Modern Language Studies — Issue 54.2 — Winter 2025

Inside the Lady Vampire’s seventh mirror, her twin comes to greet her as the night turns over rights to the day. The sisters approach each other with appreciation and tenderness. They press the pads of their fingers together like spiders dancing on a frozen lake. Then the Vampire Lady walks away without even a wave, turns down her red lamp, slips into her slippery sheets, and enters the peacefully troubled world of dreams while the lady in the mirror shivers within her narrow room. Vydal winds her backwards clock with her left hand, reads her backwards book of poetry (I dna uoy ,neht og su teL), and pours herself a cup of mirrored tea, chilled and milky. Then her face fades into smoke, her hands into shadows. This is my story, she thinks. But no one’s ever going to publish it.

54.2

VOLUME 54, NO. 2

WINTER 2025

staff

LAURENCE ROTH EDITOR

AMANDA LENIG CREATIVE DIRECTOR

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about NeMLA

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NeMLA continues its traditions of intellectual contribution and advancement at the 56th Annual Convention, to be held March 6–9, 2025 in Philadelphia. This year's theme, "(R)EVOLUTION," asks how the Humanities—in all their infinite variations, genres, and productions—have changed (in) our world, or failed to do so, or have maybe offered more or less progressive and imaginative mappings for more or less radical change. What role can the Humanities play in society, to honor our cultural and global diversity in all its dimensions.

NeMLA is delighted to host, for the Thursday opening address, Benjamin Fraser, Professor of Iberian and Latin American Cultural Studies in the College of Humanities at the University of Arizona. His most recent books are Down Syndrome Culture: Life Writing, Documentary and Fiction Film in Iberian and Latin American Contexts (University of Michigan Press, 2024) and Beyond Sketches of Spain: Tete Montoliu and the Construction of Iberian Jazz (Oxford University Press, 2023). The Friday keynote event will be given by the celebrated and award-winning writer Julia Alvarez, author of How the García Girls Lost Their Accents, In the Time of the Butterflies, ¡Yo!, In the Name of Salomé, Saving the World, Afterlife, and a new novel, The Cemetery of Untold Stories

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An “Indefinite Line?”: Shell-shock, Disability, and the Remaking of Masculinity After the Great War

Galen D. Bunting

“Why do we feel so breathless?” Bodily Abjection as Counter-Development Discourse in Mahasweta Devi’s Short Fiction

Délice Williams

Profession & Pedagogy

Voice, Sincerity, Authenticity, and Other Half-Truths

David Galef

Special Cluster: Poetics

Hester Pulter’s Poetics of Isolation

Felicity Sheehy

Lynn D. Gilbert: Learning to See Like a Poet

Jason Adam Sheets: Encounter

Cathleen Calbert: let’s eat grandma

Siobhan Rosenthal: Diary of a Poetry Editor

Elissa Matthews: Ordinary Poems

Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer: Judges

Ars Poetica with Apologies for All of It

Zeke Shomler: The Poet Is Learning How to Seek Revenge

54.2

INTRODUCTION

In June 1922, the War Office Committee of Enquiry published their report on shell-shock and its treatment during the Great War. The controversial term shell-shock was initially coined by Charles Myers in 1915, cribbed from the lexicon of soldiers, but by 1922, the term which the War Office Committee references most often is war neurasthenia, or simply neurasthenia. In 1980, the American Psychological Association would add Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) to the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders. Like PTSD, shell-shock describes a traumatic event, but unlike shell-shock, PTSD references traumatic contexts beyond combat and war: the two terms are not equivalent, nor are their historical contexts contiguous. The Report of the War Office Committee is an apt example of the controversial nature of shell-shock: throughout its pages, the term is lambasted as an ineffectual means of describing the traumatic effects of war. While the purported purpose of the report is to describe the subject of war neurasthenia and its proper diagnosis and treatment, it also responds to worry among the families of shell-shocked men, who brought forth complaints of military negligence in treating shell-shock cases. Its unstated primary purpose is to banish doubt in the government’s ability to address cases of trauma, on a public stage.

IN THE PAGES OF THE REPORT,

witnesses expressed doubt regarding the diagnosis of shell-shock, insisting that the diagnosis served as a disguise for malingering in order to escape the front (Southborough 17-18). The Report awkwardly navigated the difference between shell-shock and cowardice, retaining an unstable juxtaposition:

Fear is the chief factor in both cowardice and emotional ‘shell-shock’ and it was for this reason that cowardice in the military sense was made a subject of enquiry by the Committee ... If the individual exercises his self-control in facing the danger he is not guilty of cowardice, if, however, being capable of doing so, he will not face the situation, he is then a coward. It is here that difficulty arises in cases of war neuroses for it becomes necessary to decide whether the individual has or has not crossed that indefinite line which divides normal emotional reaction from neurosis with impairment of volitional control. (Southborough 138-40)

Though the Report concluded that if necessary, the most conservative of treatments should take place in accordance with the lack of conclusive recovery, which was the result of most experimental methods, the trick of determining the “indefinite line” between cowardice and shell-shock fell to others (193). Parliament, the popular press, and medical professionals all debated the treatment of the neurotic ex-serviceman after the war.

In this paper, I analyze the popular response to men who fail to fit into these archetypal categories of heroic masculinity. In studying the returning traumatized soldier as a gendered archetype, I draw on the work of sociologist Raewyn Connell, who identifies hegemonic masculinity as an order of

power, a hierarchy justifying the subordination of women and marginalized masculinities. Anyone who falls outside the constraints of hegemonic masculinity is denigrated within its hierarchy, arranged against an ever-moving target: the cultural ideal of manhood. Connell traces gender configuration within three arenas: the presentation of the individual, the ideology of culture, and institutions such as the state. Collective images or models of masculinity are part of a relational model of masculinity, which upholds particular archetypes as desired ideals of what men ought to be.

The constant uneasy status of shell-shocked men represents their failure to remain within normative masculinity, troubled by a gendered sickness which falls outside the boundaries of institutional knowledge and care. As Tobin Siebers notes, “the disabled body changes the process of representation itself” (173). In some narratives of shell-shock, the traumatized returning soldier proves his manliness by wounding his psyche, yet another sacrifice allotted to the field of battle. Both clinical and juridical records question the masculine will of the shellshocked soldier. Through metaphors of the failed will, these records present shell-shock as a disease which afflicts the stuff of masculinity itself. Diagnosed with a failure to exercise the masculine will, such a diagnosis is constructed as a category of disability, and thus the rhetoric used to describe shell-shock is built on a history of representing disabled men as inherently suspicious and seditious figures. In rhetoric which confronts disabled men as untrustworthy figures, they are rendered suspicious because of their disability, seditious because of their failure to maintain a coherent hegemonic masculinity. In the following paper, I argue that representations of shell-shocked men as deceivers are influenced by the instability of hegemonic masculinity itself, its constructed status reliant on changing standards of

masculinity and femininity, and how quickly it can be awarded or stripped from an individual.

Not only did the presence of shell-shocked men challenge perceptions of imperial British masculinity, but the evolving field of psychiatry also diagnosed shell-shock as a specter of gendered failure. In thwarting the idealistic standard of a masculine will to courage, shell-shocked men were affective deserters from masculinity. In this article, I read case studies of shell-shock from The Lancet alongside the Report of the War Office Committee and newspaper articles which comment on shell-shock. Popular narratives of shell-shock, spread via the press, penalize the traumatized soldier for failing to attain hegemonic masculinity, characterizing him as a traitor or enemy of the state, a gendered failure. As Siebers shows, “The fusion between ability and sexuality appears … foundational to the nature of humanity”— requiring soldiers to retain masculine and able-bodied status, which could not be troubled by any form of indefinite line (142). Moreover, the standards by which we judge cowardice have been shaped by institutional histories, which in turn are influenced by standards of masculinity and ability. Through Mike Oliver’s concept of the social model of disability, which interprets disability within a social hierarchy of power in which disabled people are structurally excluded from participation in society, I interpret cultural depictions of shell-shock as another means of responding to hegemonic masculinity in flux after the First World War (Oliver 1024-26). In consulting these sources, I present an intertextual reading in order to illustrate how representations of shell-shock have shifted from clinical records into the public sphere, constructing shellshock as a disability of masculinity itself.

I trace the roots of this diagnosis to Victorian medical frameworks of mental illness which blurred lines between mental and physical disabilities, to

the emergence of eugenics as a field of study which portrayed all people with disabilities as threatening and menacing. Victorian conceptions of wellness and ability also influenced literary depictions of men with disabilities, who are often portrayed as menacing and threatening to the security of others. In locating the case of Private Harry Farr within this complex network of power, I draw on these examples to argue that shell-shocked men threatened a treasured Victorian ideal of masculinity, power, and imperial might, which was primarily located in what many clinicians referred to as “the will.” I argue that medical and institutional narratives worked together to construct shell-shock as an etiological category, categorizing the returning shell-shocked soldier according to hegemonic masculinity, an archetype of dominant masculinity which rewards those who are able to attain it, while penalizing those who fail to meet its fluctuating standards.

SHELL-SHOCK AND ITS ORIGINS

In February 1915, psychologist Charles Myers published a paper in The Lancet entitled “A Contribution To The Study of Shell Shock: Being An Account of Three Cases of Loss of Memory, Vision, Smell, and Taste.” During his work as a military doctor in France and as a specialist commissioned by the Royal Army Medical Corps (RAMC), Myers observed and recorded the symptoms of patients who had diminished sensory functions and memories (317-18). Men suffered from a range of symptoms, including fatigue, poor sleep, nightmares, jumpiness, and somatic pain and disabilities (Jones and Wessely 23). Myers tentatively associated these symptoms with the shock of falling shells, but was cautious to avoid assigning any definitive answer for these symptoms, though he

surmised, “The close relation of these cases to those of ‘hysteria’ appears fairly certain” (320). Myers adopted the term ‘shell-shock” from the parlance of soldiers: his study brought the term into institutional use (Myers, Shell Shock in France). Through his research on the French front, Myers understood these symptoms as the expressions of a repressed traumatic neurosis manifesting as disability, not a personal failure (317-18). Myers realized that men who experienced psychiatric symptoms were often placed out of sight: in one case, he discovered that the psychiatric ward of the Boulogne military hospital was consigned to a top floor, where inmates were subject to the sound of constant bombing. Myers set out to reform the RAMC, in order to offer adequate psychiatric care.

Shell-shock was far from a new affliction for returning soldiers. In 1688, Johannes Hofer wrote of “nostalgia,” or a deep despair or depression experienced by troops stationed far from their homes with no prospect of leave (Anspach 380, Jones and Wessley 2). Hofer believed such nostalgia was caused by pathological memories of home. During the American Civil War, cases of nostalgia were recorded among Northern troops who were stationed in Southern states without regular mail service in both 1861 and 1862 (Jones and Wessley 3). British soldiers fighting in the Crimean War experienced combat stress and exhaustion manifesting as physical symptoms. Men were admitted to hospitals for “palpitations,” despite lacking a history of cardiac problems, as recorded in the Report of the Hospitals of the Army in the East (Da Costa).

Myers took steps to reform the military psychiatric system by opening a small number of specialist units ten miles away from the trenches for traumatized men (Jones and Wessely 26). Such units were called “Not Yet Diagnosed Nervous (NYDN)

Centers” in order to avoid terms such as shell-shock or war neurosis in the interest of promoting an atmosphere of wellness. Official classification differed across units and individual cases, which complicated treatment for soldiers. In cases where shell-shock had been sustained in direct combat, the diagnosis of “shell-shock” was appended with the letter “W.” Myers argued that this system of marking soldiers was discriminatory towards battle-exhausted soldiers; it also risked confusion with shell concussions. Instead, Myers preferred the term “nervous shock” (Shell Shock in France 92-94). In 1916, the category of “shell shock (sick)” was coined as an official diagnosis to mark those shell-shock sufferers whose symptoms could not be directly traced to involvement in battle (Jones and Wessley 24). The unstable nature of shell-shock as a category of treatment reveals the difficulty of assigning these symptoms to a single etiological category. The difficulty in containing shell-shocked men within a single category was indicative of a larger problem: their status as disabled men was unintelligible, and thus they were unable to receive treatment.

Medical historians have interpreted shell-shock through the codes of nineteenth-century masculinity. As detailed by Tracey Loughran in her monograph, shell-shock posed a challenge to “the critical signifier” of British masculinity: shell-shock constituted a loss of will (151). While the place of the will differs across medical literature, medical theories often placed the emotion and the will on a continuum which, if unbalanced, could result in shell-shock: Loughran identifies descriptions of struggle and battle between the two faculties as a consistent rhetorical strategy (154). Loughran argues that shell-shock was a diagnosis under development, and as such was shaped by its cultural context. Shell-shock spans the gap between older conceptions of masculinity and

challenges to those traditional ideals. My provocation exists in that contradictory space, in the gap between tradition and modernity, and what tradition can teach us about what purports to be modernity. The crisis of modernity might just as easily be understood as a crisis of masculinity—the failure of the heroic masculinity of the soldier was replaced with the figure of the returning, shell-shocked soldier. While the mentally well soldier might wield sovereign masculinity, the shell-shocked soldier’s masculinity is suspect, due to his disability, resulting in fear and anxiety over public male disability.

Eric Leed and Elaine Showalter were among the first to argue that shell-shock thwarted earlier codes of British masculinity. Leed’s No Man’s Land: Combat and Identity in World War I (1979) argues that the industrial trench combat of World War I proved detrimental to the psyches of men who took part in it. In Leed’s estimation, shell-shock formed an escape from such combat. Showalter reads shell-shock along hysteria as a stigmatized and gendered disability. She argues that shell-shock served as a physical complaint against both war and manliness itself, figuring shellshock as resistance to the expectations of masculinity (172). Leed and Showalter rely on gendered case studies to argue for a widespread model of marked masculinity and effeminacy in treating shell-shock. Through the social model of disability, the cultural archetype of the shell-shocked veteran troubles the cultural codes through which masculinity and war are read. While the mentally well soldier might wield sovereign masculinity, the shell-shocked soldier’s masculinity is suspect, due to his disability. Next, I focus on the ways in which disabled men were read through older codes of understanding disabled masculinity as inherently suspicious—and how quickly the gendered status of hegemonic masculinity (the war hero) could be awarded and then revoked.

MALINGERING AND THE TREACHEROUS MAN AT WAR

On October 16, 1916, Private Harry Farr was shot at dawn for “[t]he charge of ‘cowardice’” (Wessely 440). During the Battle of the Somme, Farr’s battalion (1st Battalion West Yorkshire Regiment) had been ordered to go forward to the front line from the rear position. Farr first asked for permission to fall out the morning of the attack, on the grounds that he did not feel well. His request was denied, and on the night of September 17, Farr refused to go forward to the front lines, saying that he “could not stand it” (440). Farr was subsequently arrested. He faced a Field General Court Martial, a trial designed for its speed (Corns and Hughes-Wilson 89). The FGCM had no lawyers, but instead employed a brigade commander, a captain, and a lieutenant (Putkowski and Sykes 17). Farr did not choose a “prisoner’s friend” to defend him, an option available to soldiers facing a FGCM (Putkowski and Sykes 14), but chose to represent himself, saying that “being away from the shell fire I felt better” (Wessely 440). This testimony did not help him. His commanding officer registered the first comment, saying, “I cannot say what has destroyed this man’s nerves, but he has proved himself on many occasions incapable of keeping his head in action and likely to cause a panic” (440). General Cavan registered the following comments: “The charge of ‘cowardice’ seems to be clearly proved ... The G.O.C. 6th Div. informs me that the men know the man is no good. I therefore recommend that the sentence be carried out” (440). Between August 4, 1914, and March 31, 1920, 312 men would be executed for wartime offenses (Putkowski and Sykes 11).

Farr’s case was unusual, not only for the swiftness of the sentencing, but also due to the fact that Farr had been diagnosed with shell-shock, resulting in at least three hospitalizations (Wessely 442). After his arrest, no medical examination followed (Putkowski and Sykes 121). In the comments of his trial, Farr is marked first as a man with destroyed nerves and then as a coward, recognized by his fellow soldiers as a man who “is no good.” Farr’s inability to remain calm in the face of shells was enough to confer status as a traitor, and he was sentenced to death by firing squad. Though shell-shock was, by this time, noted in the medical journal The Lancet, the diagnosis did not save Farr from the firing squad. As an invisible disability, shell-shock proved stymying for officers and doctors to address at the front. Allegations of malingering were common and prevented soldiers from receiving treatment. Disability scholar Ellen Samuels calls this insistence on visual disability a fantasy which “seek[s] to definitively identify bodies … and then to validate that placement through a verifiable, biological mark of identity” (2). Under the punitive label of “malingering,” which acted as a general term for either physical or mental rebellion, shell-shock received scrutiny as a form of noncompliance: it presented bodies which could not be identified. Regardless of intent, soldiers were subject to mutiny laws for any form of noncompliance with military orders. In the case of Private Harry Farr, the diagnosis only compounded his status as being “no good”—and led to his execution as a traitor (Wessely 440).

Shell-shock’s complex presentation of symptoms was at odds with a medical system which diagnosed one cardinal symptom, and shell-shocked men experienced a cluster of ongoing symptoms, ranging from physical paralyses, blindness, amnesia, and anesthesia. Thus, their failure to comply with military

protocols placed disabled men within a category of treason: those who could not or would not face the fight. Katherine Ebury argues that popular texts “influenced the representations of the military death penalty,” and many of these texts avoid language of diagnosis in favor of characterizing these men as deserters and cowards. During the war and peacetime, malingering was an offense against the state and against one’s fellow man, a form of gendered treachery. Historian Joanna Bourke presents shirking and malingering as two manifestations of physical rebellion to the duties of war: shirking is the bodily evasion of duties (desertion, forging of names on rosters, sneaking out of barracks) while “the malinger’s protest centred on his body”—the physical resistance of the body to avoid being recruited, or to be sent home (81). On the front lines, voluntary or involuntary attempts to elude military service presented the threat of treason. The institutional record of malingering attempted to contain those who exhibited symptoms of mental illness, along with those who attempted to physically escape from the trenches. Under this category of containment, shell-shocked men were seen as traitors and therefore not worthy of care.

In 1914, treatment of both physical and mental health reflected influence from Victorian ideas of wellness, which was shaped by eugenics as a theory of health. Two common frameworks governed medical understandings of mental illness: alienism and neuropsychiatric Darwinism. The core tenet of alienism was “psychophysical parallelism,” in which closed mental and physical systems worked closely without interacting with one another in a healthy man (Clark 275-76). In a mentally ill person, the mind was thought to lose autonomy, spilling over into the realm of the physical, resulting in what was termed a “lesion of the will” (Smith 165). Alienists

believed that it was imperative to treat the body while training the moral character of the will (Smith 167). At the forefront of psychiatric Darwinism loomed the societal threat which the mentally ill presented. Francis Galton argued in Hereditary Genius (1869) that mental and physical ability are both inherited, therefore rich able-boded people should reproduce, while the poor and mentally ill should be prevented from having children. Karl Pearson, who worked in Francis Galton’s laboratory, argued that “the habitual criminal, the professional tramp, the tuberculous, the insane, the mentally defective, the alcoholic, the diseased from birth or from excess” all fell into the category of the unfit (qtd. in Kevles 33). Pointing to this usage of the bell curve, Lennard Davis shows how eugenicists used deviations from the “norm” to argue that anyone who deviated was therefore a “defective,” a category which included physically disabled people and mentally ill people (7). These early psychiatric practices located trauma not in the brain, but in the body, as a physical disability, which needed to be proved for an audience, just as shell-shocked men had to prove themselves to be shell-shocked in the eyes of their doctors, their superior officers, and in the eyes of pension officials, in order to receive care. The eugenic term degeneration was first coined to describe accidents of modern travel, the diagnosis of railway spine. This modern disability straddled both physical and psychological symptoms, since, as John Eric Erichsen surmised, “the helplessness of the suffers and the natural perturbation of mind” could “greatly increase the severity of the resulting injury to the nervous system” (9). In his book L’Homme Criminel (1876), Cesare Lombroso attempted to link social delinquency and criminality with immutable traits. Lombroso argued that criminals exhibited facial and physical features which

set them apart from “honest” people (314): he identified so-called “atavistic” features to argue that criminals were biological throwbacks (230). Drawing on Lombroso’s theories of biological determinism, Max Nordau argued in his book Degeneration (1892) that shaking of railway cars pervaded the male body with tremors, leading to a breakdown in nerves. Nordau brought the eugenic term degeneration into common use, blaming railway spine for increasing decadence in the modern male, a complete breakdown in not only nerves, but morals and genetics as well. While the term degeneration was used to refer to gender and sexuality, eugenicist Henry Maudsley also drew upon Lombroso’s and Nordau’s theories to typify mental illness, calling it “a disease of the so-called immaterial part of our nature we may look upon as exploded even in its last retreat”: that is to say, a genetic and moral problem (16). Lombroso’s and Nordau’s theories of degeneration exerted influence upon theories of mental and physical illness throughout the fin de siècle, tying disability to the industrial effects of modernity. During the trial of Oscar Wilde, theories of degeneration were used in congress with theories of decadence: Michael Foldy elucidates how these theories worked together to shore up hegemonic masculinity and to penalize effeminacy (70). As Sharon Snyder and David Mitchell show, eugenicists offered categories like feeblemindedness to identify the “concept of substandard labor capacities”—that is, disability was measured based on one’s perceived ability to be a productive worker, of use to the state (Cultural Locations of Disability x). Like railway spine, shell-shock affected men’s ability to serve of use to the state. The search for the somatic source of mental illness offered a chance to avert the societal threat which mental illness presented. Through these frameworks, the reproductive futures of those typified as mentally and physically unfit menaced the security of British civilization and empire.

The figure of the disabled man was particularly

threatening to the state, not only as a potential drain, but a figure of national unrest. In the 1840s, Henry Mayhew conducted exhaustive interviews with laboring men and women of London for the newspaper The Morning Chronicle, which would later be collected in his book, London Labour and the London Poor. Mayhew frames these oral histories in detailed initial remarks which appraise each subject’s worthiness and willingness to participate in labor and thus bolster the stability of national economy. Mayhew treats blind men who work on the street with suspicion, framing these men as both dependent and possibly feigning disability in order to garner illicit gains. Samuels refers to this fear of abled people masquerading as people with disabilities “the disability con” (28). As threats to the state, the disabled masculinity of these men positioned them as dangerous figures. Representations of disability contributed to the intelligibility of a disability category: physically and mentally disabled characters in popular literature posed a threat to the continuing industrial capacities of Britain.

In Victorian fiction, disabled men signaled a treacherous unrest. As Martha Stoddard Holmes argues, in Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens, the amputee Silas Wegg runs a street-stall, but his central form of economic stability is through bilking the rich, thus serving as a threat to the stability of the state. Other Dickens antagonists who are also characterized by their disability as a moral and physical affliction include Daniel Quilp (The Old Curiosity Shop) and Wackford Squeers (Nicholas Nickelby). These characters serve as imposters who simultaneously threaten the wellbeing of the state and threaten the wealth of good-hearted but unwise benefactors. These novels do more than provide examples of disabled figures, but also serve to demonstrate the thematic establishment of the normal versus the aberrant figure of the disabled man. Through his unwillingness or outright adversity

to employment in an industrial trade, the figure of the unproductive and unfit man was an economic and reproductively threatening figure to the success of British progress.

The Victorian philosophy of muscular Christianity tied together athletics and morals in fiction. Stemming from the work of Christian socialist Charles Kingsley, muscular Christianity is an expression of physical prowess and athleticism which stands in for greater discipline of body, mind, will, and morals (Ladd and Mathisen 13-14). Writer Thomas Hughes embraced the ideal of muscular Christianity as a tool for schoolboys, to build both physical strength and moral values. In Tom Brown’s School Days, published in 1857, the titular Tom Brown must face the pain of the bullying Flashman. When he refuses to hand over a ticket for a favorite competitor in a horse race, Flashman deliberately burns him: however, despite this pain, Tom and his “chums” triumph over the cravenly bully (Hughes 200-202). Similarly, the pain of war promised to bestow young men with the proof of their masculinity through the ideals of courage, sacrifice, and camaraderie (Mosse 108). George Mosse argues that willpower, ability to control and deny bodily pain, and courage were all components of European masculinity, which were reinforced through sports as well as popular narratives (Mosse 101). Muscular Christianity exemplifies what disability scholars Mitchell and Snyder call “ablenationalism,” which joins physical productivity with “hyper-market-driven-identities” ( Biopolitics of Disability 10). Since the theory relies on physical ability as an expression of moral fortitude and strength of will as a means to build proper British masculinity, those who are unable to wield physical ability are therefore excluded from it.

During and after the First World War, innovations in medical technology allowed more soldiers to survive and return home, leading to the emergence

of the disabled returning soldier as a figure in literature. With Wyatt Bonikowski, we see “the importance of the shell-shocked soldier, as a historical and a literary figure, in raising the problem of the effects of war on the mind” (1). The figure of the returning soldier was often afflicted by both mental and physical disability. Soldiers returning home continued to suffer from modernized warfare: shattered nerves, physically disabled bodies, and other ill effects. The figure of the returning soldier is a recurrent one throughout Ernest Hemingway’s writing. Jake Barnes in The Sun Also Rises and Frederic Henry in A Farewell to Arms return home with visible injuries from the First World War. In Hemingway’s short story “Soldier’s Home,” Harold Krebs is no longer able to feel love for anyone as a result of the war. The figure of the returning soldier, despite serving national interests in war, is beset by lingering war trauma.

Even when the trauma of the returning soldier is unnamed, his masculinity and ability to defend the state is damaged by his invisible disability. Rebecca West’s 1918 novel The Return of the Soldier features Captain Christopher Baldry, who has lost his memory of the past fifteen years. His cousin Jenny and former sweetheart Margaret Grey must manage his trauma of the war. Though Chris’s memory loss is not directly linked with the medical discourse of shell-shock, his unnamed invisible disability marks him as “not quite a man” in the eyes of others (West 80). Though Baldry is not distressed or pained by his lack of memories, his perceived ability to conform to the ideal of manliness is affected as a result of his disability. Disabilities resulting from the First World War impacted the returning soldier’s ability to function in society, along with his perceived manliness.

Returning soldier Septimus Smith struggles to reintegrate into English society in Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. His memories disorder the temporal chronology of the narrative itself. After

the eugenicist Dr. Bradshaw diagnoses him with “a case of complete breakdown—complete physical and nervous breakdown” and threatens him with institutionalization, Septimus Smith kills himself (Woolf 146). The interruption of doctors’ voices and his official diagnosis both demean Septimus’s masculinity and mars Septimus’s ability to communicate. The public nature of Septimus’s suicide disturbs the murmurs of society during Clarissa Dalloway’s party: the shell-shocked soldier’s death exposes the stability of post-war peace as a façade.

“THE MAKING OF A BRAVE MAN”:

THE MASCULINE WILL AT WAR

To respond to allegations of malingering, doctors adopted detection techniques to ferret out men attempting to escape from service. On January 27, 1915, one of the first articles to name war neurasthenia in The Times of London was a report on a speech by John Collie, entitled “Fraudulent and Neurasthenic Cases.” In this speech, Collie portrays neurasthenia as a disorder produced by self-delusion and genetics: “nine-tenths of the subjective symptoms were the result of auto-suggestion” which he cedes to the “limited” intelligence of “working-class people” (5). In Collie’s estimation, neurasthenia is the “voluntary surrender … of all will-power,” and as such is difficult to untangle from malingering (5). Before the war, Collie had been a part of civilian pensions boards, finding instances of malingering in factories and in other areas where mechanized labor was common, and had published Malingering and Feigning Sickness in 1913. Collie, who later accepted a role as the President of the Special Medical Board for Neurasthenia, likely gave the talk as he was revising the manuscript. He published a new edition

of the book in 1917: doubled in size, the book contained an entry for war neurasthenia. Through this book, Collie draws on methods he used to determine malingering in cases of civilian laborers who allegedly injured themselves in order to receive monetary compensation from their places of employment. Here, I point to the work of disability scholars Mitchell and Snyder, who show how modern industrialization excludes people with disabilities from “normative modes of participation” (Biopolitics of Disability 38). Overwhelmingly, laborers who fell under suspicion of malingering worked in physically demanding and mentally taxing industrial environments, such as factories or mines. As an intentionally lethal environment, the industrial space of modernized warfare became yet another arena where men who exhibited disability fell under suspicion. Even some of the press coverage which stressed kindness and sympathy towards wounded men assigned gendered messages to the role of a man during war and his duty to the state. On May 25, 1915, an article on the subject of “Battle Shock” appeared in the London Times. Written by an unnamed medical correspondent, this article praised the care which soldiers were able to receive on the battlefield, including medical care for so-called “Wounds of consciousness.” These wounds of consciousness are wrought upon the essential structure of the brain, the writer argues: “the primitive instincts and emotions are qualities of this undermind, and fear is the strongest of the primitive emotions” (11). After establishing that fear makes up a “primitive” emotion, the writer describes “the making of a brave man” under the subheading “THE ELEMENTS OF COURAGE” (11). While the writer indicates that heredity, environment, and sociopolitical class all play a role, a brave man must first be “governed by a will which has its strength in his conscious life,” keeping his “primitive” emotions in check (11).

If this brave man is “wounded in his consciousness” and experiences psychological trauma, “the soldier ... becomes a prey to his primitive instincts,” an “emotional organism” (11). Without the regulatory impulse of the will, the writer depicts the traumatized man as only an emotional organism, less than human and at the whim of his “innate” qualities (11). In this article, the will is posed as an essential element of bravery in regulating fear. In comparison to the will, fear is a primitive emotion which holds sway over the traumatized man and saps away his humanity. Under the influence of fear, the traumatized soldier lacks the essential component for courage: strength of will. This article portrays that the objective of psychotherapy as a treatment for shell-shock is to instill “cheerfulness and encouragement,” reassuring the reader that in therapy sessions, the will is “stimulated to full activity” (11). Thus, this article poses shell-shock as a problem of war which is easily solved through quick diagnosis, effective treatment, and prompt recovery and return to the front. In laying out medical responses to shell-shock, the author stresses the rejuvenation and remaking of the will. Psychotherapy, thus, becomes the solution to the troublesome absence of the will. It exists, like a spur, to stir the quiescent will into action and thus remake the masculinity of the nerve-stricken soldier.

THE REPORT OF THE WAR OFFICE

COMMITTEE: NARRATING SHELL-SHOCK

In guarding against shell-shock, the Report of the War Office Committee amasses the testimonies of forty-six (of the fifty-nine) witnesses into summaries and direct quotes. As Ben Shephard points out, this inquest was the result of pressure for an enquiry into the judicial record of the Army during wartime:

Southborough, a former civil servant, volunteered to head the committee in order to dispel any doubts about the inaccuracy of the term “shell-shock” (138). Myers refused to appear on the committee, nor as a witness, despite his experience in coining the term and in proposing treatment regimens. Throughout the war, officers had regularly dismissed his efforts to reform psychiatric care: Myers reflected in his memoirs that he found the prospect of giving his statement “too painful” to withstand ( Shell Shock in France 141).

The Committee met officially from September 7, 1920, to June 22, 1922, calling fifty-nine witnesses to appear before the committee in a series of forty-one sessions (Bogacz 238). Of the named witnesses, eighteen are identified as holding medical degrees or working as physicians or researchers, seventeen are identified as officers or high-ranking officials in the Army, and eleven witnesses both hold medical degrees and served as officers or otherwise saw military service. These forty-six witnesses each provide a working definition for shell-shock, explain the effects of shell-shock upon the psyche or upon the morale of the troops, and explain means of detecting and treating shell-shock. Across this body of testimony, the question of how to separate fear or cowardice from shell-shock governed whether a war-traumatized serviceman would receive appropriate medical treatment and a pension. In peacetime, Peter Leese argues that the shocked soldier could no longer rely on the military efficiency to which they had been accustomed: instead, they were thrown into a series of bureaucratic procedures instituted by the Ministry of Pensions while seeking compensation (123). In other words, this “indefinite line” between cowardice and neurosis determined the material care which the state must render up to its traumatized subjects (Southborough 180).

The War Office Committee had one stated goal: to settle the debate surrounding shell-shock. Had the Army been fair in dealing with shell-shock cases, in the ad-hoc legal system used during the war? Such a question was a matter of public opinion, as Ted Bogacz details (250). Men blindfolded and shot at dawn for public cowardice could have possibly been shell-shocked veterans—and if so, the Army was liable for their inability to properly care for nerve-wracked men. As they assembled the report, the War Office Committee accounted for the fears and questions of the public. In establishing the definition of shell-shock, the Report is more than a clinical transcript of hearings: it is intended to demonstrate a sum total of what is known on the topic of shell-shock. Through the introduction, the Committee explains that the report is structured in the format of “the best connected story” (Southborough 12). Thus, the Committee shapes and assembles the raw material of the hearings into a non-sequential, non-comprehensive narrative, which summarizes quotations and “evidence” in “practical unanimity” (12). In unifying each statement, the Committee curates words from each witness in a deliberate fashion, to support a coherent definition of what it means to be shell-shocked. In each testimony, witnesses propose reasons for the symptoms they observed on the field. General Henry Sinclair Horne, who had accompanied Lord Kitchener to the front, found it probable that “miners and agricultural labourers, and men who lived open-air lives, such as shepherds and game keepers were less liable to the disorder than the clerk or artisan” (16). For Lord Horne, shell-shock is a matter of constitution: sturdy men, those unaffiliated with administrative jobs within the city, are less likely to show symptoms of shell-shock. Horne equates mental stability with bodily ability and therefore lack of

disability. Horne’s description of urban men as more prone to disorder recalls Nordau’s equation of degeneration with industrial modernity.

At least one witness explained the phenomenon of shell-shock with eugenic hypotheses. Professor G. Roussy of the Faculté de Médecine de Paris, who had served as a consultant in neurology to the French army during the war, was invited to give his testimony. In the Report, Roussy indicates that the “vast majority” of those who suffered psycho-neuropathic disorders were “predisposed” to such disabilities on the basis of heredity (19). Roussy isolated cowardice as a subject of inquiry which physicians must consider when determining a diagnosis: “any man who can control himself is a courageous man, but the man who runs away, or who does certain other actions not esteemed worthy is defined as a coward. A courageous man is a man who can exert his self control” (21). In Roussy’s analysis, the question of “self control” is a deficiency in the cowardly man, a missing element, functioning as a deficiency in the masculine will. As many witnesses questioned by the War Office Committee, Roussy does not define a strict line between cowardice and shell-shock, admitting the difficulty in distinguishing between the two. Though he agrees there was not much malingering, he argued there was a great deal of “voluntary and intentional exaggeration of a real disorder; and ... voluntary and intentional prolongation of a real disorder”—and if soldiers knew that a pension could be secured, Roussy argues that more malingering cases would increase (20). In Roussy’s estimation, shell-shock occupies an indefinite position between genetic proclivity, cowardice, and malingering: an overtly negative construction. The dichotomy between a

“cowardly” man and a “courageous” man was one which defined the focus of the War Office Committee’s inquiry. Roussy’s testimony provides a working definition of cowardice which directly relies on eugenic theory to define masculinity.

Out of the fifty-nine witnesses, six had experienced shell-shock. Of those six, only one witness is named, though not as a traumatized soldier. Squadron Leader W. Tyrrell, of the Royal Air Force, delivered his statement as an army doctor, observing shell-shock and its treatment in the field. When he turned to the subject of shell-shock, he spoke at length of his own experiences in breaking down. Thus, the Committee included both his statement on his time as an army doctor and his anonymous statement on experiencing shell-shock. His is the only statement quoted at length, while the rest of the statements (including the words of a man who was awarded the Victoria Cross, the highest military decoration of the British Armed Forces) are presented as a summary, without direct quotations. Thus, Tyrrell’s statement is distinct, not only for its volume, as it is presented uninterrupted by committee summary for three pages, but for its presentation, as it is framed as a relic which was obtained by pain, the words of a “gallant officer,” and thus a credible form of representing the experiences of all shellshock sufferers (89). Tyrrell’s testimony is pivotal in establishing war trauma as a disability which could affect all at the front.

In order to be a credible witness of shell-shock, Tyrrell must demonstrate he no longer suffers from shell-shock; moreover, all witnesses examined in the process of the Report were currently under treatment for war trauma (Reid 76). As the only narratives of shell-shock, witnesses proved both their previous trauma and their current ability to provide labor in the future. In effect, the narratives

presented before the Committee reinforced the idea that shell-shock is a problem to be solved, not a disability which continues to affect people’s lives. As proposed by Oliver, the social model of disability demonstrates how disabled people are systemically isolated from engaging with public society. Though the social model of disability does not address every condition of disability or every experience of disability, the shell-shocked soldier faced material oppression on the basis of disability in a similar fashion. Categorizations of shell-shock served to push disabled combatants to the margins of society and bar them from means of accessing a pension, and otherwise served to structurally prohibit them from remaining an active part of their communities. The War Office Committee’s report could have put such debates to rest. Instead, the report serves as a case study of how military institutions assessed the traumatized returning soldier after the war: as a threat to the stability of the state and as possible traitors to the nation. Furthermore, the conflation of shell-shock with cowardice reveals how the War Office Committee thought about this disability: as a site of possible treason and unmanly behavior.

CONCLUSION

The aftermath of the First World War brought attempts to understand the comprehensive effects of shell-shock, to delineate “the indefinite line which divides normal emotional reaction from neurosis with impairment of volitional control” (Southborough 180). In the end, the report declared, “Witnesses were agreed that any type of individual might suffer from one or other form of neurosis if exposed for a sufficient length of time to the conditions of modern warfare” (92). Though the report acknowledged that

any man might succumb to the industrial bloodbath of trench warfare, the report attempts to divide cowardice from trauma in defining shell-shock as a disability. To separate male cowardice from shellshock proved difficult when nineteenth-century notions of the will and martial masculinity were embedded in a masculine demonstration of ability, thus placing cowardice in a subaltern category of inferior masculinity.

Before the term “shell-shock” was ever coined at the beginning of the First World War, the Victorian ideal of the masculine will shaped public conceptions of combatant masculinity. The choice to fight was an act of masculine heroism and duty, an ethical burden which a man chose as a potential sacrifice on behalf of Britain. Choosing to serve as a combatant was a manly exercise of the will, which was an instrumental component of British masculinity. Capacity to exercise one’s will represented one’s personality, one’s ability for agency—in short, one’s ability to decide and choose. Choosing to serve as a combatant was a manly exercise of the will, which was an instrumental component of British masculinity, demonstrating Mitchell and Snyder’s concept of “ablenationalism” (Biopolitics of Disability 10). This concept of the will, as I have endeavored to show, has been shaped by eugenics, in which people with disabilities are systemically excluded from public society. The emergence of muscular Christianity in Victorian England also encouraged this view of the will as an expression of physical prowess and ability. This understanding of the will as a voluntary exercise of masculinity is important in understanding the Report of the War Office Committee and its accompanying testimonies, as both texts portray the neurotic ex-serviceman as both a traitor to his gender and a traitor to his country in the aftermath of the war.

In 1915, John Herbert Parsons would diagnose shell-shock as proving the worth of men: a man who became “an emotional animal” lacked the fortitude of will to continue on (61-64). Representations of shell-shocked men were informed by eugenic constructions of disability: when mapped onto the male body, disability became a specter of dependence. And when the mental deserter was considered to be as bad as the physical deserter, malingering became a form of treachery. In these popular representations of shell-shock, the soldier who required a pension was seen as a shirker: at best, he was recovered; at worst, he was bilking the government of pension money through his diagnosis. In containing the trauma of homecoming soldiers, the War Office Committee dealt with the difficult task of defending the court-martials which had occurred during the war, while reckoning for the shell-shocked men in need of continued psychiatric care who were denied pensions. In the end, the War Office Committee’s report bolstered the decisions of the military during war, not the shell-shocked, disabled man. Today, the shell-shocked soldier still governs our understanding of trauma, not only during the First World War, but in colloquial usage, where “shell-shock” remains shorthand for deep unrest and disturbance.

Through the popular archetype I have traced in this article, the shell-shocked soldier became a literal gender traitor. If the strength of the will was the highest order of British masculinity, then the breaking of the will placed the shell-shocked soldier on an evolutionary lower order of being, demoting him to a state of pre-civilization and disarray. For British physicians addressing shell-shock cases, the restoration of the will (and the reconstruction of masculinity) was the goal of treatment. The traumatized soldier is only offered conditional masculinity, as in the case of Tyrrell. When his trauma is no longer abstract, when his disability inconveniences others, he becomes a traitor or enemy of the state, a gendered failure. Hegemonic masculinity is conditional, and thus the masculinity of the shell-shocked soldier is similarly conditional. In the end, the War Office Committee’s report takes a defensive stance towards the treatment of shellshocked men. It is intended to reinforce a category of disability, to impose order upon the disorderly bodies of shell-shocked, disabled men. To evoke shell-shock today is to reference a category of disability which is overwhelmingly gendered as male, a category of gender failure that stands in as metonymy for the trauma of war.

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IIn the introduction to the English translation of her collection Bitter Soil, Mahasweta Devi declares that “the sole purpose” of [her] writing is to expose the many faces of the exploiting agencies,” to “peel the mask off the face of the India which is projected by the Government, to expose its naked brutality, savagery and caste and class exploitation; and place this India, a hydra-headed monster, before a people’s court, the people being the oppressed millions” (ix-x). The fierce directness of her declarations testifies both to the intensity of her commitment, and to the staunchly activist bent of her prolific 60-year career as a writer. Devi’s fiction and drama, like her journalism, stages such unmasking as an ethical and political intervention on behalf of those “oppressed millions” who have yet to achieve and enjoy the full benefits of modern Indian citizenship. Her extensive archive addresses bonded labor, sexual exploitation of tribal women, police corruption and misconduct, and government suppression of armed liberation movements—all of the mutually reinforcing factors that combine to create a matrix of structural and systemic violence. She is especially pointed in her critique of the policies of the Indian state, whose combination of malign neglect, active political disenfranchisement, and socioeconomic marginalization relegates tribals and lower caste groups to what she calls “backwardness.” A significant current in her body of work concerns the human and ecological costs of extractivist practices such as

mining and timber production. These two elements, her “broadly counter-developmental” stance (Huggan and Tiffin 19) and her attention to ecological violence, are intertwined. She frequently depicts development as itself a violent project, the traumatic effects of which are felt both by humans and by non-human nature.

Despite this fact, as Chitra Sankaran notes, Devi’s contributions to ecocritical discourse have been under-explored until recently in the Western academy, where her body of work has “mostly been analyzed from the postcolonial angle,” thanks in large part to the elaborate framing for that work provided by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s English translations (17#). Jennifer Wenzel and Alan Johnson have departed from the trend in their attention to the representation of the forest in Devi’s fiction. (See Johnson’s “Sacred Forest, Maternal Space, and National Narrative in Mahasweta Devi’s Fiction” and Wenzel’s “Forest Fictions and Ecological Crises: Reading the Politics of Survival in Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Dhowli’” and The Disposition of Nature .) And Sankaran’s own recent volume, Women, Subalterns, and Ecologies in South and Southeast Asian Women’s Fiction (2021), argues for more analyses of Devi’s work that attend to its ecofeminist perspectives on environmental crisis. Although I developed this project well before encountering Sankaran’s volume, my argument here moves in the important direction that she has identified. Indeed, I would submit that, residing as it does at the intersection of postcolonialism and ecocriticism, Devi’s work anticipates the combined perspectives that we now label “postcolonial ecocriticism.” Well before the emergence of that field, her texts frequently “balance[d] human and non-human environments” (Banerjee 196) and helped to expand what Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley term the “normative ecological subject” of Western ecocriticism

to include abject populations such as Indian tribal communities (qtd. in Banerjee 197).

In addition, Devi’s environmental writing forecasts and shares many concerns with that of Arundhati Roy, whose nonfiction since 1999 (Nixon 153) also takes up the cause of the “refugees of India’s ‘progress’” (Walking, 43) and vigorously contests state-sponsored development projects like the dams of the Narmada Valley, which have wrought so much ecological devastation and human suffering. Devi’s critique of development differs from Roy’s, however, in at least two important ways. First, whereas Roy expresses deep suspicion of virtually all forms of development, Devi suggests that a form of development could be beneficial to tribals and other marginalized groups. In particular, she argues that tribal communities suffer because patterns of land ownership have not been modernized, especially in areas such as Palamau, where the stories in Bitter Soil are set (viii). The result of this failure to enact “[s]ystematic and thorough land reform” since 1947 is what she terms “lop-sided development” (viii). In her view, inadequate land reform is a failure of Indian modernity that leaves the country “basically feudal” (viii). A second notable difference between the two authors is that Devi focuses more on the local and regional operations of the state and much less on the role of multinational corporations or international organizations like the World Bank and the IMF in steering the violent project of development. As Rob Nixon notes, Roy situates development in a global context, emphasizing the role of “transnational funding structures” (211) as she seeks “to expose the collusions between a fascist strain of Hindu nationalism at home and neoliberal globalizers, notably the megadam boosters at the World Bank” (155). There remains, however, significant overlap between Devi’s ethical commitments and those that Roy takes up almost a generation later.

Both authors work to advance the “environmentalism of the poor,” using their writing to stage what Ramachandra Guha and Juan Martínez Alier have called “a defence of the locality and the local community against the nation” (18)—and, in Roy’s case, a defense against the allied forces of neoliberal global capital as well.

Roy has received significant popular and critical attention internationally for writing that has increased visibility and amplified the voices of the Narmada Bachao Andolan movement in the Narmada Valley in the 1990s and the voices of Maoist fighters targeted by Operation Green Hunt, which began in 2009. I would argue that Devi’s work deserves the same consideration, especially from postcolonial ecocritics interested in mapping the development of environmentalism on the subcontinent. Moreover, given that much of Devi’s early writing about tribals and forest (mis)management in West Bengal coincides with the Chipko forest preservation movement that emerged in the 1970s in Uttar Pradesh, it seems important to include her in considerations of wider environmental movements in India.

Wenzel has attended to Devi’s depictions of forests in short fiction such as “Dhowli,” “Douloti the Bountiful,” and “Draupadi.” I believe Devi’s lesser-known works would reward similar engagement. Part of my effort here is to invite more of such attention. I concur with Wenzel’s opinion that Devi’s “work is important for scholars who would challenge the limitations of earlier ecocriticism and advocate a broader agenda of global environmental justice” (137). As I discuss later, Devi’s work renders the violence of development in imaginatively vivid and morally urgent ways, often by illuminating the ways that development disrupts relations between human bodies and non-human nature in marginalized communities. I believe her precise and forceful

articulations of the connections linking development discourse, environmental violence, bodily abjection, and what I would call political abjection make hers an essential voice in the history of environmental activism in India. Indeed, I would argue that her central contribution to the discourse of environmental justice in India is to disrupt the master narrative of development in the modernizing state—a generation before Roy—by emphasizing the perspectives and experiences of the nation-state’s abject others, its “uninhabitants” (Nixon 152), or those Thayer Scudder terms “developmental refugees” (qtd. in Nixon 152).

Before proceeding with this analysis, I wish to note here that my deployment of the term abjection is based on Julia Kristeva’s conception of the term as articulated in Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection . Following Kristeva, I emphasize the somatic dimensions of the abject: the body damaged, violated, approaching death, and rejected because of its condition. After Kristeva, I also use “political abjection” to name the condition of exclusion from conceptions of the modern state despite persistence within the domain of the state. I believe Devi’s depictions of tribal populations in the texts I discuss here emphasize the link between the bodily suffering and this political situation. The rich theorization of the postcolonial abject is a related subject that I do not have room to take up in this discussion.

In what follows, I read across Devi’s generically diverse body of environmental writing in selected English translations in order to trace her representations of abject bodies in the context of environmental crisis. I begin with a brief overview of her treatment of environmental violence in her nonfiction. I then go on to offer detailed analyses of the ways that four of her lesser-known texts deploy depictions of the physically abject body to explore and interrogate the linkages between ecological

violence, government-sanctioned structural violence, and political abjection from the modern state. In offering this analysis of a sampling of Devi’s drama and fiction, I adopt the approach described by Graham Huggan and Helen Tiffin in their volume Postcolonial Ecocriticism, “taking full account of the literary qualities of writing that is often assumed to be purely instrumental” (43), and focusing on “the aesthetic function of the literary text while drawing attention to its social and political usefulness” (14).

I wish to highlight the richness of Devi’s aesthetic choices and, in doing so, to avoid the potential oversimplifications of the writer-activist label that Roy has so forcefully problematized.

IIIn her nonfiction, Devi documents local and regional examples of Indian development’s failures and sleights of hand. For example, in her 1983 article, “A Countryside Slowly Dying,” she details air and soil pollution produced by a cement factory in Singhbhum (58). Remarking in another interview about Singhbhum, Devi underscores her sense that tribals have been excluded from modernity: “The entire Singhbhum district is minerally rich. India makes progress, produces steel, the tribals give up their land and receive nothing,” she notes. “They are suffering spectators of the India that is traveling toward the twenty-first century” (Imaginary Maps xi). She adds that tribals “have not been a part” of

decolonization in India (xi). In “Palamau, a Vast Crematorium,” Devi again emphasizes the devastating environmental effects of clearcutting and burning forests, noting that “[m]uch money flows through government department channels…in the name of tribal development,” and thousands of rupees “had been spent for the ‘upliftment and development’ of a certain area but the money had been pocketed by a few individuals” (Dust 87-88). In the brilliantly titled piece “Eucalyptus: Why?” (1983) she describes the severe and far-reaching toll that monoculture focused on an invasive tree species has exacted on Indian forests and waterways. Articles and essays like these serve important documentary and archival functions, as Devi draws on what her editor Maitreya Ghatak calls “her intimate knowledge of ground realities” to give the lie to official discourses of development (Dust vi). Nixon has argued in Slow Violence that the pursuit of development in projects necessarily involves the expulsion or “imaginative displacement” of whole populations who are already physically displaced or otherwise alienated from their home environments by such projects (161). Devi’s nonfiction clearly works against such displacement by creating an archive that bears witness to the effects of environmental violence on local spaces and bodies.

I now turn to Devi’s drama and fiction, which serve as the aesthetic complements to her journalism. Although her fiction often operates in the same social realist or journalistic mode, that style is accompanied by the deployment of non-realistic patterns of imagery that allow her to articulate even more nuanced and emotionally rich analyses of the predicament of India’s politically abject subalternized populations and ecological refugees. I maintain that the deployment of embodied abjection, by which I mean her representations of the human body pushed to the limits of its own materiality, serves several important functions in

her work. First, it allows her to recode and re-present the structural and physical violence that also lies behind the mask of development. In fact, I would argue that abject human bodies in her imaginative works are central to her efforts to articulate and analyze the enmeshment of environmental justice questions with questions of justice in its socioeconomic and political forms. Put another way, questions of social, political, and environmental justice all converge on the abject body in much of her drama and fiction. Secondly, these abject figures help her to dramatize the processes of and psychic responses to the violence of development because they contribute to her depiction of the unsettled and unsettling relationship between tribal and low caste figures and the places in which they live. Thirdly, her depictions of abject bodies prompt us to confront the fact that environmental crises are symptoms of political and social crises, and the depictions require us to confront the scale, complexity, and differentiated distribution of the costs of environmental crisis. Consequently, I believe that attending to her representations of such bodies allows us to appreciate the sophistication of her understanding of the flaws in development discourse.

The remaining sections of this article offer ecocritical readings of four texts in English translation: her play Water (Jal) and the stories “Salt” and “Seeds” from her collection Bitter Soil. In the final section, I also discuss “Little Ones,” a narrative in which the themes and motifs in the other texts converge in Devi’s especially forceful critique of the relationship between tribals and the modern state. Several other works, including her more widely read pieces, “Draupadi,” “Douloti the Bountiful,” and “Pterodactyl, Puran Sahay, and Pirtha” would reward such analysis. However, I have selected these lesser-known texts for the imaginative nuance and ethical urgency with which Devi articulates her analysis of political abjection and environmental injustice.

“Salt”

“Salt” focuses on a deprived rural population subject to the whims of a local landowner to whom virtually every villager is indebted. The setting is the tribal community of Jhujhar, “not a large village situated on the rail or bus routes,” just a village “of 76 people belonging to 17 families” (126). Ignored by the government and alienated from land by Hindu traders whom Devi describes as buying up their “land hand over fist” (125), the villagers of Jhujhar find themselves caught in a social and economic system that renders them virtually invisible. Their predicament leaves them especially vulnerable to environmental pressures: caught between the Forest Department that ignores their needs and a landowner who has them firmly in the vise grip of debt, they depend on a forest in which they are “allowed to graze cattle and goats,” but they must resort to “steal[ing] bamboo, tubers and tamarind leaves” (124). Even non-human nature seems to operate against them: “they rarely manage to snare any meat. Because the animals are now too alert. They can’t be trapped easily” (125).

Dependent for subsistence on land they do not own and a forest they are not allowed to manage, the tribals are unable to operate with full autonomy in relation to either one. As a result, debt and poaching are their only alternatives to starvation. This is the case because of government forest management practices that ignore their needs and traditions, and because of the bethbegari or bonded labor practices that are supposedly illegal. Modern forest management and economic and legal systems leave them trapped in premodern servitude, barely able to live above subsistence. The state of systemic crisis comes to a head when the Kol and Oraon peoples of the village attempt to assert their rights as sharecroppers and do “the unimaginable” (125)

by refusing to pay back loans with bonded labor. In response, Uttamchand, the landowner, vows “to kill them by salt” (128). Out of that shrewd and fateful decision, tragedy unfolds as the population discovers the economic and physiological impact of Uttamchand’s action. The villagers are eventually driven to ask to be paid in salt, undervaluing their labor by offering to trade it for “the cheapest commodity in India,” but they are quickly rebuffed by the contractor (129).

As Devi recounts the unraveling of their plans, she foregrounds the bodies of these politically and socially abject beings: “why do we feel so breathless? So listless?” the priest complains, “Everyone feels that salt is not the cause” (129-30). Later, other workers complain, “We can’t breathe easily, and bearing loads makes our limbs ache” (137). In drawing attention to their distressed and deteriorating bodies, Devi emphasizes that in a subsistence economy, financial costs are physical ones, taxes on the body. Devi adds a complicating layer to the compound in crisis by having the villagers misread that crisis: they attribute their listlessness to angry gods. In fact, a young villager who tries to get at the truth about the relationship between salt deprivation and their feeling of lethargy is thwarted by the arrogance of a medical student who fails to explain the physiological dimension of the problem adequately:

What can go wrong if one doesn’t eat salt? What can go wrong? If you eat high calorie foods instead, you’ll be able to make do with a minimum salt intake.

Arrey, there are people who have no connection with calories. Yes, yes, Indian people don’t have proper food habits.

Arrey, the people I’m talking about ...

The youth realises that all this boxing with shadows will end in his getting a headache. (132)

The exchange would be comical, were it not for the fact that lives are at stake.

Desperation leads the villagers to turn to the forest, which should be a refuge and a source of nutrients. They discover the salt lick of a rogue elephant, and begin stealing “dirty lumps” of saltearth (129). However, their theft in turn creates other disruptions in the human and non-human world, this time in the movement of a nearby elephant herd: “A kind of tension was created in the Forest Department and slowly began to increase, centered around this elephant,” Devi notes, “The ekoa [rogue elephant] had grown suspicious. So had all those [elephants] who came to replenish the salt licks ... Everything seemed topsy turvy” (138). Matters come to a head when the ekoa attacks the village:

The elephant is the largest animal that walks the earth ... So, when Purti turned around, it seemed to him as if the ancient Palamau Fort itself was coming toward them. From very close, an elephant looks even larger than it really is. The elephant attacked in silence, but the three men shrieked and shrieked … The human shrieks are swiftly felled into total silence. Then, the elephant rends the sky, trumpeting in almost human glee, and stamps off, trampling the forest underfoot. (143)

Three tribal men, desperate for salt, are reduced to “smashed, trampled human bodies” (144). The elephant that killed them, now labeled a danger to humans, is in turn shot by the Forest Department. Devi’s coda to this tragedy draws our attention to another dimension of her account of the tribals’

predicament: officials and others trying to make sense of the series of events fail to identify its root causes, accusing the men of being drunk and tampering with “nature”:

The herbivorous animal needs salt, and now man steals even that! This unnatural act reminds them once more of how difficult it is to protect wild animals from the greed of humans ... The apparent truth is that the elephant died because it killed Purti and the others. But the underlying truth seems to be something else … Someone else was responsible, someone else. (144-45)

This reading of events frames the matter as a conflict between tribals and elephants, in which tribals are at fault. However, Devi locates the problem elsewhere: not in the tribals’ exploitation of nature, but in violent human action from which repercussions radiate outward, ultimately claiming human and non-human lives. Devi emphasizes that the disrupted relationships between human and non-human nature, brought on by economic and legal injustice in the human social world, ultimately bring human and non-human nature into conflict. The version of events recounted in the passage quoted above effaces these truths.

In “Salt,” Devi presents her readers with a tragedy of compounding crises: land alienation, forest mismanagement, animal abuse, and debt bondage combine to result in two horrific events: the unnecessary killing of the elephants (supposedly justified because they attacked humans) and the reduction of Adivasi people to mute, “smashed…bodies” (144). Both acts of violence are incorporated into another narrative that deliberately distorts events by accusing the village community of exploiting animals by stealing salt from them. This misreading adds epistemic violence to the physical and economic

violence already at work. As Wenzel notes in her reading of this narrative, “The prevailing common sense about cheap salt and vulnerable elephants evicts the adivasis from their own knowledge; they are excluded from what passes for reason and common sense” (“From Waste Lands” 166). The narrative, however, insists on the interrelatedness of the forces that combine to disrupt the tribal relationship to the non-human world, as tribal peoples are pushed into a fraught relationship with animal life. Humans and non-humans suffer as a result. Moreover, Devi leads us to understand that while the scenarios she depicts may be imagined, the forces at work against these tribal populations are painfully real. Put another way, what happens in this narrative is not entirely impossible. This proximity to the actual material experience of tribal peoples—proximity that affirms the life-threatening nature of the conditions under which many tribal groups continue to live—lends the narrative its power as a work of imaginative and ethical intervention.

Water(Jal)

An essential promise of development discourse is that development will move people out of the precarious state of a subsistence economy. However, in Devi’s view, such a promise remains unfulfilled, even when it comes to meeting basic needs like the need for water. Jal, her 1976 play, centers around that need in a drought-stricken village. The factors working against her main characters are familiar ones for readers of her work: corrupt local officials, a wealthy landowner, the tendency among some tribal peoples to attribute their trouble to divine rather than human causes. In her treatment of these figures in this play, however, her approach is multilayered: she frames the environmental justice

problem not only in terms of human barriers to rightful access to water, but also in terms of what she sees as problematic traditional beliefs, as well as disturbances in tribal relationships to the supernatural.

The villagers at the center of the play feel the push and pull of these different pressures, a fact that emphasizes a prominent motif in Devi’s fiction: the difficulty in perceiving political and social problems as political and social, not spiritual or supernatural. Unlike some of her other work in which she dismisses traditional belief as dangerous superstition (see, for example, her 1987 article “Witch-hunting in West Bengal”), here she offers a more nuanced view: her treatment of the problem of water access emphasizes the importance of combining traditional knowledge with modern technology, traditional faith in a river goddess with secular forms of protest and organized resistance. Water is set in the town of Charsa, where the hard-pressed Untouchable community devotes most of its energy to finding and fetching water. In the opening scene, Devi frames the problem not in terms of drought, but in terms of unjust policy. One of the three Naxalite operatives asks Dhura, the son of the water diviner, “Water’s your greatest problem, isn’t that so?” “We don’t know what water is,” Dhura replies. But when the second operative declares that “this area’s terribly dry underneath,” Dhura retorts, “Who says so? ... You can’t learn everything from books. My father, Maghai Dome, knows all about water. Every year he spots the place, and the Santosh digs, and there’s a new well” (95). Asked to properly identify the source of their water problems, he replies, “they won’t allow us to touch it. Even at the government wells we aren’t allowed to draw water. That’s why we have to go and dig at the sands of Charsa” (95-96). Thus, the problem is not nature (drought and aridity), but social prejudice, compounded by political neglect by a local government that

does not ensure that all citizens in the area can exercise their right to access public resources. Development, which is supposed to bring this access, is undermined by other countercurrents that it has failed to adequately address.

Even as drought hovers in the background as a material substrate for the crisis facing the villagers, who lament that they have “never known a drought like this” (102), their chief obstacle seems to be the village Santosh in whose wells “all the water is held captive ... Like a pack of whores” (106). It is worth noting here that this metaphor for water as a feminized and sexualized being appears throughout the play. Phulmani, Maghai’s wife, calls the river Charsa her “co-wife,” and a “whore,” complaining to her husband when the river is in flood stage: “All that water, all the load of water that she puts on show now, why does the whore keep it hidden throughout April and May, the summer months? Your Charsa is mighty jealous of women. I dig and dig with my bare hands, and for me she has only a trickle” (124). Maghai in turn complains to the river that “for water [he has] to scrape at [her] breasts,” waiting for the Charsa to “flirt with [him]” (125). Water in the form of the river and associated rainfall is depicted as a powerful, fickle, and promiscuous feminine agent, operating on whims that seem to be above and separate from the economic and political pressures that make accessing that water difficult at most other times of the year.

Maghai can see the question of water access only in these mystical terms. However, his wife, Phulmani, although she offers prayers and songs to the Charsa, perceives the other source of their trouble: “All the wells were dug with money from the government for drought relief,” she says at one point “in a steely voice.” “If you go by the law, all the public wells belong to the public. But there’s Santosh. The

great Santosh-Babu … His needs come before everybody else’s, and he needs a lot of water” (119).

Earlier in the play, she makes a similar declaration from her secular perspective: “This husband of mine is a water diviner, he worships the water, draws out the hidden water. But I’ve never sung to his tune” (104). She offers this bitter prayer to the heavens in the same scene: “God, you are not there. If you had been there once, you’re dead now. Else how’d Santosh alone have all your water, your gift to all living creatures?” (106). As the one responsible for “scraping” to find water for the family every day, Phulmani is the one most keenly aware of the double burden of drought and denied access to the wells. Her voice offers a powerful witness to the injustice to which the play brings the audience’s moral attention. Thus, even as Devi acknowledges the cultural and social value of Maghai’s priestly romance with the divine river, she uses characters like Phulmani to keep in view the social and political causes of the water problems facing the village. There is an additional layer of complexity to the dynamic surrounding these questions about why water problems in the village exist. Santosh denies the villagers access to most wells, but he also depends on Maghai, the water diviner, to locate new areas in which to dig wells every year. For his part, Maghai continues to help Santosh even though he is never paid for it. His reason? Divine injunction that sealed

his fate. As he recounts to his son Durha, the goddess, the nether Ganga, spoke to his earliest ancestor and enjoined him that “whenever men dig for a well or a pond, you’ll gather the offerings, pray for water, and go around looking for where the water lies beneath till I tell you where to dig” (111). “How can we charge for water?” Maghai asks, “It’s forbidden. And that’s why we’re fated to go hungry” (111). Santosh of course capitalizes on this belief: “You’ve only yourselves to blame [for the drought],” he tells Maghai and the others at one point, “You’ve given up your religion, all your old rites. And that’s why the drought’s so awful (102). This is obfuscating and self-serving on its face. However, we later learn that Santosh actually has more faith in the power of the water diviner than he does in the geoscience behind the government’s modern blasting and drilling techniques for finding and digging wells. Respect for the water diviner’s abilities also comes from another figure, Jiten, who declares, “you blast the earth to divine water. [Maghai] draws on the knowledge he has inherited from his ancestors to divine water … There must be a scientific explanation for his knowledge” (117). He adds later that “someone like Maghai can have both knowledge and culture. They have a mind like a continent that no one has cared to explore” (117). Just as she acknowledges the cultural value of belief in the river goddess, here Devi affirms that such knowledge might be more than cultural, that it might be modern and “scientific” in its own right.

Despite the potential value of this knowledge, the pressures from drought and limited access to water exert themselves in increasing intensity that is registered by the bodies of the villagers. They face the intensive labor of digging for water: “I’ve done enough scraping in the sand bed of the river for water,” one woman laments. “My fingers are sore. I can’t anymore” (105). Similarly, another male villager admits that he

seems “to have no blood in the body any longer, all the blood seems to have run out as sweat” (120). Maghai himself almost collapses when he comes in one day, declaring, “All the water in the body is running out, and my head is spinning!” (120). The body— laboring, thirsty, deprived—registers the toll taken by this environmental crisis. Indeed, the play includes almost no descriptions of the toll drought takes on the land, only on the human body.

A glimmer of hope arrives when Jiten learns of a plan to “solve the problem of water” (134). He advises the villagers to work together to build a dam using only rocks to catch the monsoon water and create a more reliable source of water throughout the year. This solution involves no “blasting and drilling,” it requires communal effort, and it respects the river’s supposedly fickle ways. It seems perfect. Even Maghai is overcome with glee at the prospect: “I can see the dam, it’s all there, it’s real, we have built it now,” he declares. “We’ve taught the whore of the Charsa a lesson at last, she won’t keep us in the throes of her bitter, dry love anymore” (135). They almost succeed. But Santosh, determined to prevent them from cutting the cord of dependence on him, arranges with local police to destroy the new dam. In the skirmish that ensues, the remaining rocks give way, and Maghai is “snatched” away by the rushing river (146).

I read this ending as Devi’s declaration of her understanding that environmental justice matters are not merely matters of economics, culture, or government responsibility—they are all those things together, and the pressures exerted by all of these factors are undeniable. Fickle mother nature—or anthropogenic climate change—leave vulnerable populations even more vulnerable to drought; the Santoshes of Devi’s India can take advantage of that, and tribals themselves have knowledge and collective power that holds the

potential to address their environmental vulnerabilities. However, in the absence of practical support and protection from the government (the good kind of development), tribal communities are in an all but impossible situation. The play serves to make that predicament visible while recognizing the value of the cultural resources that many of these communities bring to their effort to understand and respond to their environmental trouble.

In my discussion of Water and “Salt,” I have worked to show that these counter-narratives about Indian modernity’s abject others depict such others as inhabiting spaces in which their relationship to non-human nature has been disrupted because of systemic, economic, and physical violence. Such disruption, I maintain, is the defining feature of these relationships. Furthermore, I have worked to show that the bodies of these socially abject figures are the sites on which the toll of environmental injustice is taken. In these final sections, I turn to two texts, “Seeds” and “Little Ones,” works of short fiction in which tribals appear as more than mere victims of structural and physical violence. In these works, Devi goes beyond the project of representing environmental injustice and instead offers visions of what an insurgent tribal subject might be. The abject body of tribal and lower caste villagers figures even more prominently here as Devi mobilizes them to represent such insurgent subjectivity.

“Seeds”

Landscape is the central image in the opening scene of “Seeds.” Devi begins the narrative with these lines: “the land north of Kuruda and Hesadi villages is uneven, arid, sunbaked. Grass doesn’t grow here even after the rains” (21). In the midst of this is an

“eerie” “splash of green,” a fallow field on which there is a “most unsettling” thatched hut that appears troubling because it should be watching over crops, but there are no crops in sight (21). Although it is supposedly empty, this is a disturbed landscape. It is a space of possibility whose lack of agricultural productivity is cause for anxiety and suspicion. Devi adds to that sense that something is awry here by offering a side note that even without crops, the land still holds potential: “there are only stray aloe plants, leaves thorny like pineapple,” but such plants hold unrecognized value: “elsewhere in the world, the fibre from these plants makes extremely strong ropes,” but “In India, they are dismissed as wild bushes” (21-22). The space therefore appears to be both mismanaged and misunderstood. Onto this scene steps Dulan Ganju, an old man with “skin gnarled and knotted.” Dulan guards this not-quiteempty patch of land every night, even though everyone else considers him crazy for doing so. Slowly, Devi reveals more details that make the scene and the space perplexing. For example, this land has been given to Dulan free: he is not just guarding it but refusing to farm it, and he did not want to accept the land when it was first given to him.

The narrative goes on to explain the complex system of “gifting” land to poor villagers in order for owners to get rid of infertile tracts while appearing to be benevolent. Dulan is able to turn this into a profit, borrowing money to buy seeds he does not plant, securing government loans for cows he does not buy or set to graze there. The value and purpose of the land seems to have more to do with its role in facilitating petty corruption than with anything having to do with farming, conservation, or nature at all. Eventually, we learn that the land is a hiding place where the original owner, Lachman Singh, buries the corpses of two men he has murdered and pays and threatens Dulan to stand guard over them.

We thus learn the real causes of the disturbing features that Devi introduces in the opening scene: the unsettling landscape conceals histories of violence and intimidation, and Dulan is in fact a hostage on land he supposedly owns. Devi pauses to point out that signs of development are arriving in this rural village: “rail tracks are laid,” local officials “are given special powers to immediately investigate, take action, prepare cases for court, in atrocities against Adivasis and harijans, [and] a well is dug” (36). The area, she states, “attempts to limp toward modernity.” But Lachman Singh easily gets away with murder, and his power seems to be increasing. The clear suggestion is that that fact alone undermines any claims that legal, political, and even infrastructural development mean anything at all. Lachman Singh is the underside of development, and, as Devi makes clear from the beginning, his actions have upset the usual patterns of relationship between farmer and land. That disruption leads to internal psychic disruption for Dulan, who struggles to conceal “two corpses beneath his heart” (35).

Trouble comes to the village when some villagers begin agitating for higher wages. As this occurs, Devi pivots to have Dulan notice “huge trees” when he visits a friend’s compound: “Such tall papaya trees are rare. He says -how did this papita tree grow so tall, Babu?” (39) In response, he receives this answer: “during the summer they would shoot mad dogs and dump them in the hole there. Trees are bound to grow well if they’re fertilized by rotting bones and flesh” (39). “Does it make good fertilizer?” Dulan asks. “Very good. Haven’t you seen how flowers flourish on the burial mounds of poor Muslims?” (39). Meditating on this, he concludes, “Yes, true enough! Karan and Bulaki [the two corpses] are

now those putush bushes and aloe plants!” (39) Moved to tears, Dulan offers a prayer of sorts: “Karan, you haven’t died even in death. But these putush bushes and aloe plants are of no use to anybody, even buffaloes and goats don’t eat them. You fought for our rights. Why wouldn’t you turn into corn or wheat? Or, at the very least, China grass? So we could eat ghato made of the boiled seeds?” (40). He decides to buy seeds and farm the land, and nature seems to cooperate with his plans. “After two years of drought - famine - crop destruction, this year the earth generously floods the land with paddy. Paddy fields disappearing into the horizon, punctuated with rows of machaans. Birds feed on the ripening paddy all day and night (44). Monsoon rains and “autumn dew” bring even more lushness, as even “the aloe plants and bushes stand arrogant, like rampant jungle. The bushes are bursting with putush flowers” (46).

Devi gives us powerful, if grotesque, images here, linking death and violence to agricultural bounty. Moreover, she simultaneously invokes and obscures images of what I believe is the ultimate form of abjection: human bodies being reduced to fertilizer. The horrific irony of the fruitful farmland nourished by the corpses of murdered young men

who were fighting for the villagers’ rights signals the profound distortion of the relationship between the terrain and the members of the community who inhabit it. The scene also foreshadows the story’s end. When Lachman Singh kills Dulan’s son and buries them in the same patch of land, Dulan “decides to go mad” (50), planting rice in an area Lachman Singh ordered him to leave fallow. He confronts Lachman Singh in the same area, telling Singh that he has “harvested enough” (53). After he kills Singh by smashing his head in with a rock, he buries him in the same patch of land. Lushness and fruitfulness come from the corpses of his enemy and his sons, whom Dulan has “turn into seed” (56), sharing his harvest with the rest of the village.

Although Devi does not evoke images of the abject body with visual descriptions of the corpses, these figures nevertheless encode the violence that constantly threatens the lives of the villagers. They also encode the possibility of liberating retaliation through similarly violent means. That is to say, the corpses of Lachman Singh’s victims, visually displaced by the lush plant life, reveal to Devi’s readers the extent to which violence permeates the lives of many communities. At the same time, the displacement allows Devi to turn that violence on its head and depict for readers a scenario in which marginalized figures use violence to exercise agency to liberate themselves from the violence that threatens them. Horrific though it may be, violence serves a restorative function here because it allows Dulan to alter and revitalize his and his community’s relationship to land from which they had previously been alienated.

“Little Ones”

“Little Ones” crystalizes many of the patterns I have discussed so far. It also features the confrontation

between those whom Devi calls “mainstream” Indian subjects (Maps, x) in this case government officials, and abject tribal others who have been victimized by extractivist government practices. In these encounters, the officials must confront the suppressed reality that their coherent vision of India as an orderly modern space is predicated on the effacement of the nation’s “uninhabitants” (Nixon 151), tribals, lower castes, and rural poor—those whose interests and rights, Devi contends, have too often been over-ridden by the nation-state’s construction of itself as a modern entity.

The narrative opens with a description of a traumatized landscape of the village of Lohri, a small, isolated Adivasi community:

The entire area is a burnt out desert. As if the earth here bears a fire of unbearable heat in her womb. So the trees are stunted, the breast of the river a dried out cremation ground, the village is dim behind a film of dust. The earth is a strange color. Even in the land of red earth, such a deep brownish-red is rarely seen. Of course, before fresh blood dries and congeals, it turns just such a dark, lifeless red. (Devi 1)

Devi’s apocalyptic description suggests a history of violence, and indeed conjures up images of a violated body. In fact, the bodies of Lohri’s inhabitants offer no contrast to the devastated terrain. The inhabitants, all near starvation and dependent on government relief, appear to the relief officer as “near-naked, shriveled, worm ridden, swollen-bellied Adivasi men and women” (2). The sight of these “dark, emaciated, and silent” people (10) in this “arid, uninhabitable place” repels him (2). The shock of seeing them is particularly strong because Hindi films had given him “the impression that Adivasi

men played the flute and Adivasi women danced with flowers in their hair, singing, as they pranced from hillock to hillock” (2). Lohri and its residents seem to be so desperate that they are beyond the redemptive possibilities of government development and relief efforts. “Even if you give those damned people land,” one officer complains, “they sell it off … They stare at you wide-eyed and ask, Where’s the water?” (3). He adds that even when given more, they sell the land anyway and go into debt so that they can eat until the harvest (3). Readers of Devi’s fiction and nonfiction would recognize that the officer’s description of events omits some crucial details about land alienation, social prejudice, and petty corruption in local government, all of which would contribute to the scenario that the officer describes. The blame for the Aagariya people’s condition, we understand, lies elsewhere. Devi soon explains that a local official, looking to extract iron ore in Lohri, blew up a sacred burial ground, bringing on the village, the people believe, a curse that continues to haunt the terrain and those who struggle to live on it. Haunting is an important concept here, because Lohri is rumored to be a haunted space in which spectral “little boys and girls” (“Little Ones” 7) arrive at night to steal relief supplies. Nixon also invokes the specter when he refers to people like the villagers as the “ghosted casualties” of development (Nixon 151).

In the narrative’s climactic moment, the relief officer comes face to face with a group of these figures, naked, grey-haired, stunted beings, females with “sagging breasts” and males with “dry, shriveled” penises (“Little Ones” 18). These are the remnants of a group of Aagariya who had escaped to the forest when the government blasted their sacred hillock. They have barely survived in the forest, depending on theft and help from their

fellow tribals to keep them alive. The relief officer is shocked, not only because of their appearance, but because of their gleeful declaration: “we protected the sanctity, and honour, of our sacred hillock by cutting you down; and since then, we’ve been forest-dwellers. No one was able to catch us. Not one politician or sipahi, no one! The old man laughs. Everyone laughs … the ghostly laughter spreads” (19). (For a more detailed reading of the abject body and insurgent subjectivity in “Little Ones,” see Williams, “Figuring Resistance: Abject Temporality and Subaltern Agency in Mahasweta Devi’s Short Fiction.”)

These abject beings seem to be declaring a kind of victory, even though their original group has been reduced to 14, and even though they are all severely malnourished. They are claiming that their survival by itself is a victory, and by stealing Milo (a chocolate malt beverage) and rice, they intend to keep on living: “we must eat and grow again, mustn’t we?” (20). The officer perceives the meaning of their laughter and menacing approach as they crowd around him. He hears “the terrible glee of a few adult children. The glee of revenge realized. The glee of hacking off the enemy’s head in revolt. Counterviolence, revenge. Against what? Against his 5-foot9-inch being. Against the natural growth of his body” (20). What he perceives is that his India, the India of development and relief and government schemes, has destroyed the Aagariya’s physical and spiritual habitat and left these people to starve. Their bodies and his testify to the differentiated distribution of rights and resources between these two Indias. In a moment that we might read as an instance of ecogothic horror, Devi mobilizes the abject tribal body here to confront “mainstream India” (her term) with this vision of its excluded other, the other that it has displaced and effectively sent into exile, even as the country might pride itself on extending relief

efforts to these supposedly “backward” populations (Maps, xvii). The stunted and revolting Aagariya body is the correlate of the lush rice paddy and aloe plants in “Seeds.” Both signify the resurgence of figures who have been pushed to the limit by structural and physical violence.

Conclusion

In my discussion of these four texts from Devi’s extensive body of work, I have traced the contours of her substantial contribution to the discourse on environmental justice, particularly as it relates to India’s most marginalized groups. I believe that an important part of her literary and political legacy is her disruption of narratives of development, especially as they involve politically abject communities. The abject body, I maintain, is a key element in her disruptive project; it encodes the violent disruption of the relationship between indigenous peoples and their home spaces. I would also emphasize that her work frequently foregrounds environmental justice as a casualty of the dominant models of development and modernity. In doing so, it provides sociological and imaginative resources for confronting the imbrications of the project of development and the state of environmental crisis. Ultimately, Devi’s fiction and nonfiction remind us that the apocalyptic scenarios of environmental devastation many of us fear are already being lived through by many indigenous, poor, and lower caste Indians. Devi’s writing does more than just sound ethical alarm bells, however: it also advances the important work of creating spaces for environmental justice communities to have their voices amplified. The moral urgency of that work prompts her readers to move, as she did for over 60 years, beyond words and into the realm of ethical action in the name of more comprehensive and resilient forms of environmental justice.

WORKS CITED

Banerjee, Mita. “Ecocriticism and Postcolonial Studies.” Handbook of Ecocriticism and Cultural Ecology, edited by Hubert Zapf, De Gruyter, 2016, pp. 194-207.

DeLoughrey, Elizabeth, and George Handley, editors. Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment. Oxford UP, 2011.

Devi, Mahasweta. Bitter Soil: Stories by Mahasweta Devi. Translated by Ipsita Chandra, Seagull Books, 2002.

---. Dust on the Road: The Activist Writings of Mahasweta Devi, edited by Maitreya Ghatak, Seagull Books, 1997.

---. Five Plays. Translated by Samik Bandyopadhyay. 1986. Seagull Books, 1997.

---. Imaginary Maps: Three Stories by Mahasweta Devi. Translated and introduced by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Routledge, 1995.

Huggan, Graham, and Helen Tiffin. Postcolonial Ecocriticism: Literature, Animals, Environment. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2015.

Guha, Ramachandra, and Juan Martínez Alier. Varieties of Environmentalism: Essays North And South. Earthscan Publications, 1997.

Johnson, Alan. “Sacred Forest, Maternal Space, and National Narrative in Mahasweta Devi’s Fiction.” ISLE, vol. 23, no. 3, 2016, pp. 506-25.

Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. Columbia UP, 1982.

Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard UP, 2011.

Roy, Arundhati. Walking with the Comrades. Penguin Books, 2011.

Sankaran, Chitra. Women, Subalterns, and Ecologies in South and Southeast Asian Women’s Fiction. U of Georgia P, 2021.

Wenzel, Jennifer. “Forest Fictions and Ecological Crises: Reading the Politics of Survival in Mahasweta Devi’s ‘Dhowli’.” Postcolonial Ecologies: Literatures of the Environment, edited by Elizabeth DeLoughrey and George Handley, Oxford UP, 2011, pp. 136-56.

---. “From Waste Lands to Wasted Lives: Enclosure as Aesthetic Regime and Property Regime.” The Disposition of Nature: Environmental Crisis and World Literature. Fordham UP, 2020, pp. 141-94.

Williams, Délice. “Figuring Resistance: Abject Temporality and Subaltern Agency in Mahasweta Devi’s Short Fiction.” South Asian Review, vol. 37, no. 2, 2016, pp. 9-27.

54.2

profession & pedagogy

Voice, Sincerity, Authenticity, and Other Half-Truths

David Galef, Montclair State University

MANIFESTO

Every semester in my creative writing workshops, we hold a session devoted to voice: how to recognize an author’s voice, what it means to have a voice, finding one’s voice, and so on. Over the years, the discussion has shifted from personality and performance to identity politics and cultural appropriation. It’s complicated.1 The term voice in literature has several meanings: from syntax and diction to tone, from personality on the page to the recognizable signature of a writer. But what inevitably follows, in many creative writing workshops these days, is the equation of voice with sincerity and authenticity. The trouble starts with urging budding writers to speak in their own voice as a means of developing their style, though the two terms are close to synonymous: writing that’s truly characteristic of who the writer is as a person. The argument equates art with truth, always a dubious proposition, and proceeds from there.

Some creative writing instructors, writers themselves, simply echo what they’ve been taught or how they write, or else quote from a handbook. In her bestselling writers’ guide Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott devotes a section to “Finding Your Voice,” in which she talks about the seductive styles of Isabel Allende and Ann Beattie and declares, “the truth of your experience can only come through in your own voice” (199). Given how beginning writers try on others’ mannerisms, this directive is understandable. But the equation of voice and style with truth and authenticity is an aspect of Romanticism still with us more than 200 years after Wordsworth’s Preface

to Lyrical Ballads. It reaches its 20th-century apogee with the confessional poets, blurring persona and author in Plath, Sexton, and Lowell, whose work is inseparable from their own feelings, their own lives. It exists in opposition to critical pronunciamentos like T. S. Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” in which he declares, “Poetry is not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion; it is not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (43).

Though not quite in either camp, I do, in idle moments, think of founding a fictional school of poetry, in which all declarations in the poems are taken as fancy rather than fact. In fact, there’s a long tradition here, and it’s why Plato banished the poets from his Republic: because they told lies. As Shakespeare’s Touchstone declares in As You Like It, “the truest poetry is the most feigning” (862).

At the risk of committing 21st-century heresy, I would like to make this claim: voice in one’s writing style is a projection, a role, not an inescapable aspect of one’s race, gender, class, or religion. And the style it rests upon, the way the words are assembled, may also be a choice.2 For a more elegant way to put it, Susan Sontag’s essay “On Style” is useful: “Style is the principle of decision in a work of art, the signature of the artist’s will” (32). Yet how artists exert control over their art may have little to do with how they manage their lives. In fact, one may be a cover for the other. Such seeming faithlessness has become anathema in art.

Where did we get this preoccupation with sincerity? In Sincerity and Authenticity, Lionel Trilling

notes: “at a certain point in its history the moral life of Europe added to itself a new element, the state or quality of the self which we call sincerity” (2). He notes the word’s etymology, sine cera, “without wax,” i.e. whole rather than patched up, and traces the word’s rise in English to the early 16th century. Originally applied to objects, it came to mean lacking pretense or falsity. It seems like an admirable trait or at least one that people pay lip service to. In fact, artful imitations of sincerity may be more effective than the real, bumbling thing. As André Gide once remarked, “One cannot both be sincere and seem so” (qtd. in Trilling 70).

SOME BACKGROUND

Is a sincere voice appearance or reality? A play such as Hamlet focuses mercilessly on the trait of sincerity but comes up with no easy answers: is Polonius’s directive “to thine own self be true” (923) a testament to the power of sincerity or a mockery of it? I can’t quite answer that question but can point to Polonius’s ignoble end and to the person who kills him, Hamlet, who remains maddeningly true to himself—unless it’s only an act, a belated triumph of voice.

Later in our cultural history, the values persist, but the terms change. To quote Trilling again: “A very considerable originative power had once been claimed for sincerity, but nothing to match the marvellous generative force that our modern judgement assigns to authenticity” (12). Authenticity is the real thing, not a pose or a mask. It’s genuine, which is also assumed to be a virtue. Trilling traces the ascendancy of this term to our society’s belief in some unconscious truth (134ff.). But in our era of identity politics, the term is all too often used for interrogation, whether some particular writers’ styles are real and belong to them and their tribe or instead are somehow a put-on.3

WHOSE VOICE?

The accusation of putting something on that isn’t yours, to the point of cultural appropriation, is a point that Zadie Smith addresses in her essay “Fascinated to Presume.” Concerned about being judged for writing outside her ethnicity, she writes, “The old—and never especially helpful—adage write what you know has morphed into something more like a threat: Stay in your lane” (6). This last refrain, which may sound innocuous as good driving advice, is really a restating of an old restriction, “Know your place.” But who represents that “you” and “your” in art, anyway? Are you the “I” in your writing?

“Just be natural,” a rather bad acting coach I know used to tell his students. The problem with that perspective is that art isn’t natural; it’s a species of artifice, as its etymology shows, and “just be yourself” is as bad advice for a poem or story as it is for a job interview. Rather, literary style or voice is the ideal form of a writer or how they wish to come across. As such, it is no more authentic than a stage production. A stage production requires a lot of work, however, and that’s not the message many writers want to hear.

Finding your voice is billed as a process of maturation, and doesn’t everyone grow up eventually? Most writing teachers will acknowledge an apprenticeship period, during which one learns from many styles before finding one’s own. Maybe the problem is the verb in “finding one’s voice,” as if it were a matter of locating something mislaid. More accurate is “developing a style,” both eloquent to the purpose and idiosyncratic to one’s personality: Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Baldwin.4

COMING INTO ONE’S OWN

Let’s try another angle. Maybe successful voice is a marriage of topic and style, a good fit of one’s

personality with a subject. Before that union, writers may have an unformed voice or an ill-fitted one. Consider two authors who found their voice or style only when they came upon an apt subject, the Mexican-American experience for a writer like Sandra Cisneros, and the subaltern in postcolonialism for Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak.

Before Cisneros found she could write vibrantly and lyrically about a neglected minority, she wrote poetry about colorful myths, such as speculations on a giant stone head found in La Venta, Mexico.5 Later, as Cisneros notes in a personal essay, “I rejected what was at hand and emulated the voices of the poets I admired in books: big male voices like James Wright and Richard Hugo and Theodore Roethke, all wrong for me” (“Ghosts” 72). Similarly, before Faulkner focused on Yoknapatawpha, he was penning jejune T. S. Eliot knock-offs for a collection of poetry called The Marble Faun.

Attending the Iowa Writers’ Workshop in 1978, Cisneros recalls a class discussion of Gaston Bachelard’s The Poetics of Space, specifically his metaphor of a house as a nest for dreams and imagination, except that for Cisneros, a house represented a cheap, cramped space shared by her parents and half dozen siblings (“Ghosts” 73). In short, her writing at the time was a mismatch of subject and sensibility. Writers like Gary Soto encouraged her to focus on her Chicana upbringing, reflected in her 1980 poetry chapbook Bad Boys Though only seven pages, it features people from her old neighborhoods with syntax and diction to match, as in the poem “South Sangamon,” which opens:

We wake up and it’s him banging and banging and the doorknob rattling open up.

His drunk cussing her name all over the hallway and my name mixed in. He yelling from the other side open and she yelling from this side no.

A long time of this and we saying nothing just hoping he’d get tired and go. (4)

In short, a change in focus occasioned a different voice. With its Chicana girl’s mixed perceptions and vocabulary, The House on Mango Street displayed a vocality that launched Cisneros’s career. In another instance, the address to the girl Lucy in the poem “Velorio,” “your hair / smelling sharp like corn” (1), finds its way into Cisneros’s bestselling book Woman Hollering Creek as “My Lucy Friend Who Smells Like Corn.”

Spivak represents a different social milieu but a similar narrative of confronting another culture that didn’t seem to have a place for her. After graduation from the University of Calcutta, she borrowed money to go abroad. The English department at Cornell gave her no financial aid, so she transferred to the comparative literature department, where she was told she lacked sufficient French and German. Her master’s thesis focused on the representation of innocence in Wordsworth. Her doctoral dissertation was a plain vanilla analysis of Yeats’s poetry called The Great Wheel: Stages in the Personality of Yeats’s Lyric Speaker. Here is an excerpt:

The idea is also presented, with many variations, in his famous swan-poems. If we acquaint ourselves with the device of swan-sky-lake-poet (in the woods) from our reading of Yeats’s poetry, these poems shine not only with universal themes, but with Yeats’s own patterning of these themes.

Only one swan-poem seems to suffer when fitted into this scheme. (Mr. Stauffer felt obliged to exclude it out of hand from his discussion of the swan-poems clustering around “The Wils [sic] Swans at Coole.”) The poem is “Leda and the Swan.” A brief discussion of this poem will end our sojourn with Yeats’s swan. (66-67)

Prose like this is what slightly damning critics call serviceable.

But Spivak, bright and assiduous, studied hard and found a niche. She worked under de Man. She translated Derrida’s Of Grammatology. And she reconnected with her Indian roots. Only then did Spivak’s professional voice emerge. Her postcolonial essay “Can the Subaltern Speak?” made her reputation. Here is a representative claim from the essay:

When we come to the concomitant question of the consciousness of the subaltern, the notion of what the work cannot say becomes important. In the semioses of the social text, elaborations of insurgency stand in the place of “the utterance.” The sender—“the peasant”—is marked only as a pointer to an irretrievable consciousness. As for the receiver, we must ask who is “the real receiver” of an “insurgency”? The historian, transforming “insurgency” into “text for knowledge,” is only one “receiver” of any collectively intended social act. (287)

In a sense, Spivak had come into her own, and from then on, she had a recognizable style, widely imitated during the theory boom of the Nineties. Does the subaltern have a voice? No, if you take Spivak’s point in the essay, that the doubly disenfranchised are muted; yes, if you take it as a metaphor for Spivak’s ascension. These two examples seem to show that successful voice is attention paid to a subject that clicks with

the author. A cynic might note that they involve angle and approach and marketing as much as aesthetics. But sincerity is involved here, too: writing about one’s roots; writing about what one knows. Here’s Spivak talking about her sources: “I turn to Indian material because, in the absence of advanced disciplinary training, that accident of birth and education has provided me with a sense of the historical canvas, a hold on some of the pertinent languages that are useful tools for a bricoleur, especially when armed with the Marxist skepticism of concrete experience as the final arbiter and a critique of disciplinary formations” (281). Which is to say that my earlier dismissal of any link between sincerity and voice may be only a half-truth.

BACK TO BASICS

These instances where subjects bring out voice apply a lot to creative writing workshop students. In every workshop I’ve ever taught, a few students, though their life is hard—because their life is hard, holding down one or two jobs and never getting enough money or sleep—want to write about fantasy worlds where dragons rule and the truth is rewarded. I allow them to, since I dislike the mantra “Write about what you know,” though I gently point out that a story might be lurking in what they think of as dull and desperately want to escape: re-shelving antihistamines at CVS or working as a waiter at Olive Garden. And every once in a while, one of them heeds me, plumbs the depths of her job and co-workers, and comes up with the best piece she’s written all semester. The voice is knowing and confident, the characters etched with the sharpness of experience. Has she found her voice? Or just located an appropriate vehicle for her tenor? Or are those the same?6

Pragmatically, as a creative writing teacher, I don’t insist that a piece works because it’s sincere or

authentic. I applaud the voice and the resulting narrative because it’s compelling—and should be even if the author never suffered with that job and those co-workers and simply made it all up. That kind of magic act, a more tenuous extrapolation from a few facts and a vivid imagination, is far rarer, but for me it summons up the essence of creativity. And it reminds me that voice is a feat of projection. As such, it displays an angle on the artist, recognizable as a distortion of sorts if one knows the writer well.7

So style and voice are more than simply reflections of one’s character. After all, a writer creates people, or shapes them, and one of those people is the author. To quote from Jenefer M. Robinson’s “Style and Personality in the Literary Work”: “What is more typically expressed by the style of a work is not the personality of the actual author, but of what, following Wayne Booth, we might call the ‘implied author,’ that is, the author as she seems to be from the evidence of the work” (234). All literature professors know this and pedantically talk about authorial personae. Similarly, in a creative writing workshop, if a student writes about a bank robbery, we don’t contact the police. On the other hand, these days we’re uncomfortably aware of some possible connections, and if a student writes a story about suicide or murderous intentions, we may want to contact Health Services so they can reach out to the student.8

Why do voice and subject continue to be read as a blueprint of the author’s psyche? As Walter J. Ong points out in “The Jinnee in the Well-Wrought Urn,” confronted with a creation, we naturally want to know something about the creator: “Anything that bids for attention in an act of contemplation is a surrogate for a person. In proportion as the work of art is capable of being taken in full seriousness, it moves further and further along an

asymptote to the curve of personality” (319). And we suspect, with some justification, that an artist’s work will provide us with a privileged view of the artist. This suspicion is what might be termed the biographical fallacy, that the events in a novel, say, must have bearing on the author’s life. The stylistic fallacy is subtler: that the way in which the elements of art are arranged reflect the personality of the artist. But as Nabokov famously thundered, “art at its greatest is fantastically deceitful and complex” (33). Of course, that doesn’t mean no parallel exists between authors and their styles, simply that the connections may be twisted or work by opposites. As anyone who’s ever confronted a mousy author of a bloody saga knows, a seeming disjunction often lies between the personal style of the writer and what they have written.

ME AND NOT ME

I myself am and am not a useful exemplar for the arguments I’m making. First and foremost, I’m a writer who likes trying on voices and donning the clothes of personalities not my own. I’ve written from the perspective of a suicidal American expatriate in Japan, a child molester, and a woman who winds up owning an enslaved person. I take care with first-person narration and try to avoid that besetting sin of many novelists, of writing characters who all speak the same. Since I started publishing flash fiction two decades ago, I’ve let my style range all over the place, since I don’t have to live as someone else for too many pages. In so doing, I’ve expanded my consciousness—or felt I have.

Ventriloquism allows me to be better and at times worse than I am in life: more articulate, more profound, or sometimes more louche. Adopting a voice different from my own allows me to get away from my personal preoccupations and into someone

else’s. On the other hand, this kind of authorial empathy via literary style may solve some narrative problems, but it may not help real-life issues. It’s not even an either/or situation. Yeats’s often-quoted lament, “The intellect of man is forced to choose / Perfection of the life, or of the work” (242) is best met with Auden’s accusation of false dichotomy, that neither will be perfect. I do what I can on dual fronts and try not to confuse the two.

COPYING OTHERS

Not everyone believes that reaching inside and pulling out an image of oneself is the best way to develop a voice. In fact, some creative writing textbooks suggest that the intense focus on one’s own voice is misguided. Heather Sellers’s third edition of her bestselling The Practice of Creative Writing: A Guide for Students, for instance, contains no entries for voice or style in the index. Instead, she talks about images, energy, tension, pattern, insight, and revision (xv-xx). In The Sincerest Form: Writing Fiction by Imitation, Nicholas Delbanco claims, “‘Sincerity’ and ‘imitation’ … are, on the face of it, strange bedfellows; as writers we weave fantasies and hope to be believed” (xxiv). Delbanco also quotes Edward Bulwer-Lytton: “Imitation, if noble and general, insures the best hope of originality” (xxiii).9 If we’re pursuing the derivation of voice, the imitation model is key, that one’s originality is a recombinant of others’ voices. That’s why one piece of advice that all writing instructors continue to give is on the mark: read more. To admirers of authenticity: where do you think the “authentic” comes from, considering that the infant is a tabula rasa? Your being derives from tried-on and discarded and retained roles that you experience first- or second-hand. “Inauthentic” really means a bad adaptation as opposed to a successful borrowing.

CODA

So how does this all transfer to any fledgling writer trying to forge their own style? Focus on both imitation and invention. Don’t worry so much about truth. “Art is a lie that tells the truth,” Picasso claimed,10 and it’s also a line that the fiction writer John Dufresne uses for one of his handbooks. Read more. Work on your rhetoric, your effects. Are they you? Maybe you’ll grow into them.

One could even define literary style as the set of techniques that allows writers to rise above themselves and the base materials of their craft. To quote Sontag again:

All works of art are founded on a certain distance from the lived reality which is represented. This "distance" is, by definition, inhuman or impersonal to a certain degree; for in order to appear to us as art, the work must restrict sentimental intervention and emotional participation, which are functions of "closeness." It is the degree and manipulating of this distance, the conventions of distance, which constitute the style of the work. In the final analysis, "style" is art. (30)

In brief, Sontag explains how style functions as an instrument of control, over oneself and one’s material. Whether or not you agree with her point, her sentences have the reassuring solidity of an equation married to the cleverness of an aphorism, a dash of European aesthetic philosophy merged with American pragmatism. This is what we’ve come to know as Sontag’s voice, and she worked hard to achieve it.

END NOTES

1. Disclaimer: This essay and the author of this essay are not approving cruel caricature or clumsy imitation. The fallout from those attempts is more for an essay devoted to sociocultural analysis.

2. Understandably, basic writing classes want to avoid having students claim their clunky prose as an aspect of style. To put it plainly, as a University of Maryland composition website does: “Students often confuse writing style with some vague sense of personal style, or personality. But style is a technical term for the effect a writer can create through attitude, language, and the mechanics of writing” (“A Word About Style, Voice, and Tone”). But the problem with defining style as a mere matter of technique is that writers in sufficient command of style deploy it seamlessly in the service of voice or personality.

3. Work billed as nonfiction carries a different set of assumptions. Given the political implications of identity, charges of inauthenticity or false representation in writing may involve what people perceive as fraud, in which a writer claims ethnic or cultural affiliation that they do not in fact have. The topic is fraught because it may involve access otherwise forbidden. The issue is complicated because the person charged may have acted as an admirable spokesperson for the group. The question remains: at what points do social identity and mimicry meet? See, for example, Sarah Viren’s account of Andrea Smith in “The Native Scholar Who Wasn’t.”

4. The issue of late style, when many authors are reduced either to their essence or to echoes or self-parody, is a topic for another essay.

5. An early poem titled “In another life” begins, “Lake Titicaca, / I am your daughter. / Brown clay men, / descendants of the sun, / thick-haired, thick-lipped / inhabitants of the mountains...” (Cadence 4).

6. One prompt I’ve found useful is asking students to write a scene from one of their worst experiences at work or school, then alter it as if it happened to another person who shares none of their views.

7. Another creative writing exercise: write an account of shoplifting from the first-person viewpoint of the ten-year-old who pulled it off. Make the child any gender that’s not yours.

8. After the mass shooting at Virginia Tech in 2007, in which the mentally disturbed student Seung-Hui Cho went on a killing rampage, his playwriting workshop professor from the previous semester said two of Cho’s plays contained such violent images and profane language that he’d alerted other faculty members. See Marc Santora and Christine Hauser’s “Anger of Killer was on Exhibit in His Writings.”

9. Exercise: read two authors to the point where you could recognize their styles in your sleep—then write your own story in a blend of the two.

10. The original translation is “Art is a lie that makes us realize truth” (Picasso). Cocteau and others made similar claims. See Quote Investigator: quoteinvestigator.com/2019/10/29/lie-truth/.

WORKS CITED

Cisneros, Sandra. Bad Boys. Mango Publications, 1980.

---. “Ghosts and Voices: Writing from Obsession.” The American Review, vol. 15, no. 1, 1987, pp. 69-72

---. “In another life.” Cadence, no. 29, 1977 p. 4.

---. Woman Hollering Creek and Other Stories. Vintage-Random House, 1992, p. 3.

Delbanco, Nicholas. The Sincerest Form: Writing Fiction by Imitation. McGraw Hill, 2004.

Eliot, T. S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Selected Prose of T. S. Eliot, edited by Frank Kermode. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1975, pp. 37-44.

Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Anchor, 1995.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Strong Opinions. McGraw-Hill, 1973.

Ong, Walter J. “The Jinnee in the Well-Wrought Urn.” Essays in Criticism, vol. 4, no. 3, 1954, pp. 309-20.

Picasso, Pablo. “Picasso Speaks: A Statement by the Artist.” The Arts: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine Covering All Phases of Ancient and Modern Art, vol. 3, no. 5, 1923, p. 315.

Robinson, Jenefer M. “Style and Personality in the Literary Work.” The Philosophical Review, vol. 94, no. 2, 1985, pp. 227-47.

Santora, Marc, and Hauser, Christine. “Anger of Killer was on Exhibit in His Writings.” New York Times, 20 Apr. 2007, pp. A1+.

Sellers, Heather. The Practice of Creative Writing: A Guide for Students. 3rd ed., Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2016.

Shakespeare, William. As You Like It, edited by Albert Gilman. The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, edited by Sylvan Barnet. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972, pp. 845-75.

---. Hamlet, edited by Edward Hubler. The Complete Signet Classic Shakespeare, edited by Sylvan Barnet. Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972, pp. 917-61.

Smith, Zadie. “Fascinated to Presume: In Defense of Fiction.” The New York Review of Books, vol. 66, no. 16, 2019, pp. 4-10.

Sontag, Susan. “On Style.” Against Interpretation and Other Essays, Dell–Laurel, 1966, pp. 3-36.

Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty. “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, edited by Cary Nelson and Lawrence Grossberg, Macmillan, 1988, pp. 271-313.

---. The Great Wheel: Stages in the Personality of Yeats’s Lyric Speaker. 1967. Cornell University, PhD dissertation.

Trilling, Lionel. Sincerity and Authenticity: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures, 1969-1970. Harvard UP, 1972.

Viren, Sarah. “The Native Scholar Who Wasn’t.” The New York Times Magazine, 30 May 2021, pp. 26-33+.

“A Word About Style, Voice, and Tone.” UMGC Online Guide to Writing and Research, coursedev.umgc. edu/WRTG999A/chapter3/ch3-21.html (site inactive).

Yeats, William Butler. The Collected Poems of W. B. Yeats. Macmillan, 1976.

54.2

poetics cluster

Midway through her manuscript, Hester Pulter hits escape velocity.

As the seventeenth-century writer claims in her poem “This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With My Son John,”1 she has freed her mind from the confines of her body, even from the earth itself:

Sad, sick, and lame, as in my bed I lay, Lest pain and passion should bear all the sway

My thoughts being free, I bid them take their flight

Above the gloomy shades of death and night. They, overjoyed with such a large commission,

Flew instantly without all intermission

Up to that sphere where night’s pale queen doth run

Round the circumference of the illustrious sun. (1-8)

The poem kicks off hard. Its initial spondee—“sad, sick” (1)—lurches it into loose iambic pentameter, which trips over the trochee of “being free,” or “round the,” among other irregularities (3, 8). Elsewhere, the poem’s neat rhyming couplets snag on the sudden triplet of “bright,” “night,” and “light” (9-11). With these little shifts and slips, the poem destabilizes both form and content. The moon, Pulter insists, is not “as [other] poets feign” (12): not “guiding her chariot with a silver rein / Attired like some fair nymph or virgin queen / With naked neck and arms, and robes of green” (13-15). Rather, from Pulter’s new perspective, the moon is just “another world” (18), not so different from the little “star” of the earth itself (20). “As the moon a shadow casts and light / So is our earth the empress of their night” (21-22), Pulter writes, refiguring (or perhaps

un–figuring) the heavens. In so doing, the poem enacts various kinds of escape: from pain, from the body, from the planet, from common perspectives, from poetic convention, and even from form itself. As a writer—through the act of writing—Pulter sets herself free.

Or so the story goes. As scholars have argued since her manuscript was discovered in 1996, Pulter finds “freedom” in confinement.2 Her single manuscript of poems, written on her husband’s Hertfordshire estate during the 1640s and 1650s, attests to a life of solitude and sorrow: poor health, many pregnancies, and rural isolation.3 As Pulter writes in a later poem in the manuscript, she felt “shut up in a country grange” (18), seemingly “buried alive” (20), “forever […] confined / Against the noble freedom of [her] mind” (1-2). 4 Yet her circumstances, however unpromising, fostered her distinctive poetics. Unlike many early modern poets, who anticipated “some form of public readership,” Hester Pulter seems to have written primarily for—and about—herself.5 Her work was never published “in her own lifetime,” nor does it appear to have been circulated in manuscript.6 As a result, Alice Eardley has argued,

The […] poetry is unusual and runs counter to modern critical assertions about the highly performative and public nature of seventeenth century verse. While emotional matters are by no means absent from the writing of her contemporaries, Pulter’s poetry has a confessional quality more readily associated with later periods. As a result, we gain a strong sense of an individual persona from which these thoughts and feelings originate.7

Of course, it’s irresponsible—not to mention misleading—to read these poems as a kind of diary.

And yet, the stuff of Pulter’s book is the stuff of her life. Pulter records her griefs, her worries, her pregnancies, her daughters, her aging body, her thought experiments, her political opinions, her fantasies of dispersing into atoms, and her dreams of exploring the universe. Part of her poems’ appeal is that they are so very personal.

Yet Pulter remains a cipher. Without a long reception history, her poetry is malleable, unsettled, still in the process of being theorized. If “we gain a strong sense of an individual person” from reading her work, Pulter is a poet about whom, at the same time, we know relatively little.8 These poems are at once intimate and impersonal, revealing and restrained. Despite the critical emphasis on her free expression, many of her poems pivot between self-disclosure and self-censure, innovation and convention, as even the full title of “This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay In, With My Son John” suggests. Pulter may begin with a frank statement of her own illness, but she ends with a more conventional praise of God:9

This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay In, With My Son John, This Being My 15th Child, I Being So Weak, That in Ten Days and Nights I Never Moved My Head One Jot from My Pillow, Out of Which Great Weakness My Gracious God Restored Me That I Still Live to Magnify His Mercy, 165510

If this is a poet becoming “as free as her verse” (103), as Pulter claims in a later poem, it is not clear what such freedom would even entail.11 With its palimpsest of revisions, this title indicates the challenge of pinning down any one poem in Pulter’s presentation manuscript. Though Pulter wrote the poem in 1648, she appears to have had it transcribed in 1655, as if she were preparing her writing for a readership. The

manuscript even includes a second hand, thought to be Pulter’s, which has gone through and corrected the main scribe’s work.12 What Pulter originally wrote—whatever that means—warps on the page. As the subtitle of The Pulter Project website claims, Pulter is still “a poet in the making,” a phrase with at least three possible meanings: a poet in development, a poet whose work we can see developing, and a poet whose reputation and reception we are ourselves developing.13 Pulter may be “a poet in the making,” that is, but she is ours to make.

In my (admittedly short) career, I’ve already spent a fair bit of time in the company of early modern women. I published my first article on Isabella Whitney, and I’ve written about Mary Carey, Aemilia Lanyer, Katherine Philips, and others. Of these writers—fascinating and challenging as they all are—I’ve returned the most often to Hester Pulter. From my first encounter with her work, I’ve responded to Pulter as both a writer and a woman, as an academic who analyzes and as a person who lives, thinks, and feels. Pulter gets under my skin. In her work, I see my own life reflected back at me: my own isolation, my own loneliness, my own feelings of being trapped in a body, in a house, and in a town.14 Like Pulter, I’ve struggled with my health. At times, I’ve even struggled to leave the house. This is in no way to equate our experiences. Only that when I read “Why must I thus forever be confined / Against the noble freedom of my mind” (1-2), I feel the thing to which you’re not supposed to admit as a serious scholar: a frisson of recognition.15

This essay will consider this connection. I’m going to read Hester Pulter from the inside-out, considering her life through mine, my life through hers.16 In fact, I’m going to tentatively suggest that my autocritical approach—my unorthodox, even inappropriate interaction with the work—may be a good way to read a writer like Hester Pulter.17 By

responding to her personal writing in a personal way, I’m hoping to avoid some of the pitfalls of earlier biographical readings, which have treated Pulter’s writing not as a literary text but as a historical document.18 Pulter, by these readings, is not a poet who wrote but a person who lived, and who just left behind this nifty little manuscript. In my own reading, I’ve arrived at the personal through the poetic. Rather than simply mining her text for details about her life, I’ve approached her manuscript as a work of literature, worthy of being read as literature, with all its poetic and affective powers intact. Or, to put this differently, I’ve read from “person to person” by reading from poem to poem.19

What first struck me about Pulter’s poetry—and what I still like best about her work—is its unapologetic sadness. I was a master’s student, just beginning to study poetry by early modern women, when I stumbled upon Pulter’s “unusual” elegies for her children.20 Unlike many of her peers, who attempted to moderate their grief, or overcome their despair, Pulter dwelled in her sorrow.21 Take her response to the death of her twenty-year-old daughter, Jane. As she writes in “Upon the Death of My Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane,” her grief has not abated even though two years have passed:

Twice hath sad Philomela left off to sing, Her mortifying sonnets to the spring, Twice at the sylvan choristers’ desire She hath lent her music to complete their choir,

Since all devouring Death on her took seizure, And Tellus’s womb involved so rich a treasure,

Yet still my heart is overwhelmed with grief, And time nor tears will give my woes relief. (15-22)22

The poem is built out of multiple repetitions. Pulter interweaves these markers of time—“twice,” and later “twelve times” or “twelve houses”—with her emphasis on continued suffering: “yet my sad heart for her still pining dies” (26), “yet still my heart is overwhelmed with grief / And time nor tears will give my woes relief” (21-22), “yet my afflicted, sad, forsaken soul / For her in tears and ashes still doth roll” (35-36). By the end of the poem, Pulter seems to suggest that she herself has died, her own heart flying up to heaven with her daughter, herself —“me”—and her daughter—“she”—a terrible internal rhyme: “My heart to heaven with her bright spirit flies / Whilst she (ah me) closed up her lovely eyes” (82). What distinguishes the poem—at least when compared to other seventeenth-century elegies—is Pulter’s lack of self-censure.23 Pulter never chides herself for her grief. Nor does she urge herself to accept God’s will, nor interpret her daughter’s death as a punishment for her own sins.24 Rather, judging from these refrains, Pulter’s grief remains unchecked. Her writing, like her mourning, could continue forever. Her grief is itself an unending refrain. In this way, her elegies seem almost startlingly modern. Again and again, Pulter sidesteps resolution. Even a more conventional elegy includes a catch. The poem that immediately follows “Upon the Death of My Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane”—fittingly titled “Tell Me No More [On the Same]”—expands upon Pulter’s despair. In this poem, she begs to be spared the details of her daughter’s loveliness, including “her lovely brown hair” (1), “her snowy shoulders” (3), and “her black diamond eyes” (5) with “cheerful look” (6).25 “Tell

me no more of her perfection / Because it doth increase my hearts dejection” (23-24), Pulter writes, adopting and adapting a refrain common in mid-seventeenth-century poetry. 26 Only when Pulter herself has died, she predicts, will her spirits finally lift:

With her, I lost most of my joys on Earth. Nor can I ever raise my drooping spirit

Until, with her, those joys I shall inherit: Those glories which our finite thoughts transcend,

Where we shall praises sing, world without end,

To Him that made both her and me of earth, And gave us spirits of celestial birth.

[…]

Nor why I mourn for her, ask me no more For all my life I shall her loss deplore, Till infinite power her dust and mine shall raise

To sing in heaven his everlasting praise. (30-44)

Like many seventeenth-century elegies, this poem makes a final turn towards devotion.27 As Pulter admits, she will once again “praises sing” to God (34). Yet nested within this conventional turn is an unconventional stipulation: she will only sing these “praises” “in heaven” (44), when she has been reunited with her daughter. Until she can praise God in heaven, that is, she will praise her daughter on earth.28 Pulter’s poems catalogue her daughter’s virtues instead of her God’s, as acts of decidedly maternal devotion.29

To some Pulter scholars, these poems are once again evidence of her striking freedom of expression. According to Alice Eardley,

Pulter’s relative isolation shaped her responses to contemporary intellectual and literary culture in ways that make her writing particularly interesting for modern readers […] Writing in apparent isolation and therefore liberated from the need to conform to the expectations and tastes of a widespread audience, she expresses opinions and emotions not usually encountered by early modern women, or indeed men.30

Over time, I’ve come to see this characterization as not quite true, or at least not the entire truth. 31 More than liberation or free expression, I see Pulter as a poet interested in different kinds of confinement. These include the immediate confinements of facing an irrevocable loss, or of inhabiting a mortal body, or of living in rural isolation. But these also include certain habits of thought. Many of her poems run on little engines of repetition. This is not to say that she doesn’t innovate: no one reading these revisions of elegy, or indeed her imaginary tours around the solar system, can fail to see a creative mind at work. But Pulter channels her vibrant interest in the world into contained forms. At times, the poems feel like exercises, rather than expansive expressions. If they are poetic escapes, or poetic preparations for “departure,” they fail upon hitting the atmosphere. 32 Poem after poem defaults to a list, self-generating, self-propagating. Anaphora reigns supreme. Even her rhyming couplets, a favoured form in the seventeenth century, seem especially neat and contained. 33 As she writes to free her mind, Pulter simply replicates the structures of containment. These can be frustrating poems to read. They can feel formulaic. They can feel unfree.

Like Pulter, I’ve spent some time “shut up in a country grange” (18). I grew up not quite in the middle of nowhere, but perhaps right next to the middle of nowhere, in ex-urban New York. There, living far from my friends, with one unreliable car and two parents who struggled to make ends meet, I developed ways to occupy myself. Weekends, when we could save up enough change, my mother and I would take the bus to sit in the cool, beautiful reading room of the town library. Evenings, if I held the top of our ancient TV down in just the right place, I could watch As Time Goes By or Keeping up Appearances on public television: two very normal programs for a child to watch, of course. I was obsessed with being a writer, and I kept extensive notebooks, in which I documented my experiences. When I look at them now, I’m struck by how many of them are records of imaginary journeys, or lists. For the first eighteen or so years of my life, I lived almost entirely within a sixty-mile radius. But from the account of my notebooks, I went on safari, or to Mars, or to Scotland. I seemed to take those clichés postered around my beloved library—that books were a passport, or that you could go anywhere with a book—very seriously. Except, like Hester Pulter, I understood writing to be a means of escape as well. Pulter and I both lived on the page. Our writing was more than an expression of our creativity: it was a proxy for life itself. We enacted, as well as escaped, our entrapment. We wrote because we couldn’t leave the house, couldn’t get out of bed, couldn’t raise the dead. We wrote because we couldn’t live.

I’ve read Pulter’s poems in full twice: once when I was studying in England, happy on a fellowship, and once again in the first year of the pandemic, locked up at home, desperately trying to keep my mind alive. Even before COVID-19, I had struggled

with my health. During the pandemic, my family and I were at particular risk, so much so that for many months, I was unable to leave the house. All those long days, sitting at home, acutely aware of my own limitations, I read Hester Pulter many times.

As I came to feel, her poems are not simply repetitions, or refrains. They are ruminations. When I read Hester Pulter then, and when I read her now, I read a woman who lives unhappily in her body.

Her body is a cage, or a prison. Her body’s bodily fallibility is a betrayal.

This is an unhappiness that goes beyond the disappointments of aging. Of course, Pulter dreaded that process: in “Made When I Was Not Well,” she “blazons” or “anti-blazons” herself, describing her body as a “loathsome ruined prison” (2).35 As she writes, revising the clichés of Petrarchan poets:

What splendent sprightliness in youth [my eyes] had!

Now weeping makes them dim, and dull, and sad

These locks did curl, and were a golden brown;

Now thin and lank, like silver threads, hang down.

[…]

My lips were cherries, rosy were my cheeks; But those that now for blood or beauty seek Will find them spoiled by Time and adverse Fate,

Whose cruelty doth give to all a date.

My skin was once as white as new-fallen snow;

Through azure veins vermillion blood did flow.

Then were my swelling breasts the bed of love,

As smooth, as soft, as white, as swan or dove.

As lilies fading shrink to shun the light

So are my withered breasts shut out of sight. (5-20)

Here, these Petrarchan images—“golden” “locks,” “cherry” “lips,” “skin […] as white as new fallen snow”—are re-imagined.36 If women are indeed composed of such beautiful things, this extravagant beauty has an expiry date. Much like Shakespeare, Sidney, or other early modern poets, Pulter casts a cynical eye on Petrarchan conceits. 37

Yet Pulter’s unhappiness also seems to arise from these very structures and strictures: from this tendency to catalogue and categorize the self. Here, the early modern blazon—this favored and oft-parodied form—calls attention to its own strangeness, its unsettling and objectifying impulse. Why, for example, is it used in “Tell Me No More,” an elegy for Pulter’s daughter? On the one hand, Pulter begs her interlocutor to “tell her no more” about her daughter’s youth and beauty, which have made her early death especially unbearable (1). 38 At the same time, “Tell Me No More” seems to critique this very way of thinking about women. “Tell me no more” these tiresome tropes, it suggests, resisting them even as it replicates them.39 As Frances Dolan asks, in a helpful insight, why would a grieving mother choose to remember her daughter’s “white, even nose” (13)? Or that her lips were “ruby” red (14), her “cheeks excelled the rose” (11), and her “breasts were heaps of snow” (17)? 40 The poem becomes a paradox: a text that erases even as it elegizes, half-memorial, half-objectification. Pulter, it seems, does not want to remember her daughter in this way. And yet this is the poetic language available to her. For Pulter, the blazon—like the body itself—becomes a kind of trap.

What Pulter captures in her manuscript is an ongoing tension between soul and body. In the seventeenth century, women’s bodies were the “absolute other”: decorative, yet cold, wet, composed of “secrets,” often “leaky.”41 Pulter attends to this boundary between the “beautiful” and the “grotesque”: between the beautiful (and dead) body of her daughter and her own aging (and living) body.42 Yet, part of what she critiques is a preoccupation with physical form itself. As she makes clear in “Tell Me No More,” she is in fact attempting to turn away from Petrarchan physicality:

Tell me no more her breasts were heaps of snow,

White as the swans where crystal Thames doth flow;

Chaste as Diana was her virgin breast. Her noble mind can never be expressed; This, but the casket was of her rich soul, Which now doth shine above the highest pole. (17-21)43

What truly matters is what “can never be expressed”: her daughter’s “noble mind,” her chastity, her goodness. This dismissal of the body—as a mere “casket” for the soul—was not uncommon in seventeenth-century poetry.44 As Liza Blake writes, many seventeenth-century metaphysical poets “emphasi[ze]” “the body as a temporary collection of dust that could be dissolved at any time.” 45 When Pulter imagines her own death, as she does in “The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge,” she imagines the birth of her soul.46 Pulter’s soul will burst free of her body as the “chipping bird” “break[s] its shell” (11). Or as “the infant” “leaves” (10) “the womb” (3). At the moment of her death, Pulter will “[scorn] this dunghill earth” (20) and “take her flight” “beyond the skies” (17), free at last from her physical form.

Yet Pulter never quite escapes. For all her stated desire to flee her body, her poems attend closely to that body, especially its frailties, its physical limits and limitations. Pulter is a poet of illness. In poem after poem, she describes herself as “sick” and “lame” (1), unable to get out of bed, suffering from pregnancies or some unknown malady.47 If her body was once a vision of beauty, it is now a source of pain: a “loathsome ruined prison” (2), mere “rottenness” (13), just another “sad confinement” (26).48 Pulter appears to suffer from something I know well, something common to the chronically ill: the feeling of being at once intensely embodied and intensely resentful of that embodiment. As David Thorley has argued, seventeenth-century writers were vexed by questions of illness and identity, asking whether “disordered bodies” “entail[ed] […] disordered selves.”49 Is “a Man, being a Creature, consisting of Soul and Body,” wrote John Locke in 1690, “the same Man, when his Body is changed?” 50 For Pulter, such questions would be fraught. Pulter knows what the sick know. Her body is at once her and not her, the vessel for her being and mere “rags of clay” (4), the source of her pain and the only thing that keeps her alive.51

As a result, Pulter’s soul remains curiously attached to her body. As she writes in “Made When I Was Sick, 1647,”

O me, how sore, how sad is my poor heart; How loath my soul is from my flesh to part! Hath forty years’ acquaintance caused such love

To rottenness that thou wilt ungrateful prove

To that invisible light of which we are beams? […]

My soul, for love or fear, make thou more haste;

For shame, rouse up a little! Mend thy pace. (1-13)52

Or again, in “Made When I was Not Well,”

My soul, why dost thou such a mourning make, This loathsome ruined prison to forsake? (1-2)53

Or again, in “Made When My Spirits Were Sunk Very Low With Sickness and Sorrow,”

Droop not, my soul, nor hang the wing,

For thou shalt shortly hallelujahs sing

To our invisible eternal King. Rouse up, my soul, shake off these rags of clay (1-4)54

In itself, this body-soul split is not unusual. Many seventeenth-century writers, most relevantly Andrew Marvell, wrote dialogues between body and soul. 55 In Marvell’s poem, the two are profoundly unhappy in each other’s company. Marvell’s soul cries out to be freed from the body—“O Who shall from this dungeon raise / A soul enslaved so many ways?”—only to be answered in kind by the body: “O who shall me deliver whole, / From bonds of this tyrannic soul?’56 In Pulter’s poem, however, this body-soul relationship is not so hostile. Again and again, Pulter must chastise her soul for its reluctance to leave her body, its dependence upon, even affection for, mere “rags of clay” (4).57 With this tension, it seems, Pulter suggests that she cannot transcend her physical being. However far afield she may send her “thoughts,” however adventurous her flights of “fancy” (49), Pulter must eventually come down.58

The poems register the impact of this realization. If the poetry gives “a strong sense of an individual persona,” this persona is itself unusual. 59 The “I” in Pulter’s work exists independently of both soul and body. As Blake notes, unlike Donne’s first person, or even Marvell’s, Pulter’s “I” is a separate entity, able to comment on what normally constitutes the self: her soul, her body, her heart, her thoughts, her virtues, her mind.60 Pulter’s “I” urges her soul to get over its attachment to her body. Or it worries that the soul won’t return for her body. It discusses the independent activities of her roaming thoughts, her intransigent heart, and her fearful soul. It is a third figure, that resides over the other parts, of and yet separate from them. If Pulter considers the problem of being a self who lives in a body, this self seems to find an alternative residence. Pulter’s “I” is the writing “I,” the authorial self, that can live on the page rather than in the flesh.

This is the final lesson of the poem that opens this essay. The first and the last line of “This Was Written in 1648 When I Lay in, With My Son John” include the same word, “lay,” which changes over the course of the poem.61 At the beginning, the word indicates the “physical” and “passive” “lying in” of the new mother: as Pulter writes, “sad, sick, and lame, as in my bed I lay” (1).62 But by poem’s end, the word has become the “lays” of “poetry and song”: the work of a writer.63 “Unto the god of truth, light, life, and love,” Pulter declares, “I’ll such lays here begin shall end above” (67-68).64 What Pulter achieves is not quite freedom, nor transcendence, but perhaps a kind of self-reliance. If we have been making Hester Pulter, as The Pulter Project declares, we are not the only ones. Pulter has always been a poet of her own making.

NOTES

1. Hester Pulter, “This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John” (Poem 45, Elemental Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http:// pulterproject.northwestern.edu/. Line numbers given in text.

2. For example, see Amanda Zoch, “Rewriting the Lying-In: Katherine Philips, Hester Pulter, and the Felt Mortality of Pregnancy,” Early Modern Women: An Interdisciplinary Journal, 15.1 (2020): 3-25 (see 20). Zoch argues that this poem “reveals Pulter’s desire to free herself from confinement.” See also Sarah Hutton, “Hester Pulter (ca. 1596-1678) A Woman Poet and the New Astronomy,” Etudes Episteme, 14 (2008): 77-87 (see 5). Hutton writes that Pulter “celebrates the freedom of her mind” with her lying-in poetry. See also Leah Knight’s and Wendy Wall’s commentary on The Pulter Project website. Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, “Headnote” to “This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John” (Poem 45, Elemental Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/

3. On Hester Pulter’s life, see Alice Eardley, “Introduction,” in Poems, Emblems, and the Unfortunate Florinda, ed. by Alice Eardley (Toronto: Centre for Reformation and Renaissance Studies Press, 2014): 1-38.

4. Hester Pulter, “Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined” (Poem 57, Elemental Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/. Line numbers given in text.

5. See Eardley, “Introduction,” 1-2.

6. Ibid.

7. Eardley, “Introduction,” 3.

8. Eardley, “Introduction,” 2.

9. Eardley also notes that “Pulter is unusually forthright about the circumstances of her own life and suffering.” On this title, see also Zoch, “Rewriting the Lying-In”: “[E]ven seven years after her difficult recovery, the inclusion of Pulter’s title suggests she has no desire to reconstruct her experience through gratitude alone: while she is grateful to God for her renewed health, the shadow of her original fear, her felt mortality, remains in the framing title” (Zoch 20).

10. Hester Pulter, “This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John” (Poem 45, Amplified Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http:// pulterproject.northwestern.edu/.

11. Pulter, “Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined” (Poem 57, Elemental Edition).

12. As Sarah Ross explains, the poem was “copied into Pulter’s manuscript in 1655.” The poem’s “long title,” “written in the hand of the main scribe,” notes the date of transcription as 1665. However, “slightly to the right, a different hand has corrected this to 1655.” See Sarah Ross, “Notes” to “This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John” (Poem 45, Amplified Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/.

13. See Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, eds., “About the Project,” in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making (2018), http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/

14. I drew inspiration for this essay from Leonard Barkan’s Reading Shakespeare, Reading Me, in which he writes that he “found in [Shakespeare] the key to [his] own life.” See Leonard Barkan, Reading Shakespeare, Reading Me (New York: Fordham University Press, 2022): x.

15. Pulter, “Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined” (Poem 57, Elemental Edition). See also Barkan on how autocritical reading “violate[s] the rules that [he] was taught” as a scholar (xi).

16. Once again, I drew inspiration from Leonard Barkan’s Reading Shakespeare, Reading Me. See previous note.

17. See Barkan on the at times “artificial […] business” of “reading-as-analysis” (xi).

18. More than any other interpretive dilemma, Pulter scholars face the problem of excessively biographical reading: a problem common to critical work on early modern women. As Linda Woodbridge quips, in her survey of the critical landscape, “men inhabit literature-land, while women inhabit history-land.” See Linda Woodbridge, “Dark Ladies: Women, Social History, and English Renaissance Literature,” in Discontinuities: New Essays on Renaissance Literature and Criticism, ed. by Viviana Comensoli and Paul Stevens (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1998): 52-71 (see 62). See also Alice Eardley, “Hester Pulter’s Indivisibles and the Challenge of Annotating Early Modern Women’s Poetry,” Studies in English Literature, 52.1 (2012): 117-141 (see 129).

19. See Barkan, who writes that “the inveterate reader enters the worlds of fictions and experiences them page by page as person to person encounters” (xi).

20. On Pulter’s elegies, see also Elizabeth Zeman Kolkovich, “In Defense of Indulgence: Hester Pulter’s Maternal Elegies,” Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, 2.20 (2020): 43-70, (see 43-44, 51).

21. Ibid.

22. Hester Pulter, “Upon the Death of My Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane” (Poem 10, Elemental Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/. Line numbers given in text.

23. See Kolkovich 51-52.

24. These gestures are typical in other elegies written by early modern women. I am thinking specifically of Mary Carey’s child loss poetry. On Carey and other elegies written by early modern women, see Pamela Hammons, “Despised Creatures: The Illusion of Maternal Self-Effacement in SeventeenthCentury Child Loss Poetry,” English Literary History, 66.1 (1999): 25-49. See also Kolkovich 54-55.

25. Hester Pulter, “Tell Me No More [On the Same]” (Poem 11, Elemental Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http://pulterproject.northwestern. edu/. Line numbers given in text.

26. See Frances E. Dolan, “Poems in Conversation” (Curation, Poem 11), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/; Scott Nixon, “‘Ask Me No More’ and the Manuscript Verse Miscellany,” English Literary Renaissance, 29.1 (1999): 97-130.

27. Leah Knight and Wendy Wall note that the “intensity” of a parent’s “grief” is “conventionally resolved with Christian affirmation of the afterlife.” See Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, “Headnote” to “Upon the Death of My Dear and Lovely Daughter, Jane” (Poem 10, Elemental Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http://pulterproject. northwestern.edu/.

28. On this turn, see also Kolkovich 58.

29. As Leah Knight and Wendy Wall note, “the poem exhibits tension between the speaker’s loving attachment to the things of […] this world and what she knows she should praise.” See Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, “Headnote” to “Tell Me No More [On the Same]” (Poem 11, Elemental Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http://pulterproject. northwestern.edu/

30. On this frankness, see Eardley, “Introduction,” 3; and Eardley, “‘Shut up in a Countrey Grange’: The Provenance of Lady Hester Pulter’s Poetry and Prose and Women’s Literary History,” Huntington Library Quarterly, 80.2 (2017): 345-359.

31. Kolkovich also argues that Pulter envisioned “a wider audience as she wrote” and intended to “expose [her manuscript] to public consumption” (61).

32. See Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, “Headnote” to “Made When I Was Not Well” (Poem 51, Elemental

Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http:// pulterproject.northwestern.edu/. Knight and Wall suggest that the poem enacts “a series of practice swings, pendulously building momentum for the soul’s anticipated onward movement.”

33. On seventeenth-century women writers and couplets, see Victoria E. Burke, “The Couplet and the Poem: Late Seventeenth-Century Women Reading Katherine Philips,” Women’s Writing, 24 (2017): 280-297.

34. Pulter, “Why Must I Thus Forever Be Confined” (Poem 57, Elemental Edition).

35. Hester Pulter, “Made When I Was Not Well” (Poem 51, Elemental Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/ Line numbers given in text. On this poem as both “blazon” and “antiblazon,” see Frances Dolan, “Headnote” to “Made When I Was Not Well” (Poem 51, Amplified Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/.

36. On Pulter and the blazon, see Frances E. Dolan, “Hester Pulter and the Blazon in Early Modern England” (Exploration), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/.

37. On blazons and anti-blazons, see Jason Scott-Warren, Early Modern English Literature (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2005), 188.

38. Pulter, “Tell Me No More [On the Same]” (Poem 11, Elemental Edition).

39. As Frances Dolan writes, “since the poem lists Jane’s attributes and tries to stop doing so, it is both a blazon and an anti-blazon.” See Frances Dolan, “Headnote” to “On the Same” (Poem 11, Amplified Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http:// pulterproject.northwestern.edu/

40. Pulter, “Tell Me No More [On the Same]” (Poem 11, Elemental Edition).

41. Laura Gowing, “Women’s Bodies and the Making of Sex in Seventeenth-Century England,” Signs, 37.4 (2012): 813-822 (see 817).

42. Ibid.

43. Pulter, “Tell Me No More [On the Same]” (Poem 11, Elemental Edition).

44. See Leah Knight and Wendy Wall, “Notes” to “Tell Me No More [On the Same]” (Poem 11, Elemental Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http:// pulterproject.northwestern.edu/. Knight and Wall argue that both “mind and body” are “characterized as merely ‘the casket’ of her more valuable soul.”

45. Liza Blake, “Body, Soul, Dust” (Curation, Poem 39), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/.

46. Hester Pulter, “The Perfection of Patience and Knowledge” (Poem 39, Elemental Edition), in The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/. Line numbers given in text.

47. Pulter, “This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John” (Poem 45, Elemental Edition).

48. I have here cited from a variety of Pulter poems. See Pulter, “Made When I Was Not Well” (Poem 51, Elemental Edition); Pulter, “Made When I Was Sick” (Poem 31, Elemental Edition).

49. David Thorley, Writing Illness and Identity in Seventeenth-Century Britain (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016), 3, 16.

50. Cited in Thorley, who also discusses this quotation. See Thorley 11-13.

51. Hester Pulter, “Made When My Spirits Were Sunk Very Low With Sickness and Sorrow” (Poem 66, Elemental Edition), in  The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018), http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/. Line numbers given in text.

52. Pulter, “Made When I Was Sick” (Poem 31, Elemental Edition).

53. Pulter, “Made When I Was Not Well” (Poem 51, Elemental Edition).

54. Pulter, “Made When My Spirits Were Sunk Very Low With Sickness and Sorrow” (Poem 66, Elemental Edition).

55. See Blake, “Body, Soul, Dust.”

56. Cited in Blake, who also discusses Marvell’s poem in relation to Pulter’s. See also Andrew Marvell, The Complete Poems (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 103.

57. As Dolan writes, “what’s curious here is that the poem suggests that it is the soul, so often depicted as imprisoned in the body and released by death, that mourns over the ruined body and wants to stay in it.” See Dolan, “Headnote” to “Made When I Was Not Well” (Poem 51, Amplified Edition).

58. Pulter, “This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John” (Poem 45, Elemental Edition).

59. Eardley, “Introduction,” 2.

60. As Blake writes, discussing John Donne’s “The Ecstasy,” “while for Donne their bodies ‘are ours, though not we’—they belong to us, though they are not the same as us, the soul(s)—for Pulter the me is clearly not the soul itself.” See Blake, “Body, Soul, Dust.”

61. See Zoch 24, who also notes this “transformation.” See also Sarah C. E. Ross, “Headnote” to “This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John” (Poem 48, Amplified Edition), in  The Pulter Project: Poet in the Making, ed. by Leah Knight and Wendy Wall (2018),  http://pulterproject.northwestern.edu/.

62. On the lying-in of a new mother, see Zoch 21-22, 24, who argues that “Pulter transforms her physically passive lying-in into the deliberately crafted lays of poetry and song.” Pulter, “This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John” (Poem 48, Elemental Edition).

63. See Zoch 22-24, who argues that “Pulter shows that the act of authorship—not the ritual lying-in itself—empowers the mother.”

64. Pulter, “This Was Written in 1648, When I Lay in, With my Son John” (Poem 48, Elemental Edition).

LEARNING TO SEE LIKE A POET / LYNN GILBERT

By late afternoon

my grandfather came in from a day’s work in the garden, blue shirt darkened all over. He sat motionless on the porch in the wicker armchair until he stopped panting.

Evening brought no relief: Sent upstairs while it was still light, I would lie head to the foot of the ancient spool bed so I could prop my chin on the sill of the open window, ready to drink any breath of air, wishing I could fly out into the cooler dusk. Waiting, my fingers would tell my bed's carved rungs like beads of a rosary, and I noticed how the crimps in the fabric of my cotton nightdress mimicked the glistening ripples in the wire of the window screen, and how, where the wires crossed, they split the street light and the moon into four-pointed stars in the sapphire sky. Once,

roused toward dawn by some dream or perhaps a grown-up creaking about the house, I sat up and leaned to the window: eastern light shone cloudy orange like the glow around a blast furnace, and the air was unutterably sweet with summer grass; the cicadas still now, and the first traffic sounds liquid like the rush of a distant waterfall.

ENCOUNTER / JASON ADAM SHEETS

The poetic concept of encounter dictates that to live a poeticallycharged existence, one must demand from life a mosaic of dynamic human and nonhuman encounters, writing through the ghosts of the things one’s meant to befriend to collectively forge the agreement with death that life requires, measured on a scale of joy and suffering by the weight of one’s participation in the truth of things; therefore, I—

lets eat grandma

/ CATHLEEN CALBERT

Don’t Worry Darling arrived in theaters with a comma-free title, made to match

all our “social media” posts. Wow Julie. Good Luck Sal. Sorry Theodore. (I only hope

that Jules and Sal cheer up Sorry Teddy with their wowza looks and lucky streaks.)

At least Olivia Wilde keeps the apostrophe, long on the endangered list, having vanished from whos, whats, theyre. Its. It’s. Its’. It’s-It? It’s upsetting, darling. Why are we upsetting

Darling? Are we like the proverbial panda that gobbles sugarcane, shoots and leaves?

What about the oxford comma, honored in song by Vampire Weekend? (Or was that making fun?)

Anyway, as they say, don’t worry, and I won’t. Who cares about bloody punctuation anyway?

The colon: my vampire bite is dashed to bits— Forget the much abused semi-colon; that dot

and tail serve time in poor phrases (do you know how to parse a sentence, or do you not, sir).

But when did the period become the bitch blot of communication? Must it now mean

Screw You at the end of every declaration? Yes, Whitman, with his amazingly fragrant armpits,

cried, O voluptuous coolbreathed earth! Lawrence had his turtle tupping like a jerking leap, and oh!

Yet these were spasms of cosmic poetry, yo. Lord, how I push myself into fake orgasms

of exclamation marks to show I’m not angry! I’m a friendly girl! nice girl! glad to know you!

I send on such multiple points of admiration to my lender, who sprinkles the little buggers throughout her incomprehensible prose and for good measure closes each email with a smiley face even though we’re talking hundreds of thousands of serious buckeroos

if I can get it together to pass what seems to be an endless, eighth-period math class.

Should I smiley-face back to her? Thumbs up? Prayer hands? Can I just send dollar signs?

When my realtor texts me three hearts, may I reply, I appreciate your professional expertise?

Perhaps I should add, Don’t worry, darling! Someday I may be willing to sleep with you!!!

Yes: your dead, right dear; reader. I barely comprehend the hieroglyphs of this effusive age, only knowing enough to stay away from vegetables and fruits.

Did you note that last period? What a shrew!

DIARY OF A POETRY EDITOR /SIOBHAN

ROSENTHAL

My instruments are outdated. Still,

In my small plane I circumnavigate

The globe five days a week.

Chasing horizons, sunsets. I see a lot.

Tiny countries coalesce from morning cloud. Later,

Evening cities prickle dewy points of orange light.

I home in. Mountains pimple, swell soft below

My fervent cockpit, quivering wings.

My routine is a thousand one night stands

Over valleys of crumpled sheets. I thank each lover

For their submission to me, slipstream on.

Viewed from here, the world spins so small and bright

It is both magnificent and magnified to absurdity.

The value of experience is my specialist terrain.

Leaving, uncommitted, I wreak gentle havoc

On earnest jungle treks, sincere hermit caves, Intransigent city slicks, idle desert storms.

Mostly, I just glide, ride the changing winds.

Very rarely, the scenery is unexpected.

Then I descend, search the unknown land

With probing hands, seeking the altitude I need.

Not every passing fancy fails me in the end.

The poem, undiscovered, waits.

A landing strip to home.

ORDINARY POEMS / ELISSA MATTHEWS

Great poetry pursues important themes. Life and Death. Passion. Love. The weight of air. Created by those muse-touched souls alone. Mostly dead. Some not. Some ought to be.

Ordinary poems discuss small things. Trees and kids and food and aaah, first kisses! Crafted by just normal folk like me still living underneath the weight of air.

I wrote a poem about a maple tree that was in fact about an unloved child who grew up straight and tall and flaming red in spite of meager light and rocky soil.

I wrote a poem about a small glass swan who was in truth an artist shattered by the need to be two souls at once and how far down you fall before you rise.

I wrote a poem about a flowerpot my son made for me when he was eight and I was sick. In a life some words are said. Children leave. I still have the flowerpot.

Ordinary folk have puny squalls that roar inside them violent and vast. A tempest has a sense of scope and scale. A shattered cup is heartbreak to its dish.

JUDGES / KATHRYN BRATT-PFOTENHAUER

It’s late October when I cut my hair—

a kind of aborted Samson. Late night blurring metallic

on the scissors. I hack at threads in the dark. Black

thick as a baby’s fist. Soft mouth sounds from the man asleep in the next room. When I slip into the bed, he kisses the spot

where I once had hair. Fingers twist into nothing.

I could die and he’d ask my corpse where I had gone.

Ars Poetica with Apologies for All of It

Because my brother loved you, and I did not know I write you an elegy while he sleeps

alone in the west. Dirt in the streets. His beige house with five rooms full of emptiness. The white

cat licks its paws in the twilight, then in the dark.

The obvious:

Your car flipped upside down on a Harare road, or smashed into a guardrail.

Braindead.

Nopulse.

He won’t tell me. But I don’t ask, either. I pretend it is for his sake.

I don’t want to imagine it: your body smeared red and horrible,

crowding the blue petals of jacaranda trees, if there were such trees

where you died. There is so much I don’t know. Maybe it was a highway. Open road.

Open skull. The rooms of emptiness where once you had a mind; light fracturing through the blonde strands of your hair.

II.

Because you were a writer, I’d like to think we had something in common across the distances, the six degrees of separation that meant yes, once we might have touched because we touched the same person.

But I did not know you.

And this is a tragedy. And isn’t that the nature of the elegy: to give voice to a thing that is in essence, voiceless: the dead. Every elegy an act of supposition: that they would want the tribute at all. I don’t know how to mourn in the ethical way anymore.

It’s cheap, the way I remember the dead.

III.

I cannot go to my brother, alone in his grief as rioters stone the French Embassy next door—something explicable in that. Cause equals effect. You died in a car crash: inexplicable.

You are dead. The memory of you goes out with the wind; the gouts of it blowing dirt back into our mouths, spitting our teeth onto concrete. You were a painter. You painted horses.

It was incredible: the way you captured a body in motion. There’s a coup going on:

all it is is bodies in motion. See how you can trace the arc of a man’s fist as it clenches around a stone. It shatters a window.

I wonder what you would’ve made of that. And then I remember you are dead. And there is nothing to make.

THE POET IS LEARNING HOW TO SEEK REVENGE /ZEKE SHOMLER a golden shovel aftter Franny Choi

I never wanted to be as soft as water, never wanted to know if there were such a thing as softness at all. When you were empty, every fragment was proof of beauty: every piece of sky could be wrapped in cloth. If anything, my body is a shard of glass, sharp but unremarkable, silent as a mirror. I never promise happiness, never go to bed without a knife pressed in the rot. That’s not true: I have no knife. I have always walked with my hands empty, felt them crumble into flakes of salt. I am not another comet, this is not another day and I have once again dressed myself with language. I am not in pain, I am in stupor. You twist my neck and we put on all of our finest adjectives. Then I cut out our tongues.

contributors

Kathryn Bratt-Pfotenhauer (they/she) is the author of the poetry collection Bad Animal (Riot in Your Throat, 2023) and the chapbook Small Geometries (Ethel, 2023.) The recipient of a Pushcart Prize, her poetry has been published in The Missouri Review, The Adroit Journal, and others. Her fiction has been published/is forthcoming in Giving Room Magazine and The Masters Review. She is a graduate of Syracuse University’s MFA program in poetry and is a doctoral student in Comparative Literature at New York University.

Galen D. Bunting is a postdoctoral teaching associate at Northeastern University. He holds a doctorate in English from Northeastern University, along with certificates in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and Digital Humanities. In the past, he has contributed to the Women Writers Project as a research assistant and served as an editorial assistant for Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society. In his current project, he traces shell-shock narratives by women and queer people across Modernist literature, to show how these works challenge archetypes of gender and war. His scholarly essays have been published or are forthcoming in The Routledge Companion to Ernest Hemingway, The Bloomsbury Handbook of Sex and Sexuality in Game Studies, Woolf Studies Annual, Praxis: A Writing Center Journal, Peitho: Journal of the Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition, and Lost Modernists. He has also written critical essays and reviews for Ploughshares, Feminist Pedagogy, Modernism/modernity, The Modernist Review, and QED: A Journal In GLBTQ Worldmaking. His creative writing has appeared in Black Warrior Review, The Minnesota Review, and The Fabulist.

Cathleen Calbert’s writing has appeared in numerous publications, including Feminist Studies, Ms., The New York Times, Paris Review, Ploughshares, and Poetry. She has published four books of poems: Lessons in Space, Bad Judgment, Sleeping with a Famous Poet, and The Afflicted Girls. Her awards include a Pushcart Prize, the Sheila Motton Book Prize, and the Mary Tucker Thorp Professorship at Rhode Island College.

David Galef has published over a dozen books, including The Supporting Cast: A Study of Flat and Minor Characters and Second Thoughts: A Focus on Rereading. He’s also published three novels, two short story collections, two books of poetry, Japanese translation, and children’s books. His latest volume is Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook. He’s a professor of English and the creative writing program director at Montclair State University.

Lynn D. Gilbert’s poems have appeared or are forthcoming in Arboreal, Blue Unicorn (Pushcart nomination), Consequence, Footnote, The Good Life Review, Light, The MacGuffin, Ponder Review, Qu Literary Journal, Sheepshead Review, and elsewhere. Her poetry volume has been a finalist in the Gerald Cable and Off the Grid Press book contests. A founding editor of Borderlands: Texas Poetry Review, she lives in an Austin suburb and reviews poetry submissions for Third Wednesday journal.

Elissa Matthews was born, raised, and still lives in New Jersey. She’s been a software programmer, a bartender in a strip club, a cook on a prawn trawler, and a cold water salvage diver. She has published one novel, Where the River Bends, and a collection of short stories, Bittersweet and Magic. Her short stories and poetry have appeared in several journals, including Red Rock Literary Review, Lilith, and Art Times.

Siobhan Rosenthal lives in New Zealand, on disability government assistance in social housing, where they are working on a Ph.D in creative writing. They have published two collections of poetry and a young adult novel, and hold international and national awards for both art and literature. Journal publications include Jewish Fiction, New Zealand Poetry, and World Literature Today. They are currently studying animation, graphic storytelling and narrative art at the Royal Drawing School.

Felicity Sheehy is a poet and a PhD candidate at Princeton University. Her critical writing has appeared in Studies in Philology and Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and the Environment, while her poetry has appeared in The New Republic, The Southern Review, The Irish Times, Poetry Daily, The Yale Review, and elsewhere. Her chapbook Losing the Farm (2021) won the Munster Literature Centre’s international chapbook prize.

Jason Adam Sheets holds a Master of Theological Studies in Theopoetics from Harvard Divinity School, where he currently serves as a Teaching Fellow. His research focuses on how theopoetic language works to shift one's consciousness into spaces of spiritual or mystical experience. Sheets’ commitment to the field can be seen in his work as a poet and essayist. Books include V Verse Is I (forthcoming, 2025), A Madness of Blue Obsidian (AGP, 2022), The Hour Wasp (AGP, 2017), and Theopoetica: An Anthology (AGP, 2022). New poems appear in POETRY (March, 2024) and Modern Language Studies (forthcoming, 2025). A Pushcart Prize nominee, his writing was recently featured in Harvard Magazine and by Oxford University’s Research Centre in the Humanities. He teaches for Poetry in America, in affiliation with the eponymous PBS television series and in conjunction with the National Education Equity Lab, and has worked as a writing and publishing mentor for AWP’s Writer to Writer mentorship program. His work has been supported by Harvard University, PEN America, and Poets & Writers Magazine.

Zeke Shomler (he/him) is a poet and educator in Fairbanks, Alaska. His work has appeared in AGNI, Folio, Cordite, The Shore, and elsewhere.

Délice Williams is Associate Professor of English at the University of Delaware. Her research interests include contemporary climate fiction, climate migration, first-year writing, and literary engagements with oil and water. She has published in Interventions: International Journal of Postcolonial Studies; South Asian Review; The Paterson Literary Review, and Africology: The Journal of Pan African Studies

Executive Editor: Timothy Yu

ISSN: 0010-7484, e-ISSN: 1548-9949

Published four times per year

Contemporary Literature publishes scholarly essays on contemporary writing in English, interviews with established and emerging authors, and reviews of recent critical books in the field. The journal welcomes articles on multiple genres, including poetry, the novel, drama, creative nonfiction, new media and digital literature, and graphic narrative. As a forum for discussing issues animating the range of contemporary literary studies, Contemporary Literature features the full diversity of critical practices. The editors seek articles that frame their analysis of texts within larger literary historical, theoretical, or cultural debates.

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