Spring 2014 by FORTY-THREE NORTH

FORTY-THREE

NORTH

SPRING 2014

forty-three north Volume 3, Spring 2014

editor-in-chief

Bonnie Wertheim

editorial board

Rachel Beamish Adam Evertz Sean D. Henry-Smith Anna Jastrzembski Eunice Lee Jamie Lee Nick Lucchesi Haley Lynch Sarah Rahman Kina Viola

Sean D. Henry-Smith Bonnie Wertheim

layout & design cover art

Gina Goldberg Sawyer Konys

contributors

Chris Bousquet

Hannah Chappell

Mira Khanna

Nate Lanman

Lauren Lanzotti

Danny Lustberg

John Rufo

Sarah Sgro

Ashley Williams

contents A Note From the Editor “Always Keeping Girls in School”... Always with a neoliberal agenda? Ashley Williams ’14

9 10

Modern Man: Sprawl and Escape in Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs

Automatons and Puppetry in Der Sandmann

Nate Lanman ’15

Lauren Lanzotti ’14

Cherishing Childhood: Gendered Approaches to Victorian Fairy Tales

Mira Khanna ’15

Haiti and the Eurocentric Canon: Re-examining Buck Morss’ “Hegel and Haiti” and the use of the canon in understanding Haiti

John Rufo ’16

Reclaiming Voice: Female Language, Body, and Time in “Penelope”

Hannah Chappell ’15

The Uncanny’s Presence in Gogol’s Short Stories Lauren Lanzotti ’14

The Failure of Knowledge Chris Bousquet ’15

42 45

What Wretches Feel: The Plight of Representation in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men

Nate Lanman ’15

“Locked Like Sisters”: Identity as a Fluid Construct in Light in August

Sarah Sgro ’14

Consider the Lab Rat: A Grammatical Investigation of Animal Pain Danny Lustberg ’14

About Us

56 61

a note from the editor The first year that Kina and I put together FORTY-THREE NORTH, the operation took place almost exclusively on the Macintosh desktop computers located in Burke Library’s Multimedia Presentation Center. We barely knew how to use InDesign, but we managed to produce a small booklet containing some very impressive writing. Its cover, an archival map of the College, has since become synonymous with the journal itself. Year two was easier, chiefly because we added talent to our staff in the areas of production where our editorial expertise was less applicable. The enlistment of art majors and seasoned Adobe users allowed us to create an original image for the Spring 2013 cover, which Sean D. Henry-Smith captured from the top of KJ using List Art Center’s roof as an access point. Adding art concentrators to our team also introduced us to the Digital Arts Lab (DAL, affectionately) in List, which has since become a kind of home base for FORTY-THREE NORTH. Realizing that we could work on layout in the company of people who were completing similar projects—rather than frenzied students trying to complete research, who didn’t like how chatty we were—was a huge comfort. Next year, List will no longer house the Art and Theatre Departments, as the primary facility for those disciplines will be the new Kevin and Karen Kennedy Center for Theatre and the Studio Arts. Though the building will have increased resources for concentrators and students who simply enjoy taking classes in those areas of study, the move will be unsettling for those who have come to call List home. This issue is an homage to location. The sextant, which appears on our front cover and as a motif throughout the journal, is a tool used to approximate the distance between two objects that can be seen. We believe its connection to location echoes our journal’s mission: to invite interdisciplinary studies and celebrate Hamilton’s place in the world of scholarship. This year’s back cover also references location. A mixed-media piece by Sawyer Konys, it is at once a self-portrait, a painting, a sketch, a piece of sculpture, and perhaps most meaningfully, an ode to the space where Hamilton artists have long exercised their creativity. Like FORTY-THREE NORTH, List has long been a site of convergence. Art courses tend to draw interest from concentrators across disciplines, and though students might complete projects with varying degrees of competence, they share the core values that make them Hamiltonians: curiosity, creativity, and openness to experience. We hope that this year’s issue of FORTY-THREE NORTH reflects those very qualities. Happy reading, Bonnie Wertheim Editor-in-Chief

“Always Keeping Girls in School”... Always with a neoliberal agenda? Ashley Williams ’14

Ashley wrote “Always Keeping Girls in School . . . Always with a neoliberal agenda?” for our WMNST 402 Global Feminisms seminar. In this rich analysis, Ashley examines how transnational corporations, such as Proctor and Gamble, co-opt women’s health issues in the so-called developing world to expand their consumer base. While acknowledging that a lack of access to sanitary napkins is a major hindrance for girls seeking an education in Kenya, Ashley’s piece illustrates how the marketing of Always throughout East Africa does very little to ameliorate the structural and material conditions facing women and girls. Indeed, the lack of access to water, health care, and education that characterize many mal-developed, or what Vandana Shiva describes as “devastated” nations, can be attributed to neoliberal policies implemented by the IMF and World Bank. As Ashley notes, corporate philanthropic initiatives, such as the Always campaign, might provide some financial assistance for a limited time, but they remain incapable of effectively tackling the larger structural problems brought about by the aforementioned neoliberal development policies. — Associate Professor of Women’s Studies Anne E. Lacsamana

Introduction: Menstruation is a difficult topic to discuss, especially for adolescent girls, but a notorious Kenyan television commercial for Always sanitary napkins1 presents menstruation as something to celebrate; it features dozens of girls singing and dancing around their school, proclaiming their confidence in Always sanitary napkins. The commercial opens with the girls complaining about the need to constantly check that their sanitary methods are providing enough protection: “on the bus I check, check! In the class I 1 “Always ‘No check No check’ Clip.” YouTube. http:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=dKKlsA5M8jg.

check, check…every hour I check…when I walk, I check…I cover, I check, I hide, I check!” Then, their schoolteacher introduces Always brand sanitary napkins, and the “check days are gone!” The girls celebrate the ability to sit, stand, study, play, and ride the bus without worrying about their feminine hygiene. This commercial contrasts greatly with American Always commercials2 that feature women in their twenties raving about the sanitary napkin’s advanced technology, its superiority over other products, and its com2 “Always Infinity Commercial- June 21, 2013.” YouTube. http://wwwyoutube.com/watch?v=PwJxU74jPAE.

patibility with active, social lifestyles. American commercials present the sanitary napkin as something that will enhance women’s experiences, whereas the Kenyan commercials present the product as something that will simply enable standard daily activities. It is clear that Procter and Gamble (P&G), the multinational corporation that owns Always brand, is cognizant of the different social locations of its Western and Kenyan customers and is marketing accordingly. P&G’s differential advertising of Always products acknowledges the social implications that sanitary napkins, often taken for granted in the United States, have in Kenya. In Kenya, limited access to effective sanitary methods is a major factor inhibiting female school attendance, causing girls to miss out on several days of learning each month and sometimes drop out of school entirely.3 There is a sharp drop in girls’ enrollment in secondary school, with less than 20% of female primary school students transitioning to secondary school.4 Consequently, there are far more Kenyan boys pursuing secondary education than Kenyan girls. The Kenyan Always commercial introduced above is progressive in that it acknowledges menstruation as an impediment to girls’ studies, presents teachers as sources of knowledge about feminine health, and counters negative cultural views on menstruation with its celebratory nature. Further, P&G supports the Always Keeping Girls in School (AKGIS) initiative that provides sanitary supplies and basic education about puberty to girls in impoverished school districts, thereby solidly linking their product with efforts in increase girl’s school attendance.5 It cannot be ignored, however, that P&G is the world’s largest producer of 3 Stella Jerop Chebii, “Menstruation and Education: How a lack of sanitary towels reduces school attendance in Kenyan slums.” BUWA! A Journal on African Women’s Experiences. (2012): 27-28. 4 Henri Kibira. “Kenya: Murugi Presses for Free Sanitary Pads in Schools.” The Star. (May 29, 2013). 5 Procter and Gamble, “Aways Keeping Girls in School.” Webpage.

household and personal gods, and thus may have individual economic interests underlying its philanthropic actions.6 When P&G’s economic and philanthropic outreach in Kenya, represented by its “No Check” commercial, is considered vis-à-vis the substantial gender inequality in Kenyan education, the company’s approach toward addressing the inequality appears limited and steeped in market-based neoliberal capitalist ideology. Background: Presenting effective sanitary methods as a means of girls’ empowerment and access to education in Kenya is not a new innovation by P&G, although their televised advertisements have brought significant attention to the topic. There was a concerted effort in 2011 to secure funding for the provision of free sanitary pads to schoolgirls, because female parliamentarians saw this as a leading obstacle to girls’ academic pursuits.7 Nearly four million dollars, about 3.6% of the primary education budget, was allocated to the cause in 2011, but this amount was insufficient to supply sanitary supplies to the 2.7 million girls in need, as it provided for only 400,000 girls. Because the Kenyan government has only a small budget allocated to public expenditure, it called for partners in the private sector to help supply sanitary products and support girls’ education.8 The Always Keeping Girls in School program is a response to the call for aid, while P&G’s general marketing and expansion into Kenyan markets is a response to the apparent demand for personal care supplies. Currently, AKGIS focuses on South Africa and Kenya, where it has provided for 28,000 schoolgirls and developed a reputation as a proponent of girls’ health and education.9 6 Wikinvest, “Stocks: Procter and Gamble.” Webpage. 7 Miriam Gathigah. “KENY: Gender Responsive Planning and Budgeting at Work.” Inter Press Service News Agency. (July 25, 2011). 8 Kibira, “Kenya:…Free Sanitary Pads.” 9 Procter and Gamble, “Always Keeping Girls in School.”

Meanwhile, it appears as if P&G has taken advantage of its positive reputation to enter into Africa’s expanding markets. Last April, Business Day reported that over the last decade, P&G has “grown its African business more than tenfold” and will continue to pursue markets there in the coming years.10 Although the report makes no specific mention of the Always brand, this brand has recently infiltrated Kenyan markets. Always sanitary napkins can be seen on the shelves of all large grocery stores and pharmacies, and Kenyans now use “Always” synonymously with “sanitary napkin” in conversation. P&G’s aggressive movement into the Kenyan market introduces doubt as to whether the AKGIS initiative and girl-centric marketing are wholeheartedly geared toward alleviating gendered education inequality; they are likely motivated just as much by economic intentions to preserve a positive trade relationship and promote the Always brand to their growing African consumer base. Benefits of P&G’s global marketing and philanthropy: Ulterior motivations aside, P&G’s marketing and the AKGIS initiative offer both tangible and ideological benefits to the Kenyan community. In terms of tangible benefits, Always sanitary napkins have emerged as an effective, hygienic alternative to traditional sanitary methods. When modern sanitary napkins are not available, schoolgirls use cotton wool, cloth, tissue paper, recycled sponge and foam, or newspapers and book pages to protect against embarrassing leaks and stains at school.11 These methods are not comfortable, convenient, or particularly sanitary, but in some areas, they are the only options available. Always pads offer longer, more reliable protection than most traditional methods, so they are a welcome alternative for girls who can access and afford 10 Moorad Zeenat. Business Day Live, “P&G to build R1.6bn manufacturing hub in SA.” (July 01, 2013). 11 Chebii, “Menstruation and Education,” 28.

them or girls who are the lucky beneficiaries of the AKGIS donations. Due to the stigma surrounding menstruation, girls face shame and harassment by classmates and community members when they suffer the consequences of inadequate feminine protection. Thus, the availability of modern Always napkins in Kenyan stores and through P&G donations gives at least some middle/upper class purchasers and lower class donation recipients relief, if only temporarily, from insecurity and stigmatization. Of course, donations are minimal, and the product is too expensive for many women and girls in Kenya, so this benefit is not very far-reaching. P&G’s marketing of Always products and philanthropic outreach approaches are also beneficial because they counter negative cultural views of menstruation. Research on girls’ experiences of menstruation in northern Tanzania showed that modernization and urbanization have weakened familial bonds and undermined traditions related to maturation in sub-Saharan Africa. Consequently girls growing up in “modern” communities and households miss out on the wisdom and mentorship provided by matriarchs in traditional tribal communities during routine coming-of-age exchanges. Formal school curricula and health initiatives have not been successful in filling this educational void, as they provide little guidance or advice about the management of menses.12 Thus, menstruation is regarded as a taboo topic rather than a normal, biological process.13 Therefore, Kenyan girls often have only a limited understanding of their bodies and feminine health. The Always “No Check!” commercial helps counter these negative views of menstruation and brings attention to girls’ shared grievances. The commercial is frequently aired on the basic cable channels. Many families in Kenya living in communities 12 Marni Sommer. “Where the education system and women’s bodies collide: The social and health impact of girls’ experiences o menstruation and schooling in Tanzania.” Journal of Adolescence. (2010): 522. 13 Chebii, “Menstruation and Education,” 28.

without even reliable electricity or running water go to extensive lengths to hook up television sets, since watching the evening news is extremely important in Kenyan culture. Thus, the commercial reaches a wide audience of girls, excluding only those living in very rural communities. In the commercial, one girl discreetly dismisses herself from class to “check” on her feminine hygiene, and her classmates immediately support her, sharing their own complaints about feminine hygiene products. This scene sends girls the message that they, like the lead girl in the commercial, are not alone in their frustrations and that menstruation is a natural part of being a female. Further, the teacher in the commercial is introduced as a source of knowledge about menstrual management, offering her students a solution—Always pads—to their complaints. The commercial thus introduces feminine health and hygiene as a matter that may be addressed in the classroom. The AKGIS initiative is also beneficial in that it provides tools and basic puberty education so that these topics may actually be discussed in some schools. Even if girls do not have the means to access Always brand sanitary products, the commercials may still be effective in mitigating some of the stigmatization, silence, and insecurity surrounding menstruation. P&G contributions as limited, market oriented solutions: Although there are many benefits to Always’ entrance into Kenyan markets and advertisements, they are minimal achievements in comparison to the much larger issue of gender inequality in education. P&G’s approach to addressing gender inequality in education is similar to the approaches taken by larger remote neoliberal development institutions such as the World Bank and IMF, in that it is limited by market-oriented ideology that does not address the rot causes of inequality. First, even if all girls in Kenya were able to access sanitary napkins, school

environments themselves are often gender discriminatory and girls’ attendance may not increase significantly. Often, girls are unable to easily dismiss themselves to the restroom, and they face harassment by male peers when they do so.14 In addition, many schools are underfunded and lack adequate private latrines, clean water, and disposal systems necessary for girls to change their sanitary napkins.15 The AKGIS initiative and the messages in the Always “No Check!” commercial seem to assume that schools give equal, nondiscriminatory opportunities for males and females to succeed and that securing sanitary supplies will automatically enhance girls’ educational participation and confidence. Unfortunately, there is often a “hidden curriculum” in schools wherein teachers have different attitudes toward male and female students, their career goals, their abilities, and their behaviors, and this tends to reinforce girls’ negative self-perceptions.16 The Always commercial features girls in a supportive, exclusively female classroom where they are empowered to address feminine health concerns to better focus on their studies, but this is not an accurate depiction of all Kenyan girls’ school experiences. Ironically, P&G is part of the neoliberal global capitalist system and a direct beneficiary of development policies that perpetuated discriminatory conditions and inhibit gender parity in education. Structural adjustment policies (SAPs) enacted by the World Bank and the International Monetary Fund (IMF) have imposed a market ideology that promoted increased economic efficiency, export, and profit and mandates reduction in public spending, effectively delegitimizing the welfare state.17 As a result, Kenya has reduced 14 Sommer, “Education system and women’s bodies,” 525-526. 15 Chebii, “Menstruation and Education,” 26. 16 Fiona Leach, “Gender implications of development agency policies on education and training.” International Journal of Educational Development. (2000): 341-342. 17 Hester Eisenstein. Feminism Seduced. Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2009: 24.

state funding of social services like education and healthcare and has introduced cost sharing initiatives. This means that although primary education may be free, girls are expected to front the cost of transportation, uniforms, books, and most importantly, all secondary education.18 Because adolescent girls are often expected to take on several household responsibilities and prepare for marriage, East African families may prefer to send their sons to school when there are limited funds available for the associated fees. 19 Access to healthcare is no more promising, because although a community health initiative is developing in Kenya, it is quite underfunded and few girls have access to basic health education. Finally, SAPs also mandate decentralization of schooling. This gives individual communities the responsibility to ensure the quality of their children’s education, relieving the government of much responsibility and allowing schools to be influenced by local cultural attitudes. In some conservative, traditional, and patriarchal communities, this has inhibited conversations about female health and has silenced girls’ demands for better facilities, treatment, and subsidized sanitary measures at school.20 SAPs have thus contributed to greater gender inequality in education by promoting economic development over public support systems that benefit girls. P&G benefits directly from the economic mandates of these same SAPs. SAPs also promote trade liberalization, foreign investment, and reduced labor restriction, allowing multinational corporations like P&G to expand investments and production into new markets like Kenya and make huge profits. P&G is currently a major global actor with plans to invest in emerging markets and open twenty new manufacturing facilities

outside of its already established markets.21 Many of these will likely be in sub-Saharan Africa, where the company is at once taking advantage of the expanding purchasing power of the growing middle class and simultaneously promoting the AKGIS program.22 While P&G markets their Always products as a tool of liberation for girls struggling with feminine health issues in school, they also reap the benefits of gender-discriminatory development policies that perpetuate the very inequality they set out to alleviate. Introducing new products and services to mitigate deep-set inequalities is a typical “market-based approach” to social problems.23 It is common for the actors of neoliberal global capitalism, such as large multinational corporations, like P&G, and development agencies like the World Bank and IMF to treat social ills as simple logistical issues and introduce technical solutions rather than address systematic inequality.24 P&G, in addressing the issue of girls’ education, has contributed a technical solution, a new modern health product, as a solution for inequality, rather than challenging the global capitalist ideology that has led to the gender inequalities as well as the company’s own success. Further, as suggested above, P&G’s philanthropic attention to girls’ education may in fact, enhance their economic success in sub-Saharan Africa. Through girl-centric marketing as seen in the “No Check!” commercial and the AKGIS program, P&G is able to simultaneously portray itself as a benefactor and market their product to an audience sensitive to the issue of girls’ access to education. This economic ulterior motive is not surprising; traditionally gender initiatives are only strongly supported when they coincide with companies’ or nations’ economic objectives.25

18 Leach, “Gender implications of development,” 336-337. 19 Sommer,“Education System and Women’s Bodies,” 523. 20 Leach, “Gender implications of development,” 337-338.

21 Wikinvest, webpage. 22 Zeenat, “P&G to build R1.6bn manufacturing hub.” 23 Chebii, “Menstruation and Education,” 29. 24 Leach, ‘Gender implications in development,” 339341. 25 Elaine Unterhalter and Amy North. “Girls’ School-

Conclusion: The marketing and philanthropic campaigns of P&G that attempt to address the issue of girls’ education could not be timelier as we approach the 2015 deadline for the Millennium Development Goals. These goals mandate both universal primary education and a commitment to gender equality and the empowerment of women and girls (MDG2 and MDG3).26 Unfortunately, it is clear that limited market-based approaches toward these goals by global actors such as development agencies, states, and multinational corporations like P&G are insufficient and possibly detrimental to achieving gender equality in education. The Kenyan government and P&G have only been able to make small market-oriented consolations by way of promoting access to sanitary products without challenging structural inequality or hegemonic development paradigms. In this dominant system of alliances between big business and the state, what can be done to effectively promote girls’ education? Commitments to economic development over human wellbeing must be challenged, funding for education and healthcare without cost sharing must be demanded, and schools must be state-mandated to ensure the comfort of female students and inclusion of health curricula. P&G has proven that it is attune to the interests of girls, whether for philanthropic or economic purposes, but can it actually initiate change? As a colossal multinational corporation, it has the ability to create the idealistic school environment envisioned in its “No Check! Commercial, if only it could look beyond its own economic wellbeing and limited technological solutions and commit to genuine advocacy for girls. Until girls’ education is valued as much as economic development, Always’ fictional classroom wherein girls discuss and cele-

brate female health and are supported in their secondary educational pursuits will remain an elusive desire for countless girls in Kenya and elsewhere in the developing world.

ing, Gender Equity, and the Global Education and Development Agenda.” Feminist Formations 23, no. 3 (Fall, 2011): 1-22. 26 Unterhalter, “Girls Schooling,” 1-2.

Works Cited

social and health impact of girls’ experiences o menstruation and “Always Infinity Commercial- June 21, schooling in Tanzania.” Journal of 2013.” YouTube. http:// Adolescence. (2010): 522. 10.1016 (ac www.youtube.com/watch?v=PwJxU cessed October 15, 2013). 74jPAE (accessed October, 15 2013). Elaine Unterhalter and Amy North. “Girls’ “Always ‘No Check No Check’ Clip.” You- Schooling, Gender Equity, and the Tube. http://www.youtube.com/ Global Education and Development watch?v=dKKlsA5M8jg (accessed Agenda: Conceptual Disconnec October 15, 2013). tions, Political Struggles, and the Difficulties of Practice.” Fem- Chebii, Stella Jerop.“Menstruation and Edu- inist Formations 23, no. 3 (Fall, cation: How a lack of sanitary 2011): 1-22. http://search.proquest. towels reduces school attendance com/docview/917429243?accoun in Kenyan slums.” BUWA! A Journal tid=11264 (accessed October 15, on African Women’s Experiences. 2013). (2012): 27-31. http://osisa.org/ buwa/regional/menstruationand-ed Wikinvest, “Stock: Procter & Gamble.” ucation-how-lack-sanitary-towels-re http://www.wikinvest.com/ duces-school-attendance-kenyan-s tock/Procter_&_Gamble_Compa (accessed October 14, 2013). ny_(PG) (accessed October 15, 2013). Kibira, Henri. “Kenya: Murugi Presses for Free Sanitary Pads in Schools.” The Zeenat, Moorad. Business Day Live, “P&G Star. (May 29, 2013). http://allafrica. to build R1.6bn manufacturing hub com/stories/20131521304.html in SA.” (July 01, 2013). http://ww (accessed October 15, 2013). wbdlive.co.za/business/re tail/2013/07/01/pg-to-build-r1.6bn- Leach, Fiona. “Gender implications of de- manufacturing-hub-in-sa (accessed velopment agency policies on edu October 15, 2013). cation and training.” International Journal of Educational Develop- ment. (2000): 341-342. http://www. sciencedirect.come/science/article/ pii/S0738059399000826 (accessed October 15, 2013). Procter and Gamble, “Always Keeping girls in School” Last modified 2012. http://www.pg.com/en_ZA/sustain ability/social-responsitiblitiy/al ways-keeping-girls-in-school.shtml (accessed October 15, 2013). Sommer, Marni. “Where the education sys tem and women’s bodies collide: The

Modern Man: Sprawl and Escape in Arcade Fire’s The Suburbs Nate Lanman ’15

Nate Lanman’s essay was written in fulfillment of a take-home final exam assignment in my environmental history course, Environmental Studies 250: Interpreting the American Environment. I have always been fascinated by how rock lyrics comment on society, and I love both the music and lyrical content of Arcade Fire. The paper prompt asked students to choose between lyrics of several songs and relate them to themes in American environmental history. Nate does a superb job doing a close analysis of “Sprawl II.” He goes beyond the lyricists’ fairly standard critique of suburban alienation to show the song’s additional depth. More specifically, he shows how “Sprawl II” and the whole Suburbs album fit in with a longtime American yearning for a kind of liberating darkness we identify with wilderness. If you never thought there was a connection between Arcade Fire and Thoreau, read this essay! — Associate Professor of Government Peter Cannavò

According to Win Butler, one of the brains behind Arcade Fire, The Suburbs “is neither a love letter to, nor an indictment of, the suburbs—it’s a letter from the suburbs.”1 Indeed, the band’s third album speaks from the heart of the modern American suburb, bringing to light its manifold opportunities and restrictions, its nuances and tedium, and above all else, the sense that suburbia is neither essentially perfect nor fatally flawed, but a unique combination of the two that has come to define the American landscape and the ideals of its inhabitants. While Butler is justified in rejecting the notion of The Suburbs condemning modern suburbia, the album 1 NME Magazine. (July 31, 2010), pg. 24. NME Magazine

expresses, in some instances, frustration and discontent for its homogeneity, with particular regard to the growth of urban sprawl over the last few decades. Such rings true in in “Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)” in which the speaker laments the monotony and idealized consumerism of the developed suburbs, and yearns to escape its artificial lights to a remote, and consequently more genuine, “darkness.” Though voiced under different circumstances, this speaker’s sentiments parallel the desire for isolation in wilderness that fueled to the writings of Henry David Thoreau and Jon Krakauer. She, too, seeks refuge from a big and bland world—for a merciful hand to “cut the lights,” and lead her to something real.

A variety of factors allowed for the rapid growth of suburbs in the mid-20th century, but the two leading causes seem to be the decline of cities and the end of World War II. Cities at the time were inhospitable environments for families. Despite the various urban renewal projects proposed by figures like Robert Moses in the first half of the century, cities were generally dirty, crowded, and crime-ridden. As living environments, they quickly became less desirable and less necessary for citizens. The construction of the interstate highway system and the widespread availability of affordable automobile made workweek commutes to the city possible. Physically residing in the city was no longer a necessity for those who worked there, and those with the means to move to the suburbs did so immediately. Further issues of the time like decaying housing stock, poorly resourced public schools, public employee pension costs, and the threat of crime also made cities less appealing. The suburbs also attracted a number of World War II veterans, who sought to raise their families in the relatively quiet communities forming outside of the nation’s major cities. On the whole, postwar suburbs were popular for their affordability, safety, and proximity to the plentiful resources of urban centers. By 1960, 52% of Americans lived in central city counties, while the remaining 48% resided in suburban counties.2 Since then, the suburbs have only grown. In the decades preceding the new millennium, the American suburb’s identity evolved from one of a populous, pedestrian-friendly, primarily residential area to a sprawling, low-density environment fit for consumers and their automobiles. Suburban sprawl offered residents the diverse resources of big cities in a markedly non-urban environment. It allowed for more living space, greater mobility for drivers, and safer communities with better schools and less crime. 2 Peter F. Cannavò, Suburbs Past and Present, Sprawl, Racial Demographics, Gender, and New Urbanism (ppt)

At the same time, sprawl accounted for centralization of food production, greater air pollution and polluted runoff, and a significant loss of biodiversity. Sprawl is most often criticized for its visual monotony.3 The image of sprawl, with its long strips of chain retailers, big box stores, abundant fast food establishments, and parking lots, embodies the pervasive stereotypes of American consumerism and materialism. These are the stereotypes that the speaker addresses in “Sprawl II.” In the refrain, she reflects, “Living in the sprawl / Dead shopping malls rise like mountains beyond mountains / And there’s no end in sight.” She feels trapped; the country is covered with sprawl suburbs and they all feel the same to her. Longing for variety and solitude, the speaker creates a dichotomy between the fluorescent lights of the urban sprawl, and the mysterious, contemplative dark of wilderness that spells her freedom. In her day-to-day life in the bright suburbs, she is told to go through the motions—to assume that suburban life is the ideal life, and that the sprawl is the ideal landscape (“They heard me singing and they told me to stop / Quit these pretentious things and just punch the clock”). In reality, this supposed ideal suppresses her imagination, and she seeks an escape. The suburbs are, in fact, frequently cast as microcosmic examples of the American dream. In his essay, “Civic Virtue and Sacrifice in a Suburban Nation,” Peter Cannavò traces the evolution of the American suburb since its rise to prominence in the mid-20th century, demonstrating how the suburbs and American identity are historically intertwined, and ultimately suggesting how we might organize future suburbs to achieve more sustainable ends. “Today,” he writes, “the large-lot suburban home is perhaps the preeminent symbol of success in America, the embodiment of the American dream.”4 3 Ibid. 4 Peter Cannavò, “Civic Virtue and Sacrifice in a Suburban Nation.” The Environmental Politics of Sacrifice. Eds. Michael Maniates, John M. Meyer. Cambridge: The

He goes on to depict areas of urban sprawl as havens for mass consumption: “[…] the centrality of consumption is reflected in the very geography of our sprawling developments. Contemporary suburbia is physically functionalized for more or less pure, unimpeded consumption.”5 On a functional level, sprawl successfully satisfies the needs of the prototypical modern consumer, but it has robbed many American suburbs of their unique physical identities. In the same way, suburban life is secure for the speaker, but it is also bland and lifeless. All of the resources she needs are centralized and available. She has the means to live her life comfortably, but laments the fact that her environment has resigned her to an existence with no greater point than merely subsisting (“These days my life, I feel it has no purpose”). In the dark of night, she realizes that she wants to escape the lights for something more wholesome (“But late at night the feelings swim to the surface”). This sentiment is a common thread of American environmental history, throughout which wild nature and liberty have repeatedly been woven into an escape from the confines of society. Henry David Thoreau, in his own writings, similarly rejected his own society and the industrial technology that was steadily encroaching on his everyday life. Thoreau decidedly abandoned this world and found refuge in the wilderness. In Walden, Thoreau recounts his two years spent in a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond, praising the grounding aspects of the landscape at every turn: “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately, to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover that I had not lived…I wanted to live deep and suck out all the marrow of life…to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its lowest terms.”6 Alone in na-

ture, Thoreau felt liberated from the stresses of his society. Like the speaker in “Sprawl II,” he embraces the notion of a remote, wholesome environment: “Let us settle ourselves, and work and wedge our feet downward…til we come to a hard bottom and rocks in place, which we can call reality, and say, This is, and no mistake…”7 Though Thoreau’s escape was temporary, it allowed him the adequate distance to reflect on his life and the social conventions that defined it. The life and death of Christopher McCandless provide a more modern example of this sentiment. In 1992, at twenty-four years old, McCandless ventured alone and significantly unequipped into the Alaskan wilderness, where he hoped to live a more fulfilling life than the one he left in the suburbs of D.C. Jon Krakauer chronicles McCandless’ trip in his book Into the Wild, and gives an abbreviated version of the story in his article, “Death of an Innocent: How Christopher McCandless Lost His Way in the Wilds.” McCandless was strongly influenced by Thoreau, and even brought a copy of Walden with him on his trek north.8 He even seems to channel Thoreau in own words. In the abandoned bus that was his final shelter, he scribbled an inspired declaration of independence on a piece of plywood covering a punched out window: Two years he walks the earth. No phone, no pool, no pets, no cigarettes. Ultimate freedom. An extremist. An aesthetic voyager whose home is the road. Escaped from Atlanta. Thou shalt not return, ‘cause ‘the West is the best.’ And now after two rambling years comes the final and greatest adventure. The climactic battle to kill the false being within and victoriously conclude the spiritual pilgrimage. Ten days and nights of freight trains and hitchhiking bring

MIT Press, 2010. Print. 5 Ibid. 6 Henry David Thoreau, Walden.

7 Thoreau, “5. Solitude, [22].” 8 Jon Krakauer, “Death of an Innocent: How Christopher McCandless Lost His Way in the Wilds,” Outside, January 1993.

him to the Great White North. No longer to be poisoned by civilisation he flees, and walks alone upon the land to become lost in the wild. Alexander Supertramp, May 1992.9 McCandless, “the product of a happy family from an affluent suburb of Washington, DC”10 lost himself in the wilderness in an attempt to tap into something real. It was not in spite of, but because of his relatively comfortable upbringing, college education, academic successes, and expectations for greatness, that he felt trapped. Civilization simply did not suit him. He was more comfortable facing his death in the woods than living the life of a “false being” laid out for him at home: “One of his last acts was to take a photograph of himself, standing near the bus under the high Alaskan sky… He is smiling in the photo, and there is no mistaking the look in his eyes: Chris McCandless was at peace, serene as a monk gone to God”11 McCandless’ feeling “poisoned by civilization” resembles the speaker’s plight in “Sprawl II.” Just as McCandless needed the wildnerness, she needs the darkness. She longs to realize that the world isn’t “so small,” but trapped in the homongenous world of urban sprawl, she sees “no end in sight.” By the end of the song, there is no sign that the speaker’s problem is resolved. “Sprawl II” fades from a synth-heavy fanfare (perhaps a nod to the advent of the synthpop genre, which, like the suburbs, evolved significantly in the late 20th century) to silence. If there is any indication of success on the speaker’s part, it is found in the track that follows: “The Suburbs (continued).” The album’s final song repeats the chorus of the opener: “Sometimes I can’t believe it, I’m moving past the feeling into the night.” Initially, this line can be read as a frustrated aside—that the speaker cannot believe how suffocating his suburban environment is, 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid. 11 Ibid.

and has become numb to emotion entirely. But this time, Arcade Fire’s female vocalist, Régine Chassagne (the lead vocalist on “Sprawl II”), joins in, compelling the listener to remember her characterization of the night and darkness in the previous song. With that in mind, “Somehow I can’t believe it” comes across as the speaker’s incredulousness at her own newfound happiness—that she has moved past her feelings of isolation and boredom, onward, “into the night.” Fittingly, all of this coincides over an orchestral rendition of the opening track’s backing melody. The band’s decision to place classical instrumentation immediately after the markedly modern sounds of “Sprawl II” almost begs interpretation. It is their most subliminal (and perhaps most powerful) signal of a departure from modern life in urban sprawl—an attempt, or at least a hinted longing, to honor a simpler past, as our society hurtles toward an uncertain future. Works Cited Cannavò, Peter. “Civic Virtue and Sacrifice in a Suburban Nation.” The Environmen- tal Politics of Sacrifice. Eds. Michael Maniates, John M. Meyer. Cam- bridge: The MIT Press, 2010. Print. Cannavò, Peter. “Lecture notes from “ES 250: Interpreting the American Envi ronment.” Krakauer, Jon. “Death of an Innocent: How Christopher McCandless Lost His Way in the Wilds,” Outside, January 1993. Thoreau, Henry David. Walden. Boston: Tic- knor and Fields, 1854.

Automatons and Puppetry in Der Sandmann Lauren Lanzotti ’14

“Wooden doll—turn thyself!” These four words toward the close of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s 1816 gothic tale, Der Sandmann, neatly encapsulate the intricate facets of Lauren’s approach to both an insightful analysis of the narrative and an innovative adaptation of the story to the stage. They suggest the presence of and relationship between the marionette and the puppeteer; the possibility that the puppet might pull its own strings; the agency of the automaton; the triumph of the inanimate; the malignancy of the master; and the plight of the human. They speak to the question of control—and its illusion. Lauren first studied this story for my Comparative Literature 307 course, “Splitting Personalities: Doppelgängers, Dolls, anD Illusions” (Fall 2012). Together with Heinrich von Kleist’s 1810 essay, Über das Marionettentheater, Hoffmann’s tale became a kind of puppeteer in its own right, leading and inspiring (one might even say, manipulating) Lauren’s choice of subject matter for her senior thesis. She couldn’t help but see its potential! At the same time, Lauren clearly tackled the project with no strings attached. As the paper will illustrate, she moves deftly between the printed page and the constructed stage, ultimately executing a crisp critique of the role and sense of puppetry for both Hoffman and herself. This is a paper about performance, as seen through the “Pretty eyes!” of an aspiring Director and Dramaturge. — Visiting Assistant Professor of English Janelle A. Schwartz

“The Sandman had brought me into the path of the marvelous and wonderful, which so readily finds a domicile in the mind of a child.” —Nathaniel, E.T.A. Hoffman’s Der Sandmann E.T.A. Hoffman, as an author, was fascinated by the connections between the inanimate and the animate, and his story Der Sandmann thoroughly explores this fascination. Because of the themes of dolls, delusions, free-will, and manipulation, Der Sand-

mann has served as a platform for ballet and puppet performance in the past and will be a strong basis for my explorative performance. The legend of the Sandman as a man who sprinkles sand in the eyes of sleeping children is a tale that extends across cultures and is based in both demon mythos and children’s fairytales; puppet theatre is traditionally based upon similar folklore. In addition, the characters and their behaviors are intricately related to manipulation and to Kleist’s suggestion of collaboration between a puppet performer and a puppeteer, and it is clear to see why Der

Sandmann lends itself in content to a puppet performance. By examining each character and their relationships in the story, I plan to demonstrate just how relevant puppetry is to Hoffman’s uncanny tale. Coppelius, the Sandman in Nathaniel’s mind, is described as a sort of goblin, one who speaks through clenched teeth and is disproportionately sized. This striking image, created in the mind of a child, is reflective of marionettes and their shape and stature. In Hoffman’s description of Coppelius, it is easy to see how his figure might better be conveyed on stage through a puppet than through a human body as Coppelius is described as being closer to a monster than to a human: …[Coppelius was] a large broad-shouldered man, with a head disproportionately big, a face the colour of yellow ochre, a pair of gray bushy eyebrows, from beneath which a pair of green cat’s eyes sparkled with the most penetrating lustre, and with a large nose curved over his upper lip. His wry mouth was often twisted into a malicious laugh, when a couple of dark red spots appeared upon his cheeks, and a strange hissing sound was heard through his compressed teeth.1 In this description, Hoffman establishes Coppelius as the most grotesque character in the story, and so having an actor play him on stage might not be as demonstrative of his gruesome nature as would a marionette that is exaggerated and disproportionate in appearance. Coppelius is not only a puppet, however; his control in the story over Nathaniel and Nathaniel’s father establish him as a manipulator as well. His puppeteering is first evident in the change in behavior in Nathaniel’s household when they are entertaining Coppelius in their home. Nathaniel describes

how “[his] father conducted himself towards him, as though he was a superior being, whose bad manners were to be tolerated, and who was to be kept in good humour at any rate,”2 illustrating the power Coppelius held over Nathaniel’s father. The manipulated man felt obligated to do Coppelius’ bidding, as if he had no choice. This lack of free will demonstrates how Coppelius metaphorically is pulling the puppet strings of everyone around him, which allows him to control Nathaniel and his father through reverence and through fear. Like his father, Nathaniel cannot free himself from Coppelius’ control, and one reading of the text would suggest that the ending, which is fairly ambiguous in itself, contributes to the idea that Coppelius can control Nathaniel’s behavior because he is the direct cause of his madness. Thus, in saying “’Ha, ha,—only wait—he will soon come down of his own accord,’” to Nathaniel atop the tower, Coppelius is pulling the psychological string that causes Nathaniel to fall to his death. This is further supported by the actions of Nathaniel, who upon Coppelius’ laughter, “suddenly stood still as if petrified; he stooped down, perceived Coppelius, and yelling out, ‘Ah, pretty eyes—pretty eyes!’— he sprang over the railing.”3 This petrifaction helps to establish Nathaniel as a puppet by creating a sense of him being wooden and rigid, and showing that his humanity has left him, leaving behind a stony shell. Also, Nathaniel shouts “Pretty eyes” multiple times, which is direct repetition from Coppelius, Coppela, and Spalanzani, connecting the three men as one controlling force and demonstrating how their words have propelled him over the building’s edge. The contrast between Clara and Olympia highlights what it means to be “inanimate” in Hoffman’s tale. When the reader is first introduced to Clara, Hoffman describes her as being beautiful in a symmetrical way, and

1 Hoffmannn, E. T. A., and Peter Braun. Der Sandmann. Frankfurt Am Main: Suhrkamp, 2003. Print.

2 Ibid. 3 Ibid.

“…Clara was censured by many as cold, unfeeling and prosaic.”4 In this symmetry of face and coldness of tone, Clara becomes a double to Olympia. Nathaniel loves Clara’s childlike nature but is frustrated by her lack of wonder and regard for reason. For example, after absent-mindedly listening to his poetry for weeks and then finally commenting in a negative manner, Nathaniel calls Clara an, “’inanimate, accursed automaton!’” and storms off in reaction to her passivity. Ironically, in Olympia, this automatic nature and stiffness seduces him, and when asked “’how it was possible for a sensible fellow like [Nathaniel] to fall in love with…that wooden doll up there?’”5 Nathaniel responds saying that Olympia is an attentive listener and her silence is a tribute to her attentiveness towards him. Contrary to his admiration for Clara, Nathaniel sees maturity in Olympia, who “appears singularly stiff and soulless. Her shape is symmetrical—so is her face—that is true! She might pass for beautiful, if her glance were not so utterly without a ray of life.”6 This is contrasted to Clara’s beauty, which lies entirely in her eyes and is vacant in the rest of her figure. Both women, at times, seem as perfectly carved and lifeless as a wooden doll, and it is their eyes that differentiates human from automaton, not their behavior. This is an interesting concept to attempt to convey on the stage, and while the idea of dolls and delusions certainly plays into puppetry, this difference and importance in the glare speaks greatly to the art and practice of masked performance. Olympia is created by Hoffman to be the inanimate and non-human figure in the text, and it is interesting to see how she fits into the Ubermarionette paradox. Olympia is a free-standing figure, and she acts of her own accord without a puppeteer directly controlling her movements. Thus, those who come in contact with her notice that she is

peculiar, for “her pace is strangely measured, every movement seems to depend on some wound-up clockwork,”7 and she is constantly sneezing. If she were to be viewed as a puppet performer, she would not be considered graceful by Kleist’s definition, as he claims that a puppet’s grace must come partly from the puppeteer putting a part of themselves into the movement of the puppet. Because she is so disconnected from her creator and manipulator, Olympia is often seen stiffly sitting or rigidly dancing. She is laughed at for her lack of coordination despite being able to keep perfect time. Her eyes, which were stolen from Nathaniel so that she could have life as a human, were the only elements of her form that correspond to the idea that the manipulator should put his liveliness into his puppet. Thus, we see how Olympia “… sat for hours, looking straight into her lover’s eyes, without stirring, and her glance became more and more lively and animated.”8 Olympia is also representative of the most complex string of puppeteering in the story. Whether the story is read with him being a colleague or an extension of Coppelius, Spalanzani exclamation of, “‘Coppelius, has robbed me of my best automaton—a work of twenty years—body and soul set upon it— the clock-work—the speech—the walk, mine; the eyes stolen from you,’”9 demonstrates how Olympia was Spalanzani’s puppet, but Coppelius had ultimate control over Spalanzani and Olympia. Nathaniel, in his courting Olympia, thought that love compelled him to go to Olympia. He also thought that her own love compelled her to be speechless except for a few girlish gasps, but in fact, the “Ahah” that came from her mouth was really “the self-winding-up of the concealed clockwork, which had, moreover, creaked audibly.”10 The fact that Nathaniel mistakes the clockwork for Olympia’s positive response to his seduction demonstrates how her constructor

4 Ibid. 5 Ibid. 6 Ibid.

7 Ibid 8 Ibid. 9 Ibid. 10 Ibid.

Spalanzani truly has control over Nathaniel through this animated woman. Olympia thus serves as the will-less key that connects all of these men together, and she, like a string, binds the puppeteers to their respective marionettes. Nathaniel seems to be the only human being in the story who is not a sort of monster or an implication of a doll, and yet he arguably has the least free will in the story, surpassed only by the prosaic Olympia. Nathaniel is manipulated first by the legend of the Sandman itself, with the story hauntingly controlling his thoughts, his drawings, his poetry, his nightmares, and his behavior towards others. Then, we see Nathaniel getting his hands and feet removed, making him an inanimate subject for Coppelius’ scientific agenda. Coppela then takes control by enticing Nathaniel to buy the spyglass that leads him to fall in love with Olympia and eventually leads him to see Coppelius and consequently kill himself. After purchasing the spyglass, Spalanzani controls Nathaniel by inviting him to court his “daughter” Olympia and by eventually returning his eyes to him from the doll. This action of returning Nathaniel’s eyes completely removes his sanity and arguably his free will, as “…now Nathaniel saw how a pair of eyes, which lay upon the ground, were staring at him; these Spalanzani caught up, with the unwounded hand, and flung against his heart. At this, madness seized him with its burning claws, and clutched into his soul, tearing to pieces all his thoughts and senses.”11 This “madness” is the result of Nathaniel losing his free will, and Spalanzani’s unwounded hand continues to pull on Nathaniel’s marionette strings. Because of their crimes, all three “sandmen” flee the city and Nathaniel, with them gone, is able to have restored health and sanity. That is, until the final scene when, “Nathaniel mechanically put his hand into his breast pocket—he found Coppola’s telescope, and he looked on one side...There was a con-

vulsive movement in his pulse and veins… Then he sprang high into the air, and, in the intervals of a horrible laughter, shrieked out, in a piercing tone, “Wooden doll—turn thyself!’”12 This mechanical movement is like that of a programmed automaton, and his actions that follow are a result of seeing Clara and Coppelius before him in his looking glass. Nathaniel, in his childhood memories, is treated like a puppet when his eyes are plucked out and his appendages are examined, and in his final hour the Sandman that tormented and controlled him was able to propel him to his death. Nathaniel, in this way, is more puppet than human, despite him being described by Hoffman as a poor and humanized youth. Der Sandmann is full of fantastical elements and mystical feats that cannot be achieved by the human body on stage, and thus in adapting it for the stage, puppets make a fitting alternative to human performers. Thematically, the story lends itself to a study of manipulation, rigid performance, and a study of beauty and grace in performative action. From Coppelius’ disfigured appearance to Nathaniel’s loss of free will, the image of a marionette reigns true to the telling of the story and the images that Hoffman conjures up. Using this analysis of the story, I hope to create a performance piece that highlights the theme of manipulation while remaining concise and easy to follow.

11 Ibid.

12 Ibid.

Cherishing Childhood: Gendered Approaches to Victorian Fairy Tales Mira Khanna ’15

In this essay written for “Romanticism, Realism and Representation in Victorian Culture”, Khanna analyzes four works of Victorian literature that are still popular today: Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, James Barrie’s Peter and Wendy, Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market and Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden. The differences among these works’ representations of childhood suggest an interesting dichotomy in Victorian culture between the attitudes of male authors and female authors. While Carroll and Barrie invent fantastical worlds to which their characters escape the world of adult responsibility, Rossetti and Burnett use fantasy and imagination to portray their characters’ desire for sympathy and their potential for adult-like agency. By comparing and contrasting these works, Khanna provokes her readers to consider the cultural implications of children’s literature then and now. — Professor of English Patricia O’Neill

During the 19th century, Victorians popularized children’s literature—including fairytales—that expressed the new idea of celebrating children for themselves. The authors of these works entered into a debate regarding the nature of childhood and how to portray it within their stories (Knoepflmacher 2). Through their constructions of the young heroes and heroines in Alice in Wonderland and Peter and Wendy, respectively, male authors Lewis Carroll and J.M. Barrie demonstrate their desire to recapture a prematurely lost imagination and their yearning for childhood innocence. Meanwhile, female authors Christina Rossetti and Frances Hodgson Burnett instead reveal the importance of growing up

and their rejection of an idealized childhood in The Goblin Market and The Secret Garden, respectively. These different perspectives may be attributed to the pervasive gender binary within Victorian culture, which held rigid and distinct roles for both sexes. Within the middle class, men were expected to attend school and develop their intellect, while women—whether they were wives and mothers or teachers and governesses—were expected to take care of children, and were legally treated as children themselves (Knoepflmacher 25). These societal expectations led women to envy adults rather than children, and portray a more holistic depiction of childhood, including its negative aspects. Men, instead, hoped to renew what

they considered to be an imagination lost from the drudgery of education and work. The fantastical settings of Carroll’s and Barrie’s tales demonstrate their love for imagination. Wonderland and Neverland are central locations in the plots of their respective stories. Wonderland consists of magical rooms and gardens in which nonsensical events occur, and in which every character abandons all semblance of logic. After the White Rabbit sends Alice—believing her to be his maid—to fetch his gloves and fan, she remarks to herself “‘How queer it seems…to be going messages for a rabbit! I suppose Dinah’ll [Alice’s cat] be sending me on messages next!’ and she began fancying the sort of thing that would happen” (Carroll 43). Alice recognizes the absurdity of her situation and surroundings, yet this does not faze or scare her. She begins to dream and imagine the possibilities of what Wonderland can offer her, and she ultimately accepts her situation with the realization that she is subject to the whims of the strange, fantastical land and its curious inhabitants. She initially reflects on her experiences in Wonderland with a positive light, stating how “It’s rather curious, you know, this sort of life! I do wonder what can have happened to me! When I used to read fairy-tales, I fancied that kind of thing never happened, and now here I am in the middle of one! There ought to be a book written about me, that there ought!” (Carroll 47). Alice appreciates Wonderland because she recognizes its detachment from real life. She freely uses her imagination and relishes her unique situation. Carroll reinforces the importance of imagination during Alice’s conversation with the Mock Turtle, in which Alice inquires as to why his teacher was called Tortoise—a name Alice considers counter-intuitive. The Mock Turtle then denounces Alice as being “very dull” (Carroll 143). Alice is considered inferior when she is unable to imagine or conceive of ideas that contradict the logic of her reality, which reinforces the significance of imagination within Wonderland. Through Alice’s interactions with the fantastical settings and illogical

characters of Wonderland, Carroll displays his yearning to recapture an imagination that was considered limited for men as a result of their constant work and structured education. Barrie similarly portrays his love of imagination in the fantastical realm of Neverland, which he describes as part of a child’s mind. Neverland, he writes, “is always more or less an island, with astonishing splashes of colour here and there…and savages and lonely lairs, and gnomes who are mostly tailors, and caves through which a river runs” (Barrie 9). Neverland is partially defined by its transcendence of reality, as it is filled with mermaids and gnomes and other mythological creatures. It is a child’s dream—full of adventure—and it begs exploration. However, danger does exist within this realm—the children, for example, encounter the crocodile that constantly pursues Captain Hook. The lost boys are wary of the crocodile, yet “none suspects that the danger may be creeping up from behind. This shows how real the island was” (Barrie 83). Barrie sought to make this fantastical world permanent and “real” so that children had a place to escape, away from the responsibilities of reality. Within Victorian society, men assumed a greater degree of responsibility than women, and Barrie projects his own desire to escape this responsibility—in a way that only a child could—through his creation of Neverland. He also rejected the idea that children should remain confined to their usual domestic settings, and instead encouraged them to explore and use their imagination without considering the consequences or repercussions of their actions. Overall, both Carroll and Barrie used their fanciful settings to demonstrate their love and celebration of the imagination. Carroll and Barrie also demonstrated their celebration of childhood innocence in their tales through their protagonists’ naiveté and simplistic approach to their conflicts. Alice begins her journey to escape the boredom of her everyday life. After watching the well-dressed rabbit disappear down his hole, she hastily follows: “In another moment down

went Alice after it, never once considering how in the world she was to get out again” (Carroll 3). Alice innocently decides to take this plunge, disregarding the possibility that she could encounter terrible danger. She lacks inhibitions, and freely makes her decisions based on her curiosity. Carroll suggests that this uninhibited spontaneity should be valued over a mature and profound analysis calculating the risk of decisions because it gives Alice the opportunity to experience the joys of Wonderland. In doing so, he also implies that innocently experiencing fantastical joys is an essential part of growing up. Alice’s simplistic approach to conflict is further demonstrated through her interactions at the Mad Hatter’s tea party. Frustrated with the Hatter’s failure to correctly solve his own riddles, she advises him to “do something better with the time…than wasting it in asking riddles that have no answer” (Carroll 101). She poses simple resolutions to the Hatter’s conundrums; however, despite already having interacted with him and his companions for a period of time, she fails to realize that the Hatter cannot be logically reasoned with. Over time, after Alice gains a better grasp of the absurdity surrounding her, she begins to question her own beliefs on what is rational. Carroll uses Alice’s ultimate willingness to shed many of her preconceived notions to demonstrate his appreciation of childhood innocence and flexibility. This flexibility largely contrasts with the typical path of a Victorian working class man, whose continual work was required to support his family. Barrie demonstrates similar notions of childhood innocence through both Peter and Wendy’s experiences with conflict. Wendy demonstrates her naiveté after she realizes that pirates are approaching the boys as they asleep. Barrie notes, “Of course, she should have roused the children at once…But she was a young mother and she did not know this… She stood over them to let them have their sleep out. Was it not brave of Wendy?” (Barrie 126). Barrie acknowledges Wendy’s inability to handle the situation as he would deem correct-

ly, but rather than condemning her for it, he instead celebrates her bravery. Wendy—herself a child—does not realize that she could be of greater help to the boys by warning them, rather than letting them lie in blissful ignorance. Ultimately, however, her actions have no lasting consequences. This shows Barrie’s belief that a lack of experience needs not be harshly criticized, and that instead one should value intuitive exploration. In celebrating Wendy’s bravery and in failing to criticize her naiveté, Barrie again reinforces his characteristic male value of childhood innocence over experience. Peter also demonstrates youthful innocence through his response after Captain Hook bites him when Peter tries to help him up: Not the pain of this but its unfairness was what dazed Peter. It made him quite helpless. He could only stare, horrified. Every child is affected thus the first time he is treated unfairly. All he thinks he has a right to when he comes to you to be yours is fairness. After you have been unfair to him he will love you again, but he will never again be quite the same boy. No one ever gets over the first unfairness; no one except Peter. He often met it, but he always forgot it. I suppose that was the real difference between him and the rest. (Barrie 139-140) Barrie contrasts Peter with regular children, who develop and mature with experience. Peter, instead—as a perennial child—exemplifies the innocent nature inherent to the condition of childhood. Peter can forget that he was ever mistreated, but normal children remember and are incontrovertibly marked by any perceived injustices towards them. Barrie suggests that, ideally, the truly innocent state of a child should be preserved so that he or she would not have to deal with the consequences of the unpleasant things life invariably offers. Peter also demonstrates immaturity with his behavior when he fights with Captain Hook. After Hook asks who and what Peter is, Peter replies, “I’m youth, I’m joy” (Barrie 228). Barrie thus associates Peter with optimism and a lack of fear. However, during the fight, Peter

also displays immaturity; rather than concerning himself with the fate of his friends, he instead uses the opportunity to glorify himself by displaying his bravery. He exhibits a stark egoism, which Barrie comments on, but does not condemn. Barrie uses Peter’s actions to reveal his appreciation for childhood innocence, bravery, and a lack of inhibitions—perceived virtues which Victorian men were generally not given extensive opportunities to display, and thus coveted. Though there are numerous conflicts in Alice in Wonderland and in Peter and Wendy, they are all relatively nonthreatening and never escalate to a point of irreversible damage for any of the main characters. Although Alice fears she will be permanently stuck at an incorrect size, she nonetheless recovers through the use of magic. Even though Wendy is accidentally shot by her friends, she somehow revives to live a long and healthy life. These benign resolutions suggest that childhood innocence free from the consequences of serious illness or danger is a continual trend within male-authored fairytales. These lack of consequences as well as the celebration of innocence and imagination even in the face of danger present a stark contrast to the conflicts within the tales of Rossetti and Hodgson Burnett, and in doing so reflect Victorian male values of creativity and freedom. Unlike Carroll and Barrie, Rossetti and Hodgson Burnett celebrated the joys of children growing up through the maturation and development of their characters. Victorian women valued maturation and development because these were qualities that society deemed out of their reach. In Rossetti’s The Goblin Market, Laura initially does not suspect the dangers that the Goblins present, despite first being warned by her sister. Instead, “Curious Laura chose to linger / Wondering at each merchant man” (Rossetti 69-70). Laura expresses an innocent curiosity similar to that of Alice or Wendy, but, unlike these characters, Laura must suffer its grave and almost deadly consequences. Her sister Lizzie, instead, is

lauded for her wisdom and maturity. Despite initially warning Laura of the goblin men, Lizzie realizes that only she can save her sister after she falls to temptation: “Tender Lizzie could not bear / To watch her sister’s cankerous care / Yet not to share. / She night and morning / Caught the goblins’ cry” (Rossetti 299-303). Lizzie thus displays empathy for her sister, which is a distinctly mature emotion that prompts her to risk the dangers of confronting the Goblin men firsthand so that she can save her sister. By depicting and lauding Lizzie’s bravery and empathy, Rossetti suggests that women should strive for agency and courage within their own lives, something women struggled for in actuality during the Victorian era. The final stanza of the poem reveals Rossetti’s ultimate message of The Goblin Market: “Their mother-hearts beset with fears, / Their lives bound up in tender lives; / Laura would call the little ones / And tell them of her early prime…/ Would talk about the haunted glen, / The wicked, quaint fruit-merchant men…/ Would tell them how her sister stood / In deadly peril to do her good” (Rossetti 546-558). Laura, now a grown woman, uses her knowledge and experience from the terrible illness of her childhood to caution her own children about the dangers of temptation. Her message is thus didactic and reaffirms the importance of sisterly love to triumph over very real and deadly dangers. Laura developed considerably from her initial, naive stage through her childhood experiences—a change that Rossetti regards as essential to successfully grow up. This interpretation contrasts starkly with Carroll’s portrayal of Alice’s lack of experience which, rather than leading her into serious trouble, allows her to discover and learn. Hodgson Burnett also lauds character development and transformation in The Secret Garden to suggest that growing up is a good and necessary experience for children. She parallels her characters’ physical development alongside their emotional maturation. Hodgson Burnett initially describes Mary as having

“a little thin face and a little thin body, thin light hair and a sour expression. Her hair was yellow, and her face was yellow because she had been born in India and had always been ill in one way or another” (Hodgson Burnett 1). Although the process is gradual, Mary eventually grows stronger and healthier by playing outdoors in the moor and inside The Secret Garden. She simultaneously grows more empathetic and kind through her interactions with Mr. Weatherstaff, Martha, Dickon, and Colin. She even reaches a point where she is able to think of others rather than herself, which marks a central point in her development. Mrs. Medlock describes how Mary has “begun to look downright pretty since she’s filled out and lost her ugly little sour look. Her hair’s grown thick and healthy looking and she’s got a bright colour. The glummest, ill-natured thing she used to be and now her and Master Colin laugh together like a pair of crazy young ones. Perhaps they’re growing fat on that” (Hodgson Burnett 266). Colin undergoes a similar transformation and developmental process, and both of the children’s physical appearances mark their newfound emotional maturity. Because they have developed and matured in this way, they are now able to enjoy their lives and experience happiness for the first time. Life experience is thus critical to providing the children with the means for achieving their goals, and in doing so, find happiness. Through this sequence of events, Hodgson Burnett suggests that success depends on one’s development—which is why Victorian women strove for maturation. Both Rossetti and Hodgson Burnett also reveal a more realistic portrait of childhood by portraying serious conflict and hardship within their tales, and in doing so, indicate their desire for a more adult representation of reality. Victorian children, after all, were not immune to suffering in their lives, and Rossetti and Hodgson Burnett did not gloss over this fact. In The Goblin Market, Laura recounts the sad fate of a girl named Jeanie who fell prey to the Goblin’s temptations: “She pined and pined away; / Sought them by night and day, / Found them

no more, but dwindled and grew grey; / Then fell with the first snow, / While to this day no grass will grow / Where she lies low” (Rossetti 154-158). Rossetti emphasizes the seriousness of Jeanie’s fate by paralleling her death with winter. The lack of grass on Jeanie’s grave perpetuates the permanence of death. Lizzie also recounts Jeanie’s story after Laura succumbs to the goblins: “She thought of Jeanie in her grave, / Who should have been a bride; / But who for joys brides hope to have / Fell sick and died / In her gay prime” (Rossetti 312316). Part of what makes Jeanie’s preemptory death so tragic is that she is unable to mature or experience the joys of growing up: she will never marry, have children, or grow old. Rossetti thus highlights the permanence of death, and in doing so, affirms the importance of life experiences. After succumbing to the goblins, Lizzie must face the consequences of her actions: “Day after day, night after night, / Laura kept watch in vain / In sullen silence of exceeding pain” (Rossetti 269-270). Lizzie undergoes actual suffering, further emphasizing Rossetti’s message of learning and growing from one’s mistakes, as Lizzie is not likely to forget the severity of her situation. This realistic representation of life reaffirms Victorian women’s rejection of an idealized childhood, which they considered useless to helping one grow and mature. Hodgson Burnett similarly depicts hardship and suffering within The Secret Garden to provide a more realistic perspective reflective of real life concerns. Mary’s story of transformation truly begins with the death of her parents in India. One of the police officers describes how she learned she was an orphan: “Poor little kid!” he said. “There is nobody left to come.” It was in that strange and sudden way that Mary found out that she had neither father nor mother left; that they had died and been carried away in the night, and that the few native servants who had not died also had left the house as quickly as they could get out of

it, none of them even remembering there was a Missie Sahib.” (Hodgson Burnett 7) Mary is essentially unloved by everyone both before and after her parents’ deaths—a hardship and loneliness that profoundly shapes her character by causing her to exhibit selfishness and resentment. Hodgson Burnett reveals a more realistic aspect of childhood by showing that children are incontrovertibly influenced by their upbringing and parents—or lack thereof—for better or for worse. Colin, too, suffers a dark beginning to his childhood. “I am like this always, ill and having to lie down...The servants are not allowed to speak about me. If I live I may be a hunchback, but I shan’t live. My father hates to think that I may be like him!” (Hodgson Burnett 128). Colin explains the grim reality of his father’s treatment toward him and the isolation he has experienced. Before meeting Mary, he essentially lived so that he could die. Hodgson Burnett suggests that isolation from the world prevents growth, and only through experience and interacting with others can children truly develop. Both Rossetti and Hodgson Burnett reveal the realities of death and suffering in their stories to highlight the importance of maturation and childhood development, again reinforcing the female Victorian desire for an adult lifestyle. Carroll, Barrie, Rossetti, and Hodgson Burnett all portray childhood from the lenses of their own gendered experiences. Their fairytales possess a wide variety of settings, characters, conflicts, and resolutions. These critical aspects of their stories—which reveal men’s desire for imagination and yearning for childhood innocence and women’s rejection of idealized fantasy and desire for growth—reflect the values that women and men considered significant. Examining these values ultimately provides a greater insight into Victorian society, as they highlight the prevalence of the Victorians’ rigid gender binary.

Works Cited Barrie, J.M. Peter and Wendy. New York: Scribner’s Sons, 1911. Print. Carroll, Lewis. Alice’s Adventures in Wonder- land. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 1999. Print. Hodgson Burnett, Frances. The Secret Garden. New York: Oxford UP, 1987. Print. Rossetti, Christina. “The Goblin Market” The Longman Anthology of British Liter- ature. Vol. 2B: Pearson Education, 2010. Print. Knoepflmacher, U. C. Ventures into Childland: Victorians, Fairy Tales, and Feminini- ty. Chicago: University of Chicago, 1998. Print.

Re-examining Buck-Morss’ “Hegel and Haiti” and the use of the canon in understanding Haiti John Rufo ’16

John Rufo in his remarkable nuanced essay “Haiti and the Eurocentric canon” successfully deconstructs, through a critical reading of the Susan Buck-Morss tome “Hegel and Haiti”, how Western scholarship in this case through the work of the philosopher GWF Hegel, failed to grasp and come to terms with Haiti’s successful revolt against Napoleon’s France and other European powers. The essay was written for “Haiti and the Caribbean” a class that attempts in part to establish a linkage between Haiti and the world system and the ways in which the former colony of France accomplished what one scholar deemed the “unthinkable” in 1804, that is, securing victory over several armies and by extension sending shock waves through the world system of the time, namely global slavery. As John notes, scholars in the Western canon ever since have either ignored or struggled to situate or categorize Haiti in world history. Through a critical and close reading of Susan Buck-Morss’ article, John manages a brilliant investigative dialectic of his own as he unravels the author’s important but flawed interrogation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic, and other intellectual struggles in the Western debate over Haiti.

— Associate Professor of Africana Studies Nigel Westmaas

Haiti is overlooked in a number of areas of study—religion, history, and philosophy—as it threatens to confuse or contrast existing areas of knowledge. Vodou never conforms to traditional western ideas of Judeo-Christianity, despite its flirtations with Catholicism; the first nation to defeat Napoleon remains largely absent from his biographies and popular histories of France; the only nation, in the 18th-19th centuries, to fully

embrace and espouse “Enlightened” ideals of freedom and equality instead of merely entertaining them is often skimmed past. One can give innumerable examples of Haiti’s prominence in world affairs over the last two hundred years. This paper will attempt to examine how the study of Haiti remains grounded in canonized western conceptions as its study pertains to contemporary scholarship, specifically in Susan Buck-Morss’ “Hegel and Haiti,”

despite, or perhaps because of, the difficulty in neatly categorizing Haiti. By observing how academics attempt to situate Haiti via Eurocentric philosophies, histories, and ideas, one can begin to understand why the study of Haiti remains ignored in most fields. Haiti does not perfectly fit into academic categories as these categorizations have been primarily structured by western academics. “Hegel and Haiti,” Susan BuckMorss’ influential scholarly work, was later expanded into a book titled “Hegel, Haiti, and the Universal History” (Drexler 455). The main thrust of her piece is that Hegel’s Master-slave dialectic, arguably one of the most important sections of his philosophical magnum opus The Phenomenology of Mind, was based on Hegel’s knowledge of “real slaves revolting successfully against real masters” (Buck-Morss 844). Buck-Morss argues that slavery, while remaining “the root metaphor of Western political philosophy, connoting everything that was evil about power relations,” was not solely metaphorical for Hegel (Buck-Morss 821). To overlook the influence of the Haitian Revolution on Hegel and The Phenomenology of Mind is to ignore Hegel as a “contemporary” commentator and to reduce his philosophy to mere abstraction, a kind of “universalism” championed by those who value Western canonization and ideas of universal greatness. “The consequence of this scholarship is partial blindness among seas of perspicacity, and it is characteristic of Western academic scholarship,” Buck-Morss explains, drafting a version of viewing Haiti’s history, and its intellectual influence, as valuing myriad perspectives over western “primary” perspectives (Buck-Morss 825). The “universal history” established by Buck-Morss is a kind of no-stone-left-unturned approach to academic study, in which all disciplinary approaches are ushered in as particularly useful. “When natural histories are conceived as self-contained, or when the separate aspects of history are treated in disciplinary isolation, counterevidence is pushed to

the margins as irrelevant,” Buck-Morss writes, explaining that the progressive project of history, or philosophy, is held back when “counterevidence” is disregarded (Buck-Morss 822). The counterevidence Buck-Morss provides is that Hegel dedicatedly read Minerva, a prominent journal that followed the news of Haiti and its revolution. Unless Hegel turns out to be “the blindest of the blind philosophers of freedom in Enlightenment Europe,” it is impossible to consider that these contemporary events did not influence his ideas in Phenomenology of the Mind (Buck-Morss 844). To overlook this crucial piece of historical evidence is to misinterpret the significance of Hegel’s Master-slave dialectic, which not only expresses similar beliefs in individual freedom that earlier “Enlightened” thinkers such as Hobbes and Rousseau occupied, but pulls them out of abstraction into a literal world. However, Buck-Morss rejects the idea that Hegel’s Master-slave dialectic could be productively used as a metaphor. Aching, in “The Slave’s Work,” follows the logic that “slave dialectic is not reducible to a question of disciplinary boundaries in which literal readings are assigned to history and metaphoric ones to philosophy. The two approaches are not mutually exclusive” (Aching 912). The idea of slavery, to Hegel, is both metaphorical and literal as scholarship on Phenomenology evolves. Twelve years before the publication of “Hegel and Haiti” Taylor writes, “today, Hegel’s idea has been displaced from the realm of philosophy to that of socio-political experience” (Taylor 21). Like all influential thinkers, Hegel has famously been used to different effects in a variety of contexts. Buck-Morss correctly opens the door to an interdisciplinary approach to history, philosophy, Haiti, and Hegel; however, she incorrectly champions the literal reading over the figurative. Perhaps this is because the figurative reading had been the predominant reading of Hegel’s Master-slave dialectic for nearly its entire history of study – drafting a more balanced approach would reduce the effect of

Buck-Morss’ groundbreaking argument. The benefits of a metaphorical reading of Hegel and the Master-slave dialectic are numerous; it is not an argument that simply benefits the Western academic, as the “metaphor [displays a] wide appeal for abolitionism and postabolitionist movements including, for instance, women’s suffrage, workers’ rights, and many nationalist struggles against colonialism across the globe” (Aching 913). Many histories, societies, stories, and movements, including The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, for one, have been productively examined using metaphorical Hegelian concepts (Aching 914). But where is Haiti in all of this scholarship? Fairly, Buck-Morss spends the first half of her article on Haiti, not on Hegel, detailing its revolutionary history and the work of Toussaint, Dessalines, Petion, and others. While the use of Hegel’s philosophy and Enlightenment ideas illuminate, to a certain extent, Haiti’s own developments of thought on racial equality from a constitutional standpoint, this type of study still maintains a certain eurocentric flavor. In this viewpoint, by throwing off the shackles of its oppressors, and in using Hegel’s Master-slave dialectic’s brand of synthesis to examine this form of freedom, Haiti somehow “receives” its greatness or importance because of the oppression the nation faced, as without any bondage, there would be no freedom, so to speak. This slavery philosophy is both espoused and rejected by Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind, though in the end, as Buck-Morss points out “Hegel repeated the banal and apologetic argument that slaves were better off in the colonies than in their African homeland, where slavery was ‘absolute’ (BuckMorss 859). Surely this is not the only way to study Haiti’s global importance; why use the philosophy of bigotry to understand and position a historically unique nation? Perhaps it is because the canon and/ or western scholarship has accepted and published on Hegel, and not on Haiti, for over

two centuries. One would be hard pressed to reject, at this point in time, Hegel’s established presence in the fields of history, philosophy, and socio-political theory/thought. In order to include Haiti in the realm of western scholarship, one needs to play by western scholarship’s own terms. Buck-Morss’ thesis is more radical in terms of shedding light on Hegel then it is in shedding light on Haiti. Toussaint, though he did encounter the idea of a “Black Spartacus” in Abbe Raynal’s writings, never read Hegel, and Phenomenology of Mind was written and published after Haiti’s emergence as the first “black” nation (Buck-Morss 828, 830, 843). Haiti is relevant to Hegel; however, Hegel is irrelevant to Haiti, at least in the literal and non-figurative worldview Buck-Morss argues for in an interdisciplinary approach to studying history. In examining Buck-Morss’ thesis, scholar Sibylle Fischer “wonders if the focus on The Phenomenology does not obscure more than illuminate, compelling scholars to return to ‘the dilemma of slaveholders’” (Drexler 455). Just as Edward Said claimed that Orientalism does more to define its speaker more than to define the Orient itself, the way in which the study of Haiti is approached claims more about its scholar than Haiti itself. There is no historical evidence, at least to my knowledge, which proves Haiti’s revolutionary debt to Hegel. Buck-Morss at no point intends to argue that Haiti is dependent on Hegel, but she does undercut her all-encompassing approach by virtue of only progressing Hegel scholarship, not the study of Haiti. Haiti’s relationship to the Enlightenment can then be seen as largely inadvertent, or traceable through the benefits of historical hindsight. By examining Enlightenment thinking and Haiti’s early history together, it is clear that Haiti “paradoxically facilitat[ed] the global spread of the very Enlightenment ideals that were in such fundamental contradiction to [France]” (Buck-Morss 821). This type of scholarship then extends to areas beyond the historical and philosophical, leading to studies

like “Hamlet in Haiti” by Alan Cheuse, which contain lines like “only the salty traces of the Dionysian figure of Ti-Noel—black Dionysos!—fleck the Haitian hillsides” (Cheuse 29). Comparisons with Greek mythology, Shakespeare, Spinoza and the French Surrealists are all invoked by Cheuse to unpack Carpentier’s Kingdom of This World (Cheuse 13, 17, 20). These points of western literary comparison attempt to legitimize and canonize the work of Carpentier rather than read his work through a Haitian and/or Caribbean lens. Though this scholarly work brings Haiti into the fold of the western literary canon, it explains concepts like vodou by giving them western frames of reference, which may falsely or only partially reveal concepts like vodou. “The black Jacobins of SaintDomingue surpassed the metropole in actively realizing the Enlightenment goal of human liberty, seeming to give proof that the French Revolution was not simply a European phenomenon but world-historical in its implications,” Buck-Morss accurately states, revealing that the Enlightenment failed to achieve its goal but, ironically, was achieved elsewhere by people politically, legally, and socially viewed by the majority of “Enlightened” thinkers as inferior (Buck-Morss 835-836). As the richest colony in the world at the time, “the Haitian Revolution was the crucible, the trial by fire for the ideals of the French Enlightenment. And every European who was part of the bourgeois reading public knew it” (Buck-Morss 837). The result of the Haitian Revolution has enormous historical and philosophical implications, becoming the literal enactment of revolutionary philosophical ideals. And yet, curiously, Hegel remains the point of comparison in academic study. Analyzing Afro-Caribbean religious expression, Patrick Taylor explains that, “a careful reading of Hegel’s work, however, suggests that the idea of freedom can be understood in another way: as a consciously willed (political) imperative, articulated in a particular historical context” (Taylor 20). Was not the Haitian

Revolution also a consciously willed political imperative, if a not more powerful (and literal) point of comparison? Taylor correctly draws a line from Christianity and western ideas to vodou, but this influence cannot go forward into Hegel, who has little to nothing to do with the literal understanding of Haitian religion. Figuratively, Hegel’s Master-slave dialectic can prove useful in unpacking a variety of histories and socio-political philosophies across many time periods and geographies. But clinging to Hegel and Enlightenment philosophies reads like a grasping for a place in the western canon as opposed to accepting Haiti on its own terms. And while “Hegel in his late work The Philosophy of Subjective Spirit mentions the Haitian Revolution by name,” the leaders of the Haitian Revolution do not mention Hegel by name because they did not need to (Buck-Morss 854). Haiti emerged as the first black nation not simply by the use of “Enlightened” philosophies, but by its own individual spirit. Strangely, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind inadvertently anticipated Haiti’s post-revolutionary fate. Though Buck-Morss does not use Hegel’s philosophy to understand contemporary Haiti, we can productively use her parallel analyses to make a final point. As she details, “slaves (again, collectivizing the figure) achieve self-consciousness by demonstrating that they are not things, not objects, but subjects who transform material nature. Hegel’s text becomes obscure and falls silent at this point of realization,” (Buck-Morss, 848). At her point of realization, Haiti too became obscure and silent. Formerly the richest colony in the world, Haiti, in its contemporary state, no longer maintains the glory of its initial years post-revolution. As we begin to understand Haiti on its own terms, perhaps Haiti will also emerge on the world stage without being bound to the literal, in addition to the philosophical, traditional powers of the west.

Works Cited Aching, Gerard. “The Slave’s Work: Reading Slavery Through Hegel’s Mas- ter-Slave Dialectic.” PMLA (Special Issue on Work; Theories and Meth odologies Section) Ed. Vicky Unruh. 127.4 (2012): 912-17. Buck-Morss, Susan. “Hegel and Haiti.” Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 4 (Sum mer, 2000), pp. 821-865. The Uni- versity of Chicago Press. URL: http://www.jstor.org/sta ble/1344332 Cheuse, Alan. “Hamlet in Haiti: Style in Carpentier’s The Kingdom of This World.” Caribbean Quarterly, Vol. 21, No. 4 (December 1975), pp. 13-29. University of the West Indies and Caribbean Quarterly. URL: http://www.jstor.org/sta ble/23050346 . Drexler, Michael J. “Haiti, Modernity, and U.S. Identities.” Early American Literature, Vol. 43, No. 2 (2008), pp. 453-465. University of North Car- olina Press. URL: http://www.jstor. org/stable/25057565 . Taylor, Patrick. “Hegel, Afro-Caribbean Religion, and the Struggle for Free- dom.” Canadian Journal of Latin Amer- ican and Caribbean Studies (1988), vol.13, No. 26: 19-32. Ideas outside the boundaries of the readings taken from class notes.

Reclaiming Voice: Female Language, Body, and Time in “Penelope” Hannah Chappell ’15

Traditionally, James Joyce was grouped with other male modernists who defined their art against a feminized Victorian popular fiction and the idea of female authorship that so dominated the Victorian age. Indeed, Joyce would seem at first glance to be participating in the modernist subjugation of women. Images of woman as muse or aesthetic object populate Joyce’s fiction, from Stephen’s bird girl at the end of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man to Gerty MacDowell in the “Nausicaa” episode of Ulysses. However, at least since the rise of the “New Modernist Studies”—a critical movement that aims to rethink the narrative of modernism as white and male by investigating the contributions of women and non-Western artists to the development of modernism—Joyce’s complex relationship to the categories of modernism has been revealed. For example, his incorporation of popular forms such as the newspaper into Ulysses sits alongside his claims to be writing for a coterie audience—professors—whom he hoped to keep busy for centuries arguing over the meaning of his “enigmas” and “puzzles.” In this essay, Hannah Chappell investigates how Joyce incorporates the female voice into his fiction in ways that work against the notion of woman as muse and aesthetic object. Moreover, the feminist theorists with whom Hannah engages in her essay, Hélène Cixous and Julia Kristeva, both wrote directly about Joyce, fascinated by his struggle to define a sense of self beyond the bounded identity created for him by nation, church, and race. In contrast to Gerty MacDowell, whom Hannah describes as “crimped by Victorian sensibilities while simultaneously exhibiting commercialized, marketed femininity,” Hannah reads Molly Bloom’s narrative as an example of écriture feminine, or as Hannah describes it, “a triumphant, unapologetic declaration of femininity.” — Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing Christiane Gannon

The concluding episode of Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) represents a transition on multiple levels: it is the moment between the close of June 16th and the start of the next day, as well as the switch from Bloom’s

perspective to Molly’s internal monologue. More fundamentally, “Penelope” reveals a shift in language that is tied to Molly and her identity as a woman. Molly’s stream of consciousness narrative interrupts the male

voice that dominates Ulysses, presenting a language that is at once universally female and unique to her individual character: Molly exemplifies her gender, but she is merely one voice amidst the diverse plurality of women. “Penelope” underscores Molly’s femininity while simultaneously stressing the heterogeneity of womankind. Further, the episode connects the ends of Ulysses, making the epic a complete circle, which demonstrates Molly’s power and the necessity of the female sex. Woman’s language—expression unrestrained by the male voice—presents femininity in its purest form, untainted by masculine expectations. In her seminal essay “The Laugh of Medusa,” Hélène Cixous addresses the lack of female language and connects this want to the way in which women have been deprived ownership of their own bodies: “Woman must write her self: must write about women and bring women to writing, from which they have been driven away as violently as from their bodies” (Cixous, 875). Woman must create, thereby achieving a form of self-genesis that gives birth to female language and, by consequence, to herself as whole, independent being. Cixous further states: “What strikes me is the infinite richness of their individual constitutions: you can’t talk about a female sexuality, uniform, homogenous, classifiable into codes—any more than you can talk about one unconscious resembling another” (Cixous, 876). Female sexuality and female speech are connected in the same way that bodily self-ownership and freedom of expression are linked: woman’s language reclaims both linguistic license and sexual autonomy by giving voice to unacknowledged female desires and motivations. Cixous also points out the diversity of womankind. It is inaccurate to speak of a single women’s language. Though there are commonalities among women, the notion of one voice to represent all females is misleadingly singular and unreflective of the diversity of the sex. Molly’s language is an example of woman’s speech, but hers is simply one

among many female tongues. Rachel Duplessis further addresses woman’s language in her essay “Breaking the Sentence; Breaking the Sequence.” She writes: “To break the sentence rejects not grammar especially, but rhythm, pace, flow, expression: the structuring of the female voice by the male voice, female tone and manner by male expectations, female writing by male emphasis, female writing by existing conversations of gender—in short, any way in which dominant structures shape muted ones” (Duplessis, 474). Molly’s narrative “breaks the sentence,” in Duplessis’s terms: her diction, syntax, and tone are radically different from her husband’s. Bloom’s stream of consciousness is scattered with abrupt stops that separate each thought and sensation: “A kidney oozed bloodgouts on the willowpatterened dish : the last...Would she buy it too, calling the items from a slip in her hand. Chapped : washing soda. And a pound and a half of Denny’s sausages...Woods his name is. Wonder what he does. Wife is oldish. New blood” (57). The frequent periods chop Bloom’s narrative into distinct component parts. In contrast, Molly’s monologue continues without pause (“that was a relief wherever you be let your wind go free who knows if that pork chop I took with my cup of tea after was quite good with the heat I couldnt smell anything off it Im sure that queerlooking man in the porkbutchers is a great rogue I hope that lamp is not smoking fill my nose up with smuts” [715].) Molly’s narrative is not a performance for male benefit; her thoughts are her own, indifferent to the reader’s presence. Bloom, too, disregards the reader’s listening ear, but his indifference does not carry the same weight as Molly’s because as a man, he naturally assumes that his voice is his own. On the other hand, Molly is revolutionizing female language by ignoring the reader. Duplessis adds, “The double emphasis on woman, yet on forgetting woman, is a significant maneuver, claiming freedom from a “tyranny of sex” that is nonetheless palpable

and dominant, both negated and affirmed” (Duplessis, 476). Molly both reaffirms and forgets her femininity: womanhood is a fundamental part of her being, but her language is not constrained by gender. Her voice possesses both male and female elements and is made stronger by this amalgamation. Molly’s often vulgar approach to sex exhibits characteristically male qualities in its blunt crudeness: “Ill let him know if thats what he wanted that his wife is fucked yes and damn well fucked too up to my neck nearly not by him” (729-30). This passage can also be read as female because Molly is using her feminine sexuality to get the best of Bloom. Molly writes her gender: she is both the creator and the subject of her narrative, again evidencing self-genesis (which is reaffirmed by her lack of a real mother.) “Penelope” breaks the male sentence, instead presenting a woman’s language that is at once unique to Molly and an exaltation of femininity. However, Molly is the product of a male author. Duplessis’s concept of revolutionary female language addresses women writers. “Penelope” seems to present a true woman’s voice, but Joyce’s masculinity must be acknowledged. Nevertheless, the strength of Molly’s feminine declaration successfully subverts Joyce’s manhood, reclaiming language within the text of Ulysses. The episode is a continuous stream of thought—unfiltered and uncensored— that gives us a direct view into Molly’s mind. Early in the narrative she reflects: “all men get a bit like that at his age especially getting on to forty he is now so as to wheedle any money she can out of him no fool like an old fool and then the usual kissing my bottom was to hide it not that I care two straws who he does it with or knew before that way though Id like to find out so long as I dont have the two of them under my nose all the time like that slut Mary we had in Ontario Terrace” (691). The lack of punctuation emphasizes both the continuity of the narrative and the absence of pretense: Molly

is not performing for anyone, so grammar and punctuation are irrelevant. She is unapologetic, presenting her opinions as fact, as is shown in the generalizing statement, “all men get a bit like that at his age.” The idiom “no fool like an old fool” demonstrates that her knowledge is commonplace and practical, as opposed to Bloom and Stephen’s academic (and in Molly’s mind artificial) intellect. Molly exudes strength and self-reliance even within her thoughts: “not that I care two straws who he does it with” (691). Of course this declaration may not be entirely true, but Molly maintains a front of resolute uncaring. This passage exemplifies the “broken sentence” that Duplessis describes: Molly’s language is distinctly her own. The continuous stream of uncensored thought diverges from Bloom’s male voice, instead revealing a female consciousness that pays no heed to masculine expectations. Molly’s female language is again evidenced in the passage: “I used to go to Father Corrigan he touched me father and what harm if he did where and I said on the canal bank like a fool but whereabouts on your person my child on the leg behind high up was it yes rather high up was it where sit down yes O Lord couldn’t he say bottom right out and have done with what has that got to do with it” (693). She scorns evasive Victorian sensibilities. Molly prefers overt discussion of the body (which reflects the openness of her own physical form.) At the same time there is lack of specificity in her language and syntax: she uses generalizing terms (like the temporally-nonspecific “used to”), while the unpunctuated flow of words requires the reader to surmise where one thought ends and the next begins. Molly’s candidness is exemplified in her musings: “are they so beautiful of course compared with what a man looks like with his two bags full and his other thing hanging down out of him or sticking up at you like a hatrack no wonder they hide it with a cabbageleaf the woman is beauty of course” (704). Molly

celebrates female elegance, disparaging the male form in blunt, almost crude, terms. Her repeated “of course” emphasizes women’s beauty, and again she presents her views as facts, as though female attractiveness cannot be disputed. Conversely, the repetition of “beautiful of course” can also be read as having a slightly bored note, indicative of the masculine obsession with woman’s exterior allure. Male language defines women by their physical attractiveness, which is a flat, limiting characterization. Molly’s double use of this phrase both highlights her exhalation of femininity and hints at the narrowness of men’s surface-level perception of females. Further, Molly’s approach to sex radicalizes her speech and reclaims both language and the female body. As Cixous aptly summarizes, “[...] censor the body and you censor breath and speech at the same time” (Cixous, 880). As with all matters, Molly addresses issues of sexuality with directness: “it makes your lips pale anyhow its done now once and for all with all the talk of the world about it people make its only the first time after that its just the ordinary do it and think no more about why cant you kiss a man without going and marrying him first sometimes love to wildly when you feel that way so nice all over you you cant help yourself ” (692-3). She reduces sex to something ordinary (as opposed to Bloom’s romanticized fantasizing), as shown in the dismissive “its only the first time after that its just the ordinary do it and think no more.” The diction in this passage is itself unexceptional: the words are not specifically related to sex, and without the context it would be impossible to know what Molly is referring to. This banality is contrasted with Molly’s frank enjoyment of sex and her potent sexual identity, which is a driving force of her character. She moves from belittling the act to musing on sexual pleasure (“sometimes love to wildly when you feel that was so nice all over you” [693].) She again addresses her sexual nature in the lines: “a young boy would like me Id confuse him a little alone

with him if we were Id let him see my garters the new ones and make him turn red looking at him seduce him” (692). This passage illustrates Molly’s sexual agency: she is aware of her power as a desirable being and is envisioning herself with a youth, which puts her in the dominant position. She imagines taking control of the situation in a traditionally male way, which redefines woman’s sexual language. Molly orchestrates this hypothetical encounter: the phrase “make him turn red looking at him seduce him” marks the boy as the object, while Molly is the active subject. Bonnie Scott argues, “As an individual and as a representative and observer of many women, Molly Bloom offers a picture of the female, more acted upon than acting” (Scott, 178). Scott fails to note the authority and self-direction that Molly achieves through her language. The repetition of “I” and “Id” in the passage emphasizes her authoritative presence: Molly is both creator and actor in her sexual endeavors. Not only do Molly’s musings on sex showcase her agency and illustrate her female language, but they also illuminate how masculine perceptions of female sexuality reduce women to emptiness. Molly reflects: “whats the idea making us like that with a big hole in the middle of us like a Stallion driving it up into you because thats all they want out of you” (694). Her wonderings on womanly anatomy reveal that by pigeon holing women as objects of desire, men are defining females by a single bodily cavity: in other words, by negative space. Cixous addresses this male fascination with the negative, saying: “We don’t fawn around the supreme hole. We have no womanly reason to pledge allegiance to the negative. The feminine (as the poets suspected) affirms: ‘. . . And yes,’ says Molly, carrying Ulysses off beyond any book and toward the new writing; ‘I said yes, I will Yes’” (Cixous, 884). Empty space and negative language are conflated, and both have become associated with femininity, but, as Cixous points out, this is a masculine fabrication. Women

are affirmative (as shown through Molly’s continued use of what Joyce terms “the female word ‘yes.’” [Blamires, 225].) Molly is substantial in every way, from her generous physique to her full-bodied language. Despite her fascination with the logistics of the womanly form, Molly does not “pledge allegiance to the negative”; rather, she upsets the male idea of female hollowness by questioning its purpose and ridiculing the masculine drive to fill said emptiness. Her approach to sexuality forges a new woman’s language by rupturing male expectations of female modesty and by calling into question the false association between womankind and negativity. While the narrative of “Penelope” demonstrates Molly’s female voice, the episode also echoes and enables the circularity that is present throughout Ulysses. The epic as a whole finishes where it begins: at the dawn of a new day. The individual episodes further manifest repetition: “Nausicaa” circles through Bloom’s fantasies, while “Oxen of the Sun” reinforces cyclicality through scenes of birth and “Proteus” through the continuous nature of the Strand and the sea. “Penelope,” too, exhibits circularity: the lack of punctuation makes the monologue into a single sentence that curves back on itself, concluding at the same point that it begins: with the assenting word “yes.” Molly is the link that connects the whole of Ulysses and makes the novel into a full circle. She is what Bloom leaves at the start of the day and what he returns to at the close of it. In this sense, she ties together the ends of the epic, acting as the joining entity that renders the work a complete unit (which makes her inordinately powerful.) In addition, Milly symbolizes future continuity. Bonnie Scott states: “The ‘darling’ and attractive Milly seems likely to carry on the maternal line for the Blooms, even if the male line (more strongly emphasized in Ulysses, as in life) should end” (Scott, 159). Scott alludes to a form of circularity that encompasses both repetition and change: Milly will continue the Bloom line through

her children, thus perpetuating the cycle, but this also represents a shift from a male-dominated narrative to a female-driven one, which will center more prominently on the maternal forces that underlie Ulysses. The circular significance of “Penelope” highlights the temporal effects of Molly’s language. By creating a woman’s tongue, Molly is also crafting female time to combat masculine constraints on temporality and human history. Julia Kristeva writes in her essay “Women’s Time”: “‘Father’s time, mother’s species,’ as Joyce put it; and indeed, when evoking the name and destiny of women, one thinks more of the space generation and forming the human species than of time, becoming, or history” (Kristeva, 15). Women have been forced to occupy a narrow space that exists outside of masculine time. Female time and woman’s language are linked: linguistic patterns influence the pace at which we read and process a text or oral speech, thereby affecting our perception of temporality. Molly’s densely packed narrative runs from thought to thought at an incredibly fast pace. Her language is rife with time-based references: her reminiscences jump back hours, days, and years, while the continuous stream of reflections and feelings conveys Molly’s unique, rapid form of woman’s time. Molly remembers meeting Boylan for the first time: “theyre all so different Boylan talking about the shape of my foot he noticed at once even before he was introduced I was in the D B C with Poldy laughing and trying to listen I was waggling my foot we both ordered 2 teas and plain bread and butter I saw him looking” (696). This scene is replayed in moment-by-moment detail, which demonstrates that Molly’s time is tied to the minutiae of the interactions she considers most significant. Despite the evident emphasis on temporality, “Penelope” still attracts the masculine misconception of female space. In his critical text “The New Bloomsday Book,” Harry Blamires states: “That the sphere [of Molly’s mind] has its macrocosmic significance

in terms of the female body we know from Joyce himself, who noted that ‘it begins and ends with the female word Yes’” (Blamires, 225). While Blamires notes the significance of the physical body in relation to Molly and to “Penelope” as a whole, he simultaneously reinforces the restrictive notion of female space by presenting Molly’s psyche as a defined area (which must naturally have boundaries.) His statement reaffirms masculine time, reducing Molly’s femininity to spatiality only and inadvertently illustrating the suffocating nature of the patriarchal mentality. “Penelope” rebuts the masculine voice and presents a woman’s language that reclaims words, body, and time. However, Molly is only one individual: as Bonnie Scott points out, women are far too diverse to be defined by a single vocabulary and syntax. Molly is distinct even from the few other female figures in Ulysses. Gerty of “Nausicaa” is crimped by Victorian sensibilities while simultaneously exhibiting commercialized, marketed femininity. Bloom’s Martha, seen only through her letter, is an echo of his sexual fantasies. Finally, Milly, who, like Martha, is revealed to us through her letter to her father, contains hints of Molly’s voice but is decidedly her own person, on the cusp of sexualized womanhood. These contrasting female voices exemplify the plurality of womankind, out of which Molly Bloom’s triumphant, unapologetic declaration of femininity rings forth.

Works Cited Blamires, Harry. The New Bloomsday Book. London: Routledge, 1988. Print. Cixous. Hélène. “The Laugh of the Medusa.” Signs 1.4 (1976) : 875-893. Print. DuPlessis, Rachel Blau. “Breaking the Sen tence; Breaking the Sequence.” Es- sentials of the Theory of Fiction. Eds. Michael J. Hoffman and Patrick D. Murphy. London: Leicester Uni- versity Press, 1996. Print. Joyce, James. Ulysses. Oxford: Oxford Uni- versity Press, 2008. Kristeva, Julia. “Women’s Time.” Signs 7.1 (1981) : 13-35. Print. Scott, Bonnie Kime. Joyce and Feminism. Sussex: The Harvester Press Limited, 1984. Print.

The Uncanny’s Presence in Gogol’s Short Stories Lauren Lanzotti ’14

Anxiety defined much of Nikolai Vasilievich Gogol’s life. He burned many of his manuscripts before they could be published (and some after they were), he underwent a spiritual crisis which prevented him from writing fictional works for the last ten years of his life, and he died (of consumption) mostly alone, alienated from friends and fame. As a literary artist, Gogol endowed many of his creations with anxiety, and Lauren Lanzotti examines the “uncanny” experiences they endure as well as the sometimes uncomfortable feelings we have as we read about them. She does an excellent job of examining both why we squirm as we read Gogol and why we laugh as we squirm. — Associate Professor of Russian John Bartle

Sigmund Freud defines the psychological phenomenon of “the uncanny” as the sensation that one gets when an experience, person, or object produces both feelings of familiarity and unfamiliarity at the same time.1 Freud cited many Gothic stories in his essay on the uncanny, and Gogol’s Petersburg tales are similar to them in their use of the phe1 Freud, Sigmund, David McLintock, and Hugh Haughton. “The “Uncanny”” The Uncanny. New York: Penguin, 2003. 121-123. Print. Freud’s essay begins by explaining the linguistic history of the term. He explains how “uncanny” comes from the German “unheimlich” which is used to express something that is not “heimlich” or homely, native, or comfortable. He goes on to explain how the uncanny is defined as “that class of the terrifying which leads back to something long known to us, once familiar,” because “unheimlich” in the German, Freud explains, is not a reversal of the term “heimlich” but rather an alteration of the term. Thus, the unheimlich or uncanny is an uncomfortable version of something that was once found familiar and heimlich.

nomenon to represent human discomfort with the unexplainable and with human doubling. In “The Nose,” for example, Gogol’s personification of a misplaced appendage is chimerical, and much of the humor is derived from his characters seeing an otherwise disturbing and terrifying experience as merely an embarrassing nuisance in their lives. Freud describes how objects, both foreign and native, are not unsettling to human perception until they get so close to each other in appearance, but without becoming exact replicas, that they fall into what is called the “uncanny valley,” or place of greatest discomfort. In the anxiety that is described throughout his stories, Gogol accurately reflects Freud’s conclusions concerning the uncanny. “The Nose” may be Gogol’s most explicit representation of familiarity being the direct cause of fear or anxiety. Gogol’s use of

the words “terrified”, “paralysed”, and “shuddered” tell us clearly that Ivan Yakovlevich is afraid when he discovers a solitary nose in a bun and knows instantly from its physicality that it belongs to the Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov. This fear is uncanny because of the immediate recognition; thus, “he stuck in his fingers and tugged –a nose, no doubt about it, a nose! And even, so it seemed, a familiar nose. An expression of horror crept over Ivan Yakovlevich’s face.”2 Similarly, Kovalyov’s discovery of the nose’s absence is unsettling because of the fact that a pimple had developed the night before. This pimple’s location was not coincidental but rather uncanny because it meant that Kovalyov had a reason to look directly at his nose for examination immediately upon waking up.3 In this case, the habit of checking his blemish became the familiar action that was altered and affected by the odd occurrence of the nose’s disappearance. When something that resembles a human face or figure is only slightly varied from the familiar, it can be described as falling into a human’s “uncanny valley”.4 In “The Portrait,” Gogol gives a representation of the anxiety of the uncanny valley in his descriptions of commercial portrait painting. Chartkov is overwhelmed with excitement due to the fact that his portrait looks just like his subject, but in trying to paint yellow streaks to accentuate the face’s delicate tones, the lady tells him that “he was imagining 2 Gogol, Nikolai Vasilevich, Christopher English, and Richard Peace. Plays and Petersburg Tales. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 37. Print. 3 Gogol, 40. 4 Vasudevan, Sandosh, and Karl F. MacDorman. “Exploring the Uncanny Valley.” Exploring the Uncanny Valley. N.p., 2006. Web. The uncanny valley is a hypothesis in the field of human aesthetics which holds that when human features look and move almost, but not exactly, like natural human beings’, it causes a response of revulsion among human observers. A robotics engineer named Masahiro Mori coined the term when he came up with his diagram of the relationship between human likeness and familiarity, or the human likeness versus the amount of uncanny sensations that are derived from that likeness.

all this” and that Lise must not feel well, for “her face is never sallow.”5 When the lady sees Chartkov explicitly putting yellow paint on her daughter’s face, she is repulsed because she sees the unfamiliar color on the familiar face, and so the portrait falls into the uncanny valley. When Chartkov has painted Psyche, and not Lise,6 her mother declares how perfect the portrait looks. The lady then resolves in her mind that it must be an image of Lise portrayed as Psyche; though not accurate to Lise’s true appearance, this portrayal is much more desirable than a true attempt at a copy of her looks. Though it can be argued that the preference is because the interpretation adds to her beauty, I would suggest that a portrait is more acceptable to the human eye when it is obviously not an exact replica as opposed to a portrait that has only minor differences from the original subject. Under such circumstances, these differences stand out and the image becomes an imposter instead of a rendering of the truth. Doubling is also traditionally considered uncanny when the doppelganger or reflection is close to being a match but is not perfectly a replica. In “The Nose,” Kovalyov’s dismembered nose has become a sort of double to him. Though the nose has a human body and a nose where a head might be, it holds a civil servant’s place in society and frequents the places where a man like Kovalyov might otherwise frequent. This nose can speak, hear, and express eye-brow-moving emotions, which is an inconceivable mystery in itself. We see similar doubling in the parallel stories of the men in “Nevsky Prospect.” While Pirogov assumes that his female prospect is stupid and easily seduced, Piskaryov believes his woman to be a “distinguished lady.”7 Then, as Piskaryov follows his woman to a brothel where he is laughed at for his romantic intentions, Pirogov is beaten and humiliated by the blonde’s husband, who she 5 Gogol, 83-84. 6 Gogol, 85. 7 Gogol, 8.

is faithful to. In this way, the stories of the two men become mirrored, where each man’s infatuation is what the other man hoped for, and in the end the women humiliate both of the men before sending them away, to death or to court, in their shame. In “The Overcoat,” Gogol repeats the action of coat-stealing to create a similar parallel to the “Nevsky Prospect” narratives. Akaky Akakievich gets his coat taken from him by two tall mustachioed men; later, as a ghost, Akaky Akakievich steals a coat from the important personage; then, finally, a ghost who is tall and mustachioed, reflective of the original thief, is left wandering the streets. Because readers like repetition in threes, this sense of potential for a third round of coat stealing without the theft being fulfilled leaves us with an unfinished feeling. The Overcoat also exemplifies doubling in the mirrored personalities of Akaky Akakievich and the important personage, two men who seem completely different but who actually share a great deal. For example, Akaky Akakievich is below the clerks in his financial situation and social skills and the important personage is above the clerks because of his promotion, putting them at opposite ends of a financial spectrum. However, both men are isolated because of their awkward social interactions. The important personage “always preserved his silence, pronouncing only the occasional monosyllable, and in this way acquired the reputation of a crashing bore.”8 In turn, Akaky Akakievich’s passion for copying and discomfort with any higher tasks earns him disrespect and social rejection. While their social positions act as a mirroring, the two men become exact doubles in the story through the repetition of an aggressive person or force stealing the coat off of each man’s back. In uncanny narratives, it is important to note that there is a difference between an uncanny feeling for the readers and an uncanny experience for the characters in the 8 Gogol, 137.

narrative. The nose is dressed up and behaves like a gentleman and is in the fifth class as a state councilor while Kovalyov is above an eighth class collegiate assessor on the table of ranks. This superiority of the nose is uncanny for Kovalyov, but not necessarily for the reader, as, “poor Kovalyov almost lost his mind. He did not know what to make of this most extraordinary occurrence.”9 For the reader, the anxiety lies more in how the nose’s behavior combines the familiar stature and clothing of a human being with an unfamiliar nasal replacement for a face. The fact that the nose speaks is uncanny for both parties because Kovalyov and the reader both attribute speech with another orifice. Also, the nose has eyebrows, but there is no mention of eyes,10 so while Kovalyov is unnerved by the appearance of the nose, the reader is made more anxious by our inability to physically see the figure and make sense of the given description. Through the “unhomely,” sensations and situations in Gogol’s short stories, readers are able to experience the anxiety of many characters who suffer from uncanny occurrences. It may be that some of the humor in Gogol’s stories comes from the safety of being an observer to these characters who must deal with coat thieves or missing noses. However, Gogol also ensures that the reader is sufficiently unsettled through his often doubtful narration and symmetrical storylines. For me as a reader, much of the pleasure of reading short stories such as these comes from the combination of the humorous and often absurd situations with the uncanny feelings that come along with them.

9 Gogol, 42. 10 Gogol, 43.

The Failure of Knowledge Chris Bousquet ’15

Chris’s essay starts with an apparently narrow concern about Descartes’s cogito, his claim that we know that we exist even if we doubt the nature and existence of everything else, even if we are dreaming or our thoughts are under external control. Descartes wants to justify all of our knowledge on this foundational belief about our selves. Chris points out that Descartes’s starting point itself requires elucidation. At the core of Chris’s piece is a broad puzzle about explanation. What constitutes an answer to a why-question? Why are you reading these words? Explanations in terms of antecedent states of your brain raise further questions about why your brain and the world is in the state it is. Explanations in terms of physical laws raise questions about why the laws are what they are. Some folks invoke theistic answers; others find that theism itself raises unanswerable questions. A conversation with a child who persistently demands more answers (“Why? Why? Why?”) can lead to the exasperation we sense in Chris’s demand for Descartes’s project. As Wittgenstein observed, explanations come to an end somewhere. — Assistant Professor of Philosophy Russell Marcus

In his Meditations, Descartes fails to prove his initial foundation for all knowledge: the cogito. Descartes claims that even if he is under the influence of a demon deceiver and must therefore doubt and purge himself of all his conceptions, there must be some “he” that is being deceived, thinking and existing. Critics often argue that Descartes must come to this assertion by means of reasoning and preconceived definitions, thus violating his commitment to razing all knowledge to the ground. However, Descartes cleverly responds to this objection by positing the cogito as part of an “internal awareness,” rather than a conclusion drawn from definitions and logic. I argue that, though shrewd, this solution leads to an infinite regression, as we are never able to find the basis for this “internal awareness.” I then apply these results to other situations, arguing

that, in fact, we cannot know we think, nor that we exist, as any basis we develop for these assertions will lead to an infinite regression. In the Sixth Objections, Descartes adeptly responds to the most destructive criticisms of the cogito: that he develops the idea “I think” using the very instruments and definitions that he had agreed he must raze to the ground. Mersenne specifically criticizes Descartes for using a preconceived notion of what constitutes thought, drawn from Descartes’s “pre-razing” beliefs. He argues, “in order to be certain that you are thinking you must know what thought or thinking is…But since you do not yet know what these things are, how can you know you are thinking” (TOR, 7). Because Descartes starts from a blank slate of knowledge, he cannot possibly know that he thinks, because he does not

know what thinking is. In essence, he does not know he is thinking because he does not know he is thinking. Descartes responds by acknowledging that one does indeed need knowledge of thought to know he is thinking, but that we have such knowledge through “internal awareness.” He asserts, “this inner awareness of one’s thoughts…is…innate in all men” (TOR, 7). Therefore, we know what thinking is and know that we think through naturally endowed knowledge. Such a response would be suitable for any objection that accuses Descartes of using “pre-razing” knowledge in order to prove the cogito, for he could assert that he does not use this former knowledge, but merely knows the cogito by “internal awareness.” Thus, this objection and reply adequately responds to criticisms that Descartes uses logic or reasoning to reach the cogito. The most apparent flaw with Descartes’s counterargument is that it begs the question. To state that we know we think because we have an internal awareness of our thoughts is essentially to say that we know we think because we know we think. Descartes merely takes the conclusion as his premise, in fact not formulating an argument at all. But for Descartes, this lack of argument does not constitute a flaw in his assertion that he thinks, but rather it is exactly what makes his assertion true. For if he came to the knowledge that he thinks by invoking logic and his conception of thought, he would not be able trust the conclusion, having doubted and denied the validity of logic and having emptied himself of all conceptions of ideas. Thus, though the mere assertion that he knows he thinks may be unconvincing without evidence, innate knowledge is the only way he could possibly know. Therefore, the idea that he knows he thinks through “internal awareness” certainly survives Mersenne’s objection, yet raises the question of how Descartes knows that we have this “internal awareness” of our own thought. If we come to this conclusion by reasoning, we cannot trust this internal awareness,

for prior to certainty about innate awareness we do not yet know that we think or that logical reasoning is valid. Descartes would likely assert that we have internal awareness of this internal awareness, but then how do we know of this second order awareness? This search for the foundation of our internal awareness will go on infinitely, leaving us without a basis on which to assert that we know that we think. We cannot know that we have internal awareness and thus cannot know that we think. A critic of the idea that this infinite regression precludes us from finding a basis of truth might make the counterargument that there exist examples in logic where, though we infinitely regress without finding a basis for a conclusion, we still know the conclusion to be true. Consider the example of Lewis Carroll’s “What the Tortoise Said to Achilles.” In this story, the tortoise makes two propositions: A: Things that are equal to the same are equal to each other and B: The two sides of this Triangle are things that are equal to the same. From these propositions, the tortoise draws conclusion Z: the two sides of this triangle are equal to each other. Yet, the tortoise wonders how one could convince a skeptical observer, who does not believe that A and B implies Z, that the argument is valid. Surely in order to convince this skeptic one would have to assert proposition C: that if A and B are true, Z must be true. Yet, in order to convince the skeptic of this, one must add proposition D: that if A, B and C are true, so is Z. This regression proceeds infinitely, never filling in the missing link of the argument. The critic of my analysis of infinite regression would assert that still Z must be and is true in mathematics, attempting to show that infinite regression is not necessarily a sign of non-knowledge. But to this critic I would respond that, if we have not yet proven that we think, that our conception of math is correct, or that logic is valid, certainly we cannot conclude that proposition Z is necessarily true. We cannot use an example within the framework which we are trying to prove exists in order to prove that this framework exists.

This again reduces to question begging, as we assume A: that infinite progression does not preclude knowledge that we think, in order to show Z: an example where infinite regression does not preclude knowledge, then applying Z to prove A. It seems that if we cannot use reasoning or internal awareness as justifications that we think, we cannot know we think. For one can only have something by obtaining it or innately possessing it. In the case of the knowledge that we think, we can only claim to possess this knowledge through reasoning or through innate possession, and I have shown that we can trust neither explanation. However, this is not to say that we do not think, but merely that we cannot know that we think. One might ask if we could someday come to know we think by discovering some other capacity for justifying this knowledge other than reasoning or “internal awareness.” I must confess we could not, for even if we came upon such a capacity, we could not know that we had it. Justification for the existence of the capacity could come only through reasoning or internal awareness, which I have established we cannot trust, or through the capacity itself, which would lead to infinite regression and leave us without a foundation for knowledge. Again, this is not to say that this new power could not bring us knowledge, but only that we could not know that it brings us knowledge. Because we cannot know that we think, we must search for another basis for determining our existence and all the other propositions that follow from this. However, it seems that any other type of knowledge will encounter the same problems as the knowledge that we think, leading us to question how we know that we know ad infinitum. For example, if one argued that he knew he existed because he speaks, this would raise the question of how he knows he speaks. To this question he would have to respond that he knows by reasoning, by internal awareness or by some other capacity that we do not know,

running into the same problems of infinite regression that occur in positing “I think.” I have argued that we cannot justify the cogito, or any knowledge for that matter, for substantiating knowledge through reasoning violates the assumption of starting from a new foundation, and justifying it through internal awareness or another capacity leads to infinite regression. Yet if we cannot justify any sound basis for knowledge, how then do we proceed? Some might say that we must take a Kierkegaard-like “leap of faith,” accepting some knowledge that we cannot empirically prove, such as thought, our existence, or God. More recent philosophers, like Wittgenstein, have taken this need for acceptance to its logical conclusion, arguing that because we cannot transcend our context (i.e. we can only judge logic through our logical brain, or analogously, internal awareness through internal awareness) we must not attempt to answer metaphysical questions, for they are meaningless. However, this leaves the realm of philosophy on thin ice, as metaphysical questions constitute a significant sphere of the field. And indeed, Wittgenstein asserts that philosophy must change its focus, from trying to answer meaningless questions to attempting to clarify questions that can be answered, and relaying these to the natural sciences. Why then do philosophers continue to ponder metaphysical questions, if there is in fact no answer? For one, they may disagree with me that knowledge is impossible to attain. But more importantly, musing over such questions allows development of the intellect, applicable to the more concrete, physical realm. Works Cited Marcus, Russell, and René Descartes. “Themes in the Objections and Replies.” Med- itations on First Philosophy. N.p.: n.p., 1641. N. pag. Rpt. in N.p.: n.p., 2009. 7. Print.

What Wretches Feel: The Plight of Representation in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men Nate Lanman ’15

Nate Lanman’s essay jumps to the heart of James Agee and Walker Evans’ Let Us Now Praise Famous Men by lingering at its edge, adopting Agee’s prefatory poem to Evans as a means of glossing the many lamentations on the difficulty and perhaps the dishonesty of their journalistic project that Agee threads through the book to follow. Agee’s tome is famously dense, the poem perhaps denser than the rest, all of it arguably mad in both conception and execution. But Nate demonstrates, with admirable lucidity, the poem’s own clear-sighted articulation of the book’s accomplishments and its limitations. Experimenting with two different ways of construing the poem’s invocations of sham madness and of true insanity in Shakespeare’s King Lear, Nate explains—cautiously, judiciously, implicitly aligning himself with the painstaking Edgar rather than the whirling Lear— why and how the better reading obtains, and what it means for our understanding of the frustrated attempt at mastery that constitutes Agee’s masterpiece. — Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing Benjamin Widiss

James Agee scarcely hides his fixation on the parallels between displays of madness in Shakespeare’s King Lear and the impossibility he attributes to his endeavor of honorable representation in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (1939). He first quotes Lear in an epigraph, and references the tragedy again in a poem of his own composition, dedicated to his partner and photographer Walker Evans. A fitting prologue to his work, Agee’s poem draws directly from the plot of King Lear, intermingling the same themes of illegitimacy, madness, and frailty that resonate in his own attempts to portray the lives of tenant

families in the American South. The poem introduces these themes through allusions to two of Lear’s leading characters: Lear, who is betrayed and gradually stripped of his power and sanity, and Edgar, who feigns madness out of necessity, but ultimately prevails over the play’s villain. On the surface, the poem serves to give the rest of Agee’s writing a thematic skeleton, yet a deeper reading suggests a direct attempt on Agee’s part to contextualize his role as a journalist, carried forth by direct comparisons between himself and either Edgar or Lear. Whether Agee chooses to associate himself with Edgar or Lear

holds greater implications about his goals in compiling the book. To compare himself to Edgar would imply that his madness (i.e. the obsessive self-consciousness that infests his descriptions) is a front, and one that he eventually abandons as he successful completes his task (“Disguise flung flat, squarely we challenge the fiend” [Agee, 15]). Seeing himself as Lear, meanwhile, would suggest that his madness is inescapable—that pure representation is impossible, and that he is equally inadequate to the task of depicting reality as Lear is to the task of ruling as a king. A close reading of Agee’s poem would suggest that Agee is comparing himself to Edgar, particularly because the poem’s treatment of Edgar puts the character in a writer’s role. “Edgar,” the speaker instructs, “[…] to the shelf of that sick bluff / Bring your blind father, and describe a little” (4). This line introduces the notion of description, which pervades the rest of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, through an allusion to a pivotal scene in King Lear. After Edgar is framed for plotting to kill his father, Gloucester, he disguises himself as the lunatic beggar Tom O’Bedlam to evade capture. Gloucester, meanwhile, is tortured, blinded, and banished for remaining loyal to the deposed King Lear. Blindly wandering the heath, he encounters Edgar (still in disguise), and asks him to lead him to the Cliffs of Dover, where he ultimately intends to commit suicide: “Bring me but to the very brim of it / […] From that place / I shall no leading need” (King Lear, 4.1.75-78). Certainly, leading through description is also Agee’s job—he was commissioned to write about a foreign way of life for readers unable to experience it for themselves. In the preface, he ruminates on their assignment to create “a photographic and verbal record of the daily living and environment of an average white family of tenant farmers” (ix). He spends a great deal of time considering what it means to be a writer, and what the exact goals of his descriptions are. Agee’s awareness of his responsibilities as a

writer would make a comparison to Edgar, whose most important action in the entire play involves description, a fitting one. While Agee claims to fully understand the role of the journalist, he fears that journalism itself is inadequate to the task of representation: “I have never yet seen a piece of journalism which conveyed more than the slightest fraction of what any even moderately reflective and sensible person would mean and intend by those inachievable words…” (206-7). Similar self-conscious digressions punctuate nearly all of Agee’s future descriptions, especially when he attempts to embody other people. He is unable, for example, to describe George Gudger without acknowledging the unassailable obstacles of his craft: “George Gudger is a man, et cetera. But obviously in the effort to tell of him (by example) as truthfully as I can, I am limited.” Such words connect, again, with Agee’s description of Edgar, whom he describes as “weeping for pity” (10). To most readers this would seem a dramatic comparison. On the other hand, Agee’s incessant self-conscious asides do come across as their own type of lament, in this case not for the climate (“Poor Tom’s a-cold” [Lear, 4.3.145]), but for his inability to meet his own expectations for accurate representation (“I feel sure in advance that any efforts, in what follows…will be failures” [210]). Further, such a rash metaphor could easily be produced by a mind as self-conscious as Agee’s. Because Agee so willingly and so frequently acknowledges the shortcomings of his craft, it would make sense for him to be self-conscious about his own self-consciousness, to the extent of likening himself, in his own poem, to a disguised madman weeping for pity. By comparing himself to Edgar in the poem, Agee would imply that he ultimately succeeds at depicting the lives sharecroppers in the South, despite the obstacles of journalism. After all, Edgar survives at the end of King Lear (which, in a tragedy, is its own way of prevailing), whereas Lear with-

ers in his madness and dies overcome with remorse. Readers would probably agree that Agee does produce a fine portrayal of the families he lives with, and that he is justified in comparing himself to a relatively successful character like Edgar. But considering Agee’s high standards for what constitutes honest journalism (a phrase he writes off as “paradoxical” [5]), it is doubtful that Agee would consider his attempt to represent these tenant families a successful one. Had an unbiased outsider written the poem, she may very well have characterized Agee as one who guides the blind successfully. But because Agee wrote the poem himself, a comparison to Lear would be more appropriate; he is crippled by the limits of language, and would characterize himself as one who succumbs to chaos, rather than one who overcomes it. If we accept that Agee is comparing himself to Lear, we might read his references to Edgar as depictions of his partner, Walker Evans. The fact that the poem is addressed to Walker Evans, and that the speaker only directly addresses Edgar, supports this reading. Yet the key distinction that favors this interpretation, again, is that Edgar’s state at the end of King Lear is far less tragic than Lear’s. By Agee’s standards, Evans would be the more successful of the two at representing reality because his medium, the camera, is better equipped to do so: “One reason I so deeply care for the camera is just this. So far as it goes…and handled cleanly and literally in its own terms…it is…incapable of recording anything but absolute, dry truth” (206). He frequently asserts that photographs—and Evans’ photographs in particular—depict the South more accurately than he could ever hope to with words. Early on, he laments the fact that he has been assigned to chronicle the lives of these people through such an imperfect medium: “If I could do it, I’d do no writing at all here. It would be photographs” (10). If Evans, too, is mad for attempting representation, he more closely resembles Edgar, who feigns madness, than Lear, who is

legitimately mad. Agee’s attempt at representation is closer to the latter. As a writer, he is led to believe that it is within his power to depict his surroundings. Yet Agee is convinced that, like Lear, his supposed power is a lie—that he is really powerless, and wholly inadequate to the task: “Description is a word to suspect. Words cannot embody; they can only describe” (206). In this way, Agee is much like Lear, wandering the heath in the middle of the storm. Lear tries to assert his diminishing power by shouting at the only entity that cannot talk back: the storm itself. Agee does the same thing; he feels helpless to produce an honest representation of tenant families through language, and in many instances laments his plight, quite ironically, through language itself. Considering Agee’s frequent expressions of inadequacy, it would at best be hopeful to say that, by his own standards, his portrayal of the sharecropping families is pure. Much more fitting is the notion that Evans, like Edgar, prevails, and that Agee is “the wild old king,” “captive” (17) to the impossibility of his endeavor. By comparing himself to Lear, Agee implies that language keeps him from successfully completing his task, just as Lear’s age and senility hinder him from maintaining power. This second interpretation is the stronger of the two. By his own means, Agee tries his best to do his job: “[…] to [describe] as exactly and clearly as I can and get the damned thing done with” (214). But he also makes it clear at all stages that he expects imperfection, so much so that by the book’s end, Agee’s task of depicting the lives of sharecroppers in the South seems ancillary. The greater thrust of his work is not an attempt to embody reality, but instead to convey a truth that few other journalists and novelists readily acknowledge: that honorable representation is impossible, and that if we consider inexact representation a disservice to our subjects, we must find a better medium for the task. He argues that Walker Evans

possesses this better medium—that Evans’ photography, compiled in the first fifty pages of Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, is as close to an accurate depiction as one could achieve. But Agee is a journalist, and journalism alone cannot, by his own standards, wholly encapsulate another way of life. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is an attempt at honorable representation, but by Agee’s high standards, it is also a failed one. Agee knew this. He knew from the start that his assigned medium—the written word— falls short when tasked with reproducing reality. He knew that the camera, while imperfect itself, was better equipped to do this. It follows, then, that Evans, the photographer, is the true Edgar figure here—the less crazy of the two, and ultimately the more successful one. Agee, possessing the weaker medium, is the “old wild king, (17)” still trapped and haunted by the impossibility of his attempt at representation. Stripped of his supposed power as a journalist, he casts himself as a once-powerful monarch rambling madly into a storm.

Works Cited Agee, James and Walker Evans. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1939. Print. Shakespeare, William. King Lear (Conflated Text). The Norton Shakespeare: Essential Plays/The Sonnets. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt et al. 2nd Ed. New York: Norton, 2009. 1253- 1341. Print.

“Locked Like Sisters”: Identity as a Fluid Construct in Light in August Sarah Sgro ’14

From her witty title onward, Sarah Sgro explores the dialectics of freedom and confinement central to all three of the intertwined storylines in William Faulkner’s Light in August. Sarah documents the fluidity of racial and gender identity that marks the novel’s central coupling between Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden, the degree to which both the action and the language depicting it bespeak a wealth of transgressive possibilities. But—carefully demarcating between the psychologies of the characters and that of the latter-day critic—she demonstrates that what may look to us like a radical subversion of essentialist constructions of identity appears to strike the characters as a failure to live up to assigned social roles. While Joanna is comfortable adopting a stereotypically manly profile in many situations, and Joe often passes for white even as he is internally convinced of his “black blood,” neither is inclined to countenance such liberties in the other. Ultimately, Sarah’s essay marks the unfortunate spot where emergent possibility runs up against entrenched power, and the violent reassertions of priority that result. — Visiting Assistant Professor of English and Creative Writing Benjamin Widiss

Faulkner uses language throughout Light in August that implies the flexibility of binaries such as race and gender; meanwhile, he limits his characters’ understanding of such fluidity, with Joe Christmas and Joanna Burden considering each other primarily as fixed categorical objects. Notably, Faulkner fosters a landscape of identity-based possibilities while describing Christmas and Burden being “locked like sisters” on “the black waters” (Faulkner 238); in particular,

Faulkner’s apparent choice to unite Christmas and Burden under the category of ‘female’ suggests that binaries such as gender are malleable. To some extent, Faulkner renders Christmas’ thoughts and Burden’s behaviors cognizant of the fluidity of race and gender binaries. Christmas’ tangled racial identity frequently manifests in his perceptions of Burden as he describes her trespassing various physical binaries, particularly that between darkness and light. Furthermore, Burden’s

plan to send Christmas to a “nigger school” (252) subverts both characters’ gender roles, with Burden assuming a patriarchal position. However, Burden and Christmas ultimately fail to embrace the ideological potential of such fluidity; their recognition of categorical flexibility is far from tolerant, with Christmas’ de-feminization of Burden and self-emasculation emerging instead as resentful. Despite the flexible template for identity that Faulkner crafts through language, Christmas and Burden revert to using one another as “female” and “black” categorical objects, perceiving one another’s identities as fixed reductive roles. Faulkner’s language crafts a vast landscape of possibilities for identity, as demonstrated by his description of Christmas’ and Burden’s sexual tryst during the second phase of their relationship. Throughout a single paragraph, Faulkner portrays Christmas as watching “two creatures…that struggled in one body…upon the surface of a black thick pool beneath the last moon” while also noting the presence of two figures coming to the “black surface…locked like sisters” (238). In both instances, Faulkner expands his template for identity by rendering the referents of “creatures” and “sisters” ambiguous, subject to various informed interpretations. Faulkner’s first reference to the “two creatures” seems to implicate the dual personalities of Joanna, including the “cold, contained figure of the first phase who… remained somehow impervious and impregnable” and “the second one, who…strove to drown in the black abyss of its own creating” (238). This referent appears to shift, however, with Faulkner’s portrayal of two bodies being “locked like sisters”; here, Faulkner ostensibly describes both Joe and Joanna coming to the “black surface” of reality together as “the world would rush back” (238) following sex or orgasm. In addition to suggesting the flexibility of identity by maintaining ambiguous referents for his descriptors, Faulkner broadly extends the category of identity by linking

Burden and Christmas so closely as to imply that they share the same body and, simultaneously, the same blood. More specific possibilities for identity unfold within the same paragraph; in addition to suggesting that Christmas’ and Burden’s identities are so fluid as to intersect, Faulkner’s language begins to play with bending identity-based binaries of gender and race. In depicting their sisterly connection, Faulkner unites Burden and Christmas beneath the category of ‘female,’ suggesting the flexibility of gender as a categorical designator. It is noteworthy here that Faulkner deems Burden and Christmas “sisters” rather than brothers. Challenging Christmas’ attempts to de-feminize Burden as “mantrained” throughout their relationship (215), Faulkner distorts Christmas’ own attempts at gender subversion; by complicating Christmas’ effort to label Burden categorically as ‘male’, Faulkner further extends the landscape of identity-based possibilities. In addition to illustrating gender as a flexible designator, Faulkner implicitly renders racial identity as fluid across both characters. Even before bridging Christmas and Burden as “sisters,” Faulkner’s apparent portrayal of Joanna’s two separate identities battling within “one body” tacitly alludes to Christmas’ own racial dichotomy. Inciting imagery that combines light — “the last moon” — and darkness — “black thick pool” — Faulkner places his description of the “two creatures” in an implicitly racial context. This interpretation is supported by the preceding sentence noting that Christmas “realised that he could not escape” (238); though the context of the paragraph suggests that Christmas struggles to escape from “the affair” that “went on submerging him more and more” (238), one could reasonably conclude that Christmas also struggles to escape from his own internally tangled racial identity. By describing Burden with language that mirrors Christmas’ own racial struggle, Faulkner makes malleable the otherwise rigid category of race.

Assuming Christmas’ perspective while describing Burden and her house, Faulkner renders his thoughts somewhat cognizant of the flexibility of binaries such as race and gender. Specifically, Christmas’ perceptions of Burden and her house frequently reference her transgression across the lightdark binary, ostensibly reflecting Christmas’ own struggle regarding his confused racial identity. Christmas perceives the Burden home as “the dark house,” entering “into the dark kitchen: a shadow returning without a sound and without locomotion to the allmother of obscurity and darkness” (209), but also depicts the flickering presence of “a kerosene lamp…after a while the light went out” (208). Similarly, he characterizes Burden’s face as encompassing both darkness and light, depicting her “eyes in the dark glowing like the eyes of cats” (237). As their relationship progresses, Christmas also witnesses Burden trespassing specific age and gender binaries, with such descriptions often occurring in the contrasting contexts of light and darkness. His perception of Burden’s age, for instance, vacillates with respect to time of day. When Christmas first notices Burden at night, “in the soft light of the candle she looked to be not much past thirty” (211); however, in the comparatively bright “daylight he knew that she was better than thirtyfive” (212). Furthermore, Christmas understands Burden as encompassing both male and female qualities. In addition to noting the odd juxtaposition of Burden’s thin manly face and round feminine body, he describes her as possessing a “dual personality…the woman at first sight of whom in the lifted candle there had opened before him…a horizon of…pleasure; the other the mantrained muscles and the mantrained habit of thinking” (215). Though Burden technically signals the femininity of a sexual object, Christmas believes that she lacks “that feminine vaccilation…coyness of obvious desire and intention to succumb” (214), instead demonstrating masculine rigidity during sex. By framing Christmas’ depic-

tions of Burden in the context of categorical transgressions, Faulkner endows Christmas with limited awareness of binary fluidity. Burden’s behaviors also suggest bounded awareness of such flexibility, as reflected in her attempt to send Christmas to law school in Memphis. By aiming to guide Christmas’ future and lead him toward a situation that will ‘benefit’ his future, Burden’s aligns herself with a typically masculine, patriarchal position. Burden’s efforts to ‘place’ Christmas in a fulfilling situation given her opinion that he is “wasting [his] life” imagines herself as possessing masculine authority over Christmas, who emerges as an inferior, conventionally female object (Faulkner 245). In the same way, Burden’s alignment with the academic institutions in question, demonstrated by her assertion that “they will take you…on my account” (252) equips her with a typically masculine source of power. Certainly, Burden attempts to mask such role reversal by insisting that Christmas will emerge as powerful patriarch rather than emasculated object, claiming that she “will turn over the business to you, all the money” and offering him apparent agency in that he “can choose any [school] you want among them” (252). Though Burden superficially denies reversing traditional gender roles, her behaviors alone indicate that she possesses some knowledge of the fluidity of gender as a binary; while she is capable of demonstrating archetypal male superiority, so too can Christmas emerge as ‘subordinate female’. While Christmas’ thoughts and Burden’s behaviors imply limited knowledge of identity as fluid, neither accept the ideological potential of such flexibility. Specifically, Christmas’ perception of gender as fluid emerges as spiteful rather than tolerant. Perceiving Burden’s masculine rigidity in sexual encounters, Christmas de-feminizes Burden and emasculates his own self; rather than recognizing such fluidity as socially empowering, however, Christmas demonstrates resentment towards Burden for flouting reductive gender

roles. Christmas’ comments regarding Burden’s “mantrained” habits are rife with bitterness and disgust, depicting her masculinity as unnatural. Denying the existence of her female body parts, he proposes that their prior sexual acts are physically implausible: “… it was as though what memory of less than twelve hours knew to be true could have never happened…under clothes she cant even be made so that it could have happened” (215), interpreting Burden’s masculinity as rendering her body as freakish and confused. Similarly, upon seeing Burden for the first time with her head bare, Christmas recoils at the feminine “loose abandon of her hair” he only knew by touch in the dark of the bedroom, maintaining that “she’s trying to be a woman and she don’t know how” (219); despite his frustration at Burden’s inability to serve as a “feminine…coy” (214) sexual object, Burden also grows angry at her attempts to be the woman she is not. Christmas’ eventual statement that “My God…it was like I was the woman and she was the man” (215) emerges as hateful, dismissing the reversal of his and Burden’s gender roles as perverse. Though Faulkner himself suggests that the binaries across which his characters span are variable, Christmas and Burden continue to use each other purely as categorical objects. Christmas’ primary frustration with Burden’s masculinity is that he must work to use her as the female sex object he desires and onto which he projects his racial strife; accordingly, he renders each of their sexual interactions attempts for him to gain masculine control. Frustrated by her resistance and inanimate presence during sex, Joe “tear[s] at her clothes” while shouting “I’ll show you! I’ll show the bitch!” (216), aiming to make “a woman of her at last” (216). Similarly, Burden employs Joe as a black object in order to fulfill her ancestors’ legacy, treating him less as a human lover and more as a “Negro” entity that she can house, feed, and protect. Upon hearing that Christmas possesses ‘black blood’ from one parent who was “part

nigger” (232), Burden takes newfound sexual interest in Christmas, displaying “throes of nyphomania” in which she verbally designates him as black, “Negro! Negro! Negro!” (237), as though aroused by the notion of sheltering a black man. Her ensuing attempt to send to Christmas to law school demonstrates a similar desire to ‘protect’ and ‘better’ Christmas so as to ease her ancestral weight. While Burden remains a female object for Joe to exploit, Joe stays a black means for Burden’s own end. Although Faulkner embeds a wide landscape of possibilities for identity in his language as well as in the thoughts and behaviors of both characters, neither Christmas nor Burden are able to apply such bounded understandings to their own actions. Regarding one another as the products of fixed reductive roles, they neglect Faulkner’s own depiction of categorical boundaries as malleable.

Consider the Lab Rat: A Grammatical Investigation of Animal Pain Danny Lustberg ’14

I have students read David Foster Wallace’s essay, “Consider the Lobster”, in two different courses: in my Philosophical Perspectives on the Self course, in which we discuss comparative neurobiology and what is called “the problem of other minds”; and in my newest course, David Foster Wallace and the Difficulty of Philosophy, in which we focus on the problem of other minds as an ethical (rather than epistemological or metaphysical) problem. Danny wrote this paper in the latter course, replacing the lobster with the lab rat, and writing it in the style of Wittgenstein. The numbered remarks, which for Wittgenstein do not add up to an argument, are meant rather to encourage us to see problems or questions in a different light. Here we come to see not only the lab rat in a new light, but also the person who is charged with experimenting on living and sentient animals—a living sentient animal himself, quite aware of his own pain and that of the creature on which (whom?) he experiments, trying to dull his own pain at that knowledge.

— Professor of Philosophy Marianne Janack

“What has a soul, or pain, to do with a stone?”

— Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (#283)

“But the pain had started for him now; she could see that, and there wasn’t much time left. It was another kind of time which he had entered now, the time a rat has: to run back and forth, to be futile. To move without planning.”

— Philip K. Dick, A Scanner Darkly

1. It is commonly said that animals have pain, but do not suffer. But what does it mean to have pain? The grammar of pain is confused and stands in need of clarification if we are to understand what it means for an animal (including people-animals) to suffer.

2. Consider the following sentences: a. {A} The bear in the bear-trap feels pain, but does not suffer it. b. {B} The bear in the bear-trap is suffering, but does not feel pain. 3. Why does {B} seem to be a more obvious brand of nonsense? Well, because the grammar of suffering is contingent on the detection of pain. That is to say, we could not understand a man who claimed: “I am suffering terribly from migraines, but they do not hurt.” Likewise, it is gibberish to say: “I suffered terribly after he broke up with me, but the experience wasn’t painful.” 4. But let us consider {A} now, and try to parse its sense. It might be asserting that the bear detects, but does not mind, the pain of having its foot caught in the metal teeth of the bear-trap. Of course, this assertion vacillates between delusion and incoherence because suffering is not a privilege of human consciousness; suffering is an animal’s reaction to unavoidable pain. If animals did not mind pain, then pain would cease to be useful. The function of pain is to cause an animal to mind the painful stimulus. 5. By definition, pain must be an aversive sensation; if this were not the case, pain would be insufficient to direct living things away from noxious or harmful stimuli. Unless pain was somehow negative, the bear, even if he got himself out of the trap, would never learn to be wary of traps in the future. To say that the bear does not suffer because it does not know or think that this pain could be otherwise is to say nothing at all; such criteria for suffering is tantamount to requiring an animal to speak the words: “I am suffering now.” ((Or else: “This pain really sucks, for me.”)) 6. You may say, “But suffering cannot be merely the reaction to pain! Suffering is a state of mind, of preference for one situation over another.” Okay, fine. The bear, like the person, will have its own picture of pain. It will also have a picture of non-pain. Why, then, are we so skeptical about the bear’s ability to exhibit a preference for non-pain over pain? The bear—it almost goes without saying—will be trying to escape from the trap. 7. It is important to remind ourselves that all the manner of animals have demonstrated a capacity to prefer a room in which they receive food pellets (or even cocaine) relative to a room in which they do not; they have also demonstrated the capacity to learn to avoid chambers in which they receive painful foot-shocks. 8. If the rats in such experiments did not prefer to avoid the painful foot-shocks in Chamber #1, they would not have spent all of their time in Chamber #2. The “behavioral realities” of animal reward and punishment are not disputed, or disputable. 9. I propose the expression of a common ‘pain and panic mechanism’ (PPM) in response to pain or the fear of pain—a mechanism that is common to all forms of animal behavior. The exhibition of the PPM is closely related to the use of the word suffering by humans. Different species of animal may exhibit the PPM idiosyncratically, but the behaviors have a distinct family resemblance. In lab rats, the PPM is characterized by freezing, burying the head, shivering, running in circles, squeaking, biting, pooping. In humans, it is screaming, whimpering, crying, etc. 10. You may say: “The lower animals may demonstrate the PPM, but it does not bother them.” Now I would have you consider the case of a man who has been abducted by aliens— for probing, we will say. Imagine that he is kept in a large glass cage and brutally probed for months by his captors (without an anesthetic, naturally—the aliens do not know that human beings are any more sensate than stones). The aliens, who communicate telepathically and thus do not know the rules of the language games of speech and gesture, record that the subject has learned to exhibit a predictable series of reflexes when the aliens approach (for example:

moves to corner of cage; makes unintelligible sonic disturbances; covers frontal light-holes with both object-manipulators). The aliens may also notice that when the subject is being probed with electric prods and spikes, it tends to thrash around and increase the sonic disturbances… a. It would be absurd for us to believe that the man abducted by aliens is not suffering— but would it be absurd for the aliens not to believe it? An answer might be: it would not be absurd, but it would be incorrect. 11. An uncomfortable question: when we tell ourselves, “animals feel pain but we do not know that they suffer,” who is it that we are trying to convince? 12. Take the following example: a Neuroscience major who is almost pathologically sensitive to the pain of animals is charged with the task of injecting ten rats with a toxic dosage of psychoactive drugs everyday for several weeks, subjecting them to stressful behavioral testing, and then dispatching each of them from the planet by way of guillotine. What does the squeamish student do to cope with this cognitive dissonance, the clash between the value of scientific knowledge and the value of animal life? a. Well, this is what he does: he convinces a psychiatrist to prescribe him beta-blockers to render his hands steady and his emotions numb; he dilutes the trauma done to himself, but not the trauma done to the rats. He also wears enormous headphones and blasts a single song (“White Room” by Cream) on repeat throughout the course of every injection and execution, so that he cannot hear the sounds the rats make when they are frightened or hurt. In other words, he turns away from the hard fact of the animal suffering; the animal suffers, but he does not listen to it suffering. i. But is the student not a coward? A hypocrite? A traitor to both the natural science of behaviorism and the natural sympathy of living things? Yes, to all of the above. ((And this, this, is certainly a difficulty of reality; in other words, it is the perfect place to apply a philosophy.)) 13. My thesis might take the form: “An animal is in pain if it detects a painful stimulus and responds to the stimulus in such a way as to avoid it; it is suffering if it tries to avoid the pain and cannot.” ((To suffer is to struggle with pain.)) 14. We do not see a person as suffering; we see that a person is suffering. 15. And so, I could claim that it is at least a logical possibility that animals suffer because they can feel pain—we can understand what it would be like for an animal to suffer because we are animals, too. If you encountered a starved-looking stray dog that said to you, “I am suffering from hunger,” would you have to believe him then? Why must we wait for the impossible to confirm what is right in front of our faces? 16. Some reasons we give ourselves for killing animals: for science, for food, for sport, for protection, for the betterment of the human species, for business, for practicality. But what is a reason besides a rationalization, after the fact? A reason helps us sleep at night; reasons are bromides, not realities. 17. There is an entire category of facts that are filed away under the heading of ‘Out of Sight, Out of Mind.’ The dangers of expanding this particular file are fairly plain. Think of the legions of mutant rats bred and mailed to laboratories around the country to be probed and ‘sacrificed,’ the cows and chickens in the slaughterhouses, the crimes against humanity perpetrated each and every day across the world. Think of the fences, platitudes, and philosophical smokescreens we use to deflect these images. 18. If you injected a chair with an anesthetic, the chair would not fall over. If you stabbed a chair with a knife, the chair would not react (it might rip, but this is different). If you stabbed a chair with a knife after giving it an anesthetic, the behavior of the chair would remain utterly

unchanged. None of this holds true for animals. 19. The animal is a form of life. Its body and behavior express at least a kind of soul. If you wish to compare the relative complexities of human and animal souls, be my guest. 20. It is not irrational to believe that animals can suffer. Why shouldn’t we view the question of animal suffering as an instance of “better safe than sorry?” Even if the belief that animals can suffer were merely a superstition (which it is not), it would still seem to be an improvement of our relationship with animals if we could ensure some degree of humanity and dignity whenever we killed one. 21. A remark about people-animals: they are inclined to avoid pain, and thus to avoid painful thoughts.

about us FORTY-THREE NORTH is an annual, student-reviewed journal that showcases the best critical writing by Hamilton students in the humanities and the arts. The name of the journal comes from Hamiltonâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s latitudinal address, itself a point of cultural and academic convergence and divergence. FORTY-THREE NORTH is an interdisciplinary journal, housed in the Department of Comparative Literature, which aims to explore scholarship across a diverse range of disciplines from literary studies to history, the study of languages, philosophy, the arts, and more. Hamilton students are encouraged to submit critical papers written in these fields, though we are also happy to consider essays that do not fit clearly into a single area of study. Since its foundation, FORTY-THREE NORTH has been set in Garamond.