests.” Smith ScholarWorks, Smith College, 2015, scholarworks.smith.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1736&context=theses.

Seldin, Benjamin, Catherine Kolodij, and Emily Bowden. “Dads Buy Diapers, Too.” Allen

& Gerritsen. July 9, 2011. https://www.a-g.com/blogroll/2011/09/~/media/b230c33eda5b4ef182b1bc3f1767a6ab.pdf Wiedmer, Terry. “Generations do Differ: Best Practices in Leading Traditionalists,

Boomers, and Generations X, Y, and Z.” Delta Kappa Gamma Bulletin, vol. 82,

no. 1, 2015, pp. 51-58. ProQuest,

https://www-lib-uwo-ca.proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/cgi-bin/ezpauthn.cgi?url=http://search.proquest.com. proxy1.lib.uwo.ca/docview/1770514324?accountid=15115.

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