Modern Language Studies 50.2 Winter 2021

front matter Discussion with An Expert On Metamorphosis I explain to her that when anthropomorphism Was new to the human psyche, some remnants Of animism persisted. Take Poseidon’s beard, For example; why do you think it’s so wavy?

To emulate the sea, she says, Playful yet astute, Half-a-grilled-cheese sandwich Borne up in her gesticulation of waves.

She is nine years of age.

I conclude that nothing is ever Completely lost in transition, For she suffers her own changes, Her appendages lengthening, Her ribs separating— Growing pains, the doctor consoles, A growth-spurt morphosis rocketing Her between natural milestones.

I also once told her that as we age, Our bodies change so much, our cells dead, Clones in their place, that every seven years We are like new people.

I regret having told her this.

She weeps some nights Over places she has lived before— Her connection to various rooms, Toys misplaced, neighbors she has known— All severed nomadically in transit,

Already the anxi ety of being A ten-year-old bears down on her; For good measu re, while biting her nails, She hordes ever y toy and trinke t, Rocks, even, fo r she knows too w ell The sad chasm of loss.

When she mak es her inquiry to me of Arachne, She asks if the transformation of the hapless seam Into the first sp ider immortaliz stress ed th e otherwise mor After all, do we not see spiders tal woman. everywhere?

Is Arachne hers elf present som ehow in this ub iquity?

She has finishe d her sandwich, and I my lunch, And the urgenc y of schedule Pulls us from th is quiet momen t, As it has done so many times be fore.

No, sweet child , I promise you this: No mortal pain is forever.

Joshua Brunet

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VOLUME 50, NO. 2

WINTER 2021

staff LAURENCE ROTH EDITOR MARK FERTIG CREATIVE DIRECTOR ANGELA FULK ASSOCIATE EDITOR: PROFESSION & PEDAGOGY RANDY ROBERTSON ASSOCIATE EDITOR: REVIEWS PATRICK THOMAS HENRY ASSOCIATE EDITOR: FICTION AND POETRY AMANDA LENIG WEB EDITOR CRYSTAL VANHORN SUBSCRIPTIONS MANAGER ALLEE MEAD COPY EDITOR AMANDA GILLETTE MANAGING EDITORIAL ASSISTANT

about NeMLA The Northeast Modern Language Association (NeMLA) is a scholarly organization for professionals in English, French, German, Italian, Spanish, and other modern languages. The group was founded as the New York-Pennsylvania MLA in 1967 by William Wehmeyer of St. Bonaventure University and other MLA members interested in continuing scholarly discourse at annual conventions smaller than that hosted by the Modern Language Association. In 1969, the organization moved to wider regional membership, election of officers, formal affiliation with MLA, and adoption of its present name.

NeMLA continues its traditions of intellectual contribution and advancement at the 52nd and first ever Virtual Convention, to be held March 11–14, 2021. This year’s theme, “Tradition and Innovation: Changing Worlds Through the Humanities,” asks how evolving traditions in the humanities have helped us understand our changing worlds, both real and imaginary. We are delighted to host, for our Thursday opening address, Professor Jed Esty, author of Unseasonable Youth: Modernism, Colonialism, and the Fiction of Development and Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania, which is the local host institution. Our Friday keynote event will be given by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan, whose novel Manhattan Beach will be the focus of “NeMLA Reads Together.” Please see the NeMLA web page at www.nemla.org for information on joining the organization and about the fellowships, awards, and publications available to members.

Modern Language Studies appears twice a year, in the summer and winter, and is a publication of the Northeast Modern Language Association. © 2021 Northeast Modern Language Association • ISSN 0047-7729

NeMLA board of directors 2020–2021 OFFICERS Brandi So, Touro College and University System President Bernadette Wegenstein, Johns Hopkins University First Vice President Joseph Valente, University at Buffalo Second Vice President Carol Salmon, University of Massachusetts, Lowell Past President Carine Mardorossian, University at Buffalo Executive Director DIRECTORS, REPRESENTATIVES, AND MEMBERS-AT-LARGE Thomas Lynn, Penn State Berks British and Colonial/Postcolonial Studies Director Francisco Delgado, Borough of Manhattan Community College–CUNY CAITY Caucus President and Representative Katherine Sugg, Central Connecticut State University Comparative Literature Director Abby Bardi, Prince George’s Community College Creative Writing, Publishing, and Editing Director Maria Matz, University of Massachusetts, Lowell Cultural Studies and Media Director Jennifer Mdurvwa, University at Buffalo Diversity Caucus President Olivier LeBlond, University of North Georgia French and Francophone Studies Director Charles Vannette, University of New Hampshire German Studies Director Dana Gavin, Old Dominion University Graduate Student Caucus Representative Tiziano Cherubini, Baylor University Italian Studies Director Maria Plochocki, City University of New York Professionalization, Composition, and Pedagogy Director Victoria L. Ketz, La Salle University Spanish and Portuguese Studies Director Benjamin Railton, Fitchburg State University U.S. and Transnational/Diaspora Studies Director Justine Dymond, Springfield College Women’s and Gender Studies Caucus Representative

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MLS 50.2 contents

Articles Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters and the 2008 Recession Melissa Rampelli Revising Character, Revisionist History: Clarissa, Marlow, Stephen, Quentin, Bilbo Miles Osgood

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Fiction & Poetry Delicia Daniels: Property Assessment Chart

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Erotic Empire

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Profession & Pedagogy Pursuing Apollo and Daphne: Questioning Bernini’s Statue Judith Sanders

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NeMLA Notes: On the 52nd Annual Convention Theme From the President: The “Beginner’s Mind” and the Possibilities of a Virtual Convention

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articles

ood Morning America host Chris Cuomo sat on a set full of greenery, ribbons, and snowflakes. But on that day, December 12, 2006, he greeted the audience with a less than cheery warning: “For most Americans, the most valuable thing we own is our homes. So listen up because foreclosures are rising at record rates” (Hobson). By 2006, house prices had increased more than 180% from 1997, and household debt as a percentage of disposable income jumped from 77% to 127% (Phillips and Yu 13).

Already on the rise in December 2006, home foreclosures would increase by 97% year-over-year by the next December (Amadeo). As people rang in the New Year in January 2008, the United States saw the lowest home sales rate in ten years (Amadeo). One month later in February 2008, home prices plummeted by 24% year-over-year and foreclosures rose 60% year-over-year (Amadeo). In March 2008, the Federal Reserve began bank bailouts with the hope to recover Bear Stearns, then Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, then AIG. On September 15, 2008, Lehman Brothers filed for the biggest bankruptcy in history, spreading global panic. Stocks tanked. Oil prices plummeted. The number of homeless students swelled (Abramson). Despite panic leading up to this impending 2008 crash, some people still voiced continued faith in the soundness and stability of the market system.

Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, in July 2008 broadcast interviews, acknowledged the troubling times but reassured the U.S. public that “it’s a safe banking system, a sound banking system. Our regulators are on top of it. This is a very manageable situation…our economy has got very strong long-term fundamentals, solid fundamentals” (Paulson qtd. in “Paulson Warns”). Paulson presented the market as a system that is at times vulnerable but ultimately fundamentally strong. So long as the recession was billed as an anomaly in an otherwise stable and secure system, people could, and still can, buy into myths of invulnerability.

As the worst financial recession in over half a century gripped the United States in a state of national panic, Leviathan emerged onto

the literary scene as the largest and most formidable sea monster in Ben H. Winters’s 2009 Jane Austen mash-up, Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters.

Winters’s novel retains Austen’s original plot: the three Dashwood sisters and their widowed mother are uprooted from their estate at Norland when the childhood home is passed down from their now deceased father to their brother-in-law and his young son. Invited to stay with distant cousins, the Dashwood women travel to their new temporary home where the daughters seek marriage as their only option to gain financial and domestic stability.

A need for money is the true catalyst for Marianne’s and Elinor’s marriages in Austen’s original novel and Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters retains this idea of financial precarity while adding in the threat of sea monsters, Leviathan (the largest sea monster) and the Alteration (the change that rendered people vulnerable to deadly beasts of the sea). When taken together, the novel’s date of publication, allusions to Leviathan, and metaphorical language of liquidity invite a financial reading of the sea monsters and the 2009 novel at large.1 The allusion to Leviathan introduces into Winters’s novel the idea of absolute governmental authority, if only to question its benefit to the commonwealth given that Winters’s Leviathan proves a threat rather than an assurance of civil peace as Thomas Hobbes contended.2 Linking Winters’s Leviathan to the U.S.’s economic climate is not far-fetched given that references to a Hobbesian Leviathan are ample in our post-Depression and post-Recession discourse; economic and political theorists have referred to the U.S. government as Leviathan when discussing subsidies, taxes, bailouts, and regulatory decisions, ultimately pointing to the Federal Reserve as a monstrous force fueling or prolonging economic crisis. For example, American economic historian Robert Higgs has drawn on the Hobbesian allusion to link government and

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the economy in two of his monographs, Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society (2004) and Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government (1987). The etymology of the name Leviathan offers another, if similar, connotation of specifically monetary consolidation to Winters’s novel. Throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Leviathan figuratively denoted “[a] man of vast and formidable power or enormous wealth” (OED). As writers today forward theories of the 2008 crash, they carry over this allusive coupling of Leviathan and monopolized wealth, with headlines like “The Wall Street Leviathan” and “Sovereigns v creditors - Deferring to Leviathan” showing up in The New York Review of Books and The Economist, respectively.

The language of liquidity surrounding finances from the seventeenth century onward—with the likes of drowning in debt and underwater borrowers—further links the sea motif to economic conditions. From the early seventeenth century onward, “underwater, adv. and adj.” has been used as “part of a more general extended metaphor” to describe a person or company who is in “financial difficulty” (OED). Examples include an August 1886 Boston Daily Advertiser entry that reads, “[a] firm which was a hundred thousand dollars under water might be carried along for years, and supposed by the community to be perfectly solvent” and a 1933 Bankers’ Magazine article that explains how “[l]ast December the company was ‘under water’ to the extent of $11,750,000; now it shows a net worth of nearly $2,500,000” (OED). More recently, we began using “underwater, adv. and adj.” to also figuratively “[d]esignat[e] or relat[e] to a loan with a balance that exceeds the current market value of the loan” (OED). In the 1870s, people began to use “floater, n.” in the context of the Stock Market to refer to “[a] government stock certificate, a railway-bond, etc. accepted as a recognized security” (OED). In

the mid-seventeenth century, “liquid, adj. and n.” described an “[u]ndisputed” “account or a debt” but this usage is only seen now in Scots Laws wherein it applies to “a debt that has been ascertained and constituted against the debtor, either by a written obligation, or by the decree of a court” (OED). From the 1870s onward, “liquid, adj. and n.” has more broadly denoted “assets, securities, etc.” that are “[c]apable of being promptly converted into cash” (OED). A November 1974 Times article describes how “[t]hese small engineering businesses..are now..low on liquid assets” (OED). As early as Samuel Johnson’s 1755 publication of A Dictionary of the English Language, “liquidate, v.” meant “[t]o clear off, pay (a debt)” (OED). In Winters’s post-modern pastiche, Elinor warns that “[i]n the water lies danger…only doom” (12). Impending danger does not seem so far off when we consider the threats of monetary distress in Austen’s day as well as in the early 2000s.

If, given this publication context and etymological framework, we can read Sea Monsters through an economic lens, then the spinoff arguably establishes the sea monsters as a metaphor for monetary difficulty by staging attacks at the same moment as the characters’ threats of financial setback. The sea monster motif in Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters reinforces Austen’s original theme of economic distress.3 Often touted for their love triangles and marriage plots, Austen’s mature novels also relentlessly use situational and dramatic irony to call into question the effects of inheritance laws and to probe into and deconstruct genteel society’s (false) projections of social prestige and financial stability. The sea monster motif in Winters’s novel allows Austen to do the same for our own moment, reminding today’s readers of the looming financial anxiety that plagued not only Austen’s genteel characters but also themselves as early twenty-first century Americans. My argument here is thus twofold. Winters’s novel homes in on and magnifies

the reality of financial dependence in Sense and Sensibility and thus joins an established vein of Austen literary criticism.4 But ultimately, my focus here is not on how Sea Monsters invites us to reread Austen’s novel but on the force of the contemporary financial narrative it offers. By capitalizing on the financial anxiety that plagues characters in Sense and Sensibility, Sea Monsters comments on the realities of the 2008 recession that were fresh to readers in 2009. In the post-recession moment, readers gravitate toward Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters for the parallel it offers them to their own precarious states. But, in the context of the most severe economic downturn since the Great Depression, the spinoff offers readers more than violence and vulnerability: it encourages readers’ investigation into the causes of the 2008 recession as an attempted safeguard against future financial disaster.

Theories of the Alteration and Georgian England Winters’s adaptation retains the original characters’ financial situations but adds in the Alteration—that which “had turned the creatures of the ocean against the people of the earth”—and presents various characters’ theories for the Alteration (Winters 8).

Leviathan is the leader of the sea monsters, a plot detail that sets up the Alteration as an event that exacerbated the monopolization of wealth and power in England. The sea monsters themselves are the myriad financial difficulties that threaten the people in their everyday lives. The multitude of different theories for how the Alteration came about reflects the complex ways financial (in)security was changing during the Georgian period. Sheryl Craig’s, E. J. Clery’s, and Jenny Davidson’s work on money in Georgian England offers different lenses through which we might interpret the Alteration in Sea Monsters. Craig situates Austen’s work amongst

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the bank failures, post-Waterloo crash, national debt, and economic recessions that plagued Georgian England and argues that Austen’s novels reveal her liberal Tory politics about the domestic economy and reform; Austen began writing Elinor and Marianne in 1795 while “Britons were experiencing the first financial crisis of Austen’s lifetime, the economic results of a harvest failure of biblical proportions” and the financial plight of the Dashwood sisters in Austen’s original novel is “a fictional reenactment of the actual national economic crisis” (Craig 30).

Per Craig’s historical analysis, the Alteration could be the harvest failure in which “the price of food doubled while incomes remained stagnant” (30).

Clery also places Austen’s revision of Sense and Sensibility within a deep economic depression as well as the Bank Restriction Act of 1797 and the Bullion Report of 1810; Clery argues that Sense and Sensibility reflects the economic moment by fashioning men as bullion—“[t]heir value seems to rise regardless of innate worth”—and women as banknotes—“liable to depreciation” (141). If we look to Clery, we could interpret the Alteration as the combination of “trade blockades with their damage to exports and manufacturing, unemployment, poor harvests and food shortages, galloping inflation and a bleak military outlook” which collectively “undermined confidence in financial institutions” (134). If we look to Davidson, the Alteration might be the “major restructuring of kinship ties over the course of the long eighteenth century” that “resulted in a massive psychological (and sometimes also legal) disinheritance of daughters at the expense of sons” (128-29). It is this context of inheritance and disinheritance that appears most relevant to Winters’s use of the Alteration in Sea Monsters.

Winters introduces Henry Dashwood’s theory (the first and most thoroughly developed theory) of the Alteration immediately after Henry learns about and is distressed by his late uncle’s will and

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the effects it will have for his wife and daughters.

Given this formal detail, I argue that Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters invites readers to interpret the Alteration as analogous to centuries-old inheritance customs in Georgian England.5 In her 1848 history, Courtney Stanhope Kenny dates the rise of primogeniture in England to the Norman period during the eleventh century when William I first implemented the practice amongst his militia (12, 46). In their most basic forms, primogeniture dictates that an estate be inherited by an eldest son and entailment ensures that the inheritor could not mortgage, divide, or sell an estate but instead can only pass the estate to the next male heir in the line of the landowner who originally created the entail.

Together, primogeniture and entailment served to prevent the dissipation and subdivision of an inheritance. In Austen’s day, when a male relation died without a will (a case of intestacy), “primogeniture applied only to male descendants, unlike primogeniture as a rule of inheritance in entails and settlements, under which women were often but not always excluded” (Jamoussi 10). However, as Kenny discusses, preference of sons commonly carried over to settlements amongst the upper classes and wills amongst the lower classes (42). Since estates were entailed to firstborn sons, the structure of inheritance meant second- and subsequent-born sons needed to secure a living or marry well; daughters relied on the goodwill of their male relations unless they could marry well, which appeared unlikely for women of small fortunes. Under the common law of coverture, a husband gained sole control over his wife’s fortune; in turn, wealthy women became vulnerable to fortune-hunting second sons, and the less well-off women were often overlooked as marriage prospects. In Austen’s original novel and Winters’s spinoff, Henry Dashwood is the “legal inheritor” of the Norland estate, but his uncle’s will entails the estate through three generations. Henry

will only have possession of the estate for his lifetime, and, upon Henry’s death, the house will go to his son, John, “alone,” while his three daughters from his second marriage (Elinor, Marianne, and Margaret), who need the money most sorely, will be “left with a mere thousand pounds a-piece” (7, 8). This mirrors a similar inheritance situation in Pride and Prejudice, where Longbourn was entailed and Mr. Bennet could make use of the property and the land’s £2,000 yearly income only while he was alive. Since the Bennetts do not have a son for an heir, the Longbourn estate passes to the next male heir (Mr. Collins) in line of the landowner who originally created the entail. The novel’s famous first line might read more aptly as, “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a daughter entailed out of her father’s home and income must be in want of a wealthy husband.” In Sea Monsters, Mr. Dashwood reflects on the nature of this inheritance structure and theorizes that there was in some distant corner of the globe, the headwaters of a noxious stream that fed a virulent flow into every sea, every lake and estuary, poisoning the very well of the world. It was this insalubrious stream (went Henry Dashwood’s hypothesis), which had affected the Alteration; which had turned the creatures of the ocean against the people of the earth; which made even the tiniest darting minnow and the gentlest dolphin into aggressive, blood-thirsty predators, hardened and hateful towards our bipedal race; which had given foul birth to whole new races of man-hating, shape-shifting ocean creatures, sirens and sea witches and mermaids and mermen; which rendered the oceans of the world naught but great burbling salt-cauldrons of death. (8) The Alteration, here, stands not only for the monopolization of wealth, but also, by effect, the

perpetuation of financial struggle and class division.

In this reading, the “headwaters” could be the rise of inheritance laws and customs, specifically primogeniture and entailment, in England, while the lurking, attacking sea monsters could indicate the ensuing experiences of financial precarity. The imagery eerily echoes Thomas Paine’s critique of primogenitureship in Rights of Man—that the “ideas of distributive justice are corrupted at the very source” (Paine qtd. in Ruoff 356; emphasis in original). In Austen’s original text, these laws of inheritance separate members of the Dashwood family, threaten to divide the Ferrars family, and generate money troubles all around, “provid[ing]”, as Ruoff writes, “the materials for a structural critique of the system of inheritance” (355). In Sea Monsters, Henry’s theory of the Alteration parallels Austen’s original critique, reinforcing how the laws and customs of primogeniture and entailment “poison[ed] the very well of the world” with a financial and legal framework in which many Britons were vulnerable (Winters 8).

Sea Monsters and the Problems of Regency Period Inheritance Winters’s novel builds upon Sense and Sensibility’s financial anxiety for the Dashwood women and sets up the metaphor between monster and money problems by introducing the monsters at strategic points. In Austen’s original, the sardonically painted scene in which John and Fanny Dashwood contemplate their supposed inconvenience and loss of independence in offering money to John’s mother and three sisters suggests how inheritance customs promoted greed and monopolization of money. The mash-up inserts a fire-serpent attack after Fanny and John decide not to increase their financial support, reinforcing how their penuriousness scorches the Dashwood women financially (15-16). The constant threat of sea monsters to the Dashwood sisters as

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they leave Norland further plays out the metaphor to show the vulnerability women experienced under the customs of inheritance in the Regency period.

The location of the Dashwood sisters’ future home on the Devonshire coast spatially illuminates the monstrosity of their economic vulnerability with only the goodwill of their cousins, the Middletons, buoying them up in their quite humble state. This area is most known and feared for its treacherous waters and vicious, human-hunting sea beasts. As the Dashwood women journey through the “churning sea,” they are attacked by a sea beast boasting a “vast mouth…display[ing] two jagged rows of razor-sharp fangs” (25, 28, 29). In Austen’s original, John and Fanny Dashwood continuously whittle away their financial assistance toward the sisters—deciding they cannot even help to move their furniture—and so, too, does Winters steadily decrease the number of willing helpers as the women set out upon the “churning sea” to their new life of economic exile: The first mate announced that they had crossed the third line of longitude and entered the realm known and feared as the Devonshire coast.

The captain apologized that his superstitious crewmen would take them no farther. The Dashwoods were gingerly lowered into the sea in a cockleshell, which pitiable vessel was cut loose and shoved in the general direction of Pestilent Isle; as the schooner disappeared behind them, the captain called out “God be with you” and turned away; the gesture had a certain coldness to it, as if the whole world was turning its back on them along with the man.

This disheartening impression was reinforced by the head of the bosun’s mate slowly drifting by, a twist of seaweed caught in its eye socket. (31) Winters equates the women’s precarious berth upon the grotesquely corpse-speckled sea with their

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financial desperation when the world seemingly turns its back on them. They are able to survive the journey “thanks to Mrs. Dashwood’s clever hand upon the rudder and Elinor’s sure understanding of the coastal map that Sir John had included with his letter” (31). Similarly, the novel asks readers to make the link between Sir John Middleton’s assistance navigating the treacherous sea (by way of the map) and the housing and monetary support he offers.

Making it through their treacherous financial state will depend upon both the continued goodwill of Sir John and their own knowledge of how to navigate the economic seas with little money.

Even though the Dashwood women can defeat the beasts and stay literally and metaphorically afloat, the name and nature of their ultimate destination—Pestilent Isle—keeps the social critique in full view. In Austen’s day and today, the word pestilent could describe that which was “harmful or dangerous to…social order” (OED). Much to the dismay of the characters at the end of the novel, the island upon which Barton Cottage sits is actually the temporarily submerged head of Leviathan—the grandest sea monster that must be annihilated before the human race can find peace. The Austen mash-up links Leviathan and pestilence, not so stealthily critiquing the pernicious effect that monopolized capital and land has on social order.

Sea monsters also remain a constant threat to Edward Ferrars as he grapples with the weight of marrying well so as to not risk financial estrangement from his wealthy but proud mother. In Austen’s original, Edward is at the whim of his mother’s approval and needs to marry well in order to inherit the estate from her. In Winters’s novel, Edward knows “there would be many difficulties in his way, if he were to wish to marry a woman without an estate sufficiently inland to protect against whatever bloodthirsty selachian might one morning drag itself out of the tide” (24). The spatial metaphor of marrying into

an estate sufficiently inland and away from the sea monsters conveys the necessity of marrying well to remain the inheritor of the Ferrars estate. Edward’s other option—living closer to the water and the sea creatures that inhabit it—means disinheritance and supporting himself and his future wife through a livelihood that requires him to dip his toes into the ebb and flow of the free market. The text invites this metaphorical reading by lacing discussions of Edward’s financial situation with sea creature attacks: when Edward and Mrs. Dashwood talk of him gaining independence from his mother, “a tuna the size of a man” attacks their boat, throwing Edward into the water; when Lucy Steele tells Elinor how Edward’s mother “would never approve of it [their engagement]” since Lucy “shall have no fortune,” the Devonshire Fang-Beast attacks Elinor and Lucy (103, 129). Though Edward is reconciled with his mother at the end of the novel, Edward and Elinor’s income still greatly depends upon his career as a lighthouse keeper at Delaford, a position which keeps him in close proximity to the sea monsters within the lake.

Winters depicts the complexity people faced when dealing with the customs that promote conglomerations of wealth. In the opening of Winters’s novel, Henry Dashwood attempts to right the system by searching for the headquarters of the poisonous stream that sources the Alteration in order “to discover a method to dam its feculent flow” (8).

Henry only makes it a quarter of a mile off the shore before he is eaten by a hammerhead shark. The attack conveys the social danger of trying to challenge and change the customs of inheritance in English society.

As Zouheir Jamoussi notes, “to attack primogeniture in whatever respect was to call into question what had been regarded for centuries as a fundamental inheritance principle on which rested and depended the continuity of the social and political influence of the greater land-owning families up to the end of the 19th century” (12). Henry’s grand plan gets

reduced to a desperate, tragic plea for his wife’s and daughters’ financial well-being scrawled in the sand, and even that is washed away with Fanny and John’s selfishness.

Theories of the Alteration and the 2008 Recession If the novel’s sea creature motif sheds light on the monetary precariousness that plagued early nineteenth-century life, the appeal of the novel today lies in its contemporary financial narrative.6 Winters’s Alteration—and the events leading up to and following it—offers a narrative analogous to the proceedings leading up to and following economic crashes that have dotted U.S. history and unleashed increased financial troubles onto the people and country at large. By inviting a financial reading of the Alteration and including differing theories for this change, Sea Monsters encourages readers to investigate and evaluate the purported causes behind these recessions.

Given the novel’s 2009 publication date, the question of what “headwaters” sourced the rise and fall of the U.S. economy in the early 2000s is a pressing one for Winters’s readers. In economists’ post-recession theorizing as to the cause of the 2008 crash, there is general consensus that the bust of the residential real estate bubble, which peaked in 2006, led to widespread economic distress. In a financial context, a bubble “refers to a situation where the price for an asset exceeds its fundamental value by a large margin. During a bubble, prices for a financial asset or asset class are highly inflated, bearing little relation to the intrinsic value of the asset” (Chen and Silver). During the housing bubble, the U.S. saw a run-up in housing prices. According to the United States Census Bureau data, in 2000, the average home price in the United States was $207,000 (“Median and Average”). One year later, in 2001, the average

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home price was only $6,200 higher, at $213,200 (“Median and Average”). By 2007, the house price had risen $100,400, or 51.5%, to $313,600 (“Median and Average”). While housing prices increased by nearly 6.1% per annum between 2001 and 2007, “wages and salaries grew at a 1.8 percent average annual rate in the 2001-2007 expansion” (Aron-Dine et al.).

Meaning, house prices were outpacing the ability to pay for the houses. As the house prices increased, so did the Federal Reserve interest rate. In theory, the increase in interest rates should have slowed the increase in housing prices, but people continued to buy real estate nonetheless. In June 2004, the Federal Reserve’s interest rate was 1.25%, which helped push interest-only loans. An interest-only loan allowed borrowers to pay only the interest rate for the first few years. However, this interest rate was not fixed and could thus fluctuate immensely. The rate gradually increased over the next two years and by June 2006 the interest rate was up from 1.25% to 5.25%. This means that if someone purchased their home on an adjustable-rate mortgage in June 2004, by June 2006, their monthly payment would have tripled. Unable to pay mortgages or sell their homes for profit, many homeowners defaulted on payments, and banks, generally unwilling to refinance homes worth less than the mortgage, foreclosed. The bubble burst and “$8 trillion of housing wealth disappeared in the span of four years” (Baker). Banks, pension funds, insurance companies, hedge funds, and individual investors throughout the United States and Europe had invested in these mortgage-backed securities, and thus the crisis rapidly flooded the global economy.

Just like Winters’s characters dispute the cause of the Alteration, analysts today dispute the causes behind the rise of the U.S. residential real estate bubble.

The multitude of theories for the Alteration in Winters’s novel mirrors the myriad causes economists put forth as they analyze the causes of the 2008 crisis in its aftermath. In contrast to what

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Henry believes, Edward Ferrars claims that “God in his vengeance…had smote the English race for this impertinence [when Henry VIII turned his back on the Holy Church] and [had] set the beasts of the sea against them” (Winters 18). Sir John believes that “the Alteration resulted from a curse laid by one of the tribal races who had come under England’s colonial dominion over the centuries” (32). As to the debated cause of the housing bubble, some political and economic analysts point to the government for deregulating banking practices when they repealed the 1933 Glass-Steagall Act in 1999 (Fried; Perry and Dell). Others point to private and commercial banks for opportunistically using the Glass-Steagall repeal to foster predatory lending practices and sub-prime mortgages (Bond et al.). Still, others pinpoint the subprime borrowers themselves and the irrational risks they took by overleveraging themselves when purchasing their select homes.

Within each of these recession narratives, theorists identify the respective catalyst as the “headwater” that “poisoned” facets of the financial world, giving rise to “sea monsters” in the U.S. housing market and financial crisis. In other words, the market system itself was stable and pure, and the bubble catalyst and the resulting recession were anomalies disrupting this stasis. Through characters’ multiple theories of the Alteration, the novel gives readers space to flesh out these figurative narratives. Exploring these contemporary applications is important because the danger of sea monsters remains relevant to market conditions today. Economists and real estate experts debate whether we are currently in an asset bubble and, as Benjamin Keys argued in September 2018, “We need to keep a close eye right now on this tradeoff between access and risk” in regard to lending standards (Keys qtd. in Loney).

———

Sub-Marine Station Beta and America’s Aura of Invincibility If the multiple theories of the Alteration encourage readers to learn about the causes of the recession, the fate of the Sub-Marine Station Beta that Winters includes in Sea Monsters warns readers against buying into a myth of financial invulnerability that persists during bubbles and despite crashes. After Station Alpha collapses in Sea Monsters, the characters build Station Beta. After Station Beta collapses, Marianne Dashwood intends, at the close of the novel, to learn hydrology and help build Sub-Marine Station Gamma. The narrative time focuses specifically on Sub-Marine Station Beta, which is a seven-milelong community enclosed in “a massive Dome of reinforced glass” four miles below the ocean’s surface amidst the swarming vicious sea creatures (Winters 146). The repeated building and collapsing of protective domes in Winters’s novel figuratively recalls the bubble-recession-recovery-bubble cycle of the real world economic market. The domes—and the overconfident mentality that occurs within the domes—are suggestive of the euphoric bubble stage in this cycle. A core characteristic of the euphoric stage of a financial bubble “is the suspension of disbelief…[and] a failure to recognize that regular market participants and other forms of traders are engaged in a speculative exercise, which is not supported by previous valuation techniques” (Chen and Silver). The destruction of Station Alpha, for example, could be historically read as the S&L crash of the late 1980s. The formation of the Sub-Marine Station Beta Dome, like the boom of the U.S. housing bubble that formed out the late 1990s, then magnifies characters denying past events and their vulnerability to the forces around them.

If, as my reading thus far has suggested, sea monsters are financial difficulties, the work of the hydro-zoologists calls a reader’s attention to how financial engineers repeatedly have confidence in

their ability to tame and control the market forces after another period of recovery. Winters describes how, “thanks to hydro-zoology science, chemical desalination, and other scientific wonders passing common understanding—the water, and the beasts within it, had been so thoroughly brought to heel” (149). Because of these “perfect new techniques of marine animal domestication and control” the people lived, worked, and recreated “in the total safety provided by a fortress in the very heart, as it were, of the enemy camp” (148). The hydro-zoologists’ belief in the “perfect new techniques” in the spinoff exposes real-life assumptions about low levels of risk and high levels of security that we see during bubbles.

Made confident by the fact that real estate has, historically, always appreciated on a macro level as well as by the widely accepted fundamentals of Modern Portfolio Theory, the U.S. financial community, like the hydro-zoologists, thought they had controlled their risk. In July 2005, an interviewer asked Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke, “What is the worst-case scenario, if in fact we were to see [home] prices come down substantially across the country?” (Sanchez). Bernanke shows how secure players felt when he stated, “Well, I guess I don’t buy your premise. It’s a pretty unlikely possibility. We’ve never had a decline in house prices on a nationwide basis. So what I think is more likely is that house prices will slow, maybe stabilize: might slow consumption spending a bit. I don’t think it’s going to drive the economy too far from its full employment path, though” (Sanchez). This faith—that housing prices never decline on a nationwide basis—combined with the use of Modern Portfolio Theory (MPT), undergirded the financial community’s plans.

MPT “can help investors choose a set of investments that comprise one portfolio. Together, the investment securities combine in such a way as to reduce market risk through diversification while achieving optimal returns in the long run” (Thune). In the early 2000s,

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banks bundled homeowners’ residential mortgage loans together and sold them as mortgage-backed securities on the secondary market to pension funds, hedge funds, and insurance companies. This process was intended to safeguard banks and investors in a couple of ways. By bundling high-risk and low-risk loans together according to Modern Portfolio Theory, banks attempted to reduce risk for investors. Banks also paired these mortgage-backed securities with credit default swaps, which, like an insurance policy of sorts, would protect an investor from the default of high-risk loans. So long as residential real estate maintained its value, insurance giant American International Group (AIG) would be able to support the insurance needs of a manageable number of defaults. AIG likewise was operating according to historical data and MPT. The financial community created its own dome of imperviousness: with these steps taken, nothing could fail. What banks did not consider in the early 2000s was that the loans themselves were toxic; they were bundling and selling an exorbitant number of sub-prime loans as bulletproof investments at historic records despite the deterioration of the underlying credit.

Because of the hydro-zoologists’ “perfect” sea monster taming techniques, the characters view the Sub-Marine Station Beta Dome in Sea Monsters as not only literally airtight but also invulnerable, and this collectively made aura of safety encourages characters’ carefree living and spending in a way that recalls the “irrational exuberance” that marked the 2006 housing bubble. In Sea Monsters, the Station includes second homes and “famous shopping esplanades” (146). And, “for those having the means, [it] was a place to live and work and be diverted by numerous undersea pleasure gardens and aquatic exhibition halls” (148). The Station is a place where dispensable income circulates easily.7 It is a space that allows people to continue to shop under an illusion of fail-safe security much like, figuratively

20 Modern Language Studies 50.2

and financially speaking, the peak moment of a bubble cycle.

During the heyday of a bubble cycle—at the peak of the market— both investors and buyers display “irrational exuberance.” Alan Greenspan, the then-Federal Reserve Board chairman, used the phrase “irrational exuberance” in a 1996 speech at the American Enterprise Institute to warn against overvaluation during the dot-com bubble (Greenspan).

In Irrational Exuberance, Robert J. Shiller uses the term to describe the “psychological basis” of bubbles: news of price increases spurs investor enthusiasm, which spreads by psychological contagion from person to person, in the process amplifying stories that might justify the price increases, and bringing in a larger and larger class of investors who, despite doubts about the real value of an investment, are drawn to it partly by envy of others’ successes and partly through a gamblers’ excitement. (2) Irrational exuberance manifested in investors’ “gamblers’ excitement” and in homeowners’ conspicuous consumption of homes once outside of their budget but now made an option through interest-only and/or sub-prime loans. New financing options for homes, such as no-income-no-job-no-assets loans (commonly referred to as NINJA loans), caused house prices to rise. However, the promise of refinancing or selling for a profit down the road was almost guaranteed in the mind of the buyers.

There was almost no perceived risk.

Through dramatic irony, Sea Monsters critiques those who refuse to recognize the Alteration or the threat of the sea monsters, a weighty metaphor that encourages contemporary readers to pay attention to the shifts and risks in our markets. In Sea Monsters, Edward formulates a theory for the Alteration but Mrs. Ferrars and Fanny Dashwood dismiss Edward’s

scholarly pursuits as “a waste of time and potential” (18). Even though he too develops his own theory, Sir John is quick to state “Nothing…Never mind” whenever the topic of the Fang Beast comes up (36, 62). Margaret, the youngest Dashwood sister, becomes suspicious of the Alteration and seeks out more information, but her mother, Mrs. Dashwood, dismisses her concern with the mountain, demanding “no more talk of mountains, or queer spirals of steam, or other childish fantasies” (39, 142). When read metaphorically, the spinoff dramatizes issues of transparency and denial that likewise plague discussions of impending busts and recessions.

Voices of disbelief spilled ink and filled the airwaves in the early 2000s as well. According to more than two dozen current and former executives at Freddie Mac, the chief executive of Freddie Mac, Richard F. Syron, disregarded the warnings he received in 2004 from Freddie Mac’s chief risk officer about the unhealthiness of the firm’s loans (Duhigg).

In August 2005, the National Association of Realtors (NAR) published “Anti-Bubble Reports,” to “respond to the irresponsible bubble accusations made by your local media and local academics,” stating that these “10-page reports show that the facts simply do not support the possibility of a housing bust—not for these 130 markets and not for the nation” (Dowd and Hutchinson 207; “Market-by-Market”). In August 2005, Jerry Howard, the Executive Vice President and CEO of the National Association of Home Builders (NAHB), claimed that “reports of an impending housing price collapse are greatly exaggerated” (12a). He assured readers that “[d] emographic and economic fundamentals support today’s housing expansion,” concluding that “[i]t doesn’t take a Ph.D. in economics to conclude that short supply and high demand do not add up to a housing bubble” (12a). These are only a few examples of how confidence in the market and disbelief toward recession manifested.

And with foreshadowing, Winters’s novel hints that the lifestyle of supposedly secure consumption and disbelief within the bubble will not be sustainable.

The previous destruction of Station Alpha already foreshadows Station Beta’s decline before it is built.

And even before the final collapse of the Station Beta Dome, the supposedly domesticated sea monsters repeatedly wreak havoc despite the hydro-zoologists’ “perfect new techniques.” In Hydra-Z, “the very heart of the Station’s scientific facilities, where captured monsters were submitted to the most rigorous re-training and biological modification programs [and]… brought before paying audiences to demonstrate how completely they had been made to do the will of man,” the death-lobsters grotesquely consume the trainer and maul and kill spectators (Winters 163). It is not long before the protective glass itself begins to break.

What starts as a small crack in the Station Beta Dome morphs into a rapidly spreading spider web of fissures and a suffocating collapse that mirrors the speed and severity of many recessions, particularly the 2008 economic collapse’s timeline. Though initially unconscious of any threat just like the others, Elinor Dashwood comes to see the spreading cracks in the Dome-glass before it ultimately breaks. While visiting Mrs. Jennings in Station Beta with Marianne, Elinor initially is too consumed with daily activities to see the first cracks. As she speaks to Marianne about Willoughby’s explanatory letter, a swordfish begins tapping on the glass: The swordfish rapped ardently, punctuating the passion of Marianne’s outburst…[T]he swordfish tapped continually against the glass. For some reason, its persistent presence connected itself in Elinor’s mind with the rampaging lobsters…

Neither, absorbed in Marianne’s grief, noticed the tiny crack on the glass that had been the fruit of the swordfish’s relentless exertions, nor

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the tiny cartilaginous grin it wore as it swam away. (179-180) Later, that evening, plagued by nightmares, Elinor awakes and sees the crack: “In the dim bioluminescence of a passing gulper eel, Elinor spied a tiny crack in the Dome-glass, at the very spot where she had seen the little swordfish tapping away at the glass” (199). But, weary from poor sleep, Elinor “hardly marked the small spider web of cracks before the gulper eel swam off…and the sea was plunged again in darkness” (201). It is not until days later during a visit with Lucy Steele that Elinor speaks of the swordfish and the cracks in the Dome-glass (211).

Lucy, a sea witch in disguise, would not entertain the conversation.

Following the analogy, Winters’s novel suggests that, in the midst of economic bubbles, there will always be some economists who see the cracks and caution that the market is likewise becoming increasingly unhealthy. In his March 8, 2003, annual letter to the shareholders of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett shared his skepticism toward the mortgage-backed derivatives that were flooding the

22 Modern Language Studies 50.2

investor market: “In our view, however, derivatives are financial weapons of mass destruction, carrying dangers that, while now latent, are potentially lethal” (Buffet qtd. in Weinberg). At the annual Economic Policy Symposium in 2005, Dr. Raghuram Rajan, chief economist at the World Bank, warned that “[t] he interbank market could freeze up, and one could well have a full-blown financial crisis” if big banks continued to handle derivatives in the same way (Rajan qtd. in Lahart). These economists, amongst others, saw the initial warning signs in the market conditions. In a few short years, the “domesticated” forces of the market bit back, the cracks of the bubble spiderwebbed, and well-established firms such as Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers went under.

When the Dome cracks and the sea monsters rush in, everyone scrambles for safety. Linda Troost reads Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters as parodying Austen’s erasure of the working class from Sense and Sensibility. She highlights how the working-class characters who keep the Dome operating behind the scenes are the most vulnerable to the attacks when Station Beta collapses. She asks, rhetorically: “Guess who ends up eaten?” (7). In the

case of the 2008 crash, was it Wall Street or Main Street? With the destruction of the Station, Sea Monsters asks readers to take a more critical look at the exuberant faith we place in the market both during bubbles and despite crashes.

Will We Always Have Sea Monsters?

Leviathan lurks regardless of the Dashwood sisters’ happily wedded unions, as the novel’s final illustration entitled “The Ceremony Took Place on the Shores of Deadwind Island Early in the Autumn” so poignantly reminds readers (Winters 337). Sea Monsters ends much like Austen’s original novel ends, with Elinor Dashwood marrying Edward Ferrars and Marianne Dashwood marrying Colonel Brandon. As the two newly wedded couples stand in the foreground of the illustration, Leviathan’s tentacles rise up out of the water above their heads. Though the monster appears to be descending into the water, it is neither dead nor maimed. Indeed, during the last explicit conversation about Leviathan, Mr. Palmer tells the others: “Leviathan slumbers, but day will come of wakening” (331). Leviathan will rise again as he did in the housing bubble in the early 2000s and,

before then, the dotcom bubble in the late 1990s, the Savings and Loan crisis in the late 1980s, and the Great Depression in the 1930s. These historical recovery-bubble-recession-recovery narratives are all cautionary tales. Economic collapses are not anomalies. And now, a decade after the crash, the Trump administration has announced its plan to re-privatize Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac while Robert J. Shiller is predicting house prices will fall, and the price of prime real estate is already falling (Gordon; Kennedy; “Prices”). In a 2011 Forbes article, Steve Denning asks a pressing question: “Do we want to deny reality and go down the same path as we went down in 2008, pursuing short-term profits until we encounter yet another, even-worse financial disaster?” Sea Monsters draws on the tense financial undercurrents of Austen’s original novel and raises this same pressing question. Ultimately, the novel suggests that we would do well to educate ourselves about the 2008 recession in order to navigate the seas and mitigate future financial crises that make us as vulnerable today as the Dashwood sisters were in their Regency-era England.

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NOTES 1 In its “Reader’s Discussion Guide” for Ben H. Winters’s 2009 novel Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, Quirk Productions suggests that the sea monster motif highlights the original novel’s critique of courtship with Austen’s sharp tongue made literal through the threatening bite of monsters: “painful personal setbacks often occur at the same moment as sea-monster attacks, suggesting a metaphorical linkage of ‘monsters’ with the pains of romantic disappointment” (Quirk 342). Attacks do indeed occur at times of personal hardship in love, and the reading that Quirk Productions promotes is not without merit: the Fang-Beast attacks when Lucy reveals to Elinor her four-year engagement with Edward; the performing lobsters attack the audience when Marianne sees Willoughby arrive at Amphitheater Seven with a new woman; the anglerfish devours a servant when circumstance finds Lucy, Elinor, and Edward in a room together (Winters 125, 167, 214). But money and marriage are inextricably linked in Sense and Sensibility, and a need for money was the catalyst for the Dashwood sisters’ marriages in Austen’s novel.

2

In Leviathan, Hobbes writes of the necessity of sovereignty, or absolute authority: “the Multitude so united in one Person, is called a COMMON-WEALTH, in latine CIVITAS. This is the Generation of that great LEVIATHAN, or rather (to speake more reverently) of that Mortall God, to which wee owe under the Immortall God, our peace and defence. For by this Authoritie, given him by every particular man in the Common-Wealth, he hath the use of so much Power and Strength conferred on him, that by terror thereof, he is inabled to forme the wills of them all, to Peace at home, and mutuall ayd against their enemies abroad” (132).

3

The scope of this article does not include developing a theory of adaptation for Austen studies, analyzing other adaptations of Sense and Sensibility, or connecting to Quirk Production’s other adaptation of Austen’s work, Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. Other scholars have gone in this direction of adaptation theory; for readings of Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters in terms of adaptation theory and its integrity to Austen’s original novel, see Miller, Soares, and Troost.

4

So much important work has been done on money in Austen’s oeuvre, so I note here the most recent work that has informed my reading. See Craig, Clery, Davidson, and Hume. Craig and Clery offer exciting historical readings of Sense and Sensibility as grounded in England’s economic recessions.

Davidson looks to Austen’s novels and letters to explore the myriad material factors that influenced a woman’s marital prospects and thus her financial and emotional fate; she argues that women’s dependence and restraint—as wives and as daughters—is the common refrain throughout Austen’s oeuvre.

Hume looks to Austen’s letters to note her own financial anxieties and argues how understanding the incomes in Austen’s novels through equivalent purchasing power today can reshape our reading of Austen’s commentary on class and money for women in particular.

5

For an enlightening reading of Austen’s decisions around entailment and her play on the word “will” in Sense and Sensibility, see Ruoff.

6

Troost comments that Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters is most relatable to our own current moment: “most of the barbs are aimed at the twenty-first century” (8).

24 Modern Language Studies 50.2

7

This type of spending and consuming also gestures to contemporary modes of virtual, and seemingly nonexistent, spending through electronic means such as Bitcoin, which launched on January 9, 2009.

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Austen, Jane. Pride and Prejudice. Edited by James Kinsley. Oxford UP, 2008.

——. Sense and Sensibility. Edited by Edward Copeland and Janet M. Todd. Cambridge UP, 2006.

Baker, Dean. “The Housing Bubble and the Great Recession: Ten Years Later.” Center for Economic and Policy Research, 12 Sept. 2018.

Bond, Philip, et al. “Predatory Lending in a Rational World.” Federal Reserve Bank of Philadelphia Working Paper No. 06-2, Nov. 2006.

Chen, James, and Caleb Silver. “5 Steps Of A Bubble.” Investopedia, 25 July 2019.

Clery, E. J. Jane Austen: The Banker’s Sister. Biteback Publishing, 2017.

Craig, Sheryl. Jane Austen and the State of the Nation. Palgrave Macmillan, 2015.

Davidson, Jenny. Reading Jane Austen. Cambridge UP, 2017.

Denning, Steve. “Lest We Forget: Why We Had A Financial Crisis.” Forbes, 22 Nov. 2011.

Dowd, Kevin, and Martin Hutchinson. Alchemists of Loss: How Modern Finance and Government Intervention Crashed the Financial System. John Wiley & Sons, 2010.

Duhigg, Charles. “At Freddie Mac, Chief Discarded Warning Signs.” The New York Times, 5 Aug. 2008, www.nytimes.com/2008/08/05/business/05freddie.html. “floater, n.” OED Online, Oxford UP. Accessed Sept. 2019.

Fried, Joseph. Who Really Drove the Economy into the Ditch? Algora Publishing, 2012.

Gordon, Marcy. “Trump Administration Unveils Plan to Privatize Fannie Mae, Freddie Mac.” USA Today, 6 Sept. 2019, www.usatoday.com/story/money/2019/09/05/ fannie-mae-freddie-mac-overhaul-plan-privatize-mortgage-companies/2226608001/.

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Greenspan, Alan. “The Challenge of Central Banking in a Democratic Society.” Annual Dinner and Francis Boyer Lecture of The American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research, 5 Dec. 1996, Washington, D.C. Higgs, Robert. Against Leviathan: Government Power and a Free Society. Independent Institute, 2004.

——. Crisis and Leviathan: Critical Episodes in the Growth of American Government. Oxford UP, 1987.

Hobbes, Thomas. Hobbes’s Leviathan: reprinted from the edition of 1651. Edited by W. G. Pogson Smith.

Clarendon Press, 1909.

Hobson, Mellody, and Chris Cuomo. “Home Foreclosures 2006.” Good Morning America (ABC), Dec. 2006, p. 1. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=n5h&AN=35085065&sit e=ehost-live.

Howard, Jerry. “There Is No Housing Bubble.” USA Today, 24 August 2005, p. 12a.

Hume, Robert D. “Money in Jane Austen.” The Review of English Studies, vol. 64, no. 264, 2013, pp.

289-310.

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Kennedy, Simon. “Nobel Laureate Shiller Says U.S. Home Prices Could Start Falling.” Bloomberg.com, 5 Sept. 2019.

Kenny, Courtney Stanhope. The History of the Law of Primogeniture in England and Its Effect Upon Landed Property. J. Hall & Son, 1878.

Lahart, Justin. “Mr. Rajan Was Unpopular (But Prescient) at Greenspan Party.” The Wall Street Journal, 2 Jan. 2009. “leviathan, n.” OED Online, Oxford UP. Accessed June 2019. “liquid, adj. and n.” OED Online, Oxford UP. Accessed June 2019. “liquidate, v.” OED Online, Oxford UP. Accessed June 2019.

Loney, Dan. “The Real Causes—and Casualties—of the Housing Crisis.” Knowledge@Wharton.

13 Sept. 2018, knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu. Accessed 1 May 2019.

Madrick, Jeff. “The Wall Street Leviathan.” The New York Review of Books, 28 Apr. 2011.

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Miller, Sydney. “How Not to Improve the Estate: Lopping & Cropping Jane Austen.” Studies in the Novel, vol. 49, no. 4, 2017, pp. 431-52.

National Association of Realtors. “Market-by-Market Home Price Analysis Reports.” Anti-Bubble Reports, Oct. 2005.

“Paulson Warns Of More Tough Times.” CBS News, CBS Interactive, 20 July 2008, www.cbsnews.com/ news/paulson-warns-of-more-tough-times/.

Perry, Mark J., and Robert Dell. “How Government Failure Caused the Great Recession.” The American Enterprise Institute, 26 Dec. 2010. “pestilent, adj., n., and adv.” OED Online, Oxford UP. Accessed June 2019.

Phillips, Peter C. B. and Jun Yu. “Dating the Timeline of Financial Bubbles During the Subprime Crisis: Cowles Foundation Discussion Paper No. 1770.” Cowles Foundation for Research in Economics, Yale University, August 31, 2010. pp. 1-41. http://cowles.yale.edu/sites/default/files/files/pub/d17/d1770. pdf “Prices of Prime Properties around the World Are Falling.” The Economist, 7 Mar. 2019.

Quirk Productions. “Reader’s Discussion Guide.” Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters, by Ben H. Winters, Quirk Productions, 2009, pp. 342-43.

Ruoff, Gene. “Wills.” Sense and Sensibility. Edited by Claudia L. Johnson, W. W. Norton & Company, 2002, pp. 348-59.

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Shiller, Robert J. Irrational Exuberance. 3rd ed., Princeton UP, 2015.

Soares, Rebecca. “Morbid Curiosity and Monstrous (Re)Visions: Zombies, Sea Monsters, and Readers (Re)Writing Jane Austen.” Women’s Writing, vol. 25, no. 4, 2018, pp. 429-42.

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Troost, Linda. “The Undead Eighteenth Century.” East-Central American Society for EighteenthCentury Studies, November 2010, Omni William Penn Hotel, Pittsburgh, PA. Presidential Talk. “underwater, adv. and adj.” OED Online, Oxford UP. Accessed June 2019.

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MAYBE NOTHING EVER HAPPENS ONCE AND IS FINISHED. —William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!

THERE WERE OTHER POINTS OF VIEW. —Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway The most telling detail about Clarissa Dalloway in The Voyage Out is that her favorite Shakespeare play is “Henry the Fifth” (55). In Rachel Vinrace’s Bildungsroman, Clarissa plays the Henry to her Hal: a model for one of Rachel’s possible futures, as the mature, patriotic, dutiful Englishwoman that Rachel might become if she were to survive, marry, and return home. Clarissa’s feminine take on this role (as a kind of Queen Henry) reaches satirical heights in her dialogue with Richard just a few pages earlier, in a cabin exchange that begins with a royal imperative—“We must have a son, Dick”—rises to a national speech—“it makes one feel as if one couldn’t bear not to be English!”—and concludes with praise for her steadfast husband—“What I like about you, Dick…is that you’re always the same” (51-52).

But Clarissa, for her part, changes. In Mrs. Dalloway, Clarissa’s Shakespearean preferences are for Cymbeline and Othello, rather than for the histories; her path to marriage turns out to be anything but straight; her spirited resolve comes up against a suicidal darkness; and we discover that, in contradiction to her single-minded Englishness from The Voyage Out, there was a quality “she always envied—a sort of abandonment…a quality much commoner in foreigners” (32). Clarissa is so sufficiently different in Mrs. Dalloway, in fact, that Brian Richardson has singled her out as an anomaly in his short study of “Transtextual Characters,” going so far as to say that we ought to separate “Clarissa I” from “Clarissa II,” as each is an “illusory variant,” “an independent entity,” “a separate figure bearing only a nominal relation to the original” (529). For Richardson, a recurring character must be “consistent with essential aspects of the original presentation” or, at least, “cannot

provide new information about the original” (539).

This definition and its use on Clarissa Dalloway are, to my mind, excessively restrictive, particularly because Woolf goes out of her way to preserve the “nominal relation” across The Voyage Out, “Byron and Mr Briggs,” “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” and Mrs. Dalloway. But I agree with Richardson that we need some account of what Woolf is doing to this character—in contrast, for example, to the return of Prince Hal as King Henry. What I propose is that Woolf doesn’t create a second Clarissa, but rather revises her first one in such a way that we are forced to reconsider the original character in the original text.1 And the first clue as to how this comes about is that the revised Clarissa is capable of imagining herself as something other than English.

A passion for revision—even to revise what is already published and established—is a quality common both to modernist fiction and to a concurrently burgeoning field in historiography. Among the many “-isms” that we associate with the modernist period, we ought to include “revisionism”—not merely because textual revision was one of the unifying obsessions for Woolf and an otherwise disparate group of experimental writers, but because the same period marks the popularization of revisionist historical scholarship. The “revisionists” were, first and foremost, historians who wanted to re-examine the Great War and re-write the Treaty of Versailles: a model for scholars who would then, in the years to come, turn their critical attention to other histories written by other victors. This historiographical movement provided interwar novelists with the inspiration and the model for a new, retroactive form of revision.

Modernism’s own work of revision is known today for

its hidden genetic developments—for emendations and overhauls applied to manuscripts, typescripts, proofs, and new editions—but in their own time, modernist writers, like the popular historians of their day, also wanted to make certain changes brash and visible, as Hannah Sullivan has documented (2, 38-39). Traceable changes from serial publications through book editions were just the start; revisions between distinct works allowed for more radical possibilities, formally and politically. Prefiguring the more outward-turned historical and feminist revisionism of Orlando or “Judith Shakespeare,” in the early 1920s Woolf saw her own text, The Voyage Out, as itself a kind of incomplete history, open to re-interpretation. By way of tutor Doris Kilman—whose German sympathies, unorthodox pedagogy, and hostility toward Clarissa synthesize historical revisionism with Woolf ’s intertextual revisions—Woolf uses Mrs. Dalloway to think about how to teach and train readers for the same revisionist tasks.

As historical revisionists re-examined political actors, modernist novelists re-examined their characters. Clarissa Dalloway is only one in a series of key

modernist protagonists—along with Charles Marlow, Stephen Dedalus, and Quentin Compson—who are all not merely recurring characters, but revised ones.

Woolf, Conrad, Joyce, and Faulkner use these figures to continue, retroactively, to rewrite their earlier fictions, changing the characters themselves in the process. In literary worlds where other characters often also return, the four characters here receive their authors’ special attention because they come to stand in for those authors, signaling in repeat appearances revisions both textual and personal.2 Fittingly, since each author first invents his or her character in an early, developmental career-phase, each character initially appears in a Bildung text.

Most of the authors then return to this character in smaller works as their experimental styles mature, and eventually each includes the character again in a major, later novel—one directly in dialogue with the original work. The table at the bottom of this page outlines this pattern, using dates of composition. The parallels here are striking, but naturally they are not absolute. Marlow is already aging when he narrates “Youth”; Rachel Vinrace, not Clarissa, is the protagonist of The Voyage Out; and

Character

Original Bildung Text(s)

Intervening Appearances

Later Novel

Charles Marlow

“Youth” (1898)

Heart of Darkness (1899), Lord Jim (1899-1900)

Chance (1898-1913)

Stephen Dedalus

Stephen Hero (1904-06), A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1907-14)

Clarissa Dalloway

Melymbrosia (1909-12), The Voyage Out (1912-13)

“Byron & Mr Briggs” (1922), “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street” (1922), “The Prime Minister” (1922)

Mrs. Dalloway (1922-25)

Quentin Compson

The Sound and the Fury (1927-29)

“A Justice” (1931), “That Evening Sun” (1931), “Lion” (1935)

Absalom, Absalom!

(1934-36)

30 Modern Language Studies 50.2

Ulysses (1914-22)

so on. I will address the particularities of each case as I proceed; for now, I want to make the following general observations.

To begin with, the interrelation of revision and character recurrence is apparent even in this catalog of titles. Many of these works have gestation periods of four or more years, and several leave in their wake complete, abandoned drafts (Stephen Hero, Melymbrosia) or famous alternate titles (The Hours for Mrs. Dalloway, Dark House for both Light in August and Absolom, Absolom!). Next, not one of the characters in any row maintains consistent major- or minor-character status throughout: Marlow and Stephen take more secondary roles in later works, Clarissa becomes a protagonist rather than a passing visitor, and Quentin switches from taking part in his own family’s history to narrating another’s. These forces alone—the prevalence of textual revision and the strategy of shifting narrative perspectives—would already provide a strong correlation between these fictions and revisionist impulses. But, in addition, the gap in time between original and final conceptions of each character includes revolutionary historical events that inspire both the content of the final literary work and contemporary movements in revisionist history. The culmination of first-wave feminism in British and American suffrage movements sparks early feminist revisionism; Irish Independence (belatedly) brings about a counterreaction against nationalistic myths; the beginning of the Great Depression, exacerbating racial disparities in the South, invites reconsiderations of Reconstruction history; and, at the very origins of “revisionism” as a term, the end of the Great War prompts the War-Guilt Question.

THE NOVEL OF REVISIONS; OR, THERE AND BACK AGAIN To explain the interest of the modernist revisionist project to narrative theory, I want to turn to another contemporary, J.R.R. Tolkien. Toward the end of The

Hobbit (1937), Tolkien made the mistake of writing that Bilbo Baggins “remained very happy to the end of his days.” This posed an almost immediate problem for the author when he turned to The Lord of the Rings, since the Bilbo who appears in the opening chapter, now 111 years old, has been corrupted by the One Ring. To resolve this contradiction, Tolkien first devises “the Red Book of Westmarch,” positioning himself merely as the editor of volumes written by his characters, such that he can now explain several details in The Hobbit as Bilbo’s lies. Tolkien even shows Bilbo coming up with the “end of his days” line within The Fellowship of the Ring, only to have him add, in a meta-fictional gesture, “But now I shall have to alter that” (Bowman 273-74). Tolkien would then go on to make the alterations himself, releasing a corrected edition of The Hobbit in which the Ring’s ominous darker powers are newly apparent (22, 325).

As Mary R. Bowman has observed, The Lord of the Rings is correspondingly full of references (often in Bilbo’s voice) to the problem of closure in tales (274).

This case is of interest because it breaks supposed rules of character recurrence. By creating inconsistent accounts of a character between a preliminary novel and its sequel, Tolkien has done just what Richardson prohibits (539): the presence of a corrupted Bilbo Baggins in The Fellowship of the Ring reveals Bilbo’s lies in The Hobbit, until Tolkien goes back to provide “new information about the original.”3 Only the invention of the metafictional “Red Book of Westmarch” or the retroactive revisions to The Hobbit reconcile the Bilbo variants.

For modernist novelists, these strategies from the fantasy genre were not generally viable, so a later novel would have to do the revision work on its own.4 This is the kind of intertextual exercise that, as some critics would have it, creates the “illusory variant,” the “declaration of the multiple,” or simply “a new or different character.”5 Richardson, in fact, identifies both Marlow in Chance and Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway as examples of “variants” (529), while articles 31

Julian Murphet points to Stephen Dedalus in Ulysses to make the case that modernist characters are inherently “multiple,” even within individual texts (257). But what Conrad, Woolf, and Joyce do in these novels is actually quite similar to what Tolkien does in his Fellowship. By adding new layers of complexity and self-awareness to their pre-existing characters, they allow each character to “contain multitudes” while nevertheless insisting that, from Bildung text to sequel, he or she is the same person. Several of these novelists, as we’ll see, play with the trope of having created doubles, ghosts, or multiple personalities, but that does not mean, as Richardson claims, that the original character and the recurring character are “distinct individuals that share the same name” (539), or, as Murphet claims, that the suturing power of the shared “proper name” is an act of deception (256). To the contrary, as Jeremy Rosen argues, even when different writers re-write canonical stories, “characters can be altered dramatically and still ‘add to our knowledge of the original’” (172, 177).

Within a single author’s own oeuvre, this principle is even more apparent. Joyce, for instance, does not distinguish “Stephen I” from “Stephen II.” Rather, he forces us to reconsider Stephen in Portrait through new information in Ulysses.

Bilbo’s fixation with endings brings us to another, longer debated topic in narrative theory: the problem of closure in the modernist novel. There have been three main positions on the subject of how modernist novels conclude.6 First, the thesis: modernist novels are open at the end, either because the expansion of experience and consciousness provides no real constriction (Alan Friedman) or because, in the case of Bildungsromane, protagonists are unable to identify with a cohesive nation (Jed Esty). Second, the antithesis: modernist novels are closed, because all novels—even experimental ones—tend toward closure (Wayne C. Booth, Frank Kermode, Marianna Torgovnick). Third, the synthesis: modernist novels are open and closed, because they combine aesthetic 32 Modern Language Studies 50.2

closure with the suggestion of ongoing character life (William R. Thickstun). My reading aligns most with Thickstun’s, but since none of these cases accounts for intertextual relationships (e.g. The Hobbit’s false closure in light of The Fellowship of the Ring), I believe I can add a fourth category. The modernist texts examined here are re-opened.7 This act of re-opening—sometimes literal, as when Woolf re-read The Voyage Out in the 1920s—is not just performed by writers or by texts; it also suggests an activity for readers. Imagine the effect of these sequences of works appearing over time, from one decade to the next. The final word on the Dalloways in 1915 seems to be Uncle Ridley’s—“Well, that’s over…We shall never see them again” (84)—but then readers did see them again in 1925. Helen’s concluding complaint about Clarissa’s “idiotic theories,” left originally unchallenged in The Voyage Out (88), now has to fit beside the “heaps” of transcendental, Woolfian “theories” that Clarissa holds in Mrs. Dalloway (148-49). Similarly, from 1914 to 1919, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man appeared to close with Stephen’s permanent, exilic departure from Dublin. When he returns from Paris in Ulysses, readers could no longer understand the ending of Portrait as such, nor imagine Stephen any longer as a Hero. As we will see, high modernist works deliberately draw our attention to original moments of closure so as to reinterpret them retroactively.

These later works inaugurate, then, a new genre, which I’ll call the Novel of Revisions: a synthesis of plural revisionist impulses, textual and historical. Unlike what we already call the “Revisionist Novel”—the genre of interest to Rosen (82), which shares a common ancestor in historical revisionism but emerges in the 1960s—the Novel of Revisions takes the author’s own earlier work as its primary target. The first innovation of this genre is to re-open a narrative that would otherwise be self-contained.

These novels return to concluded character stories to show what happens next, to revisit the earlier

decisive junctures, or to reveal complexities that were obscured in the original work. The particular modernist quality of this project is that it is self-reflexive, playing concurrently with textual revision and historical revisionism. To understand these layers, then, will take more than the typical methods of genetic criticism. Here, with the impact of environmental factors including intertexts and historical events, we need something more like epigenetic criticism: critical readings that observe, in the final expression of a work, the external forces that activate details in a particular genetic, compositional sequence.

Although the Novel of Revisions can only be said to coalesce as a genre in the modernist period, when a cluster of novels incorporates similar strategies of revision and revisionism in the same historical moment, similar works appear throughout the history of literature. Homer’s Achilles actually might bear the closest resemblance: by passing from major character in the Iliad to minor character in the Odyssey, and by reflecting with regret on the fateful choice of his youth, he prefigures Quentin (who also speaks, in a sense, as a shade) and Stephen (the disappointed former hero in Joyce’s own Odyssey).

In an interview with the Paris Review in 1956 (Stein 1), Faulkner manages, while listing the works that he most enjoyed re-reading, to catalogue a fair number of other important returning characters—including Falstaff, Prince Hal, Don Quixote, and Huckleberry Finn—most of whom could be read as revised in some way.8 Of the many nineteenth-century literary worlds that use recurring characters (including Cooper’s Leatherstocking Tales, Balzac’s Comédie Humaine, Trollope’s Chronicles of Barsetshire and Palliser Novels, and Zola’s Rougon-Macquart), Balzac’s Lucien de Rubempré and Trollope’s Phineas Finn are the most important precursors to modernism’s recurrences. The return of both characters from their younger days into court-trial plots fictionalizes the later modernist project of re-assessing character. In the twentieth-century model, the original character

also returns for judgment, but the judge might be the author, the reader, or (as we’ll see in the case of Doris Kilman) a new character. Going forward, the most distinctive feature of the modernist Novel of Revisions is that, even working with a somewhat serial form, it operates independently of reader expectations. The surprising revival of the late Quentin Compson is different, for instance, from that of Sherlock Holmes. Though “The Adventure of the Empty House” does revise the plot of “The Final Problem,” the detective’s character remains more consistent than his modernist counterpart, as the pressure for his return came from readers, rather than from Doyle’s own revisionary goals. The modernist novelists here distinguish their character-returns from nineteenth-century chronicles, romans fleuves, and popular serials by refusing the constraints of such consistency.9 REVISIONISM AS A MODERNIST MOVEMENT Though the practice of writing historical revisions was hardly an invention of the twentieth century, the label of “revisionist historian” first arose in the 1920s to account for critics of the Versailles Treaty.10 The movement’s foundational essay was Sidney Bradshaw Fay’s “New Light on the Origins of the World War,” which posed the initial “War-Guilt Question” and—finding that the defeated powers were not, after all, solely responsible for the conflict—criticized the harsh reparations imposed by the victors. The character of this inquiry, and of the revisionist movement that followed, was distinctly textual. The revolutionary leaders of Germany and Austria felt they had nothing to lose by turning in government documents from pre-war monarchical régimes, and these formerly classified materials circulated quickly among the American intelligentsia, moderated by The Nation and The New Republic.

Revisionism grew in response to this unexpected discovery of source materials (Adler 2). Fay observed that Kaiser Wilhelm II’s very psychology was now articles 33

on display in the American press, as the readers of his handwritten marginalia were suddenly privy to “royalty revealed in Unterhosen” (617). The goal of the revisionists was itself editorial: for Harry Elmer Barnes, lasting peace would depend on “far-reaching revision of the Treaty of Versailles and its associated documents” (16, 18).

As it happens, the peak of ultra-revisionist literature surrounding the War-Guilt Question was 1922 (Adler 11), the same year we now designate as the peak of high modernism. The two movements came together inside the Bloomsbury Group, where Woolf had uncommon access to the early ideas of the War-Guilt revisionists from the British side.11 E.D. Morel, author of Truth and the War in 1916, was Leonard Woolf ’s colleague on the Labour Party Advisory Committee on Imperial Questions in the 1920s (Reader 109), and his literature exposing the government’s misleading “moral war” arguments found supporters throughout Bloomsbury’s associates—notably in Bertrand Russell and Lytton Strachey (Sherry 256). By way of the Group, the Woolfs were also well acquainted with one of the English representatives present at the Treaty of Versailles negotiations: John Maynard Keynes, then a member of the British Treasury. In a diary entry from June 1919, Virginia Woolf relates Keynes’s “disgust at the peace terms” of the Paris conference and his consequent political resignation (280). Keynes’s book condemning the Treaty, The Economic Consequences of the Peace, appeared later that year and affected his writer friends no less than the general public. T.S. Eliot, recommending the book to his mother in 1920, wrote, “I can never quite put Vienna out of my mind.

And I have seen people who have been in Germany and they are most pessimistic about the future, not only of Germany, but of the world. They say that there is no hope unless the treaty is revised” (353, emphasis added). This is a revealing bit of diction noticed by Christopher Ricks (“More than One Waste Land”), and the term took on a public life in 1922 34 Modern Language Studies 50.2

when Keynes published A Revision of the Treaty.12 Woolf, for her part, contrasted Keynes’s book against literary devices: “Reading Maynard too—” she notes in her diary in April 1920, “a book that influences the world without being in the least a work of art” (33).

If Woolf had yet to think through the possibilities of “revision” in war-guilt revisionism, she at least sensed the “guilt”—a feeling that returned to her when Hitler rose to power (Lee 713).

We’re accustomed to historicizing modernism according to the events in its own period, and so far I’ve followed suit. After all, what could be more typical of such historicism than to orient the argument around the end of World War I? However, the investigations that follow will also consider what modernists thought of as history at the time. The works considered here also take creative license with current events—whether playing with the quotidian details of June 16, 1904, in Dublin; the British Prime Minister’s appearances at London dinner-parties in 1923; or Caddy Compson’s fate during the German occupation of Paris in 1945—but revisionism becomes more apparent in modernism when the authors look further back. Recall that Joyce and Woolf both rewrite the Shakespearefamily biography (in “Scylla & Charybdis” and A Room of One’s Own) and that both write alternate English cultural histories (in “Oxen of the Sun” and Orlando). Their characters are historians as well.

When Stephen Dedalus isn’t lecturing on Anne Hathaway’s infidelities, he’s teaching schoolchildren about the Battle of Asculum (albeit not very well).

The Dalloways hire Doris Kilman, an occasional Extension lecturer, to teach history to their daughter.

Conrad and Faulkner, for their part, both create narrators whose very work is historiographical: through discussion, conjecture, and even physical investigative pursuit, Marlow and Quentin revise the histories of mythical or misrepresented men (Kurtz, Jim, the Sutpens). Quentin in particular has the challenge of re-assembling events that predate

him, through a compilation of interviews and conjectures. Rather than simply including revisionist polemics as chapters (as War and Peace does), works like Absalom, Absalom! fictionalize the revisionist process, provoking readers to use similar scrutiny when returning to the author’s earlier works. Woolf ’s distinction in this group is that, as she goes through her own compositional revisions, one can see her characters take on the rhetoric of actual historical revisionists. In this light, the fact that the periods of composition for The Voyage Out and Mrs. Dalloway fall on either end of the Great War is integral to the changing concept of Clarissa.

OTHER POINTS OF VIEW: DORIS KILMAN’S HISTORY LESSON In the same early months of 1920 that Woolf was reading Keynes’s The Economic Consequences of the Peace, she was also re-reading The Voyage Out for the first time in seven years. This was an experience that brought about a different kind of shame. Though she concedes a few compositional successes, Woolf confides to her diary in February, “The failures are ghastly enough to make my cheeks burn,” lamenting, “I can do little to amend” (17). Woolf ’s frustration at the impossibility of further revisions is particularly poignant for the novel at hand, as The Voyage Out took at least four years to complete, spanned five existing drafts, and may have left seven other versions burned (DeSalvo 8-9). It is as if Woolf regrets having stopped amending in 1913—as if she wishes to have gone on making changes for another decade.13 By the end of that decade, though, she hit upon a solution in Clarissa Dalloway. Clarissa, only a minor character in The Voyage Out, served Woolf ’s revisionary purposes for two reasons. First, Woolf could make her invisible revisions more apparent to her readers: Woolf had already worked on making Clarissa more sympathetic in later drafts of The Voyage Out (DeSalvo 106), but now she could stage an obvious re-evaluation between The Voyage Out

and Mrs. Dalloway, giving Clarissa her own memories of youth. Woolf had written about the experience of misinterpreting a female character twice in the early 1920s, in “An Unwritten Novel” and “Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown”; here she would take another try at interpreting Mrs. Richard Dalloway. Second, Woolf wanted her new novel “to criticise the social system,” and Clarissa had close connections to Parliament and London society (Rachman 4). Clarissa, then, gave Woolf opportunities to incorporate both intertextual revision and political revisionism into a new project.

Across an essay, two stories, and the development of a novel, Woolf gradually devised a way to put Clarissa’s revision and War-Guilt revisionism together. In the unpublished 1922 essay “Byron and Mr Briggs,” Clarissa expresses new literary tastes (for Donne and Keats) but characteristically retains “an English woman’s respect for literature” (494-95). These glimpses re-affirm her qualities from The Voyage Out more than they predict those of Mrs. Dalloway. However, “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street,” written that same year, begins to put a revised Clarissa and anxieties about the war together: “Fear no more the heat o’ the sun. Fear no more she repeated…Thou thy worldly task hast done. Thousands of young men had died that things might go on” (158-89). Here is the new Clarissa, with a new history to confront. In the unpublished 1922 short story “The Prime Minister,” Woolf makes her first explicit attempt to put the politics of the WarGuilt Revisionists into her coming project. Here, Septimus Smith and H.Z. Prentice (a character later abandoned) both voice revisionist sentiments of the kind Keynes and Eliot had expressed, sympathetic to the Germans and Austrians.

That (perhaps) had made [H.Z. Prentice] bitter.

But not sufficiently to distract him from the overwhelming injustice which at that very moment, as he walked towards Leicester Square, weighed upon Russians, Germans, Austrians; articles 35

kept continents cramped in its grip… (318) [Septimus] could not behave properly any more[,] he had got outside society. He would kill himself. He would give his body to the starving Austrians. First he would kill the Prime Minister and J. Ellis Robertson. My name will be on all the placards, he thought. He could do anything, for he was now beyond law. (322) These threads suggest one way that the War-Guilt Question might have entered the Dalloway home: as a political suicide-attack at Clarissa’s party. In the end, Woolf brought the Dalloways and the War-Guilt Question together around a different character and different circumstances. In Mrs. Dalloway, the revisionist resentments quoted above belong not to Septimus Smith or H.Z. Prentice but to Doris Kilman, and the attack on Clarissa’s home is not that of a terrorist but of a teacher.

It is no coincidence that Kilman, the history tutor to Elizabeth Dalloway, is both the novel’s ultimate revisionist and Clarissa’s mortal enemy.

Kilman has become an outcast in London society, dismissed from school during the war because, due to her own German descent, “she would not pretend that the Germans were all villains” (121). As Christine Froula argues, “she is a walking allegory of the aggressively aggrieved postwar Germany Keynes tried to forestall” (105).14 In self-defense, perhaps, Kilman has become well-versed in “modern history,” such that she comes to represent not only those unfairly victimized by Versailles reparations but also the British revisionist historians defending them (11-12, 120-21, 129). Now, it is Miss Kilman rather than Septimus who “would do anything for the Russians, starved herself for the Austrians” (11).

This description comes to us, dismissively, from Clarissa’s mind, and it is tempting to read Kilman as Clarissa does: as a self-righteous villain, prideful in her contrarian views and in her poverty. But in light 36 Modern Language Studies 50.2

of Woolf ’s political readings and affiliations after Versailles, it is Clarissa who becomes the ultimate object of critique. When Clarissa describes Kilman as a specter, a tyrant, or a prehistoric monster, she draws on the epithets and images applied to the “Hun” in British war rhetoric. Clarissa’s own phobias surrounding her daughter have turned Doris into this monstrous enemy, just as England has changed Doris’s family name from the innocuous “Kiehlman” to the more aggressive “Kilman” (120-21).

Doris Kilman’s revisionism, then, is a kind of retribution against the Dalloways—one that begins with the re-education of Elizabeth. The distinctive feature of Doris Kilman’s pedagogy is that she goes outside the bounds of standard history by going outside the bounds of conventional teaching exercises. As she and Elizabeth walk together (notably) through the Army and Navy Stores on Victoria Street and stop for tea, Elizabeth recalls Kilman “staying on after the lesson”: And she talked too about the war. After all, there were people who did not think the English invariably right. There were books.

There were meetings. There were other points of view. Would Elizabeth like to come with her to listen to So-and-so (a most extraordinary looking old man)? Then Miss Kilman took her to some church in Kensington and they had tea with a clergyman. She had lent her books.

Law, medicine, politics, all professions are open to women of your generation, said Miss Kilman. (127) The conspicuous lack of detail in this paragraph suggests that Elizabeth isn’t a very keen pupil—or, perhaps, that Doris Kilman isn’t an especially effective teacher. But what Elizabeth does remember is the variety of modes of learning available to her—books, meetings, lectures, tea-time conversations—and the variety of political perspectives that go with that

research.15 If revisionism could be said to have a maxim, it is one of the phrases that Elizabeth has retained: “There were other points of view.” This aphorism might also describe Mrs. Dalloway as a novel and modernist fiction more generally.

The signal that Kilman does get through to Elizabeth is in the exchange that follows, when Kilman asks if her own ruined career was “her fault,” to which Elizabeth responds, “Good gracious…no” (127). Again, through Clarissa’s eyes, it is possible to read this scene as a self-pitying Kilman demanding re-assurance, with Elizabeth merely obliging. In the wake of Versailles, though, it cannot be a coincidence that a paragraph about the War-Guilt Question ends with a question of “fault.” In the context of the whole paragraph, Kilman’s multifaceted pedagogy has successfully taught Elizabeth not to blame the vanquished.

If it seems a stretch, in this way, to find an analogue for Virginia Woolf in Doris Kilman (of all characters), consider that Kilman also seems to be engaged in the same kind of authorial revisionism with regard to Clarissa. When Kilman comes face to face with Clarissa, we learn, “there rose in her an overmastering desire to overcome her; to unmask her” (122). This had been Woolf ’s own project from 1920 to 1925. By unmasking a character who had previously, in The Voyage Out, been the “Fool” and “Simpleton” that Kilman sees on the surface (122), Woolf implicates her heroine in the same political history that Elizabeth has been learning. Clarissa’s newfound interior life in Mrs. Dalloway is double-edged. In many ways, as a fuller character with a more complicated personal history, she is more sympathetic in Mrs. Dalloway than in The Voyage Out; but, as a more mentally autonomous character, she can also, now, be held more fully responsible for her faults, including faults that bear on this historical moment.

Famously, Woolf spared Clarissa a suicide when the author decided that Septimus Smith, the

war veteran, would die in the novel instead (Scott xlviii); and that genetic decision (layering revision onto revisionism) haunts the social world of Mrs. Dalloway. Here, as on the Front, a solider has died to save a hostess—“that things might go on.”

Septimus’s suicide is the story of a belated casualty of the Great War, a war waged by the Dalloways’ Parliament friends—a needless war, according to the revisionists—fought so that Clarissa and her guests might live on in the luxury of victory. Clarissa herself realizes, “Somehow it was her disaster—her disgrace” (181). Brian W. Shaffer argues that Woolf ’s take on this social interdependence fictionalizes the “theory of civilization” expounded by her brother-in-law Clive Bell, who proposed that civilization requires leisure classes, which in turn require the support of slaves. Woolf ’s most quoted assessment of Bell’s Civilization (1923) is that its title concept amounts to “a lunch party at no. 50 Gordon Square”—a critique that might seem unduly harsh if Bell himself hadn’t written the following: “after the handsome sample of savagery offered us between August 1914 and November 1918, we, nostalgic intellectuals, know that we have returned to the artificial pleasure of a fashionable dinner-party.”16 Clarissa, of course, throws just such a party in Mrs. Dalloway. There, instead of “royalty revealed in Unterhosen,” we see bared before us an entire aristocratic class. Woolf implicates the party-guests in Septimus’s death: Richard Dalloway for his political role in the war, Dr. Bradshaw for his medical mishandling of shell-shock, and even, it seems, Clarissa Dalloway for conscious complicity in her social circle, or for failing to inform herself and act within her sphere of influence.

Having “unmasked” Clarissa and exposed her conscious agency, Woolf prompts her own versions of the War-Guilt Question; but, following the example of Keynes and Kilman, she also wants us to apply such questions further backward in time. If Clarissa has had strong critical faculties and a certain worldly wisdom all along—going back all the way to her articles 37

youth, and culminating in a long-held “transcendental theory” that she was “somehow attached to this person or that” (149)—how accountable is she for Rachel’s death, in The Voyage Out? By modeling the Victorian ideal of wifehood, does Clarissa help precipitate Rachel’s hasty engagement and the disastrous expedition that results in her fatal illness?

This might be going too far. Still, the improbable connections between Septimus and Clarissa in Mrs. Dalloway, along with the “transcendental theory,” suggest that even indirect relationships in Woolf ’s worlds can be powerful, for saving lives or for ending them. Forebodingly, Clarissa does confide in a letter in The Voyage Out that she’s concerned about the young Rachel: “poor thing—” Clarissa writes, “I wish one could rake her out before it’s too late” (49-50).

This prompts Clarissa to propose her own idea for women’s educational reform: “We ought to start a society for broadening the minds of the young” (50).

In retrospect, this line explains why Clarissa might tolerate Doris Kilman in Mrs. Dalloway, in spite of her fundamental antipathy: the Dalloways, with full knowledge of Kilman’s controversial opinions, have hired her to broaden Elizabeth’s mind. This is the kind of line, in other words, that connects “Clarissa I” and “Clarissa II.” In one direction (from I to II), this line from The Voyage Out resolves an otherwise puzzling problem in Mrs. Dalloway: i.e. why Clarissa puts up with Kilman. In the other direction (from II to I), the Kilman storyline in Mrs. Dalloway explains an otherwise puzzling problem in The Voyage Out: i.e. why Clarissa would want a broadminded education for Rachel.

But if the Clarissa of The Voyage Out already has misgivings about her own education and her marriage, and if she has some secret wisdom to impart to Rachel, there is no safe way to express it. Before she can close or mail the letter she’s writing, her husband picks it up and reads it, adding his own postscript (49-52). Richard is so often by Clarissa’s side on the Euphrosyne that it’s unlikely she could ever reveal 38 Modern Language Studies 50.2

any personal doubts to Rachel, if this is the kind of “raking out” she has in mind. The problem that The Voyage Out exposes, then, is that, at sea, Clarissa has no room of her own. This will have to wait until Mrs. Dalloway, when Woolf provides Clarissa with both mental and architectural privacy. Woolf ’s own polemical lectures on that theme will arrive just a few years later, as War-Guilt revisionism makes way for feminist revisionism. Clarissa Dalloway is the link in between: a figure re-read across textual revisions in both political and gendered terms. The process of discovering Clarissa’s concealed interior world is a form of training, for Woolf and for her readers, in methods that apply to history, to fiction, and to pedagogy. Woolf follows Doris Kilman’s path, as both a historian and a history tutor, from the motivating pursuit of “other points of view” to varied sources of research (reading Keynes and re-reading The Voyage Out)—a pursuit that culminates, with Mrs. Dalloway, in an unusual but effective educational experiment, combining revisionist fiction and revisionist history.

THE AGE OF REVISIONISM: CONRAD, JOYCE, AND FAULKNER, AFTER “YOUTH” The main distinguishing feature of Marlow, Stephen, and Quentin’s returns, as opposed to Clarissa’s, is that we read their youths as complete narratives.

These memories of youth may be retrospective and episodic (as for Marlow in “Youth”) or nonlinear (as for Quentin in The Sound and the Fury), but, as opposed to the jump from Rachel to Clarissa across Woolf ’s texts, they make a clearer case for the Novel of Revisions as a post-Bildung genre Chance, Ulysses, and Absalom, Absalom! each use a character whose youth and development were textually completed, only to re-open that character’s life in its later years or final months. Compared to the Clarissa Dalloway case, then, it’s less obvious that these re-openings work as revisions, rather than simple sequels. Here, the nature of revisionism as a project of expansive research—taking in new

materials and perspectives—becomes especially important. Conrad, Joyce, and Faulkner diversify the narrators, characters, and worldviews in later works not to disavow their earlier fictions, but to make visible the counternarratives already available inside those prior works.

Conrad, curiously, began to compose the novel that would revise Charles Marlow in 1898, the same year that he first created the character. Marlow appears, that year, in the short story “Youth” as the aging chronicler of his own first voyage to the Indian Ocean, recalling the formative adventure of an exploding ship. In that story, the one character Marlow promises that he’ll “never forget” is not one of his crewmembers, but instead the captain’s wife, Mrs. Beard—even though she only stays aboard the ship for a month. Mrs. Beard seems to have had the same effect on Conrad, who planned for his next novel to be the story of a different captain’s wife, Flora de Barral. This project, which would eventually become Chance, would take fourteen years to complete; and, in that time, Conrad would leave a series of revealing revisions, many of which are testaments to the difficulty of trying to move beyond “Youth” (Ray xiii, xv). The novel’s original title, Explosives. A Ship-board Tale, and its opening chapter, “Young Powell and His Chance,” return to the themes of Marlow’s first short story, after which Conrad leaves a visible record of changing narrative styles and emphases, turning first to the story of Captain Anthony and only afterward to his wife, Flora.

In his 1920 Author’s Note to Chance, Conrad looks back and realizes, “At the crucial moment of my indecision Flora de Barral passed before me, but so swiftly that I failed at first to get hold of her” (331). That moment of indecision was no doubt in 1898, when the two captains’ wives boarded and disappeared: Mrs. Beard on Marlow’s ship, and Flora in Conrad’s plan for the plot of Chance.

But Conrad did eventually get a hold of Flora, and

so began his revisionist project. Chance recovers the unwritten story of a possible female heroine, casting a light in the process on the literary history of absent sailors’ wives (e.g. Crusoe’s, Gulliver’s, Ahab’s) as well as on the neglected lovers of Marlow’s interstitial adventures between “Youth” and Chance (e.g. Kurtz’s Intended, Jim’s Jewel). Such a recovery would prefigure the work of women’s history that began in the 1920s and ’30s, with the theorists of the French Annales and the American New History schools. Conrad, likewise, returns to former material and finds its hidden second half. As an added surprise, he also finds that hidden second half in Marlow, who now refers to his own “small portion of ‘femininity’” that has saved him “from one or two misadventures…either ridiculous or lamentable” (111). This intimation not only retroactively informs Marlow’s character in Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim (allowing readers to re-consider his particular fixation on certain men), but it also informs revisions in Conrad’s career. “Youth,” I would argue, is precisely one of these stated “misadventures”: a story saved by its own small portion of femininity when it inspires the more ambitious Chance. Conrad makes his revisionary objective clear first by subdividing Marlow’s character and then by subdividing even his authority as a narrator. Just as revisionism resists single, unchecked historical accounts, Marlow’s voice is no longer as dominant in Chance. The lone storyteller of “Youth” faces more competition from alternate narrators here, in Chance, than in any previous appearance (Jones 73). Marlow’s goal is to correct the story from others’ distortion (Ray xix), but he is also open to cross-examination by the anonymous principal narrator when he, too, over-generalizes. Conrad’s revisionism, then, runs deep enough to turn on his own fictional historian.

Joyce, arguably, goes a step further by turning on himself. Joyce’s early acts of revision to his fictional alter-ego, Stephen Dedalus, were particularly violent: as competing stories would have it, Joyce articles 39

threw three hundred pages of either Stephen Hero or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man into the fire (Spencer 7-9, Gabler 98-99). Joyce’s compositional difficulties, though, also generated future material: some of what he abandoned in Stephen Hero would return in Chapter V of Portrait; and later on, the extra materials for Portrait became the early episodes of Ulysses (Gabler 91, 99). As with Conrad, Joyce’s compositional effort between works was continuous, but readers were to find a gap of several years in Stephen’s character chronology.

That gap is significant. Portrait ends on a note of apparent triumph: Stephen’s Bildung is complete and he ventures out on his career as a cosmopolitan poet. With the Martello tower episode deferred until Ulysses (Gabler 98), there are few indications that the hero will falter in Paris and return home.

Portrait’s closure, in effect, is Stephen’s declaration of self-sufficiency—an ending that is misleading on several fronts. Even though this declaration includes Stephen’s independence from Irish politics, the curious, unforeseen timing of Portrait’s publication ahead of the Proclamation of the Irish Republic in 1916 risked suggesting different conclusions. H.G. Wells, for instance, in a 1917 review, understood Stephen as a character oriented by the revolutionary ideals of his political surroundings, entrenched against the English as much as his peers (88). One of the effects of re-opening Stephen’s story in Ulysses, then, was to correct two false impressions that the ending of Portrait might have given: of the supposed success of Stephen’s Bildung and of the possible political allegory in his rebellion.

The first revision is clear enough. In “Proteus,” Stephen looks back on his narcissistic youth with self-loathing. Reflecting on his earlier literary aspirations, Stephen splits in two—not, as Marlow does, into masculine and feminine, but into writer and critic—submitting to internal cross-examination (Ulysses 3.136-43). To clarify the politics of Portrait, however, Joyce takes a more indirect approach, and 40 Modern Language Studies 50.2

so doing foresees the goals of Ireland’s 1930s revisionist historians. The founders of Irish Historical Studies, some fifteen years after Ulysses, hoped to correct historical errors propagated by nationalistic consensus—or, as T.W. Moody put it, to win “the mental war of liberation from servitude to the myth” (qtd. in Curtin 195). There are many parts to Joyce’s revisionist Irish history in Ulysses—in particular, Bloom’s presence as alternative and adversary to nationalist voices like that of “the citizen”—but where Stephen is concerned, myth itself was the problem.

Joyce re-mythologizes Stephen in Ulysses, such that the poet is no longer a Daedalian hero but an unripe Telemachus, a floundering Hamlet, or a fallen Icarus. Though the old myth continues to color his character, the new ones cast him in a far less heroic light—and, notably, his mythic analogs continue to be foreigners. Ulysses is generally deceptive in its mythic identifications, and this effect hits Stephen especially hard, as his “strange name,” Dedalus, no longer seems the prophecy he once thought (Portrait 148). Of course, it has always been possible to read Stephen as the falling Icarus in Portrait (along with a host of other bathetic ironies), but that’s precisely the point. Ulysses helps expose these pre-existing features. As a revisionist project, the novel does more than rely on the emergence of new historical material; it points out alternate interpretations in the material that’s familiar. Now one can see, in fact, within Portrait’s ending, Joyce anticipating how H.G. Wells would misread him. Stephen records a chance meeting among his last diary entries: “Talked rapidly of myself and my plans. In the midst of it unluckily I made a sudden gesture of a revolutionary nature…

People began to look at us” (223). Portrait makes such a gesture, but it’s similarly unintentional; and so, Ulysses takes a second look.

In the midst of the mad experiment that brought Quentin Compson back to life, Faulkner almost seems to have forgotten that he died to begin with.

Quentin’s chapter title in The Sound and the Fury

marks the date of his suicide on June 2, 1910, at age 19; and yet Quentin narrates “That Evening Sun” in 1917, at age 26. A few years later, in Faulkner’s manuscript for Absalom, Absalom!, Quentin finds himself visiting Rosa Coldfield in Mississippi in September 1910, now three months after his death in Cambridge (Langford 11-12). Although Faulkner would later correct this date to 1909, the final novel repeatedly refers to Quentin, impossibly, as twenty years old (259, 297, 301). I don’t actually think Faulkner remembered to check his dates in one case without checking his math in the other. Instead, I think he kept the references to Quentin’s “twenty” years because they build to one provocative line in the final chapter: “I am older at twenty than a lot of people who have died” (301). Emotionally, textually, and now even numerically, Quentin has lived beyond his years.17 The “people who have died,” after all, include Quentin himself. He has died already in The Sound and the Fury—perhaps not according to his own chronology, but according to Faulkner’s bibliography. In Cambridge, he might only reach nineteen; in Faulkner’s intertextual expansion, his existence continues.

In the process of turning Dark House into Absalom, Absalom!, Faulkner promoted Quentin from merely one of four narrators to the central figure mediating the Sutpen story (Langford 3-5, 11). Why Quentin, and why this story? These are the questions that Quentin asks himself at the beginning of the novel, when listening to Rosa Coldfield, and we’d do well to take the novel’s first answer seriously.

“It’s because she wants it told,” Quentin realizes, so that strangers “will read it and know at last why God let us lose the War” (6). Rosa targets Quentin as her ideal scribe because she envisions him joining “the literary profession as so many Southern gentlemen and gentlewomen too are doing now” (5-6). This prediction connects Quentin with Faulkner, of course, as a fellow storyteller, but it also connects him to a growing number of contemporary Southern

historians. In Quentin’s time as in Faulkner’s, the prevailing historical interpretation of Reconstruction history, as formalized academically by the Dunning School, was the same as in The Clansman (1905) or Gone with the Wind (published, like Absalom, Absalom!, in 1936): that Southerners (including slaves) were better off before the Civil War, that Northern meddling had caused the strife of the post-war years, and that institutions such as the KKK were necessary defenses for protection against North-inspired miscegenation (Railton 54-55). Rosa’s task is to inspire Quentin to revise this account.

As Faulkner was writing Absalom, Absalom! in 1935, W.E.B. DuBois published Black Reconstruction.

According to DuBois’s revisionist account, the failure of Reconstruction was not the failure of black suffrage but the failure to change the basis of property in the South. After the war, DuBois recounts, the Freedmen’s Bureau had 800,000 acres of Confederate property in its possession, which it intended to distribute to emancipated slaves (though even this expanse would be insufficient). The freedman, writes DuBois, “had, then, but one clear economic ideal and that was his demand for land, his demand that the great plantations be subdivided and given to him as his right” (611). After the 1860s, much of the government land remained tied up, and many freedmen (who had turned down other jobs while waiting) were forced to return to their old masters (601-11). Though Faulkner and DuBois would not come into contact until 1956,18 Black Reconstruction and Absalom, Absalom! (formerly Dark House) share a common interest in unused Confederate property.

Here we come upon Rosa’s second use for Quentin: he’s the able-bodied young man who will help her break in to Sutpen’s Hundred. When, at the end of the novel, they finally enter, they find Henry Sutpen, the heir to the plantation, holding onto his place in the house as he waits for death. Even in 1909, fifty years after the Civil War, he lords over Sutpen’s Hundred as a squatter, keeping his mixed-race, illegitimate articles 41

relatives, Clytie and Jim Bond, either at his service or outside his doors (294-300). Faulkner saves this climactic scene for last, and in the process allegorizes the very problem that DuBois had exposed.

If the final misadventure of the novel prompts us to re-read Reconstruction history with a new perspective, it also demands that we do the same with Quentin’s own personal history. In The Sound and the Fury, Mr. Compson assesses the cause of Quentin’s anguish in these resonating words: “you cannot bear to think that someday it will no longer hurt you” (112). Because this is among the last pronouncements on Quentin’s pain before the chapter ends, a first-time reader may well assume that it is the thought motivating his suicide. In other words, Quentin must kill himself rather than wait for the day that he’ll accept Caddy’s dishonor. But Absalom, Absalom! provides the opposite argument.

In an echo of Faulkner’s compositional process—as “Faulkner actually relived the story” in his circuitous, repetitive rewriting process, according to Gerald Langford (42)—Quentin is subjected to ongoing permutations of his own trauma through the Sutpen tale. “I am listening to it all over again,” he realizes, “I shall have to never listen to anything else but this again forever” (222). The Sutpen tragedy, with its constant reminders of Caddy and of the Compson family’s collapse, will never cease, and will never

42 Modern Language Studies 50.2

cease to hurt him. Quentin realizes in Absalom, Absalom! that his father was wrong: that what he cannot bear is precisely the knowledge that he’ll never move beyond these histories.

Whereas characters in “the literary profession” like Quentin or Stephen may have struggled to move forward, their creators succeeded. The pattern of authorial growth among these bibliographies, from early Bildung narratives to later polyphonic novels, is also an account of modernism emerging from realism. This is especially apparent in Woolf and Conrad’s trajectories (from The Voyage Out to Mrs. Dalloway, or from “Youth” to Chance), but it also applies to Joyce (from Stephen Hero to Ulysses).

Revisionism, then, as a key mark of distinction between early experiments and mature work—in fact, as the practice of making such a distinction—is nothing less than a defining feature of high modernist fiction.

BEYOND BILDUNG, BEYOND MODERNISM Like its recurring and revised protagonists, the Novel of Revisions has had an ongoing life beyond its modernist youth. Revisionism evolved, becoming one of the major narrative paradigms of twentieth-century literature. The post-Bildung novel, no longer needing an original Bildungsroman, took hold in post-WWII fiction in American fictions of

divorce and mid-life crisis (e.g. McCarthy, Bellow, Updike)—works that look at undoing young decisions. In some cases (overlapping or not), characters have also continued to age and change across several works, in ways similar to Marlow or Stephen (e.g.

Martha Quest, Rabbit Angstrom, Nathan Zuckerman, Tambudzai). As historical revisionism took on the agendas of postcolonial literature and later feminist waves, Revisionist Novels grew alongside, returning to characters created by earlier authors in creative re-tellings (e.g. Une Tempête, Foe, The Penelopiad).

This practice differs from its modernist predecessor not only by targeting works other than the author’s own, but by prioritizing more overt political goals. If these postcolonial and feminist texts have expanded the political dimension of the Novel of Revisions genre, other writers have expanded on its formal dimension. Comic books and science fiction, following Tolkien’s hobbit-sized footsteps, have gone beyond intertextual revisionism by introducing the more aggressive corrections of “retroactive continuity.” So-called “retcon”—a concept sometimes also applied to Sherlock Holmes’s return—revises a fictional world’s backstory in order to explain its otherwise discontinuous present (Clover 14-16).

Adrienne Rich, meanwhile, has put the political and the formal elements of revisionism together with the personal in her concept of “Re-vision,” by

which she (like the writers examined here) re-enters her old poems with new understanding, while also re-interpreting herself at younger ages. Jean Rhys, similarly, provides a bridge between early and mature revisionist genres. Wide Sargasso Sea is most apparently a Revisionist Novel in the postwar mode, but, like the Novel of Revisions, it also re-writes one of Rhys’s own modernist narratives. The character Antoinette Mason re-imagines not just Charlotte Brontë’s Bertha Mason but also Rhys’s own Anna Morgan, from Voyage in the Dark, as the author leaves behind her Left-Bank modernist days to re-create herself as a postcolonial revisionist. Appropriately for a revisionist heroine, Antoinette has her own version of Doris Kilman’s teaching motto, re-written: “There is always the other side, always” (77).

These various developments should come as no surprise; it is in the nature of revision to suggest ongoing changes. Notably, however, Conrad, Joyce, Woolf, and Faulkner all managed to continue writing major works after Chance, Ulysses, Mrs. Dalloway, and Absalom, Absalom! without returning again to Marlow, Stephen, Clarissa, and Quentin. Even after the belated emendations and editions, the exiles and deaths undone, the closures re-opened, some revisions have to be final.

articles 43

NOTES I’d like to thank Amanda Claybaugh and Alice Staveley for their help with this article.

1

In two respects, this argument builds on the case made by Jeremy Rosen at the end of Minor Characters Have Their Day, where he likewise 1) faults Richardson for setting “unduly rigid” criteria and 2) proposes that it is possible to “radically revise” a character while not creating a separate entity (171). Whereas Rosen makes these arguments with regard to the “minor-character elaboration” of contemporary genre fiction—wherein new writers revisit classic minor characters from the literary canon—I point attention to the fact that Woolf and others experimented with these possibilities within their own fictions. (Moreover, they “elaborated” and “revised” both minor and major characters.)

2

In Reading Virginia Woolf, Julia Briggs puts these terms together—modernism, reading, the textual, and the personal—and thereby lays the groundwork for my argument about Mrs. Dalloway. “Woolf ’s interest in what happens during the process of reading led her… to pursue analogies between the process of ‘reading people’ and reading texts” (64). Here, I refine the analogy, now between acts of revising people and revising texts.

3

See also Brooks 336: “we must exercise caution in using the Quentin of the later novel to throw light upon the Quentin of the earlier. But Faulkner, in choosing the character Quentin for service in A, A!, must have deemed the choice a sound one.”

4

Briggs does point out that Woolf frequently revised her work after publication: “for Woolf, as a modernist and feminist, no text was ever finished. She continually revised her own work…” (210). The Voyage Out is a particularly good example, as it changed a great deal between 1915 and 1920, with the result that different versions from different presses multiplied from 1920 to 1929 (217). However, Woolf didn’t substantially alter characters in these post-publication revisions.

5

I’m citing Richardson again here, but also Julian Murphet, who argues that modernism marks the moment when the very idea of individual and coherent character “undergoes a critical demotion” (263), and Rosen, who imagines that a “rigid structuralist” would read “any addition” to a character as an “alteration” that creates a new entity (171). While the phenomenon of “transtextual characters” might support Murphet’s argument, his claim is actually that the multiplicity of modernist character is apparent within individual texts: he refers only to the Stephen of Ulysses (not Portrait), and he chooses Septimus Smith rather than Clarissa Dalloway as “the single greatest instance of characterological abandonment to the multiple” (257, 265). Rosen, meanwhile, actively resists both Richardson and Murphet’s positions (177-78).

6

For a more complete summary of these positions, see Thickstun 9-13.

7

The closest existing critical term I could find to describe this phenomenon is Marianna Torgovnick’s “linkage” (14) but she applies this term to serial or roman fleuve fictions, for which character-continuation is expected (or even announced: “to be continued”). I don’t think this applies to the modernist case here.

44 Modern Language Studies 50.2

8

Huckleberry Finn is the most compelling comparison: the changes in perspective, tone, and political complexity between The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Adventures of Huckleberry Finn closely resemble the developments across several of the pairings examined here.

9

As Hans Walter Gabler argues with respect to Woolf, “Revision releases, deepens, shifts, or suppresses [a text’s] potentials in a tendentially limitless, and thus theoretically indeterminate series” (227). Briggs concurs that the “series of texts” Woolf produces as a “reviser” is characterized by “change, variation, difference, and the refusal to provide a definitive or final version” (209). These claims are based on revisions applied to individual texts, across varying editions, but the statements could apply equally well to the “potentials” and “versions” of individual characters across texts.

10

The first account of “revisionist” in this sense cited in the Oxford English Dictionary is dated 1926 (A.3).

11

Outside the revisionist war-guilt scholarship that follows, Woolf also encountered criticism of the Paris Peace Conference (of a more creative, literary kind) in Hope Mirrlees’s Paris, which the Hogarth Press published in 1920.

12

Melba Cuddy-Keane notes that the journal The Highway offered promotional copies of Woolf ’s Jacob’s Room and Keynes’s Revision of the Treaty together in 1923 (92).

13

In fact, Woolf would make several retroactive revisions in 1920 for the American edition, even cutting an entire chapter. She did not change anything about Clarissa Dalloway at this stage (Briggs 217, Goldstein 127-28).

14

Froula’s brilliant work connecting Kilman, Keynes, and Freud in Virginia Woolf and the Bloomsbury Avant-Garde (102-10) anticipates some of my reading in this section. Whereas Froula reads the conflict between Kilman and Clarissa in line with Keynes and Freud’s warnings about the political future (interpreting Kilman’s resentment and ideological turn to Russia as “socialist fantasies”: 108), I turn in the other direction, focusing on Kilman as an interpreter of the political past.

15

Cuddy-Keane observes that shortly after publishing Mrs. Dalloway, and for years to come, Woolf repeatedly criticized the university lecture as a domineering pedagogical method. She promoted dialogue-based education instead (90-93).

16

See Shaffer 81-82. Woolf likely needed no additional motivation for attacking Clive Bell in Mrs. Dalloway apart from her political inclinations, but she may nevertheless have remembered his unpleasant critique of The Voyage Out as she set about writing its revision. See Woolf, The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1, 307.

17

In the preceding paragraph, Shreve says, “No wonder you folks all outlive yourselves by years and years and years” (Absalom, Absalom! 301).

18

In 1956, DuBois challenged Faulkner to a debate on integration. Faulkner declined, by letter, writing that he did not believe there was any disagreement between them, except on the question of patience while awaiting reform. See Blotner 1603.

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——. Chance. Oxford UP, 2008.

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Cuddy-Keane, Melba. Virginia Woolf, the Intellectual, and the Public Sphere. Cambridge UP, 2003.

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Goldstein, Bill. The World Broke in Two: Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, D. H. Lawrence, E. M. Forster, and the Year That Changed Literature. Henry Holt and Company, 2017.

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Reader, Luke. “‘Not Yet Able to Stand by Themselves’: Leonard Woolf, Socialist Imperialism, and Discourses of Race, 1925-1941.” Trans-Scripts, vol. 1, 2011, pp. 102-30. “revisionist, adj. and n.” OED Online, Oxford UP. Accessed 13 May 2015.

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Wells, H.G. “James Joyce.” James Joyce: The Critical Heritage, edited by Robert H. Deming, Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1970, pp. 85-87.

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——. The Diary of Virginia Woolf, Vol. 1. Harcourt Brace & Company, 1977.

——. Mr. Bennett and Mrs. Brown. L. and Virginia Woolf, 1924.

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——. “An Unwritten Novel.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Harcourt, 1985, pp. 112-21.

——. “Mrs. Dalloway in Bond Street.” The Complete Shorter Fiction of Virginia Woolf, Harcourt, 1985, pp. 152-59.

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——. The Voyage Out. Oxford UP, 2009.

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50.2

fiction & poetry

PROPERTY ASSESSMENT CHART The following poem contains real and imagined documents that incorporate actions of rebellion as a response to the horrors of the Domestic slave trade, the Atlantic slave trade, and Police Brutality.

This archive lists the first page of Inhumane Human property of the estate of John J Webster. The John J. Webster Files are located in The Inez Hatley Hughes Research Center and Collection Center in Marshall, Texas.

PROMOTED

KILLING

NEGROES

MISC

TOTAL VALUE

SEAN CARROLL RICHARD MURPHY KENNETH BOSS EDWARD MCMELLON

congregate 41 bullets

AMADOU DIALLO

flaunts his wallet

sold to highest bidder

GEORGE ZIMMERMAN

proposes 1 bullet

TRAYVON MARTIN

shouts back on bended knee

engaged

TIMOTHY LOEHMANN

presents 1 bullet

TAMIR RICE

cops strange toy gun

aim

DARREN WILSON

projects 1 bullet

MICHAEL BROWN

DANIEL PANTALEO

positions chokehold

rebel. reveals hands

contact

ERIC GARNER

inhales

no air required

harbors 1 bullet

OSCAR GRANT

defends false claim

end of the line

professes standard arrest

SANDRA BLAND

takes high-way her way

BLANE SALAMONI

petitions 1 bullet

ALTON STERLING

questions without cause

JERONIMO YANEZ

prepares 1 bullet

PHILANDO CASTILE

ROYCE RUBY

cocks 4 bullets

MICHAEL SLAGER

centers 8 bullets

JOHANNES MEHSERLE

BRIAN ENCINIA

strange fruit

fire

cautions weapon

Add mission: subject moved

KORRYN GAINES

matches military muscle for son

mother down

WALTER SCOTT

turns his back

run nigger run

PROMOTED TERRANCE MERCADAL JARED ROBINET WENDE KERL

JUSTIN ORTIS JEFFREY SCHMIDT

KILLING choreograph 2 bullets contracts 1 bullet hoist 1 bullet

NEGROES

MISC

TOTAL VALUE

STEPHON CLARK

reenters home

minstrel prey

DANQUIRS FRANKLIN

lowers loaded hand

deal: doubt

VICTOR WHITE III

refuses to play

get out of jail fee

appears around corner

JOSHUA COLCLOUGH

craves 1 bullet

WENDELL ALLEN

JASON VAN DYKE

relishes 16 bullets

LAQUAN MCDONALD

MARK RINE

cradles 2 bullets

RUMAIN BRISBON

BRAHEME DAYS ROGER WORLEY

channel 1 bullet

JERAME REID

FRANCISCO MARTINEZ DANIEL TORRES CHAND SYED

herald 1 bullet

CHARLY KEUNANG

homeless and black

clash

TONY ROBINSON

disrupts peace

extend screams

SAMUEL DUBOSE

suspended license

drag

hits patrol car with motorcycle

curate journey

missing bicycle reflector

lapse visibility

MATTHEW KENNY RAYMOND TENSING

spins 1 bullet sets 1 bullet

BRIAN TRAINER

thrusts 2 bullets

TERRENCE STERLING

CLINTON FOX

renders 3 bullets

PATRICK HARMON

54 Modern Language Studies 50.2

attitude with knife weapon on hip raises hands

commencement. fall return. threat drug deal gone bad discipline

PROMOTED

KILLING

NEGROES

MISC

TOTAL VALUE

SHELDON TRASHER

tends 1 bullet

MAURICE GRANTON

jumps fence

misery must come down

CAMERON BREWER

carries 1 bullet

DANNY THOMAS

mental issue

riddle. flesh

BETTY JO SHELBY

tucks 1 bullet

TERRENCE CRUTCHER

raises hands

attack

D.C. TWIDDY

readies 7 bullets

AKIEL DENKINS

touch DNA

abolish

AARON CODY SMITH

reveals at least 4 bullets

GREGORY GUNN

suspicious painter’s stick

RYAN O’NEILL

steadies 2 bullets

ERIC LOGAN

parades knife

sharpen

ignite

AT LEAST 14 POLICE OFFICERS FROM 8 DIFFERENT LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES

brag, 59 bullets

JAMARION ROBINSON

unfinished warrant

execute

CHRISTOPHER NEWMAN

directs 4 bullets

GREGORY HILL JR.

plays loud rap music

eliminate jungle pride

possess 13 bullets

JAQUAVION SLATON

hides in car

sale. disappearance

puts car in reverse

satan’s speed

FORTH WORTH OFFICERS CHIEF KRAUS 2 LOS ANGELES SHERIFF DEPUTIES

stash 34 bullets

RYAN TWYMAN

US MARSHAL SERVICE’S GULF COAST REGIONAL FUGITIVE TASK FORCE OTHER LAW ENFORCEMENT AGENCIES

polish 20 bullets

BRANDON WEBBER

unfinished warrant

rush the message

fiction & poetry 55

PROMOTED

KILLING

NEGROES

SUNG KIM

builds 1 bullet

JIMMY ATCHISON

VALLEJO POLICE

arrange 55 bullets

HOOVER POLICE

save 3 bullets

MISC hides in closet

peek

WILLIE MCCOY

sleeps in luxury car

advertise blue vallejo rights

EMANTIC BRADFORD JR.

tries to be a hero

enemy lines

PLAIN CLOTHES OFFICER

supplies 1 bullet

D’ETTRICK GRIFFIN

enters unknown car

IAN COVEY

provides 1 bullet

JEMEL ROBERSON

armed, security guard, hero, and black

enjoys 1 bullet

DEANDRE BALLARD

touches guard

SECURITY GUARD

TOTAL VALUE

forgo paperwork

try again

war

AMBER GUYGER

occupies 2 bullets

BOTHAM JEFAN

sits, black in his own apartment

enforce shame

ANAND BADGUJAR

reserves 1 bullet

ROBERT WHITE

holds folding knife

file away

JASON STOCKLEY

stacks 5 bullets

ANTHONY SMITH

alleged drug dealer

ultimate high

RICHARD HASTE

redeems 1 bullet

RAMARLEY GRAHAM

spotted with gun

target

DARREN SANDBERG

hooks 1 bullet

MANUEL LOGGINS JR

enters car unarmed

pedal

CHARLES KLEINERT

angles 1 bullet

LARRY JACKSON JR.

declines to answer question

send solution

RANDALL KERRICK

shapes 12 bullets

JOHNATHAN FERRELL

knocks on door for medical assistance

robbery in progress

JUVENTINO CASTRO

molds 1 bullet

JORDAN BAKER

56 Modern Language Studies 50.2

fits burglar description

conjure harassment

PROMOTED

KILLING

NEGROES

MISC

TOTAL VALUE

CHRISTOPHER MANNEY

designs 14 bullets

DONTRE HAMILTON

sleeps on street

resurrect risk

SEAN WILLIAMS

combines 2 bullets

JOHN CRAWFORD III

holds BB gun

imminent danger

JOHN MCMAHON KRISTY IRWIN THE COUNTY OF SAN BERNARDINO SHERIFF’S DEPARTMENT THOMAS SHELTON ELLIS BROWN

PETER LIANG

grind 25 taser sparks

wrangle 9 bullets links 1 bullet

DANTE PARKER

fits burglar description

noose

grabs two cans of soda and doughnut

chalk line

AKAI GURLEY

enters home stairwell

welcome hell

KAJIEME POWELL

CLIFFORD PROCTOR

preserves 2 bullets

BRENDON GLENN

homeless and black

decorate streets

BRAD MILLER

clasps 4 bullets

CHRISTIAN TAYLOR

runs away, possible burglary

seek and hide

MARK RINGGENBERG DUSTIN SCHWARZE CHARLES AUGUST WINSON SETO ANTONIO SANTOS NICHOLAS CUEVAS SCOTT PHILLIPS

lock 1 bullet

worship at least 19 bullets

ROBERT RIALMO

pins down 16 bullets

BRENTLY VINSON

detains 4 bullets

JAMAR CLARK

scuffles during police attack

MARIO WOODS

walks away from police, homeless

break the body

bullseye

QUINTONIO LEGRIER

denied assistance by 911 operator

premeditated. rope

KEITH SCOTT

backs up on command, weapon off

dead man walking

fiction & poetry 57

PROMOTED

KILLING

NEGROES

JOSH MCDANIEL RICHARD GONSALVES

salvage 4 bullets

ALFRED OLANGO

ROY OLIVER

connects 1 bullet

HOLDEN LAFLEUR

safeguards 4 bullets

DONALD CIOTA II

MISC

TOTAL VALUE

needs psychiatric aid

bite smoke

JORDAN EDWARDS

in car, black, and innocent

auto theft

DeJUAN GUILLORY

matches description of ATV burglar

grieve

restores 1 bullet

JONATHAN HART

fits description of shoplifting burglar

our turn

DEREK CHAUVIN THOMAS LANE TOU THAO ALEXANDER KUENG

Kneel on human neck and Spirit of a Nation for 8 minutes 46 seconds

GEORGE FLOYD

enters grocery store with cash

save your breath

MYLES COSGROVE BRETT HANKISON SGT. JONATHAN MATTINGLY

release over 40 shots without knocking

BREONNA TAYLOR

sleep, while black

who’s there?

choke and inject drugs

ELIJAH MCCLAIN

suspiciously walking

pose

AURORA POLICE DEPT

DELICIA DANIELS

58 Modern Language Studies 50.2

Erotic Empire

legion light employs 100 pairs of eyes for a strange harmony

a troublesome gift

bodies braided through rusted chains

sovereign seduction for the man whose finger and tongue will meet moisten the ship diagram expose the manifest

run my land

along the revenue of your name hold your position below deck clasp or cramp

choose your verb take the ride

—Delicia Daniels

fiction & poetry 59

50.2

profession & pedagogy

Bernini, Gian Lorenzo Apollo and Daphne 1622–25 Galleria Borghese, Rome Image via Wikimedia Commons

Pursuing Apollo and Daphne: Questioning Bernini’s Statue Judith Sanders A friend in Rome took his creative writing class to the Borghese Gallery to be inspired by Bernini’s Apollo and Daphne. Lucky students, I thought. That’s one of those masterworks that commandeers all your attention, like a swallow of brandy or a flash of lightning. You marvel at the artist’s technical skill—how did he turn stone into soft, mobile flesh?

You are entranced by the beauty of the figures— perfect incarnations of the human form—and the symmetry of the composition. You are swept up by the encapsulated emotions—desire, desperation, surprise. You are struck by how the statue stops time: It freezes a dramatic Ovidian metamorphosis so you can contemplate it from all angles. As you turn to leave, you feel like you’ve undergone a metamorphosis yourself. You’ve experienced something beyond what your own limited life has brought you.

You feel enlarged and energized.

That’s what I thought. As did my friend.

But the students, he told me, did not. Where we saw beauty, they saw only rape.

End of discussion. Anything more would glorify a hideous crime.

They argued that rape cannot be beautiful. The only ethical response was dismissal. To praise the statue, or even simply pay it attention, was to align oneself with the dehumanizing male gaze. Doing so would deny the glaring fact of a woman’s pain, even rape her again by obliterating her subject-hood, using her for one’s own pleasure.

So what’s a teacher to do? Validate the students’ outrage over a crime being passed off as art? Abort

the assignment? Retreat to the Borghese’s basement café? Raise a coffee to righteousness?

It wasn’t my creative writing class; I wasn’t there.

But I found myself pondering what I as a teacher might have done in such a situation.

I. THE MYTH First, as we gathered around the statue, I’d ask the students this: what are you looking at? Yes, here’s the god Apollo chasing the wood nymph Daphne, whom he desires. The students might recall that she has chosen a life of chastity, so, to escape him, she begs her father, a river god, to turn her into a laurel tree. The statue captures the astonishing moment when her fingers transform into leaves, her skin into bark, her feet into roots. Her gaze pivots between the peril behind her and the sacrifice ahead. Apollo, his hand already on her, is on the cusp of realizing that he will never fulfill his desire.

The students might need a back-story refresher: Apollo—god of archery, among many responsibilities—had mocked little Cupid for toting such a big bow. How could a shrimp like him handle such a heavy weapon? Only mighty Apollo could do that!

You can practically hear him thumping his chest.

But Cupid proves him wrong. He shoots Apollo with the golden arrow of desire and Daphne, the first passerby, with the leaden arrow of disgust.

We could pause to dig into competition among men over body size in general (and weapon-size in particular) as a driving force of cultural production; we could rue male characters’ use of women profession & pedagogy 63

characters as pawns in their power struggles. For now, however, I’d simply have the students note how the myth repels sympathizing from the get-go: neither Apollo nor Cupid are behaving nicely. Each is not only a victim, but also a bully. And why should they drag in poor Daphne? She didn’t do anything. It’s all unfair, stupid, even tragic.

But perhaps we are judging apples by the laws of oranges. We are not in the realm of human interactions here. Principles—like justice and compassion—do not apply. And these gods are not like ours. We think of gods as paragons—as creator and judge (Yahweh) or models of loving kindness (Jesus)—but those pagan gods are uninhibited, entitled ids. They do whatever they damn well please. And their myths seldom model ethical behavior. Instead, they entertain with their outlandish permutations of possibilities, with ordinary occurrences sliding into miracles as they defy natural law. Myths also hypothesize about origins.

They crystallize psychological truths. But what are those, exactly? Well, there isn’t just one, but many, often inchoate, intermingled, and contradictory. We sense them, we’re drawn to possess them, but they elude us, rather like a desirable nymph eluding the god whose light, in other contexts, would symbolize reason. So, how much can we figure out about this myth’s import, about the hold it has had on the imaginations of artists from Ovid to Bernini? What do these resonant images imply?

• I’d invite the students to consider the main duo’s relationship. Yes, it’s crude, one-sided lust. There’s no courtship that might blossom into mutuality. In Ovid’s version, Apollo doesn’t even converse with Daphne. Instead, he loftily mansplains that she’s beautiful, creepily envisions a makeover for her hair (what a control freak!), and then reminds her how great he is. Apparently, he doesn’t think she’s interesting or funny or smart or wise; he doesn’t yearn to hear what she has to say about politics or movies 64 Modern Language Studies 50.2

or family dynamics. Although both characters are archers, he doesn’t ask, “How about that new model?” or, “Which wood do you prefer?” He doesn’t give a fig about her opinions, much less her happiness. He doesn’t make it his life’s mission to help her fulfill her potential. And although he is the god of music, among other responsibilities, he doesn’t strum his lyre beneath her window, doesn’t even try to melt her hard heart with song. No, gods are spared such effortful preliminaries. The lustful male god cuts to the chase (literally): he just wants her body, as Bob Dylan might bluntly put it, “so bad.” Being a god, he feels entitled to grab. After all, that’s what his father did; he’s a chip off the old Zeusian block. It’s only after he loses her that he starts to “love” her—that is, honor her selflessly by making the laurel his symbol.

For her part, Daphne is not turned off by just this particular pushy guy. He should be irresistible: he is, after all, the most dazzling star in the sky.

He’s hot—literally, being The Sun—even if he does bully little putti. So it’s not just that she doesn’t want him—it’s that she doesn’t want even the hottest hottie in the universe. The image insists that she doesn’t want anybody. She just wants, like Greta Garbo, to be alone.

At first glance, the two lead characters’ sexualities grow out of well-worn tropes. Apollo’s sense of entitlement to Daphne’s body is standard GrecoRoman fare. The students might have noticed how many myths depend on rape, including Greece’s foundational myth about Helen and Rome’s about the Sabines. (Why does so much explanatory substructure depend on men’s domination of women?

Maybe the answer is too obvious to bear repeating.)

And certainly, this mentality has permeated our own culture, spawning #MeToo—possibly a source of the students’ objection to Bernini’s statue. Here, it seems to say, is yet another powerbroker indulging himself.

Daphne’s celibacy also grows out of a trope— although this one has lost currency. The Greeks and Romans worshipped Artemis/Diana, a major

and (mostly) celibate goddess. Athena, goddess of wisdom, didn’t fool around. For centuries, Romans revered their Vestal Virgins. Yes, simultaneously these same Romans frolicked nude in baths and gyms, patted phallic charms, and chucked their catamites under the chin as they headed out to conduct their numerous bisexual and adulterous affairs. But Vestal worship and jolly promiscuity weren’t necessarily contradictory. In those tolerant times, celibacy like Daphne’s might well have been a respectable, normative choice, adopted by even goddesses as well as priestesses and ordinary folks, from a menu of options far broader than that available in our own allegedly permissive era.

So, the overheated male pursues the icily unobtainable woman, whose purity or commitments or rejection only inflame his passions. We know the story; we’ve heard countless variations. Dante and Beatrice. Petrarch and Laura. Lancelot and Guinevere. The duc de Nemours and the princesse de Clèves. Lovelace and Clarissa. Swann and, yes, Odette. However, standard as such tropes might be, this myth, in my view, upends them. Stick with me, students, I’d urge, as I show you how.

I’d ask them to note the origin of the characters’ sexual behavior: Both his aggression and her refusal are punishment. An infection from a poison dart.

Cupid has spiked the punch. Neither behavior is a natural expression of character. Apollo’s a cultured fellow, the opposite of Dionysus; he doesn’t usually run amok. He’s debasing himself by chasing after an inferior. And Daphne’s behavior is more extreme than that of her role model; in early myths, even Artemis took a night off from celibacy on occasion.1 So is the myth a meditation on the nature of desire—an origin story, so to speak? Is it proposing that attraction does not feel free, but rather magnetic, an irresistible natural pull? As if a god had shot you with some phallic arrow dipped in Love Potion #9, so there’s nothing your puny conscious mind can do about it? Revulsion likewise isn’t a choice; it too

seemingly arises from forces outside one’s control.

Meds gone awry, or compulsions originating in traumas; myths, devoid of all but the barest exposition, will defer these to the novel, two millennia further on, to explore. We want so bad, or we don’t? And often, we don’t know why?

If so, it’s better to keep oneself free of it all—by not provoking the love god in the first place, by respecting his power. Love might seem small and innocent, a charming frolic, accurately represented by a cute, chubby child-god. But never underestimate his skill with his outsized weapon—that is, passion’s power to ruin your life. But it’s not just hot lust like Apollo’s that this myth deplores. Rather, it construes both extremes of hot-and-cold as punishment, tailor-made by the love god to fit the crime. Yes, her revulsion is an ancillary punishment, designed to exacerbate his, but it carries its own significance.

Although we modern spectators gravitate to her cause, construing her as an innocent victim, from another angle she’s locked in childhood latency, still playing tomboy with her bow and arrow. Remember, I’d tell the students, how the myth begins by repelling sympathy for both competing male protagonists. That repulsion could sweep in Daphne as well, though we might well miss the old-fashioned cues.

And what about her father? Myths are the race cars of narrative, stripped machines that speed to the dénouement. Every part must function, or it’s offloaded. So of what use is this clunky add-on, this deus ex machina? She’s a wood nymph, so why can’t she turn herself into a tree—why does she have to appeal to a male protector? In the interpretation I’m developing, her dependence qualifies her position: her childish need for her father’s intervention underscores her immaturity and renders her—and the choice she represents—as less worthy of sympathy.

She embodies an extreme that anyone who wants to be happy—or human, meaning mobile, sensitive, and free—should reject.

So, I’d tell the students, I propose that this myth profession & pedagogy 65

presents both characters’ behaviors as destructive.

Both endure tortures from thwarted passions. Both have unhappy outcomes: Apollo’s heartbroken and Daphne’s an effin’ tree. Rather than mindlessly channeling male entitlement to women’s bodies, as the students initially thought, maybe this myth deplores it by saying, “Look what happens when passion overwhelms you.” And likewise, rather than revering chastity, the myth deplores it too by illustrating how it dehumanizes you. According to Peter Brown in A History of Private Life, much of Roman philosophizing sought tranquility through self-control (242-3).2 In promiscuous times, with a range of gratifications available, this myth perhaps illustrated needed but unwelcome advice—hence its encoded delivery. The myth might well be advocating for Goldilocks-style moderation: not too hot, not too cold; not too much lust, not too much chastity. No brusque, crude, mindless hide-and-seek, no pursuit or rejection based solely on physical attraction/revulsion, without the moderating force of a relationship grounded in mutuality. No grabbing, but no global rejection, either. Fire or ice can suffice to end the world, as Robert Frost has put it. No sensible person would want to be shot with either arrow.

So the myth proceeds by negatives. Rather than modeling desirable behavior, in the Biblical-parable style of the Good Samaritan or, say, Abraham’s obedience, it shows gods doing what humans shouldn’t—not because it’s morally wrong, but because it’s inimical to happiness. It’s not sex per se that’s bad, but rather the loss of tranquility. Of dignity.

Only the moderate are fully, happily human—better off than even the gods.

• These complex images can have other implications.

What about the fact that Daphne gets away? The students saw rape, but the rape never happens. You could interpret the myth as a David-slew-Goliath triumph of the underdog: a little nymph outwits a powerful god. I’d ask the students if they detect any 66 Modern Language Studies 50.2

celebration of a woman’s power, her cleverness and resourcefulness, her commitment to remaining independent, her successful defiance of male domination.

Doesn’t the myth emphasize her victory by making the laurel the crown of emperors and athletes, an evergreen symbol? Or is the victory a Pyrrhic one, so costly as not to be a victory at all? Students, I’d ask, how does her escape affect your interpretation?

Perhaps the myth is simultaneously exploring another psychological phenomenon. Perhaps it does invite sympathy for Daphne herself, if not for her drug-induced chastity. Perhaps, encoded in the unadorned depiction of attempted rape, is sympathy for the victim. Perhaps the image of an assaulted woman turning into wood expresses what happens when, in the language of modern trauma theory, a subject is stripped of subjectivity, reduced into an object, and used as a mere tool for the gratification of the perpetrator’s unchecked and solipsistic desires. Perhaps Daphne’s metamorphosis into a tree literalizes how rape dehumanizes a woman; she hardens her flesh against future touch to protect her vulnerable heart. I’d ask the students if, seen in that light, the myth deplores the psychological consequences of violation.

Furthermore, perhaps the image shows that sex without love, domination rather than mutuality, deprives the pursuer of the connection he has so clumsily sought. In this light, too, rather than glorifying the rapist’s action, as the students initially thought, the myth again condemns it.

II. THE STATUE Next, I’d ask the students to consider the statue itself. What is its relationship to the myth of its title?

I’d lay my cards on the table. Students, I’d say, to my mind, if this is a depiction of rape, or even attempted rape, there’s something fishy about it.

I’d tell them we’ll start back in the myth, by noting that Daphne’s resemblance to Apollo’s twin sister Artemis—another chaste-huntress—lends an

incestuous tinge to his desire. Likewise, if Apollo were that beloved twin, Daphne might not be running away. With all this displaced desire circulating, is the myth subtly resisting heterosexual mating? And if so, how does the statue respond? I’d pursue this line of inquiry via short detours into background information and neighboring galleries.

I’d invite the students to examine how Bernini chose to represent this story. I’d remind them that we are not, of course, seeing anything that actually happened. Apollo never did pursue Daphne. There never was an Apollo, or a Daphne, anymore—sorry, kids—than there was a Santa Claus. We are not even seeing Bernini’s source: Ovid’s tale, a revision or compression of what must have been multiple fluid versions in an oral tradition. So we are seeing a representation of a representation of a representation, in an infinitely receding series. And as in a game of telephone, the message modifies with each transmission. In the dark mists beyond Ovid, we have no original, no referent, no stable signified on which to anchor the signifier—that is, no real event—nothing except the amorphous, evanescent clouds of human experience.

That vagueness gives the sculptor freedom. He is not beholden to anything tangible that he must represent, as he would be if sculpting a bust of an actual person like Hadrian or Garibaldi, who must have their signature beards (the former curly, the latter pointed, as Groucho would put it, like a gun about to go off).

If we are not seeing a concretization even of Ovid’s story, it’s because that of course would be impossible, a direct metamorphosis of words into stone, ephemeral ideas into marble-hard reality, which even the magician Bernini could not pull off.

Then what are we seeing? An interpretation crafted in 1622. That’s 1,614 years after the text’s first publication in 8 AD, and the design is inevitably shaped by circumstances contemporaneous to Bernini’s life.

So, let’s examine some of those and how they might

have affected the sculptor’s choices, conscious or not.

First, I’d have the students note that Bernini’s Apollo doesn’t look much like a god. The Greeks fashioned their god statues to be larger than humans, in keeping with the gods’ greater powers—think of the forty-foot Athena who once towered within the Parthenon, and the seven-foot basketball-center Apollo Belvedere in the Vatican that Bernini allegedly used as a model. The Romans made their gods into hunks, as did Bernini’s predecessor, Michelangelo.

I’d ask the students, “How might you depict the Sun God—huge, intimidating, omnipotent? Plated, perhaps, in gleaming gold? Rays shooting from his crown, his fingers?” Bernini’s god, however, has nothing supernatural about him, beyond his perfect beauty. He is life-sized, no larger than the spectator or the woman he pursues. In 1829, an English traveler for New Monthly Magazine observed that this Apollo looks more like a shepherd.3 If Apollo had chosen to incarnate a mere shard of His Glittering Magnificence in shepherd form—as his father Zeus had executed his rapes disguised as a swan or bull—Ovid doesn’t say so, nor does Bernini. His depiction draws more on the idealized pastoral, the artistic tradition of the marvelous (in both senses) and the Marvellian “Come live with me and be my love” variety, with its clean, pretty, prancing rustics “with flowers in their hair.” (Not anachronistic, on Bernini’s part, for a Greco-Roman myth, since the pastoral descends straight from Virgil.)

Next, I’d ask the students, how might you depict a rapist—would it be like that? Note that this statue’s limbs are delicate. His cheeks are soft, his lips full.

His hair curls. His gait is more like a dancer’s than a criminal’s. Why, he’s downright femme.

Bernini could sculpt a more macho dude. For our first detour, I’d show the students his David, with its bulging biceps, in a nearby gallery. Bernini could also sculpt a rapist who looked more like a rapist, crazed with lust and violence. We know, because he did. Also, our second detour into a neighboring profession & pedagogy 67

gallery takes us to Bernini’s Rape of Proserpina.4 It depicts Pluto, the god of the underworld, abducting Persephone, the goddess he’ll force to be his wife.

She’s crying. He’s grabbing her. He’s huge and scary.

The encounter is unambiguously one of violent domination. Its owner had commissioned the gentler Apollo and Daphne specifically to replace The Rape of Proserpine, which he had given away—a fact that might take on significance as our explorations proceed.

I’d ask the students why a wood nymph would equal the sun god in size. It’s notable how alike these figures look, given the power differential in role and gender. Here, we sense a gap opening between Ovid’s story and Bernini’s interpretation. The story describes a mighty god attempting unsuccessfully to force a little wood nymph to have sex with him.

The size gap alone suggests a yeti chasing an elf, or a gorilla a squirrel. But Bernini crafted two idealized human figures of similar size and looks, in symmetrical form, their torsos in parallel arcs engaged in a graceful pas de deux.

If it’s a depiction of a rape, it’s a bad one. There’s no violence. The power differential is minimized. It’s all just too pretty.

Now the students might protest: that’s just what we’ve been objecting to all along—the prettification of a heinous crime! But I’d urge them to bear with me. Yes, the myth concerns attempted rape—but that might not be what the statue depicts, despite its title. The name might be a decoy, a cover-up, camouflaging something else altogether.

I’d tell the students that young Bernini sculpted this statue on commission for his powerful patron, Cardinal Borghese, master of the ornate palace we’re standing in. Far from being celibate as his position as a Catholic prelate required, this Cardinal was infamously, scandalously gay. And he had particular tastes. He kept, locked in a special cabinet, a statue of a reclining hermaphrodite, a life-size, sensuous nude, prettily endowed with both breasts and penis.

68 Modern Language Studies 50.2

Borghese had gone so far as to commission Bernini, only a couple years before, in 1620, to sculpt a mattress for this treasured possession. So Bernini knew this hermaphrodite intimately; he had had to calculate how every inch of its body, every ounce of its weight, would depress a bed. (The resulting stone mattress is so realistic that apparently early viewers were tempted to poke it.) A copy of this once-private porn stash is now displayed in the Borghese; on another short detour, the students can see it for themselves.

Perhaps the mythic rape is in the eye of the statue’s beholder. We are so schooled in assuming the dominant, entitled male’s subject position that we align ourselves with it automatically. When we do so, we notice the rape elements from the myth: his hand on her hip, her expression, which could be terror. But a viewer occupying a different subject position like Cardinal Borghese—the statue’s intended audience—might well have foregrounded other elements.

I would propose to the students that how you understand this statue itself, apart from the myth, depends on what you assume happens after the freeze-frame. Perhaps, from Borghese’s point of view, the two nearly identical bodies are about to meld—not into heterosexual rape, but into another hermaphrodite. In a moment, as the rear figure’s front closes up against the back of the other, the branch rising suggestively at his groin might push between her thighs, endowing the resulting blended figure with both breasts and penis, like the treasured, secret statue. This one, unlike the other, could be displayed, because its hermaphroditism is only implied.

There’s another possibility. Much as in the myth, Apollo pursues a creature who resembles his twin; so, here, he pursues a body that resembles his own.

The statue shows one femme figure nearing another, aligned in parallel arcs that could snap together perfectly. The heterosexual binarism is softened, blurred (or, as we used to say, “problematized”); the

rippling limbs almost form one fluid continuum.

If you assume that what follows is a coupling of two nearly identical bodies, the sexuality here is homosexual and—dare I use the anachronistic term?—“closeted.” Perhaps Borghese preferred this delicate homoerotic dance to the heterosexual power-grab of the sculpture he had just given away.

Perhaps, in gazing at his acquisition, he could align himself with either the Apollo clasping his near-twin or with passive Daphne—whose biological gender, like that of the daffy transvestite Daphne in Some Like It Hot, might not (since “nobody’s perfect”) matter.

Students, I’d say, I’m proposing that “the gaze” assumed here isn’t that of the dominating, patriarchal, heterosexual male, but rather of a connoisseur of sameness. Perhaps the mythological title gives cover to this pursuit of a hermaphroditic or homoerotic merging. Just a few years earlier, Caravaggio, also funded by Borghese, had pulled off similar stunts.

For example, in 1602, he painted a sexy nude boy and called him Saint John the Baptist. (Yeah, right.

And The Song of Songs is about the love of Christ.)

Students, I’d ask, could it be that this statue only pretends to be about a famous myth of heterosexual male dominance, while actually suggesting an imminent hermaphroditic or homosexual coupling? Is that the real metamorphosis here? Are we spectators assuming a heterosexual viewpoint out of habit?

I’d ask the students to let me throw caution to the winds and go further: Maybe that’s why this homosexual, hermaphrodite-loving Cardinal commissioned a classical subject. He was reaching back to a time when the emperor Hadrian could publicly love Antinous, Zeus could keep Ganymede, and, according to Paul Veyne in A History of Private Life, homosexual activities were normal (202-5).5 Perhaps classicism, with its connotations of learning and culture, provided Borghese with a respectable screen.

I’d bolster this theory by noting that the statue invites a polymorphous sexual response. It doesn’t align the spectator’s gaze with Apollo’s; it doesn’t

objectify the female figure’s attractiveness any more than the male’s. Unlike the myth, it presents both figures as alluring. No matter what the viewer’s gender or orientation, both bodies look perfectly beautiful and attractive; whoever you are, you probably want to stroke them both, although you know a museum guard would come running.

The students might be interested to know that The Church sought to contain the statue’s freewheeling eroticism by slapping a moral on it: In order to instill the pagan-inspired artwork with a proper Christian morality, the base was engraved with a Latin couplet composed by Cardinal Maffeo Barberini (the soon-to-be Pope Urban VIII), reading: “Those who love to pursue fleeing forms of pleasure, / In the end find only leaves and bitter berries in their hands.”6 Barberini was trying to shrink a myth into a parable.

The students might notice that his “moral” refers entirely to the male character’s experience. It erases Daphne’s, since she didn’t seek any “pleasure”; by this logic, there’s no need for her to be imprisoned, Ariel-like, in a tree. This Orwellian label is a small part of the Church’s futile attempt to straitjacket sexuality. The statue, whatever else you might say about it, displays carnal exuberance. It delights in capturing the graceful, ephemeral beauty of the young naked body of any gender. In so doing, it overpowers this flimsy “moral.” Once again, the devil has all the best tunes.7 III. EXPANDING THE STORY Since this is a creative writing class, I’d invite the students to swap analysis for imagination. They could probe the images associated with the myth or statue to see what they discover. For starters, I’d suggest that they reverse the roles: What if Cupid had switched the arrows, whether by accident—oops!—or design?

What if Daphne was fired up to pursue Apollo, but profession & pedagogy 69

he’d been infected with disgust? What would he turn himself into for protection? Students, I’d say, you could modernize the scenario: he’s gay, or he just doesn’t like her. Hunting—ugh. He deletes her texts.

Or imagine yourself deeper into the classic version. What is it like to run naked and barefoot through the forest, pursued by the Sun? Seeking refuge in a shady glade, hiding behind trunks from the spear-like rays that pierce the gloom?

How does it feel to be a tree? How does Daphne feel inside her palisade? Safe, content, her solitude assured? Certain that no living creature can violate her newly impregnable (in both senses) body? Free at last—thanks, Dad—from Cupid’s curse? Free of the curse of being beautiful? Or does she worry that her assailant, her stalker, might return with an ax? Again, can you imagine a modern equivalent?

Can she get a restraining order against a celebrity powerbroker? Has she wrapped herself in bark the way a real woman might in shapeless clothes? Or in remote intellectualism, or gambling, or geo-caching, or needlepoint? Or the haze of drugs?

Would the students dare imagine themselves into the mind of the pursuer—even if they believe him intent on rape? If they modernize the scenario, if he’s stalking her, if the chase is terrifying, what does that feel like to him? How can someone do such a thing? Or what if he is merely enjoying erotic hide-and-seek, as the statue’s delicacy suggests? Is such a game possible without exploitation?

Such experiments in reversal and modernization might raise intriguing questions: Why does a sexually assertive Daphne seem exceptional to us, given that Greco-Roman mythology portrays such women? (We might consider Psyche, Circe, Calypso. Or Selene, the moon goddess, who loved beautiful Endymion; she seduced him as he slept and bore him fifty daughters.)

Conversely, why are men nearly always depicted as aggressors? Don’t men sometimes want to protect their purity, virginity, chastity? Aren’t they sometimes shy? Might they be disciples of the same-sex god of 70 Modern Language Studies 50.2

a pursuit associated with another gender? Does our culture provide pathways for exploring such feelings?

Is there a repertoire of images for us to draw on in crafting the Daphne-like man—anything besides a celibate Jesus—or have we stumbled onto a blank, an erasure?

The statue itself could cue explorations. Imagine a conversation between Apollo and Bernini. Apollo has parked his chariot for the night; the horses are stabled, watered, and curried. He’s headed to Olympus for his nightly nectar, but first he swings by the studio. He finds Bernini dozing over his sketches, the candle guttering. The artist wakes, startled by the blaze in the doorway. He’s about to shout FIRE. But it isn’t; it’s the glowing Sun God himself, checking how the portrait of him is coming along. His klieg-light beams illumine the half-chiseled statue, propped amid heaps of shavings.

From the heat, the wax model—the sculptor and his assistant measure it with calipers to transfer its contours to the unforgiving stone—starts to melt.

Bernini is awestruck—or maybe, being a genius, he is accustomed to supernatural visitations from Muses, say, or the shades of Phidias and Praxiteles.

Apollo might comment, Good job, you’ve made me gorgeous. Or, Humph, no resemblance; you’ve made me a wimp.

The students could dig into the process of creation. What’s it like to be a genius? Bernini looked at the heroic poses, the frozen busts, the stylized figures of the vast majority of surviving statues from antiquity, and he revolutionized sculpture. He made it dramatic. He made it cinematic. He made stone move. What was it like to be an innovator, to change what’s given, to look around the world as it is and, with one penetrating insight, imagine how the world could be different—and try it?

How about the statue’s figures? What do they say to each other when they get off their pedestal at night? Once the guards have shooed out the tourists and switched off the lights, do the marble figures

unfreeze? Do they stretch, pull on bathrobes or sweats, massage the stiffness from each other’s shoulders? Maybe they gossip about the day’s visitors—did you see how those creative writing students stalked off? Maybe the two are tired of play-acting Apollo and Daphne. Maybe they really do like each other.

Maybe they talk about archery after all. And by the way, how’s his sister?

Imagine the custodian who arrives after hours with a feather duster. Maybe she or he is old, stiff, wrinkled, hairy. Maybe the custodian lingers over the beautiful nude bodies, caressing the cleavage, the nipples, the buttocks, the groin, with the feathers.

Maybe these two unchanging beauties, under his/her care night after night, fulfill some dream of youth, love, perfection? Maybe she or he feels enriched by caring for them, by knowing them so intimately, by extracting lint from Apollo’s navel? Or maybe that custodian is bored, devoid of imagination and sensitivity, hurrying to catch the soccer match on TV? I’d propose one other scenario. Imagine the initial conversation between the rich, powerful Cardinal and the poor young artist. Students, I’d remind them, he’s your age, while the Cardinal’s in his fifties. Bernini’s bursting with talent and confidence, but he’s also wary. The Church holds power of the purse and can determine his future, but Church politics make vipers look polite. Will he thrive as an artist, growing rich and fat on Church commissions, or will he be reduced to making bricks?

As he approaches the Cardinal, he tries to project both deference and caginess. Borghese, pale and delicate, is magnificent in a white lace dress and red silk cape.8 His villa too is magnificent, its walls clad in colored marble, its ceilings and medallions frescoed, its tracery gilded. Bernini bows and asks, “How may I be of service to Your Eminence?” Is Bernini shocked when the Cardinal leads him to the locked box and reveals the hermaphrodite? Does the figure revolt him—yet he must spend months making its bed?

Later, how does he feel when the Cardinal offloads

The Rape of Proserpina, over which he’d labored for years—does that gesture convey a message that the young sculptor takes to heart?

And what was it like for Bernini to make his sculpture? Imagine him at Carrara, surveying the quarry, the mountain and pit of white stone glinting in sunlight; haggling with the masons, handing over the Cardinal’s gold; selecting a block to be hoisted onto a cart and towed to his faraway Roman studio.

Picture him in there, circling the rough-hewn stone.

Burning the midnight oil. How to do it. How to convey attraction, flight, terror, transformation? A hundred sketches rejected, torn. Finally—yes, this will please the Cardinal. The wax model, melted down, begun again, the head or arm turned this way, then that. At last, the chisel poised over the block. The first strike, a nick off the corner. Must find, as Michelangelo had counseled, the statue within the stone. The figures start to emerge—a hand, a head, a foot. Chipping away, flake by flake.

Feeling sometimes like god, making man out of clay. Or Pygmalion, shaping perfection. Deciding the size of the breasts, the angle of the nipple, the thickness of the lips. Polishing it, running his hands repeatedly over both male and female bodies, as if caressing a beloved.

Students, think about this: What if he made a mistake—a nose was off-center, an eye crooked, one hand smaller than the other? What if he sneezed and the chisel slipped? What if a loud noise—a gunshot, thunder, a scream—startled him mid-stroke, and the chisel lopped off a finger? What if apprentices or servants, inflamed with wine, brawling over women or money, knocked into it; it teetered and crashed, the twigs snapped, the leaves shattered? What if a flaw appeared deep in the stone, a crack, a knot?

The infinite perils must have kept him awake and trembling late into the night. Imagine the Cardinal sniffing around the studio, lifting his white lace hem so it wouldn’t trail in the marble dust, critiquing.

Would Bernini have begged, “Your Eminence, please, profession & pedagogy 71

have patience?” And then, with three years of labor, complete at last, how did the young sculptor feel?

Imagine him circling it, swiping a cloth here or there.

His final moments alone with his creation. How was it presented to its owner, the Cardinal—was it unveiled in a public ceremony? Did His Eminence pull a silk cord to raise the concealing drapery, revealing the two stunning figures to ooh’s, aah’s, toasts, applause?

Did the Vatican prelates in attendance, sumptuous as peacocks in their multicolored vestments, whisper behind bejeweled fingers, My, what a pretty boy this canny sculptor has given our dear Cardinal?

And when Bernini—praised and paid, wined and dined—returned alone to his studio late that night, how did he feel when he raised his candle and saw the empty place where the beautiful figures had stood poised in flight? And how did the Cardinal react to his expensive acquisition? Did he visit it alone that night and run his own hands over the flawless bodies? Since they were his, no museum guard would come running.

And in imagination, I’d remind the students, you can own them, too. No old-guard narrative need police your responses. You, like Bernini, are not beholden to any real-world referents. You too can do what you wish.

IV. AFTER CLASS When do we persist in asking our students to study an artwork that they deem offensive? When do we point out that studying isn’t condoning? When do we maintain that there might be something to learn nevertheless?

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There’s a difference, of course, between asking students to contemplate literal versus artistic representations of violence and exploitation—of actual versus imagined suffering. For the former, the compassionate teacher titrates the exposure, depending on the students’ maturity and circumstances, and weighs the distress that might be induced against the knowledge that might be gained. But for the latter—for distillations of experience in artistic form—the standard is different; we can push harder when no living person was hurt, no actual blood was shed. No bruises mar this creamy marble sculpture; it might remind us of innocents who stumbled into the crosshairs of brutes who believed themselves gods, but it does not depict any one such victim literally.

In an English class in general, and in a creative writing class in particular, while we might toggle between subject and representation, we ultimately focus on the artist’s choices. We tease out, in John Berger’s essential phrase, the “ways of seeing” implicit in the work. In this case, the meaning of Bernini’s statue shifted when we speculated about how the artist might have catered to its gay owner. From that point of view, rather than glorifying heterosexual rape as the students had feared, the statue metamorphoses a myth about moderation into a celebration of intersexual- and homoeroticism. Such students wouldn’t have known of that possibility had a teacher not overridden their veto.

Yet even when we present a bloodless artistic representation—or, as in this case, a representation of a representation—we, like my friend, do sometimes encounter a spectrum of negative reactions ranging

from offence to revulsion. The latter is almost impossible to overcome. No student can learn in that state. But if we teachers cannot counter the poisonous effects of the leaden arrow of disgust, we at the very least can administer an antidote to the sting of being offended. The antidote—homebrewed and slow-acting, but potent—comes in bottles labeled “Why?” and “How?” Why do the students feel as they do, how were such feelings provoked, and why or why not are they justified? Why does the representation take the form it does, and how does its meaning change from different viewpoints and in different contexts? How does the work connect to a broader web of experiences and values?

In deciding when to override student objections—when to cancel “cancel culture”—we might use this guideline: where there is conflict, there is interest. Paradox, cognitive dissonance, ambiguity— these are all trailheads. In the case of Bernini’s statue, the contrast between the indisputable loveliness of the presentation and the presumed violence of the subject invites our best detective work and our hardest thinking.

Besides, if you don’t engage with that which offends you, I would want to tell the students, you cut yourself off from most of human experience.

Since history chronicles one grotesquely offensive act after another, so does the art, so does the literature, which contemplates it. Should we never study Shakespeare because of anti-Semitism in The Merchant of Venice, racism in Othello, sexism in Much Ado about Nothing and The Taming of the Shrew? Misogyny in Macbeth and Hamlet? Not read

Eliot because of his anti-Semitism, Pound for his fascism, Wodehouse for his wartime broadcasts on German radio, Dickens for his dehumanizing idealizations of women? Then how would we learn about such things? How long could we cling to the stubborn hope that purity exists somewhere, that cruel abuses of power are an exception rather than the tragic rule? Who would be left? And who could cast the first stone?

If we allow students to censor the curriculum, or if we do so ourselves preemptively, how would they learn to detect the subversive, the suppressed, the resistance to the dominant narrative? They would miss the critique of toxic masculinity implicit in Macbeth and Hamlet, for example, or the clandestine gender-bending underlying what Alcott herself dismissed as the “moral pablum” of Little Women, and the idyll of companionship across identity categories, possible only outside “sivilization,” camouflaged within conventionally racist Huckleberry Finn. We would be complicit in silencing the already stifled voices that “cancel culture” aspires to hear.

• Before the students pack up to leave the gallery, I’d thank them for sticking with me. I’d conclude this imaginary class by affirming that I, unlike Bernini, have not hewn smooth and graceful forms from stone. But I have tried to show that the search for them can be enriching. Chiseling builds muscles.

And coordination. And flexibility. Who knows what you might find?

profession & pedagogy 73

NOTES 1 The editors of the Encyclopedia Britannica note the following on Artemis: “The frequent stories of the love affairs of Artemis’ nymphs are supposed by some to have originally been told of the goddess herself. The poets after Homer, however, stressed Artemis’ chastity…”

2

Brown comments on the perceived importance to health of the upper-class male’s “delicately maintained balance of complementary humors” (242). Custom warned against “a collapse of the harmonious image of the self of the wellborn man…[that] caused him to behave in a manner as uncontrolled as a slave” (243).

3

Quoted in “Apollo and Daphne (Bernini).”

4

“Rape” is being used in the archaic sense of “abduction,” but the intent is obvious.

5

“Nearly anyone can enjoy sensual pleasure with a member of the same sex, and pederasty was not at all uncommon in tolerant antiquity. Many men of basically heterosexual bent used boys for sexual purposes. It was proverbially held that sex with boys procures a tranquil pleasure unruffling to the soul, whereas passion for a woman plunges a free man into unendurable slavery.” (Veyne 204) Moreover, Brown writes, “Homosexual and heterosexual love were not distinguished. What was perceived as an underlying continuity between the two was the fact of physical pleasure. What was judged, and judged harshly, was the effect of such pleasure on the public deportment and social relations of the male. Any shame that might be attached…resided solely in the moral contagion that might cause of man of the upper class to submit himself…to an inferior of either sex” (243).

6

For further details and educational resources, see the Artble article on Apollo and Daphne: www.artble. com/artists/gian_lorenzo_bernini/sculpture/apollo_and_daphne

7

Certainly, there are other possible interpretations of this mythic confrontation between two richly symbolic figures—the sophisticated herder (Apollo, as Odysseus found out, owned cattle) and the primitive hunter, between the bearer of the cultured lyre and of the rustic bow-and-arrow—but since the students’ objection involved sexuality, that’s the aspect of the myth I’ve focused on.

8

For his portrait, see wikipedia.org/wiki/Scipione_Borghese.

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WORKS CITED AND CONSULTED “Apollo and Daphne.” Artble, www.artble.com/artists/gian_lorenzo_bernini/sculpture/apollo_and_ daphne. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020.

“Apollo and Daphne (Bernini).” Wikipedia, 6 Dec. 2020, www.wikipedia.org/wiki/ Apollo_and_Daphne_(Bernini).

Ariès, Philippe and George Duby, editors. A History of Private Life. Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1987.

“Artemis (Greek Goddess).” Encyclopedia Britannica, www.britannica.com/topic/Artemis-Greekgoddess. Accessed 21 Dec. 2020.

Brown, Peter. “The ‘Wellborn’ Few.” Ariès and Duby, pp. 242-3.

Ovid. Metamorphoses. Translated by Mary M. Innes, Penguin, 1955.

“Scipione Borghese.” Wikipedia, 26 Feb. 2020, www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scipione_Borghese.

Veyne, Paul. “Desire and Passion.” Ariès and Duby, pp. 202-5, 243.

profession & pedagogy 75

50.2

NeMLA notes

On the 52nd Annual Convention Theme The “Beginner’s Mind” and the Possibilities of a Virtual Convention From the President: Brandi So In the Japanese martial art Aikido, practitioners are encouraged to embrace shoshin, or the “beginner’s mind.” It is a mindset that attunes one to the sensations of learning. The purpose of the practice is two-fold: to have an open mind to the rewards of even the most basic elements of training, and to have an open heart to the journey of those learning around you.

Learning, while not without moments of accomplishment, can be uncomfortable, and it’s often achieved by leaning into the heat of the unknown.

Learning takes trust, vulnerability, and earnestness.

It takes courage, but also a sense of humor, and the ability to laugh at oneself and smile at others. Zen teacher Suzuki Roshi wrote that “in the beginner’s mind there are many possibilities, but in the expert’s mind there are few.” Planning NeMLA’s 52nd Annual Convention as a virtual event has placed me in this mindset. I’ve helped plan eleven NeMLA conferences, but planning a virtual NeMLA requires a beginner’s mind. I’ve learned to open my mind to aspects of the conference I previously took for granted, and I’ve learned to open my heart to the needs of those joining us in the virtual platform.

Fortunately, laughing at myself and smiling at others comes easily.

Whether NeMLA is your first virtual conference or your tenth, we will all join it and each other somewhere on the continuum of a “beginner’s mind.” In my weekly conversations with NeMLA’s Executive Director, Carine Mardorossian, I saw an emergence 78 Modern Language Studies 50.2

of common threads—patterns that extended beyond my role as President into the broader stitchwork of my work in online learning and instructional design.

These threads connect to the great tapestry of our work as scholars and teachers. I’ve come to see the vision of this convention as a mural that captures the wholeness of our work, capable of holding and celebrating the diverse character of our membership’s interests, abilities, and challenges.

Whether you see this Convention, as I do, as a public arts project that invites the connectivity of our expertise, our frailties, and our ideals, or whether you understand this connection through a different metaphor, I believe that there is a meaningful alignment between our upcoming convention and the landscape of our work as teachers and scholars in the era of Covid-19.

KEEPING THE PROMISE OF EDUCATIONAL TECHNOLOGY REQUIRES HUMANITY In my work in professional development and distance education, my faculty clients always breathe a sigh of relief when I tell them that I believe technology for technology’s sake will never deliver an improved experience—for anyone. Whether they articulate it or not, there’s a healthy suspicion among faculty that shoehorning in technological solutions to teaching, learning, and scholarship is a misguided approach.

Faculty instinctively know this, and for many, the shift to remote teaching has dimmed the glow of teacher-student engagement and the enlightening

quality of the life of the mind. As I work with so many who lament the darkened hallways and abandoned classrooms at their institutions, finding this common ground is the first step to building trust.

Our members can likewise trust that our virtual convention holds these very same ideals, that technology for technology’s sake never works. Rather, we know that technology is only meaningful to the extent that it fosters collaboration and exchange. This is one reason we are so humbled, as an organization, to see that our members are coming together in such great numbers despite the remote shift. The number of sessions and registrations alone testify to the importance of people ahead of the technology.

This year’s convention will feature nearly 500 sessions and over 2100 abstracts. To me, your overwhelming declaration of intention and presence represents the good faith that is the heart and soul of NeMLA: that it is an organization of generous and earnest academics who appreciate that they can take scholarly risks among good-natured colleagues, and that they are willing to lean into the heat of the unknown by sharing their work through the convention’s digital platform. The online platform will provide opportunities for social, emotional, and cognitive connections, but it is merely technology—an echo chamber—without the voices of our members. We’re excited to go on this adventure with all of you.

———

BRIDGING THE DISTANCE HAS MADE US BETTER As a humanist who specializes in distance education, I used to work solely with educators teaching asynchronous online courses. Covid-19 changed everything, and the resulting turn to Zoom, Microsoft Teams, Skype, and other synchronous virtual meeting platforms laid bare the deficiencies of technology. Those unaccustomed to online teaching found the sparks of physical interaction sorely missing, and many encountered a stark fact: A Zoom room is nothing like a classroom. In that moment, faculty learned that there was more than mere distance dividing us. We saw more intimately into our students’ lives and were confronted with the distressing realities of economic disparity and other hardships they faced while completing their education.

This shift to remote education is also when many faculty faced the challenge of becoming students themselves. The “beginner’s mind” gave fresh eyes to what it was like to be unfamiliar, to lack confidence—a state that all of our students experience regularly. A wellspring of compassion for our students followed, which led to a quiet awakening about online learning: the key elements to learning—to deep retention of knowledge and mastery of a discipline—is more than a cognitive endeavor; it is crucially linked to our social and emotional lives.

And so two key elements of engaged learning came into focus for me. Firstly, that memory-making, and thus all intellectual endeavors, are most NeMLA notes 79

enduring when they coincide with other stimuli through seeing, hearing, speaking, touching, and smelling. The more senses that we fire off in a learning moment, the more pathways we forge to that stored information—the more correlations we network around knowledge. This is why teaching is such a powerful tool for learning. When we stand in front of a classroom, we are moving, speaking, writing, and listening. We learn most about our work through teaching it, and when we give students opportunities to do the same, the results are profound. This year, many faculty had to deconstruct how learning, scholarship, and social engagement work in virtual environments. Their reassemblage conferred an enduring understanding of the lynchpin of distance education: that prioritizing humanistic goals of connection and collaboration is the key to delivering on the promise of educational technology.

The second, more difficult lesson we learned is that the chemicals that contribute to learning are too easily replaced with ones that can detract from it, in some cases, irrevocably. Fight-or-flight hormones like cortisol and adrenaline help us make split-second decisions and keep us safe. They also shut down reflection and knowledge retention.

Covid-19 gave us plenty of evidence of how disruptive these feelings can be to our work. This knowledge opened our hearts to the struggles of our students and colleagues, and this openness led us to confront and reclaim the underappreciated aspect of human connectivity in our work.

When I begin workshops on active learning, I share a personal anecdote of a time in which I made a mistake or felt uncertain. I model the pathway to mutual trust, which often begins with a gesture of vulnerability. Instead of adrenaline or cortisol, I encourage the endorphins that lend themselves to learning and meaningful exchange, to feelings of belonging, friendship, safety, and connection. We are at our best when we’re strengthened by experiences that permit reflection and thoughtful expression.

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These are complex goals for a remote lecture hall or a virtual staff meeting, but we’ve pursued them with passion and determination—simply because we must.

There is no limit to my admiration of your efforts in this journey, and my praise could never capture the range of experiences and determination that has shaped the lives of our colleagues and teachers, but this too, is in the heartbeat of our convention—a celebration of your work in its many forms!

NEMLA 2021 AND FORWARD: THE MEMBERSHIP IS THE MISSION If this missive were an elegy, we’d be arriving at the consolation, with the revelation that while our convention is not in-person, it still thrives in a virtual world. However, this shift is more dramatic than simply recreating the same conference in an online environment. Our conference theme is “Tradition and Innovation: Changing Worlds Through the Humanities.” When I proposed this framework, I could not have known how poignant or apt this theme would be to the lived experiences of 2020.

The conference is transformed because we are transformed. If NeMLA 2021 were a poetic device, then we would be a volta. Our outlook is new, renewed, and continually renewing, imbued with new hope and positivity as we enter a new year. There is so much we are eager to leave behind, but we cannot help but carry forward the parts of us that have changed forever, for better or worse. I see this in the scholarship, the session topics, and the papers.

Our work as humanists is as incomplete as ever, which is a challenge that feels almost exhilarating as we embark on the slow but ever-lightening trek toward a post-pandemic era.

I know that many of us look forward to a return to the customary ways, but our social context has given us a new relationship to remote work. Some of our favorite introverts and homebodies won’t be rushing back into the office, particularly if they’ve

found satisfying means of connecting and collaborating without leaving the comfort of their home.

The return to normal, however it returns, will not be to the same for everyone, and in some ways, we may be better educators and scholars for it.

In her most recent work, The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind, Judith Butler writes about vulnerability as a human condition, one that is a prerequisite to our understanding of inter-reliance, protest, and even as a “presupposed” context of our claim to individualism and the right to exist. I’m delighted to share the news that Judith Butler is our 2022 Keynote Speaker in Baltimore, so we will have the extraordinary opportunity to discuss the reach of her work. For now, it is a timely reminder that our own interdependence and vulnerability is in fact a position of power, particularly when we use it to support and affirm the differing positions of others.

I invite you to come to NeMLA’s 2021 Convention however you are, transformed in whichever way this past year has transformed you, and know that your presence is important to us, that your colleagues are looking forward to seeing you, and that you belong. As you prepare your talks and presentations

for our first-ever virtual NeMLA convention, remember that you are among friends and that the goal is not to test the limits of technology for technology’s sake, but to break down the barriers of distance and technology-mediated interactions to gather and share our work while making sincere and engaging connections.

In closing, I ask that you make a promise to yourself: to not neglect the most important aspect of the conference. Set aside time in your schedule to attend colleagues’ presentations, to join us for the special events, to use the meet-up tools for informal coffee breaks and chats, and to stop by the exhibitor’s booths and join their Zoom room to say hi. At NeMLA, the membership is the mission, and our mission is you. Your perspective and presence are what make our vision complete.

Pedagogy and Professionalization has always been an important part of the NeMLA program, but this year we hope you’ll take special note of the workshops and sessions and join the conversation to share how you are translating the challenges of our time into inspired practices and innovative solutions.

WORKS CITED Butler, Judith. The Force of Nonviolence: An Ethico-Political Bind. London; New York: Verso, 2020.

Suzuki, Shunryū, and Trudy Dixon. Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind. Boulder: Shambhala, 2020.

NeMLA notes 81

CONTRIBUTORS

Joshua Brunetti lives in Connecticut where he serves the public as a Probate Court Clerk and teaches part-time at two community colleges as an adjunct professor of both English and Public Speaking. New to being published, his poems have appeared so far in Dual Coast Magazine (Prolific Press) and Teach.

Write. Magazine.

Delicia Daniels is a poet, essayist, and biographer. Her first publication, The Language We Cry In, was selected as the Discovery Prize winner for the 2017 Writers’ League of Texas Book Awards. Ms. Daniels is currently a Ph.D. student in the Department of English at the University of Louisiana at Lafayette.

Miles Osgood is a Lecturer for the Structured Liberal Education program at Stanford University. He is at work on a book about world literature, international sport, and the Olympic Art Competitions of 1912 to 1948. He has published essays in The Washington Post, Public Books, The Chronicle of Higher Education, and the Cantor Arts Journal. He is also designing a board game about little modernist magazines called Manifesto!

Melissa Rampelli is an Assistant Professor of English at Holy Family University. Her current manuscript examines the relationship between medical plots of pathology, gender, and narrative form in the nineteenth-century British novel.

Judith Sanders’ essays have appeared in such journals as The American Scholar, Film Quarterly, and Independent Teacher, and on the website Full-Grown People. Her poems have appeared or are forthcoming in numerous anthologies and journals, including Calyx, English Journal, and Persimmon Tree, and on the website Vox Populi. Her poems won the Hart Crane and Wergle Flomp Humor prizes. She holds an M.A. in creative writing from Boston University and a Ph.D. in English from Tufts University and has taught English and writing at Boston University, Tufts University, Bowdoin College, on a Fulbright Fellowship in France, and at independent schools in Pittsburgh where she now lives.

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