The Channel 2012

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Channel

MCGILL UNIVERSITY Montréal, Canada

Copyright © The Channel: The Department of English Undergraduate Journal, McGill University, Montréal Canada, 2012.

Editorial selection, compilation, and material © by the 2012 Editorial Board of The Channel and its contributors.

The Channel is an academic journal of McGill University with literary submissions by its undergraduate students studying in the Department of English.

Printed and bound in Canada by Copie Express.

All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted and cited from external authors, no part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Cover art by Scott Durno. Inside portraits of people sitting before Marina Abramović

by Marco Anelli. Time intervals detail their time-trial endurance before the artist. Layout and design by Ryan Healey.

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THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH UNDERGRADUATE JOURNAL

FEATURING ESSAYS BY Suzanne Boswell James Hugh Keenan Campbell Kaitlin Doucette ZoĂŤ Erwin-Longstaff Daniel Gurin

James Lock Jennifer Yida Pan Kevin Paul Morag Santini Jenna Whitnall

EDITORS-IN-CHIEF Ryan Healey

SENIOR EDITORS

Jade Hurter Avinash Kanji Olivia Lifman Julie Mannell Natalie Martiniello Gillian Massel Sinead Petrasek

Carolyn Rowan

ASSISTANT EDITORS Emma Ben Ayoun Sarah Cooperman Scott Leydon Lauren Pires Valerie Silva John Watson

CONTENTS Kevin Paul

Bergson, Durée, and Spatialized Time in the Poetry of John Glassco

James Lock Criticism or Comedy? Putting the Humor of The Handmaid’s Tale into Context

Jennifer Yida Pan

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“And wat he had feld was in his thoght”: Sensation and Education in The Vision of Tundale

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Kaitlin Doucette

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The Good Feminist: Almodóvar on Rape

James Hugh Keenan Campbell

The Spark and the Soul: Mary Shelley’s Critique on the 1816 Vitalism Debate

Jenna Whitnall

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror and the Threatening Reality of Gender Roles in the Weimar Republic

Suzanne Boswell

“Biological, Pathological Details”: H.D. and Biography

Zoë Erwin-Longstaff

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Feminist Tragedy: The “Real” and Surreal In Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls

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Daniel Gurin

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Rimbaud Goes Rambo: Politics and Nothingness

Morag Santini

Christ’s Unknown Bride: The Reformation and Religious Anxiety in the Poetry of John Donne

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Our Contributors

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BERGSON, DURﾃ右, AND SPATIALIZED TIME IN THE POETRY OF JOHN GLASSCO KEVIN PAUL

45 min.

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Bergson, Durée, and Spatialized Time in the Poetry of John Glassco

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The relation of time to space in the poetry of John Glassco (1909-1981) represents an indispensable point of entry to understanding his significance visà-vis modernism. Central modern questions – arising out of Fordist production, new modes of telecommunication and mobility, mass media and new visual technologies, and other developments – concern radically reconfigured experiences of space and, more significantly for many critics, time. A significant body of literature traces what can be read as a response to this upheaval through a philosophical rethinking of time, as well as its literary products. Critics generally treat French philosopher Henri Bergson, who published Time and Free Will in 1889, as an innovator of this philosophical and literary development. In her book Henri Bergson and British Modernism, Mary Ann Gillies writes of the distinction Bergson draws between a pure time, durée, internal to consciousness, continuous, and not externally representable, and ‘clock time’, an artificial spatialization of time that Western civilization has come to give precedence.

In his poetry, unbound by philosophical stringencies, Glassco juxtaposes durée and segmented, clock time with other kinds of spatialized time that seek to bridge the gulf identified by Bergson, in rendering the inner, indivisible, fluid nature of time in a way that serves the conscious construction of a coherent external reality. In this essay I trace the development of this poetic project from a translation of time into architecture and pathways toward an increasing dissolution of time’s spatial rendering, ultimately giving prominence to spaces of foreclosure. Glassco is not unequivocally Bergsonian, but engages with questions directly linked to the modern problems of temporality at the forefront of Bergson’s thought. At stake in Glassco’s poetic imagination is the possibility of provisional asylum from the paralysis confronting finite being upon the loss of a stable, insulating distance from its own finitude.

Gillies suggests that for Bergson, to spatialize time is to make it divisible.

The segmented intervals of seconds, hours, and years “exist for the convenience of human beings and help circumscribe and control the natural environment” (11).

They achieve a uniform mathematics for quantifying, measuring, recording, and predicting natural phenomena, and thereby for designing technologies to modulate and exploit them. Yet there are other ways to spatialize time. The possibility that time can be spatialized toward ends other than atomization and control is critical to understanding how Glassco will engage with, yet depart from, a Bergsonian logic.

As Gillies makes clear, Bergson’s theory does not simply counterpose an inauthentic clock time to be discarded with an authentic, inner durée. Bergson “raised durée over l’étendu (clock time), but he did not dispense with l’étendu

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entirely. [...] [F]or human beings to have an existence outside their inner world, they need to construct an external reality. Hence they use the method of science – the spatialization of time – to reconstruct their lived experience of durée” (12).

Glassco explores precisely unscientific methods, the strategies and tactics of poetry, toward a similar project.

Before outlining the exact modes of Glassco’s spatialization, it will be valuable to consider the relevance of Bergson’s theories to modernism in a more general light. In Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development, Ricardo Quinones elucidates the effect of the hegemony of l’étendu on modern experience, wherein “states of consciousness become discrete multiplicities (that are yet homogeneous, and in the same line of succession), impermeable, like matter, one to the other” (72). In contrast, the logic of durée is one of ongoing flux; it accords the past a force that permeates the present, disallowing the isolation of discrete ‘moments’. Quinones posits a modernist project centered on recollecting and reconstituting durée by portraying “the freedom of difference, discrepancies based on qualitative intensities rather than linear sameness”, the “permeable presence of the past” (73) toward overcoming the dull uniformity and repetition felt in modern life. In Glassco’s poetry, such a drive to recover the affecting but fragmentary “physical details [...] from the nothingness to which our standardized experience relegates them” (74) is in tension with a search for a quasi-coherent understanding of something whole.

A number of modernist techniques can be read as conditioned by a Bergsonian project, and their presence or lack thereof in Glassco’s poetry will aid in situating Glassco in relation to both modernism and the mainstream modernist engagement with time. For example, the jarring juxtapositions and dissonant forms common to much modernist poetry assert difference in the face of homogenized time. Similarly, the disruption of fixed meaning acknowledges precisely the possibility of the intrusion of the past into present consciousness.

Finally, Gillies shows how allusiveness in modernist poetry affirms durée, taking as exemplar T.S. Eliot, who promotes in his “Tradition and the Individual Talent” a “perception, not only of the pastness of the past, but of its presence” (qtd. in Gillies 69). How do the levels, forms, and aims of allusion in Glassco resemble or depart from Eliot’s, and how does Glassco deploy or depart from the multitude of other modernist techniques with which his contemporaries are experimenting?

Before entering the worlds of Glassco’s poems, it is useful to note the traces of Bergsonian ideas in the poet’s explicitly self-reflexive thought.

In “Euterpe’s Honeymoon: Notes on the Poetic Process”, first published in Northern Journey in 1971, Glassco claims the principal technical quality of a “successful lyric poem” to be the “vital and vivifying element” of “a single major and continuous pulsation” as its “internal movement” (114). With “pulsation” recalling rhythm, a regular motion relative to time, and the later use of words including “progress” and “succession” (114), Glassco makes clear a concern

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for the inner time of a poem. Glassco’s notion of continuous movement recalls durée. At the same time, his reference to “a beginning, a middle, and an end” (114) implies discrete sections and the kind of artificial temporal structure that Bergson seeks to deconstruct. However, he speaks too of an “ecstatic process of composition” (114). This evocation of the poet standing outside himself in creative surge evokes a standing-outside of the present, a freedom, achieved through a qualitative intensity, from flat, segmented time. Echoing the products of a strained, ambivalent relation to time in his poetry, Glassco appeals to metaphor, to the “alternate spells of swimming and resting” of the “water-beetle against the stream” (114). Significantly, while this metaphor suggests discontinuous segments, it also discloses the possibility of recollecting a position on a kind of circular trajectory – of making the past present, and of disavowing the makingfinite of a destination. Glassco’s relation to time here appears deeply ambiguous, faintly suggesting the irruptive pressure of durée beneath the scientific time of l’étendu.

The narrow existing body of writing on Glassco’s poetry speaks to a more intelligible treatment of time. In Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists, Brian Trehearne holds that generally “Glassco’s poetry speaks of beauty, ecstasy, and intensity of life as properties of the past, or whose present lustre will quickly fade under the discolouring process of time; and of decay, loss, and bitter failure as present qualities, inevitable results of that past intensity” (191). This dichotomy reflects, to a certain extent, Glassco’s life experience: in the introduction to Glassco’s Selected Poems, Michael Gnarowski recounts the leisurely Parisian adventure of Glassco’s youth, accompanied by his lover Graeme Taylor, which served as the inspiration for the fantastical Memoirs of Montparnasse, the work for which Glassco remains best known. The stay in Paris was interrupted by a lung infection forcing Glassco’s return to Canada, and the remainder of his life was marked by loss and decay – Taylor’s marriage to Sappho in 1941, Taylor’s death in 1957, further hospitalization, and the death of Glassco’s wife in 1971.

However, the Selected Poems ultimately refuse to attach positive qualities to the past and their reversal to the present in precisely the way Trehearne describes. In effect, Glassco’s mapping of present points of precarious access to the past sets up a fragile interplay between beauty and decay, possession and loss, and ecstasy and suffering, rendering the categories, ‘properties of the past’ and ‘properties of the present’, recurrently unstable.

In this project, one of Glassco’s principal strategies is to translate time into architecture. In this strategy, which one can locate in the early stage of his recorded poetic career, his principal architectural figure is the farmhouse. The farmhouse is a paradoxical image for Glassco. He lived in the Eastern Townships of Quebec as he wrote a number of poems beginning in 1940 portraying “The Entailed Farm”, “Gentleman’s Farm”, “Quebec Farmhouse”, and “A House in the Country”. The farmhouse was strongly of the present to the poet, who grew up in

Montreal. Yet, in his modern context, the farmhouse is a signifier of a past way of life – the proper object of nostalgia for the “bucolic” poet, as Glassco himself was portrayed (10). Thus on one level Glassco’s recurrent depiction of the farmhouse re-iterates the presentness of the past that so drives the Bergsonian T.S. Eliot in his conception of tradition.

Along similar lines, “The Entailed Farm” (28-30) opens up this architecture of the past to a particular flow of time. Entailment here refers not to logical necessity but to the legal settling of a prescribed line of inheritance of property. The title of the poem thus invokes owners before the “coffined farmer” and after the “white-bearded boy”, yet these beyonds are bound to a certain law, insofar as ownership cannot be freely transferred.

The farmhouse’s (dis)location in flux inflects the more significant matter of how Glassco embeds a certain temporal discourse into the representation of the architecture itself. “The Entailed Farm” depicts a decaying structure occupied by a furtive, reclusive figure and visited by an explicitly modern subject, interpellated as such: “You, tourist, salesman, family out for a picnic”. This mode of address imagines the regimentation of time for the visitor – l’étendu of a trip, a work day, a leisurely outing circumscribed by city affairs. The visitor, identified with the reader, is a modern temporal subject. The poem continues: Who saw the bearded man that walked like a bear, His pair of water-pails slung from a wooden neckyoke, Slipping in by the woodshed—Come away, That naked door is proof against all knocking!

Standing and knocking there, You might as well expect time’s gate to open On the living past, the garden bloom again,

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With the construction “time’s gate”, the architecture of the (field-gated) farmhouse becomes a mode of understanding time, a time marked by both closure (the “mute, sealed house”, the door deaf to knocking) and radical openness, a wall having collapsed in the house’s decay. Rather than a quantitative segregation of the past (to the “ten years ago”), this paradox suggests a qualitative break constituted by the inability to inhabit, yet the possibility to recollect. Evoking the former, even the legal occupant of the house seems to disavow living there, in his undomesticated gait and entry only into the “woodshed”. The poem at once effects a recollection, bringing the past into the present, enacting (in the guise of the irrecuperable) the previous glory of “[t]he house stand upright, hay-barn’s swayback coping”. Similarly, the “greed of the coffined farmed”, which is “slow” – understood temporally – can be “revive[d]”. In these instances, the present past stresses the stances and motions and desires of things, not the things themselves:

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thus the poetic accent of the agrammatical present verb tense. In this way Glassco signals a primary interest in the precise mutability of being in flux as that which he seeks to recollect. The objects of loss are possibilities, freedoms, not possessions.

The possibility of youth and the foreclosure of age seem to converge in the “white-bearded boy”, signaling a simultaneous invulnerability and susceptibility to time. This figure suggests a unified reading of the architectural closure/disclosure as one. (Importantly, when “you” are “out of sight”, you are so to both the house and the boy.) It is of vital significance that Glassco’s verse only renders the house as “sealed” or “proof” upon some form of attempted access: “the muddy mile of side-road”, then the knocking. “The Entailed Farm” bars active entry but produces a position of passive reception of a stream of images that increasingly subvert the borders of the house: Where the spring’s tooth, the stripping shingles, scaling Beam and clapboard, probes for the rot below Porch and pediment and blind bow-window, And the wooden trunk with the coloured cardboard lining Lies where it fell when the wall of the flying wing Fell down ten years ago;

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In this way the poem suggests the thrownness of human being in time.1 There are elements of the past that one cannot seek out, procure, produce at will to present consciousness. The past will present itself, disclose itself, disclose its presentness, following a logic internal to time itself. Such a schema recalls the problem of a forgotten detail – which could be invaluable, a nuance of Paris, a departed lover – that no mental effort can retrieve, but that ‘comes to mind’ when least expected.

This conclusion departs from a Bergsonian project of active redemption from systematized time. Instead, “The Entailed Farm” reflects its subject matter in suggesting openness as constitutive of the mode of being-in-time that permits authentic interface with the past.

“Gentleman’s Farm” (30-33) explores connected territory, opening with a transfixing line of space-time collapse: “Ten miles from anywhere eighty years and more”. In this loss of intelligibility of this line, it is significant that both time and space are rendered ambiguous. Does the distance metaphoricize time? Do the years index a distance? Are the years an age, a duration? The line stages the struggle for supremacy between space and time that underlies the modernist theoretical undercurrent anticipated by Bergson, who upholds time 1

In Being and Time, Martin Heidegger writes: “This characteristic of Dasein’s Being—this ‘that it is’—is [...] disclosed in itself all the more unveiledly; we call it the “thrownness” of this entity into its “there” [...]. The expression “thrownness” is meant to suggest the facticity of its being delivered over.” (174) Heidegger thus foregrounds the ontological passivity of Dasein, whose essential mode of being is Being-toward-death – an inescapable orientation to the certain foreclosure of all possibility.

against its ostensible spatial displacement. Critically, this struggle is one centered on the production of meaning, and suggests the construction and adoption of a stable mode of understanding time (and space – a resolution of this conflict) as a precondition of coherent meaning-making. Ultimately, the line can be read to imagine a certain uniformity of urban newness – ‘ten miles from anywhere that existed eighty years ago’ – to be realized in the “frozen roadstones grind[ing] iron shoes and tires / And the timberwood’s last stand / Liv[ing] only in brushwood and long memories”. Thus modernity erects barriers to the past’s presence, yet – another paradox – the “taut wires” electrifying the city mark the poem’s transition to depicting a familiar rural architecture. Indeed, the poem’s title signals a related paradox, between the distinction and refinement of the “gentleman” and the bucolic quality of the “farm”, that the poem makes explicit, counterposing the farmer’s “bare living” and the gentleman’s “orgulous legend”. That the farm belongs to the urbane gentleman and the wires interpellate the “naked land” suggests a particular inflection in this poem of the agricultural architecture, an inflection whereby the rural is present to yet disavowed by the urban, foreshadowing a debased pastoral scene of “stone-pocked fields and bog-born stunted alders”.

The calendric invocations of “each November” and “the weekday absentee” prefigure a spatialized time in dialogue with Bergson’s l’étendu. The poem imagines two principle structures, one disavowed, one idealized. The former is [...] a dream-barn, a body of wood and iron Figuring forth on the mind’s wilderness,

With wealth for an ally, The structural mania of the human heart — Whose buildings rise in a kinder soil than this,

And beneath an inward eye

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Where all goes well and the pioneer has profit, Where the titan’s work subserves as in a dream

The all too fictive goal, And the end is perfect beauty, the blessed vision, The working out of a man’s reverie

Of his own memorial!

Referencing the divine or spiritual forces of the “titan”, and earlier the “Genie”, the poem ties this architecture to a desire for eternity, indeed for an enduring “memorial”, through which the present self is deposited infinitely into the future.

Thus the barn comes in the repeatable form of a dream, in an image that can be disseminated, freed from a material singularity. Following the conclusions of “The Entailed Farm”, such control over time is a doomed venture; the barn’s dreamt quality takes on an obverse significance – virtual, locked in the individual,

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impossible, “all too fictive”. This configuration of time, the lines imply, rises in an unkind “soil”, highlighting its inorganic nature, its artifice. Further, by deduction from a contrast with the constructions of “the human heart”, the imagined memorial represents a site subject to an outward eye. Indeed, it externalizes and fixes durational time. The poem renders this strategy as absolutely inadequate barrier to decay, the “forefixed harvest of man’s reverie” ever subject to “sad and stealing change”.

The alternative architecture is that of “the right, the wavering line”.

With this concluding appeal, the poem seeks a middle ground between a structure imagined as perfect and its total dissolution. In Bergsonian temporal terms, it suggests a move to synthesize perfectly divisible, uniform ‘clock time’ and unalloyed, heterogeneous durée. Such a synthesis serves the interests of a project to escape the meaninglessness of undifferentiated minutes, hours, and days without falling into a subsequent abyss proscribing the vector of common understanding that lies in external representations of experience. The architecture of the “wavering line” is characterized by contradiction: “The grandiose design / Must marry the ragged thing”. The barn’s raggedness suggests an enduring incompleteness that is the product of an openness to processes of decay “marr[ied]” to the design itself.

Thus, the future is made present to the present. Further, a line cannot be seen to waver from the perspective of a single point – a self-contained present. The “wavering line” implies a vision not of a whole, which is immeasurable, but of part of a flux: the points that have been, from which the line wavers, are present to consciousness. The introduction of the barn marks a vision that rhetorically collapses the now and the then: “Look backward now”. This architecture upholds contradiction not just in itself but as a generalized schema. Thus it displaces the time of a “mathematic of indifference”2 that “equate[s] / Farmer and Gentleman” in the memorial, exemplifying the search posited by Quinones for “the freedom of difference, discrepancies based on qualitative intensities” (73), yet presenting this freedom not within an autonomous new mode of time, but in constant tension with the mathematical, the standard. “Gentleman’s Farm” intricately weaves the wavering line of temporal experience into a wavering experience of the self.

This latter instability points to both tensions of identity (as between farmer and gentleman) and to an ambivalent existential condition, linked to the freedom to continue giving meaning to the past in the present, undermined by the ongoing decay that is the constant promise of that meaning’s total dissolution. As “The Entailed Farm” foregrounded receptivity to the flux of time, “Gentleman’s Farm” stresses a time of difference.

Pathways in Glassco, as the connectors of architecture, and architectural themselves, are critical to the poet’s construction of time. The significance of pathways is linked to that of the surrounding world they disclose. Roads, paths, and trails can be linear, regularly marked, and continuous, or circular, twisted, 2

“The Entailed Farm” instructs us to invert the relations of possession in the construction time’s X.

unmapped, unmarked, discontinuous, occasioning vision or lostness, and these opposed qualities may intermingle in and co-constitute the trajectory. In general, the pathway is fundamentally a double image that invokes at once a movement – ephemeral, fluid, subject to speed and acceleration – and a stable link between fixed points. In this way pathways may doubly encode time. “The Rural Mail” and “The Brill Road”, among other Selected Poems, prompt critical decodings.

“The Rural Mail” (25-26) indeed presents two incongruous visions of temporality. Glassco, who carried mail in rural Quebec during World War II, depicts here the “green paths” of a courier’s route “trodden by patience” (my emphasis) – immediately eliciting a consideration of the path in relation to time.

From the perspective of this pathway, the poem opposes “To the smashed records for gobbling and spewing, / Cows that exist in a slow-motion world”. While on one level these lines contrast the rapidity of the modern age with the slow, organic pace of nature, they counterpose not only speeds but temporalities, different schematic relations to time. The “smashed records” of industrial production indicate precisely measurement, recording, rank, entailing a time translated into l’étendu, made objective, measurable, recordable, and conquered, smashed by mechanical ingenuity. The cows’ “slow-motion world” implies a subjective, inner time, durée, and accords it supremacy over the spatial world in defining the latter by slowness. This tension reflects precisely the double nature of the path from which it is viewed, a path that is both a measurable distance between points and the lived experience of a journey. It is a duality which inflects the poem’s treatment of decay. A farmer on the postman’s route is slowly dying: I sense his hours marked by my two-wheeled cart Descending the stony hill: as I stop by his box The ring of tin as the Knowlton News goes in Is a day’s knell — and the countryside contracts For an instant to the head of a pin;

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The trajectory of the cart marks the progression of time in hourly, then diurnal segments charting decay and loss. The cart subsumes time in its spatial trajectory.

Yet, the verse then moves to subordinate space to time, in the “instant” of contraction which evokes the countryside’s shared, collectively inevitable future of perpetual decay. Complementing this Bergsonian gesture, the “reflective pity” evoked, alongside “pleasure”, by “birth” suggests a consciousness of human thrownness into the flux of time not as scientific knowledge but as qualitative intensity. Crucially, Glassco differs from Quinones in his appeal to this rupture of the quantitative, in attaching it not to physical details but to a generalized experience of time. Here can be read the traces of a search that exceeds the bounds of a conventional modernist project, in aiming to access a transcendent meaning.

What, ultimately, is the significance of the visibility of this duality –

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heterogeneity/uniformity, durée/l’étendu – from the pathway? What constitutes the meaning of the pathway as vantage point? In considering these questions more closely, it will be useful to first turn to “The Brill Road” (36-37).

The title’s naming (of an Eastern Townships village) evokes at once a colloquial “brilliant”, prefiguring the blinding elements that characterize the represented experience of the road, which “goes / Straight into a white screaming sky”. The poem makes clearer than most in the Selected the collapse of time, specifically the time of human being, into space: Yes, we follow the blinding years, Into the sweeping, swallowing wind, Into the gape of all and the loss of person Driving his birthright deathward in a trance Over the mountain’s swollen Jovian brow, The “blinding years” suggest the artificial divisions that obscure, in Bergsonian thought, authentic experience of time, yet which we “follow” anyway, dependent on stable, communicable meaning as firm ground against the absolute dissolution of “the loss of person”. The poem represents a dramatic and dark counterpoint to “The Rural Mail”’s careful arrangement of a dual visibility, the informal “brill” acquiring a bitter, abortive inflection. In place of provisional ground between inadequate temporalities (durée and l’étendu), Glassco here finds an abyss.

Snowfall covers all regular road markers, surrendering a divisibility whose rationale guards against the illogic of decay to the ruptural deathly icons of the “skeletons of scarecrows”, the lone remaining indicators. The road Like a noosed lifeline to five worthless farms Peters out under the snow.

The road is a trick, like every form of life, A signal into the dark impartial storm (The leveller of land, the old mound-maker Smoother of great and small): though the road is wrong Always, and leads upwards forever To impossible heights, into the boiling snow, There is no turning back; but the road is a trap.

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Even this ceded pathway, this violently wavering line, is a “trick”, falsely promising “signal” of something enduring, material, and whole. The destination, really, is fragmented (“five”), “worthless”, and ultimately inaccessible – on the other side of a forever-rising mountain. Whereas “The Rural Mail” suggests a spatial bridge to time as flux through heights of affect, in “The Brill Road” qualitative intensities – exhaustion, terror, an “orchestra of fear” – mark denial,

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impossibility, and internment in nothingness.

Yet, “The Brill Road” is far from an irreconcilable aberration in Glassco’s poetry. An analogy can be drawn between the “us and our servants / Madly seeking the other side of the mountain” and the modern interlopers of “The Entailed Farm”, who, in knocking, are denied entry. For Glassco, the pathway, like architecture, demands a certain ontological passivity from the human relation to time. Indeed, the stance of the traveller involves a fateful unawareness to the fact that “we do the mountain’s bidding”, that the active quest to map time is a “trap” whose chains tighten upon resistance. In contrast, the “patience” of “The Rural Mail”’s postman, who “hang[s]” and “sense[s]”, signals a necessary existential resignation. Moreover, his form of labor itself indicates receptivity – the givenness of the mail, the route, the stops. Both poems produce a consciousness of human finitude, but the postman’s passive stance enables visions which give discursive legibility to time, and thereby sustainable meaning to impending nothingness.

We are thrown onto roads, paths, and trails, as we are thrown into the palimpsestic architecture of time. Ontological passivity thus constitutes the pathway as vantage point. And this possibility of vision is contingent on the structures of forgetting and recollection. The heedless colonizer of time forgets the path’s wavering and continually repeats a frozen movement, whereas the eye of the traveler who can double back, detour, recollect, accedes to a timeworld furnishing an ever-present past and delivering unalloyed difference. In the poems so far considered, Glassco employs architecture and pathways to spatialize time as both flux and measurable quantity, enabling the poet to map the conflict between these understandings. Moreover, Glassco’s verse imagines the possibility of a precarious middle space which thematizes the wavering line as promise of an intelligible representation of experience that eschews the deadening uniformity felt in modern life. One notes the echo of a wavering line in the rhyme schemes of many of these poems. In “The Rural Mail”, for instance, the restrained ABACBC of the first two stanzas surrenders to the decay of half-rhyme and the near-total loss of ABCDCE (fourth stanza) before regaining a degree of its early regularity.

This kind of transfer to form of the poetry’s mode of understanding time highlights the centrality of the project I have thus far ascribed to Glassco’s poetic enterprise as a whole.

As the relationship between “The Rural Mail” and “The Brill Road” makes clear, Glassco’s thought about time can be continuous without being univocal or static. Moving now to another phase of his writing career, I will explore how the later production bespeaks a poet whose ownmost foundation has weakened, his ownmost horizon neared. The poems “The Day” and “A Point of Sky” invigorate a concern with the loss of self and point to an existential dissolution, by depositing time simply in substance and to a certain extent abandoning elaborate schemas promising spatial access to a flux. We find traces here of barer human sensations, at once less accessible and more intense than ever.

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“The Day” (80-83) imagines the dissolution of spatialized time.

Envisioning the day of a persona’s death, it equates “a removal from time” with a “severance from substance”. Thus the complex architectures and pathways of the earlier poems have been reduced to undifferentiated matter. The invocation of a “disinherited man” establishes a connection with “The Entailed Farm”, positing death as material dispossession. Importantly, Glassco does not fully discard these schemas, but uses their absence, their pastness, to examine an ownmost loss. This examination involves a process of abstraction from, yet not the destruction of, a spatialized time. Extending the logic of the turn to “substance”, “The Day” presents the startlingly indefinite images of “the man in space [...] [i]n a place of beating air” (time spatialized here by the “beating” rhythm of the air). The form of the poem is notable in that relatively free verse increasingly cedes to blocks of short lines, achieving through a literal ‘narrowing’ the effect of treating even the materiality of the poetry – ink on a page – as undifferentiated. These gestures evoke a grasping at a spatial freedom (the freedom to differentiate, to imbue structure) as escape from the impending foreclosure of all possibility.

Yet, “The Day” additionally translates its time into spaces of foreclosure.

There is the denial of reference point – for meaning, for existence – to the “bird on the ocean” (an image of a “soul, naked at last”) and the “man / Lying upon the air”. More dramatically, Glassco gives us the figure of the “impossible city”.

A modern image of mechanized eternity, never darkened, always in motion, this architecture invokes the contradiction between Glassco’s poetic search for structures of spatialized time that are precarious and ambivalent yet inorganic – enduring outside of human time – and the certain and absolute finitude of human time. “The Day” figures the search for this city as inauthentic: “Or will he still seek in his failing mind for the impossible city?” Glassco still seeks to understand relations to time through space: deliberately, the space of foreclosure is the space of l’étendu, of the alarm clock, the bus schedule, the factory shift – such are the temporalities foreclosed by authentic being in relation to death. In summoning love, “desire and the liquor of its adoration”, as solace in the face of death, Glassco also suggests an alternative time: “Consider only the human music taking its way to silence”. In love, the poem finds a “music”, a rhythm, a time that shatters the glass of Bergson’s durée; it produces an inner, “human” consciousness of inevitable decay that is nevertheless communicable, shared, if only with one other. The thread of ontological passivity as site of essential possibility lengthens: the beloved is “the singing prisoner” who has given over “body”, “brain”, and “heart to whoever may / [ choose you”. The self, surrendered, and the world, operant on a foreign time, become new kinds of impossible spaces that render impossibility total, thereby meaningless. Death then comes not as foreclosure, but as a release, a new possibility apposed to an “ended” “dream”:

So on that final day That final day Removed from time Dependent on nothing When nothing will matter, You will escape Like a mouse in the darkness

Glassco re-iterates a logic of the impossible space in “A Point of Sky” (88-92), but to bleaker ends, which re-frame the human time of love as an essentially transitory, faltering option. The titular image signifies precisely an impossible space in that it denotes a site both infinitesimal and free-floating, unanchored. In one of his most Bergsonian moments, Glassco presents an image of pure consciousness of being-in-flux. The inner, felt times of “boredom” (‘too slow’), “disaster” (‘too fast’), and “distress” (uncertainty) mark a face in a mirror that becomes “the true face of our condition”, death, “[t]he suspended sentence falling on us like a fist”. Times intermingle, as “[i]n this hour” (the present) “the future has suddenly shrunken / Into the compass of the catoptric past, / Caught and pinned in a single glance”, and “[i]ts hopes and terrors are here and now”. Glassco here ties the inability to re-constitute heterogeneous, flowing time in coherent spatial terms to a radical vulnerability to decay. As opposed to concrete spatial formations, time is recurrently encountered through the “glance”: As her glance in the morning of meeting Holds the whole history of our passion Multiplying and making rich the events That will never arrive

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The fourth line’s abrupt reversal bespeaks a precarious visual logic, subject to the ‘glance back’. This shift signals a rupture in the spatial language of time, whereby legibility itself will suffer a major dissolution.

In the final architectural figuration I will consider, “A Point of Sky” portrays the hospital or nursing home room in which the activity of a decaying consciousness will cease: “The prison and refuge of your life’s remains”.

Subsequently, it becomes “prison of time”, time’s prison. In the absence of concrete descriptors, one imagines an austere space, indeed not unlike a prison cell. Yet, also implied is a space that is illegible; the occupant’s “breath” and “hands” striving, but against the faint, phantasmic walls of an abyss. The poem only makes clear that memories – of a smell, a sound – have entered the room with the body. These “inviolacies” act to suspend to the room seemingly lost to presentness in some ambiguous relation to another time. The verse proceeds to an image of semi-conscious neighbors and their “slippered feet passing your door /

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Only to pass, never to pause / [...] No visitation or communication”. This sense of closure signifies a time rendered illegible, shuttered to “visitation”, impossible to the visitor. The poem thus produces the paradox of spatialized time as vehicle for understanding the very inaccessibility of time to the rational mind which arranges, orders, sets things in place. As one in a multitude, this image does not negate the conclusions already drawn from Glassco’s poetry. Rather, it adds to a series of gestures enforcing the precariousness of all attempts to ‘read’ time from a location of ontological thrownness.

These poetic representations of death suggest Glassco as the occupier of a liminal modernist space, perhaps one appropriate for a figure of as contested a category as “Canadian Modernism”. Quinones writes of the modernist project to restore to death “its sting” (160) by according it a place outside of rationality, and a “transcendent” (162) role, in literature. By contrast, “The Day” builds to a reconciliation with death through the powers attached to love. Alternatively, “A Point of Sky”, through the buildup of a desperate struggle to escape the nothingroom, and the absence of a textual representation of the awaited end of life, posits death as an authentic point of rupture, incommunicable as time. I do not intend to elaborate on Glassco’s position relative to the precepts of modernism, a concern tangential to my project, but it is clear that such an investigation could fruitfully begin at precisely an understanding of how time is rendered recuperable and irrecuperable throughout the poet’s body of work.

John Glassco’s poetry discloses a many-layered and ambivalent relationship to time. Its recurrent presentation of confrontations with finitude articulates a network of questions more than it resolves a given problem. Through constructions of space to not only reflect temporal concerns but embody logics of time, Glassco works through a tension between durée and l’étendu, a tension built to critically intervene in Bergson’s counterposition of the two times as engaged in a struggle on civilizational terms. Glassco’s farmhouses and footpaths suggest the inadequacy of reproducing the traces of durée in details and summits of affect. These time-spaces privilege occupants receptive to a time of difference, establishing as protocol an ontological passivity relative to Bergsonian flux. In his later work, Glassco’s focus shifts from the open and closed space to those of foreclosure – spaces of impossibility. These later ventures recollect the provisionality and precariousness of all the ways by which time, flux, and finitude are converted into spaces of life and death.

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Works Cited Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 1962.

Gillies, Mary Ann. Henri Bergson and British Modernism. Montreal: McGillQueen’s University Press, 1996.

Glassco, John. Selected Poems with Three Notes on the Poetic Process. Ottawa: Golden Dog Press, 1997.

Quinones, Ricardo J. Mapping Literary Modernism: Time and Development.

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Trehearne, Brian. Aestheticism and the Canadian Modernists: Aspects of a Poetic Influence. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1989.

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CRITICISM OR COMEDY? Putting the Humor of The Handmaid’s Tale into Context JAMES LOCK

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Criticism or Comedy? Putting the Humor of The Handmaid’s Tale into Context

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Three years ago, I read The Handmaid’s Tale for the first time. The copy I read belonged to a friend, who received it from another friend, who stole it from a roommate, who bought it from a used bookstore three blocks from a university. It was clear that, like me, each of my book’s past owners were students — between the covers and in every margin were words like “subaltern” or “postphenomenology” and names like Judith Butler or Jacques Derrida. Brackets borrowed from earnest professors surrounded every important paragraph and arguments lifted from peerreviewed papers framed every important page. It became difficult to get through Atwood’s words without stumbling over somebody else’s first. Unfortunately, passages like Offred’s silent walk to the market (or the modest hip show she subsequently gives the Guardians) elicited laughter when I knew that pity was probably more appropriate. But it was the notes surrounding the passage, not Offred’s desperate display of sexuality, which made me laugh. Here were five or six radically different readings of the same passage, each more speculative than the one preceding it. While it amused me to know that a previous reader valued (and annotated) Offred’s (self-deprecating) strut (down the catwalk) (of a postfashion future), I constantly second-guessed myself when I tried to construct an interpretation of The Handmaid’s Tale that was not interrupted by the parenthetical nonsense (like in this sentence) that accompanied it. I was an individual reading a story about another individual contextualized by what other individuals thought until, halfway through the novel, one sentence stood out to me: “Context is all” (Atwood, Handmaid 166).

There are, fittingly, many ways to interpret this statement. Offred delivers this claim after her first evening alone with the Commander, reasoning to herself that their innocent board game is perhaps not such an unexpected turn of events. When the reader places emphasis on the word “context,” it becomes a sentence about rationality and perspective: What happened to me was strange, but to the Commander it was normal. When the reader places emphasis on the word “all,” it becomes a sentence about objectivity: It is impossible to say whether what happened to me was strange or normal, because a larger context surrounds both of us. Focalized through Offred, this sentence is meaningful in its ability to simultaneously display her self-doubt and self-awareness. However, coming from Atwood, this sentence is significant in its ability to simultaneously characterize her heroine and encourage an examination of double-meanings throughout the text.

That the sentence “Context is all” perfectly articulates my chaotic experience of reading a used copy of The Handmaid’s Tale, however, is simply ironic. Wordplay and irony are two of Atwood’s greatest crutches—and strengths.

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In a single sentence Atwood directly addressed me and, with an acknowledging wink, told me to stand back and examine The Handmaid’s Tale from a broader perspective. What I saw was a fictional autobiographical account discussed in a fictional academic symposium framed by three literary epigraphs interpolated by the annotations of previous students appropriated from a slew of esteemed academics. There are, naturally, elements of irony within each narrative—even within the narrative of me reading the novel for the first time. Yet surrounding each narrative is a frame that encourages the reader to examine each narrative in a particular way. Given Atwood’s emphasis on context, it is necessary to examine The Handmaid’s Tale and its surrounding criticism from perspectives not limited to the novel itself.

Appropriately, Atwood devotes the majority of The Handmaid’s Tale to Offred’s story. While the tragedy of Offred’s situation and treatment deserves (and receives) utmost seriousness, Atwood adopts a tone that is heavily ironic, occasionally humorous, and overwhelmingly satirical. Because these devices inform and amplify each other, it is important to discuss how they are different in order to understand how Atwood uses them. Irony, which juxtaposes expectations against unexpected results, manifests itself in two forms in The Handmaid’s Tale: verbally (as in the sentence previously discussed) and situationally (like the Commander’s request for a game of Scrabble). Humor is a common cognitive response to irony. When the reader understands the discrepancy between expectation and result, he or she will find it humorous (like the way Offred wants to “shriek with laughter” upon learning that sex is not what the Commander wants [160]). Satire, meanwhile, is a literary form that relies upon the reader’s understanding of irony. Satire ridicules an object—an idea, an individual, or society altogether. Weak satire, like name-dropping academics in the first paragraph of an essay about the limits of academia, calls attention to the flaws of an object, while strong satire, like the Gileadean Republic’s plausible history and the way it derives from second-wave feminism, seeks to instruct or improve, by example, the object it ridicules.

Throughout Offred’s narrative, she and other characters are aware of and, in some cases, even use irony, humor, and satire. Some critics suggest that, in order to gain the self-awareness, Offred must become “educated both to a certain kind of more complex linguistic competency and to a broader ironic stance that finally motivates her to autonomous action” (Wagner-Lower 84). This assertion ignores the entire pre-Gileadean history that Atwood meticulously constructs.

Offred’s experiences with her mother at a book burning (Atwood, Handmaid 4243) suggest that Offred was a child during the second-wave feminist movements of the late 1970s or early 1980s, while Offred’s descriptions of (and familiarity with) her environment (191-192) suggest that the ceremonial center of the Gileadean Republic was once Harvard University. That Atwood briefly attended the same school is not a coincidence—both women’s pasts plainly imply that Offred was

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a student there. While it is difficult to speculate whether or not The Harvard Lampoon or even The Simpsons had a chance to exist in Offred’s increasingly theocratic, fictional past, to assume that Offred—a university-educated student in the late 1980s or early 1990s—is so unfamiliar with irony that she has to learn it, is ridiculous. A pre-outing conversation between Offred and Moira during their university days demonstrates a masterful grasp of irony and humor: I had a paper due the next day. What was it? Psychology, English, Economics. We studied things like that, then. On the floor of the room there were books, open face down, this way and that, extravagantly.

Now, said Moira. You don’t need to paint your face, it’s only me. What’s your paper on? I just did one on date rape.

Date rape, I said. You’re so trendy. It sounds like some kind of dessert. Date Rapé.

Ha ha, said Moira. Get your coat.

She got it herself and tossed it at me. (42)

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In one brief conversation are examples of verbal irony (date rapé) and situational irony (Moira tells Offred to get her coat and immediately does it herself). It is difficult to believe that Offred lacks ironic distance when she feels comfortable making jokes about rape; even Moira responds to Offred’s objectively shocking joke with apathy and sarcasm. More difficult to believe is the assertion that Ofglen must instruct Offred in the rules of wordplay when the latter appears very capable of it already, much to the same extent that the Aunts at the Center bombard the Handmaids with instructional mottos that have obvious double meanings like “Pen Is Envy” (215). Thus, the foundation of Offred’s self-awareness is her ability to grasp the irony of her situation and the language she uses to describe it. In fact, Offred is so aware of her tragic circumstances that it makes her laugh — a situation that in and of itself is ironic because the language Offred uses to describe her laughter is violent and threatening: Offred feels herself “about to be sick” or “choke,” quickly realizing that she could even “die of laughter” (169). Atwood assumes that the contemporary reader is as familiar with these ironic devices as Offred, and similarly wastes no time explaining them. It is their prevalence, however, that makes them worth examining.

As The Handmaid’s Tale effectively demonstrates, strong satire does not need to be made overtly humorous to convey a point. It does, however, need to be ironic, and, as a result, Atwood constructs layers of irony to make her satire work on several levels. The constant use of verbal irony encourages the reader to recognize situational irony in an otherwise dismal story, which Atwood demonstrates in self-contained passages such as the conversation between Offred and Moira. Instances of situational irony, meanwhile, suggest that there are

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broader examples at work. Once Offred casually mentions the subjects that she studied in university, she reveals that, presently, “writing is … forbidden” (44) and that a pillow inscribed with the word “FAITH” is “the only thing they’ve given me to read” (64). Later still, the reader discovers Offred’s past occupation as a library clerk—a job that ironically involves both reading and writing. Offred slowly reveals the way her job became unsafe in face of the book burnings and unfit for women in an increasingly patriarchal society (203-204). As these ironic situations become more intricate, their ties to non-fictional events in Offred’s past become stronger. This association, in turn, forces the reader to acknowledge the discrepancies between real historical events and their fictional outcomes in the future. It is this comparison that transforms The Handmaid’s Tale into a contemporary satire.

The satire of The Handmaid’s Tale, however, extends beyond the main narrative. Like nearly all of the devices Atwood employs, the novel’s epilogue serves two purposes: it offers a conclusion to Offred’s story and, perhaps even more importantly, offers a broader perspective to the events that precede it.

The Twelfth Symposium on Gileadean Studies includes a keynote speech from Professor Pieixoto of Cambridge University, who discusses the recordings known as “The Handmaid’s Tale” and speculates over which historical figures correspond to the people Offred mentions in her story. Because the way he speaks suggests that little lexical change happens to the English language over two hundred years, it is fair to assume that the idioms and asides he makes during his lecture carry the same semantic meanings in contemporary English. Since the epilogue does not necessarily change, or offer any new insight into Offred’s plight, it is also fair to assume that Atwood wants readers to examine the behavior of this new character.

Piexioto peppers his discussion of Offred with puns on words like “tail” or “bone,” purposefully calling attention to their contemporary sexual connotations (345).

Here, Atwood paints a picture of future academia that is still despairingly similar to the male-dominated academic field in which many contemporary women struggle to establish a presence. It is a dismal outcome to the already dismal future Atwood describes in Offred’s story: even after the Republic of Gilead, academia continues to underrepresent women. This is especially ironic given the implied collapse of a patriarchal society which Atwood suggests has built itself on the more extreme notions of second-wave feminism.

Like the narrative before it, an examination of multiple layers of irony in the epilogue necessitates an inquiry into the possibility of satire. In these final pages, Atwood juxtaposes a fictional outcome and a fictional story, making it difficult to call the epilogue a satire on those grounds alone. Atwood’s relationship with academia, however, adds poignancy to this passage. In an essay following the publication of Oryx and Crake, Atwood states her stance as a writer: “I’m not a science fiction expert. Nor am I an academic, although I used to be one, sort of” (Atwood, PMLA 513). With The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood intentionally distances

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herself from the academic striving for empirical truth and speculates over the possible outcomes created by imposing empirical truth on society. Her distance may not even be self-imposed—for two decades Atwood published works that labeled her “as a feminist novelist by a panoply of writers and critics,” a term she resisted before “carefully defining the kind of feminist she was” (Neuman 858).

This labeling suggests that, in an academic world that automatically delineates her voice as inexorably feminine, Atwood’s voice never even had the chance to speak unmarred by critical context. It is no surprise then that Atwood bitterly, yet appropriately, fills the academic conference in the epilogue of The Handmaid’s Tale exclusively with male characters who introduce, reference, and joke with other male characters about a story that primarily concerns the subjugation of one woman.

With this aversion to the exclusion and strictness of academia in mind, the epilogue becomes a particularly satirical anecdote to what is already a satirical work of fiction. It is possible that the epilogue’s inclusion in The Handmaid’s Tale is a response to the criticism of her novels that precede it, most of which feature female protagonists who must cope with stereotypically feminine issues (breast cancer in Bodily Harm, body image in Lady Oracle, etc.). If one likens satire to holding a mirror up to society’s faults, then Atwood’s epilogue fittingly holds a mirror up to academic criticism, painting it as a patriarchal institution as much as Atwood’s male critics paint her as a women’s writer.

Atwood does not limit this analysis to the last several pages of The Handmaid’s Tale; there are clues in Offred’s narrative that parallel Atwood’s criticisms offered by the epilogue. Offred regularly thinks about her daughter and, despite their separation, feels an obligation to rectify the abduction of her daughter by state authorities. During Offred’s most trying moments, the thought of their past and (unfortunately improbable) reunion sustains and empowers her. Yet years after their separation, when Serena Joy presents Offred with a photograph of her daughter to prove that she is still alive, Offred finds her “changed” (Atwood, Handmaid 264), even entirely assimilated into the Gileadean Republic. After this moment, Offred never mentions her daughter again, and places her aspirations of escape and change onto other objects—like her lover Nick (310). If one believes that Atwood is an author that regularly sees her work disappear into the hands of academics and critics to scrutinize and mold, then the loss of Offred’s daughter can be interpreted as an analogous situation. In a model in which publishers exchange money for manuscripts, publications become a commodity owned by the reading public as much as by the author who wrote it. Perhaps Atwood laments this process, especially when novels and poetry concerning contemporary women’s issues become assimilated into a patriarchal academic institution. That Atwood makes Offred confide in Nick is an especially cynical comment on this process—if Atwood cannot place faith in the availability or longevity of her own work on her own terms, then pandering to the male-dominated fields of publishing

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and criticism becomes a necessary evil in order to assert her voice. Should things not change drastically from the present day as Atwood speculates in this epilogue, it is not difficult to imagine a future critic discussing The Handmaid’s Tale in the same breath as a playful misogynistic remark against Atwood—in the same way that Professor Pieixoto discusses Offred’s story.

While such an analysis is itself a speculation, there are nonetheless concrete indicators that Atwood encourages a satirical reading of The Handmaid’s Tale. Framing both the tale and the epilogue are three epigraphs: one Biblical, one proverbial, and one literary. The Biblical epigraph, which describes a surrogate birth between Jacob and Rachel’s maid (Genesis, 30.1-3) eerily similar to the ceremonial births that Offred and the other Handmaids attend (Atwood, Handmaid 185), is clear in its intention. It contextualizes the patriarchal reasoning behind the Republic of Gilead and cites religious precedence for what Atwood views as a possible outcome of a society in which dropping fertility rates and extreme feminism collide. The Bible, which devout Christians believe is the absolute word of God, contrasts with the second epigraph, a Sufi proverb, which is more transparently a cautionary word of advice made literary through oral tradition. If the Biblical quote aids Atwood’s construction of a satirical future, then the Sufi proverb emphasizes the importance that Atwood subsequently places on double meanings in words and situations. The Jonathan Swift epigraph, however, makes Atwood’s satirical intentions the most clear because it aligns her proposal in The Handmaid’s Tale to Swift’s own “Modest Proposal.” The quotation humorously likens Atwood’s early work to the “vain, idle, visionary thoughts” (Swift 17) that prompted his mocking endorsement of casual infant cannibalism, perhaps recalling the polarized reception of Atwood’s earlier work that prompted her to create such a bleak satire. In placing this quote directly before Offred’s narrative, Atwood expects her readers to recall both the satirical content of Swift’s essay and the strong reaction it elicited from his contemporaries who rejected the content as preposterous or barbaric.

What is interesting, however, is the order in which Atwood presents these three epigraphs, as well as her choice in using them. The Swift quote follows the Biblical quote, offering two drastically different methods of approaching the content of the novel. As Karen Stein suggests, the reader is free to examine the novel from a spiritual point of view or from a political point of view (61-62). The Sufi proverb that follows them both, however, entails two meanings. By placing this epigraph last, Atwood suggests that the reader is correct to approach her novel in either way or, ideally, in both ways at once. With the content of Offred’s story, the Gileadean Republic, second-wave feminism, and the academic world all in mind, it is perfectly valid to call The Handmaid’s Tale a political satire as much as a religious one. But, as is usually the case, Atwood cleverly builds a second intention into these epigraphs: she ultimately chooses the epigraphs herself, which means that she ultimately chooses the way she frames the interpretation of her

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novel. Although the epigraphs are not written by Atwood, her ability to handpick and include them grants her the position of author-by-appropriation. This mimics the way the Commander chooses which Bible passages to read to his subjects: “The state cynically selects the texts which it privileges to authorize its political control … Bibles are kept locked up, and only the men are legally allowed to read them” (Stein 62). In this way, the epigraphs are not just a way of indicating the intended satire, but are themselves satirical.

The lengths to which Atwood goes to secure authority over the text are necessary, but almost humorously exhausting in their execution. In writing The Handmaid’s Tale, Atwood seems to tell two stories: one that concerns the speculative future of women in a plausible theocratic nation and another that concerns the self-consciousness of authorship in an academic environment that values structure over sincerity. It is difficult to determine whether or not Atwood expects readers to value the novel’s structure over its content — her later novels are certainly more conventional in their structure (in that anything Atwood wishes to say, she conveys within the content of the primary narrative).

In The Handmaid’s Tale however, Atwood strongly encourages the reader to believe that “context is all.” But, if context is all, what role does content play?

If one temporarily ignores the academic posturing and criticism about criticism that Atwood takes so much effort to discuss, The Handmaid’s Tale is still a selfcontained work of fiction with instructional value. Most readers will connect with characters despite the meta-narratives, and Offred’s story effectively highlights the past and present inequalities of women as well as the potential outcome of censorship or delineated-status movements of second-wave feminism in a society that still leans in the direction of patriarchy. Thus, The Handmaid’s Tale is a satire about something that has not happened as much as it is a cautionary tale about what could happen. This is the foundation onto which The Handmaid’s Tale falls when its meticulously constructed (but perhaps too structurally redundant) frames collapse under the weight of academic scrutiny.

Of course, it is completely possible that Atwood did not intend this incredibly ironic reading of her novel to happen and any examination of its structure is as speculative as the story it contains. If this is the case, then the only thing ironic about The Handmaid’s Tale is the criticism that surrounds it, in the same way that the annotations that accompanied my copy of the novel surrounded, guided, and misguided my first reading of the text. On the other hand, if all of Atwood’s irony is intentional, then I have humbly, and only half-ironically, added yet another layer of context to The Handmaid’s Tale.

Works Cited Atwood, Margaret. The Handmaid’s Tale. Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1999.

----. “The Handmaid’s Tale and Oryx and Crake ‘In Context’.” PLMA, Vol. 119, No. 3, Special Topic: Science Fiction and Literary Studies: The Next Millennium.

May 2004. pp. 513-517.

Neuman, Shirley. “‘Just a Backlash’: Margaret Atwood, Feminism, and The Handmaid’s Tale.” University of Toronto Quarterly, Vol. 75, No. 3, Summer 2006. pp. 857-868.

Stein, Karen. “Margaret Atwood’s Modest Proposal.” Canadian Literature, No.

148. 1996. pp. 57-73.

Swift, Jonathan. “A Modest Proposal.” London, 1729. Eighteenth Century Collections Online. Gale. McGill University Library. 5 March 2012.

Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer. “From Irony to Affiliation in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, Vol. 45, No. 1. 2003. pp. 83-96.

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“AND WAT HE HAD FELD WAS IN HIS THOGHT” Sensation and Education in The Vision of Tundale JENNIFER YIDA PAN

5 min.

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“And wat he had feld was in his thoght”1: Sensation and Education in The Vision of Tundale In his introduction to the fourteenth century Middle English poem The Vision of Tundale, Edward E. Foster notes that it “seems [...] to rely on a more popular taste for the grotesque and horrific, mediated by eventual consolation, rather than on Cistercian spirituality.”2 He suggests, however, that while it may appear less edifying than the original Latin Visio Tnugdali (1149) by the Irish monk Marcus, “the demonstration of God’s tempering of justice with mercy must have contributed to the later audience’s pleasure and solace.”3 Though he advocates scholarly attention to Tundale, his interpretation trivializes the social significance of the text. Working primarily with the Passus, the various stages of Tundale’s journey through Purgatory, I argue that a wider historical reading, taking into account not only “popular taste” in literature but also the general zeitgeist of the time, reveals in Tundale an active engagement with theological doctrines. The “fear of purgation in the future,” which thirteenth century theologian William of Auvergne believes will make “men [...] more ready and more eager to begin penitential purgation in [their current] life...”,4 gains immediacy in Tundale through Tundale’s “drede of payn.”5 Dread, unlike fear, suggests inevitable, rather than possible threat. Starting in V Passus, Tundale stops being a mere observer and begins to experience purgatorial suffering. Throughout his journey, he continually experiences dread as he progresses from Passus to Passus, knowing that as soon as one stage of pain ceases, a new one will arise. The reader, whom the narrator interpellates in the introduction of the poem, imaginatively participates in these sensations. Rather than a simple indulgence in “the grotesque and horrific,” these sensations enable the reader to undergo an educational6 experience similar to Tundale’s. The Vision of Tundale presents penance as a didactic experience.

Most critics have dismissed Tundale as unfit for scholarship on account of it being “linguistically repetitive[,] rhythmically pedestrian,”7 and “structurally chaotic”8; however, the jarring effects of the text’s repetitive and banal language and rhythm lend themselves to alternate, meta-experiential readings. By 1

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Marcus. The Vision of Tundale. Edward E. Foster, ed., Three Purgatory Poems; 'The Gast of Gy', 'Sir Owain', 'The Vision of Tundale'. (Michigan: medieval Institute Publications, 2004): 2349.

2 Foster, Three Purgatory Poems, “Introduction”: 188.

3 Foster, “Introduction”, 188.

4 Arthur Goldhammer, trans, The Birth of Purgatory of Jacques Le Goff. (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1984): 243.

5 Tundale, l. 1145 6 My use of the word “education” is not strictly limited to the scholastic sense. Anything that is meant to teach is, for the purposes of my essay, considered educational.

7 8

Foster, Introduction, 179.

Ibid.

continually stimulating the senses of the reader, repetitive language and rhythm help to ingrain reading experiences in memory. While the narrative may appear to proceed episodically with no apparent logic, the narrative structure of each episode through Purgatory, starting at Passus V, generally follows a cycle of anticipation, experience, and cessation, of pain. We may consider Passus I – IV as part of the anticipation that leads up to Tundale’s experience of pain in Passus V. Thus, each episode develops logically through a linear temporality in which pain increases, and finally ends once it reaches an apex in threshold. In between episodes, the angel speaks to Tundale of God’s mercy. The emphasis of Tundale’s experience is on learning, rather than suffering; pain serves to ingrain the angel’s lesson in his memory.

Before specifically focusing on the educational quality of Tundale’s journey, I will survey the function of physical sensation in medieval practices as they relate to penance and involuntary corporal punishments. Despite the vast differences between the provenances of these physical sensations, I seek to emphasize their common orientation to futurity, their common aim to correct or educate. Subsequently, I will explore more extensively the associations between memory and sensation. The final sections of this essay will move into more detailed discussions of pain, dread, and learning in the text, towards an understanding of Tundale as an experiential and edifying experience for both Tundale and the reader, rather than simply an indulgent text.

From Hunger to Martyr

Without attempting to give a comprehensive account of practical consequences of medieval theological thought, I intend to show in this section, that bodily sensation was closely linked with education. From mild penitential practices to more extreme mutilations of the flesh, and even to torture and martyrdom, physical suffering was not simply a form of restitution or punishment, but also an instructive agent. Although torture and martyrdom are not self-inflicted, their reliance on physical pain as a method of indoctrination accords with the logic of penance9. Sensations helped to ingrain teachings in both individual and collective memory.

Penance, as Miri Rubin explains in Medieval Christianity in Practice, 9

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They also differ from acts of penance in that they are oriented towards the education of a society, rather than of an individual. Although I treat torture and martyrdom concurrently, the former is perhaps more secular than religious. William T. Cavanaugh argues, in Torture and the Eucharist, that the practice of torture was “an attempt to 'disappear' the church and other bodies which would rival the state. [... It] works to discipline an entire society into an aggregate of fearful and mutually distrustful individuals.” Martyrdom, on the other hand, provides “the seed of future resistance, [those] who make the church visible as the body of Christ.” Despite their different and opposing purposes, torture and martyrdom both rely on physical suffering. Both the state and church educate through these implementations of physical pain.

35

“may be awarded as fasting, alms, or sacerdotal prayers, the last presumably a reference to vicarious prayer.”10 As we would expect, some form of self-denial characterizes penitential practices. In such collections as The Penitential of Cummean,11 hunger is the primary prescription. Cummean provides specific instructions according to the degree of sin. On gluttony, for instance, he writes: “if [the culprit]12 is a monk of inferior status, he shall do penance for three years, but his allowance of bread shall not be increased.”13 Alternatively, he whose gluttony is so extreme that it prevents him from observing religious duties, he who “is not able to sing psalms, being benumbed in his organs of speech, shall perform a special fast.”14 While the former glutton must consume less bread than usual, the latter glutton can consume no bread. Depending on the degree of sin, occasional denial of certain gastric pleasures may not be sufficient for expiation.

Mortification of the flesh was likely practised less frequently than other forms of penance, especially for the layman. Nevertheless, as evinced by the writings of eleventh century monk Peter Damiani, pain of flesh [...] “raises the soul to God”15; physical pain inflicted through mortification of the flesh, though of a different sort of pain from hunger, was likewise believed to be spiritually beneficial. Similar to most other penitential activity, mortification of the flesh was usually performed willingly. It is curious, then, that people who are repentant enough to wound their own flesh should actually require this sort of wounding.

What does mortifying one’s flesh achieve that a penitential activity such as fasting does not offer? According to Damiani, a wounded body can cure the soul by bringing it closer to God.

In John T. McNeill and Helena M. Gamer’s prologue to The Penitential of Cummean, they refer to its directions for penance as “health-giving medicine of souls”16. Then, they continue to discuss “the remedies of wounds.”17 By using metaphorical language of the body to describe the soul, they encourage readers to think of the soul in bodily terms. In order to heal the soul’s body, they suggest, one must deprive the physical body of pleasurable sensations and induce pain instead.

In The Vision of Tundale, there appears to be a curious corporeality to Tundale’s 10

PAN 36

Miri Rubin. medieval Christianity in Practice. (New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 2009): 142.

11 It consists of a series of verdicts compiled by an Irish Abbot in the mid-seventh century, and remained in production and circulation in the fourteenth century, concerning appropriate penance for particular sins.

12 Parenthesis in original text.

13 John T. MacNeill and Helena M. Gamer. Medieval Handbooks of Penance: A translation of the principal libri poenitentiales and selections from related documents.(New York: Octagon Books, 1965): 101.

14 Ibid.

15 James Bruce Ross, and Mary Martin McLaughlin, ed., The Portable medieval Reader. (USA, Penguin, 1977): 53.

16 17

Macneill and Gamer, Medieval Handbooks, 99.

Ibid.

soul.. Descriptions of his soul’s senses and body parts confirm the physicality of its form. As he journeys through Purgatory, the body of his soul suffers often, but it heals just as frequently. Even the soul, it seems, feels physical sensations and responds to repeated stimulation.

St. Augustine, who wrote in the fourth and fifth centuries but remained influential even beyond the late Middle Ages18, also discusses similarities between body and soul. In The City of God, he refutes the prevalent assumption that “resurrection has reference only to the body”19: [W]hy do [those who believe that resurrection refers only to bodies] not listen to such sayings as, ‘Do not depart from him, for fear you may fall’20, and, ‘in relation to his own Master he stands or falls,’21 and, ‘Anyone who thinks he is standing firm should beware in case he may fall’?22 For the fall that we should beware of is, I imagine, the fall of the soul, not that of the body. If, therefore, resurrection is of things that fall, and if souls also fall, then assuredly it is to be admitted that souls rise again.23 The main issue of confusion, it seems, has to do with the figurative language of the soul in scripture. To speak of body and soul in absolute exclusivity of one another, to suppose that “resurrection has reference only to the body,” is fallacious. Both the material body and the soul, Augustine suggests, will physically rise again. In the passage quoted above, he cites particular instances in scripture when a “fall” must refer to the fall of a soul. Material bodies are not the only “things that fall.”

As a result, he likens fallen souls – souls who have lost God – to fallen bodies, by which he means bodily death.

The Vision of Tundale subscribes to a similar understanding of the relation between body and soul. The soul can feel, in the same way that bodies feel. Since it is Tundale’s soul, and not his material body, that travels through Purgatory, it is his soul that incurs sensations of pain. The narrator’s following description in II Gaudium24 of souls that have departed from bodies suggests that souls remain 18 See Eric Leland Saak's Interpreting Augustine and Augustinianism in the Later Middle Ages.

19 20

See Ecclus. 2,7.

.

21 See Rom. 14,1 22

See 1 Cot. 10, 12.

23 Augustine, The City of God, 919.

24 The Gaudia follow the Passus and chart the ascent to heaven, with each Gaudium bringing souls one stage closer.

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St. Augustine of Hippo. The City of God. Trans. John O'Meara. (New York: Penguin Books, 1983): 919.

37

susceptible to temporal suffering: Men and wemen saw he thare That semud full of sorow and care, For they had bothe hongur and thurst And grett travell withowttyn rest.

Gret cold they hadon alsoo, That dudde hom sorow and made hom woo.

Hem wantedyn clothys and foode; As dowmpe bestys, nakyd they yode.25 At this point, Tundale perceives the discomforts of suffering souls to be similar, or equivalent, to earthly discomforts. Thus, the experience of the souls in II Gaudium remains identifiable for those whose souls are still contained within material bodies. We might surmise that, as Tundale refers to the souls as “men and wemen,” they retain the forms of the material bodies that they occupied while living on earth. Moreover, their bodily souls experience earthly sensations including “hongur,” “thurst,” lack of “rest,” “[g]ret cold,” and even lack of “clothes and foode.” Their senses of perception are comparable to material bodily sensations. This may be why Tundale vividly retains impressions of his journey through Purgatory – “He held in mynde and forgeet hit noght”26 – even once he, or his soul, returns to his material body on earth. As Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman note in Last Things: Death and The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages, “[i]t is human suffering that induces redemption. And human suffering is possible through our body [...].”27

Impression of Sensation

Learning in the middle ages would have relied almost entirely on memory. Physical books were not commonplace, and literary communities placed a high value on memory. In Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas reflects that “intellectual virtue is engendered and fostered by experience and time.”28 Implicit in his declaration is the indispensability of memory; intellectual virtue can only exist if experiences are retained throughout time. According to Aquinas, as Mary Carruthers explains in The Book of Memory, “experience is the result of many memories.”29 Experience refers not only to situational experience throughout

PAN 38

25

Tundale, 1507 – 1614.

26

Tundale, 2350.

27

Caroline Walker Bynum and Paul Freedman. Last Things: Death and The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages. (Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2000): 93.

28

Thomas Aquinas. Summa Theologica. http://www.newadvent.org/summa/ (2008) Mary Carruthers. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in medieval Culture. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990): 66.

29

life, but also to the way in which we physically experience the world. Aquinas believed that stimulated senses imprint experiences in compartments of the mind.

Carruthers explains that in Aristotle’s De anima: The two major faculties of the sensory soul [...] are the common sense (sensus communis) and the imagination. Sensus communis is the receptor of all sense impressions (Avicenna defined it as “the center of all the senses both from which the senses are diverted in branches and to which they return, and it is itself truly that which experiences”). It unites and compares impressions from all five external senses, but it is also the source of consciousness.

It both receives the sensation of hearing a sound and realizes that hearing is taking place.30 Sensus communis and imagination are pivotal in my reading of Tundale. The repetitive and detailed descriptions of sensual perception throughout the poem, which have previously been simply dismissed as aesthetically indulgent, actually aid both Tundale and the reader to remember the lessons the angel taught him in Purgatory. Frequent juxtaposition of painful stimulation of physical senses with the angel’s moralizations imprints the experiences in memory. Before sending Tundale into Passus V to experience his first instance of pain in Purgatory, the angel explains that “[t]his peyn is ordeynyd full grevos / For prowd men and bostus.”31 As such, Tundale’s journey through Purgatory is perhaps less of a frivolous adventure, and more of an occasion of practical education. The angel’s words become reinforced by the physical sensations Tundale suffers. After all, as Hugh of St. Victor declared, “[t]he whole usefulness of education consists in the memory of it.”32 Sensing Some Things Awful

30

Carruthers, Book of Memory, 52.

31

Tundale, 431-432.

32

Hugh St. Victor. Preface to Chronica. Cited in Carruthers, Book of Memory, 80.

PAN

Bearing the “two major faculties of the sensory soul” in mind, I turn now to a closer reading of The Vision of Tundale. The abundance of senses invoked in the text allows Tundale to process and retain lessons throughout his journey. The description of senses is notably lavish in all of the Passus.

39

At the very start of I Passus, he witnesses a terrifying sight:

As the gost stod in gret dowte, He saw comyng a full loddly rowte Of fowle fendys ay grennyng, And as wyld wolfus thei cam rampyng.

He wold a flown from that syght, But he wyst never whydur he myght.33 The narrator begins by first describing the sights: “full loddly rowte,” “fowle fendys,” “wyld wolfus.” Only after conveying these horrors to the reader does the narrator reveal Tundale’s fear. A primary effect of such a narrative structure is that the scene unfolds before the reader as it unfolds before Tundale. As such, the emphasis in this passage is less on the resultant fear than on the experience of seeing these “rowte,” “fendys,” and “wolfus” arrive.

Passus II begins similarly; however, Tundale’s sight is noticeably hindered: When the angell had told his tale, Throw an entré he lad Tundale, That was darke; they had no lyght, But only of the angell bryght.

Thei saw a depe dale full marke, Of that Tundale was full yrke.

When he hit saw, he uggod sore.

A delfull dwellyng saw he thore.

That depe dale fast he beheld.

A fowle stenke therof he feld.34

PAN 40

Curiously, the sense that dominated his first impressions in I Passus – sight – is hindered as he enters II Passus. He finds that he “had no lyght.” The reader likewise, not knowing what to expect, follows Tundale in the dark. After another realization of fear, Tundale’s focus turns towards another sense. His olfactory sense is intensely stimulated by “a fowle stenke.”

Tundale’s initial impressions in III Passus involve yet another sense.

Whereas his first reaction upon entering I Passus elicited only one sense – and only two upon entering II Passus – he can now simultaneously experience sights, smells, and sounds: Thei passyd forth from that peyn And comyn to a greyt montteyn That was bothe gret and hye.

Theron he hard a delfoll crye.

Alle that ton syde was semand 33

Tundale, 133-138.

34

Tundale, 311-320.

Full of smoke and fyr brennand; That was bothe darke and wan And stank of pyche and brymston.35

35 36

Tundale, 357-364.

Tundale, 389-402.

PAN

At this point in his journey, it appears that he can register the visual without having to give it considerable attention. The narrator indicates the presence of a “greyt montteyn / That was bothe gret and hye,” but does not indicate explicitly that Tundale notes what he sees. The words “syght” or “saw,” for instance, do not appear as markers the way “hard” and “stank” do in the above-quoted section.

Perhaps such a difference may have to do with the constraints of language.

Whereas sights can be described in words, it is more difficult to evoke smells and sounds without first mentioning that they are, in fact, smells and sounds.

Nevertheless, the fact that markers of sight could have appeared, but did not, suggests that sight is not Tundale’s primary concern in this section. Instead, he seems to be most focused on the “delfoll crye.” The interaction between several of Tundale’s senses in III Passus begins to recall Aristotle’s sensus communis.

Recalling thatTundale has largely been charged with having a “chaotic structure,” I would argue that, thus far, based on the progression from I Passus to III Passus, Tundale is actually rather carefully structured. With each Passus, another sense comes into focus. Granted, he refers to multiple senses throughout every Passus, but his initial impressions upon entering each new section of Purgatory progress in an ordered fashion. If what I propose – that there is a sense of structure in the poem - is true, then perhaps IV Passus should evince further progression in the evolvement of Tundale’s senses. Here is the beginning of IV Passus: The angell ay before con pas, And Tundale aftur that sore aferd was, Thei hyldon ey forthe the way Tyll thei come to anothur valay, That was bothe dyppe and marke.

Of that syght was the sowle yrke.

In erthe myght non deppur be.

To the grond thei myght not see.

A swowyng of hem thei hard therin And of cryyng a delfull dyn.

Owt of that pytte he feld comand A fowle smoke that was stynkand Bothe of pycche and of brynston, And therin sowlys brent, mony won.36

41

Indeed, compared to the start of III Passus, there is a measure of progression.

Firstly, sight, sound, and smell appear to have equal emphasis. Each phrase – “Of that syght was the sowle yrke,” “[a] swowying of him thei hard therin,” and “[a] fowle smoke that was stynkand / [b]othe of pycche and of brynston” – comes with its own marker: “syght,” “hard,” “stynkand.” Moreover, this passage also hints at a new sense; Tundale “feld comand / [a] fowle smoke.” To feel smoke suggests the stimulation of any combination of Tundale’s senses. He may smell the smoke, feel its heat, see the approaching haze. He does not appear to isolate a particular sense. Rather, Tundale feels the approaching smoke through a general sense – a compilation of sensations in sensus communis.

In subsequent Passus, Tundale begins to physically experience the pains of Purgatory. As such, he continues to smell, see, and hear, but physical sensation becomes the primary focus, the strongest sense in the sensus communis.37 Remembering Senses

In order to argue that Tundale undergoes an educational journey through the narrative, I must establish, not only that his senses are frequently stimulated during the journey, but also that he remembers such sensations.

Though the narrator does not state in great detail the extent to which Tundale remembers his journey, there is nothing to suggest that Tundale has forgotten any significant portion of it. When he, or rather his soul, returns to his earthly body, Mony a mon and also wemen Wer geydordyd abowt hym then.

He told hom wer he had yben, And wat he hard had and seyn; And what he had feld was in his thoght, He held in mynde and forgeet hit noght And he warnyd ylke a man that peyn wold drede Too amend hom here, or that they yeede.38 As he recalls his experiences, he focuses on his senses. He recounts “wat he hard had and seyn,” and the “payn” he suffered. But, he seems to leave out his olfactory sense. This omission indicates that, perhaps, he does not recall all the details of

PAN 42

37

Curiously, Tundale’s sense of taste never seems to be stimulated throughout his journey. I can only speculate as to why. Perhaps it is because, unlike the other four senses, the sense of taste often involves ingestion. The pains that Tundale feels help him learn, but the purpose of learning is not to internalize pain, but to internalize knowledge. Or, perhaps it is simply that souls do not need to eat.

That they can feel hunger does not presume that they can eat. Regardless of the reason behind the missing sense in Tundale, different sensory perceptions clearly abound in the poem.

38 Tundale, 2345-2352.

his journey. Nevertheless, he vows to remember what he has learned; “[h]e held in mynde and forgeet hit noght.” Moreover, he passes on his new wisdom to the “mon and also wemen” who gathered around his seemingly dead body, as he progresses from student to teacher.

I suggested earlier that the act of reading Tundale could likewise be an edifying experience for the reader. The detailed and horrifying imagery in the poem, such as the moment in VII Passus when “[m]ony men of relygeon / [t] hat full wer of fowle vermyn / [b]othe withouttyn and withyn,”39 makes a strong impression on the reader’s memory. Carruthers explains that ancient philosophers, including Aristotle and Avicenna, insisted “on the primacy and security for memory of the visual over all other sensory modes, auditory, tactile, and the rest.”40 For the reader, the abundance of images contributes to his or her ability to retain the lessons divulged throughout the text. Carruthers further notes that “for the memory-artist, [...], it made no difference whether material to be retained was presented to him orally or in writing – his visualization technique was the same.”41 As such, the “grotesque and horrific” in Tundale serves a purpose beyond that of aesthetic indulgence. Such indulgences, in context of the poem, are actually moral, as they aid the reader in remembering Tundale’s experiences, as well as the lessons Tundale derives from them.

39

Tundale, 798-800.

PAN

Stimulation Intensity

The logic of narration in Tundale suggests that the relative intensity of sensuous stimulus correlates with the depth of memory impression and retention. The narrator asserts that Tundale feels such wonderment when he enters VI Gaudium, that the “savour and smyll” and “voyse and melody” were “soo swete”, that the experience “[m]ade [hym] forgette clene / [a]ll odur joyes that he had seyn.”42 This passage suggests that stronger sensations can potentially displace weaker sensations of a similar sort. Since heavenly joys are so much more extensive than earthly joys, he effectively forgets the latter. Accepting that memory may be susceptible to overwriting, the multiple moments during which Tundale claims to be feeling the worst pain he has ever felt may offer more insight into the way Tundale remembers his suffering.

Before he even experiences purgatorial pains, Tundale thinks to himself in IV Passus that “[t]hat peyn” he witnesses “well more semand / [t]hen all the peynus that he byroryn fand. / That peyn passyd all odur peynus.”43 This marks

Ibid.

43

40 Carruthers, Book of Memory, 95.

41 42

Tundale,1973-1976.

43

Tundale, 403-405.

the first of many such declarations. Because it is the first time in Purgatory that Tundale makes such a complaint, we must infer that “all odur peynus”44 necessarily refer to earthly pains. Unlike Tundale’s VI Gaudium experience in which he forgets previous joys, the narrator does not imply that by IV Passus Tundale has forgotten his previous pains. On the contrary, Tundale recalls other painful experiences in comparison.

While it is true that he frequently repeats assertions that he has just witnessed the worst pain, Tundale bases these declarations mostly on conjectures in response to what he sees. The second time he makes such a conjecture is in VII Passus. After seeing how men and women were being torn apart, he pleads: “Lord, delyver me from this woo.

Y beseche yow that Y mey passe this care, For sweche a peyn saw Y never are, And all odur turments that ben schyll, I woll suffur at yowre wyll.”45 From an observer’s perspective, Tundale judges that the current pains surpass even previous purgatorial pains. He later reiterates that “[o]f that peyn he thought more aw / [t]hen of all tho peynus that he ever saw.”46 The emphasis, both times, is on what he is seeing. Although it is perhaps possible that he has simply forgotten the pains he experienced in prior Passus, that the current suffering he witnesses is not actually worse than previous pains, it is unlikely. First, he calls on the Lord to “delyver [him] from this woo,” indicating that he remembers he has experienced pain in other Passus, and assumes that he must suffer in this one as well. Secondly, he also vows that he “woll suffur [odur turments] at [the Lord’s] wyll,” which implies he knows that his journey through Purgatory will continue past VII Passus. That he both looks back on past events and anticipates future events in his journey based on his previous experiences suggests that he retains memory of his previous sufferings.47

His linear sense of orientation through Purgatory parallels the order of his suffering. Though supposedly chaotic, there are unmistakable threads of linear progression in the text. I have already addressed the increasing sensations in I Passus through to V Passus. I now further suggest that once Tundale actually begins to experience Purgatory, the pain in his suffering increases and finally peaks in X Passus. Indeed, the narrator informs us in X Passus that:

PAN

44

Tundale, 752-756.

45

Tundale, 752-756.

44

46

Tundale, 761-762.

47

In comparison, the fact that Tundale forgets previous joys once he reaches VI Gaudium may suggest that pain is more deeply engrained in memory. If such is the case, then pain for Tundale is more didactically effective.

Then was Tundale full ferd, For more peyn never he hade.

For drede of peyn full sore he qwoke.

Hym thoght his hedde all toschoke.

All his peyn byforyn, hym thoght, So muche as that grevyd hym noght.48 His assertion that “more payn never he hade” includes pains Tundale felt throughout his journey, as the narrator compares this final instance of suffering to “[a]ll his peyn byforyn.” This time, the narrator observes that it is the worst pain, while Tundale actually experiences it. X Passus is, essentially, the apex of purgatorial suffering. The angel already hints, near the end of IX Passus, at the extreme suffering Tundale will experience in X Passus. “Grettur peynus yett shalt thu see,” he informs Tundale, “[h]eraftur that abydus thee.”49 By tracing the intensity of pain in Tundale’s suffering, we are able to uncover the structure underlying his journey.

Dread and Learning

Recalling my earlier discussion on dread and the immediacy of “drede of payn”, I now consider the various implications of “drede” for Tundale in relation to the poem’s structure. The meaning of the word is simultaneously one of fear and awe50, and the meaning in which it applies to Tundale changes throughout the poem. In the above-quoted passage from X Passus, the “drede” is not quite fear.

He is, after all, already suffering – fear is usually oriented toward an anticipated future occurrence. In the following section, I seek to show that the transformation of the word “drede” further delineates Tundale’s educational journey.

“Drede” in the earlier sections of the poem generally connotes fear.

Tundale is fearful, specifically, of pain. Such fear is an inward dread in which he is concerned exclusively for himself. Upon exiting I Passus, the angel instructs him to “[h]ave no drede,”51 as he cannot be dragged into Hell. Near the end of IV Passus, the angel declares: “Drede thee noght her of this syght. / This payn schalt thu schape full well, / But odur peyn schalt thu fell.”52 In both instances, it is clear that Tundale fears potential suffering tremendously. The angel assures Tundale that he need not feel “drede” in IV Passus, as he will escape that particular pain.

49

Tundale, 1124-1124.

50

According to the Middle English Dictionary.

51

Tundale, 295.

52

Tundale, 428-430.

PAN

48 Tundale, 1143-1148.

45

Simultaneously, however, the angel effectively intensifies Tundale’s fear by telling him that he shall surely suffer later. Throughout the first four Passus, Tundale’s anticipation of pain, and thus dread increases.

From V Passus to IX Passus, Tundale continues to dread particular impending instances of pain. In V Passus, when he is about to suffer for the first time in Purgatory, “the angell vaneschyd,” leaving Tundale on his own to anxiously fear what is to come. “No wondur,” comments the narrator, “thaw he had drede.”53 Indeed, it seems the angel did as much as he could to render Tundale more fearful of his forthcoming suffering.

Similarly, in VII Passus, He saw an hydous hwond dwell Withinne that hows that was full fell.

Of that hound grette drede he had.

Tundale was never so adrad.

Wen he had seyn that syght, He bysoght of that angell bryght That he wold lett hym away steyl, That he com not in that fowle Hell.

But the angell wold not for nothyng Grant hym hys askyng.54

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“[A]drad,” though related to “drede,” connotes only fear in this instance.55 Proper “drede,” as it turns out is one of the lessons Tundale must learn. The angel will not allow Tundale to evade feelings of dread; instead, he must experience them over and over again. Dread of anticipatory pain is, like physical pain, a sensation.

Thus, like the repetitive cycles of pain and healing that he suffers on his journey, the repetitive occurrence of his dread serves to reinforce his memory.

In X Passus, when Tundale finally reaches the apex of pain, he also arrives at the apex of “drede.” This time, he feels “drede” while he is already experiencing pain. Rather than an anticipatory fear of pain, I suggest that in this moment his “drede” becomes reverential of God’s power. Indeed, he felt both “drede” and pain so intensely that “he qwoke.” Unlike his earlier inward dread of pain, though he continues to suffer, he reaches beyond himself in this moment to think of God and not exclusively of himself. Once he experiences such “drede,” his Purgatorial experience ends. The angel then leads him into I Gaudium, bringing him closer to 53

Tundale, 516-517.

54

Tundale, 765-774.

55

According to the MED, http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/mec/med-idx?size=First+100&type=orths&q1=adrad&rgxp=const rained. Notably, however, “waxen adrad” would signify reverence.

Heaven. Immediately thereafter, “the drede that Tundale hadde / [W]as awey”56. “[T]han”, the narrator explains,“was he glad.”57 What had been a mixture of pain and reverence in Purgatory becomes exclusively pleasant as he begins to ascend to God.

When Tundale finally returns to his material body, he begins to instruct his fellow “mon and also wemen” on “drede.” After telling them about the sensations of Purgatory, [...] he warnyd ylke a man that peyn wold drede Too amend hom here, or that they yeede.

He cownseld hom to bee holy And bad hom leyve hor greyt foly And turne hom to God allmyghtty, Servyng Hym evermore devowtly.58 At this point, the meaning of “drede” for Tundale undergoes transformation once more. In the beginning, “drede” was a forward-looking fear. Eventually, he learns to appreciate it as reverence for God. Once he returns to his material body, however, “drede” also refers to a backward-looking moral lesson. Having already experienced both meanings of “drede,” he can look back on it with a distance that allows him to educate others in its meanings. Fear of pain, he suggests to the surrounding people, is not sufficient; one must be concerned, first and foremost, with serving God. One must learn, by experiencing sensations of fearful “drede,” to observe reverential “drede”.

Reading Sensation

On reformed penitents like Tundale, Mary Flowers Braswell writes in The medieval Sinner: Characterization and Confession in the Literature of the English Middle Ages: The reformed penitent is never an individual, but a type. His confession has stripped him of those particular sins which have made him unique, and he has espoused the cardinal virtue of humility. He is a passive good; the goal of the confessional has been met, and we find him interesting not for his future activities but for his past.59

56 Tundale, 1499-1500.

57 Tundale, 1499-1500.

58

Tundale, 2350-2356.

59

Mary Flowers Braswell. The medieval Sinner: Characterization and Confession in the Literature of the English Middle Ages. (London and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1983): 13.

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Her argument may be an oversimplification of the reformed penitent figure

47

in medieval literature. To say that he is “never an individual” is unsettling.

Nevertheless, Tundale appears to be one such “type.” The narrator begins the poem by declaring: “I woll yow tell what befell than / in Yrlong of a rych man; Tundale was is right name.”60 Tundale’s name is of a lesser concern to the narrator than the “type” of man Tundale is. He becomes a kind of model figure for penance.

Thus, in following his journey, readers may receive an educational experience similar to his.

According to Rob Meens, “[v]isionary literature, depicting the harrowings of hell and the pleasures of paradise, was obviously used to stir people to repent and confess their sins.”61 Because Tundale’s sensations in Purgatory are so palpable, Tundale could have been just as effective, if not more effective, at compelling people to seek penance. The often noted “grotesque and horrific” characteristics of Tundale’s Purgatory allow the reader to relate to Tundale’s experiences. Throughout the Passus, the narrator often describes pains in terms of such earthly phenomena as hunger and cold. Even with more grotesque characterizations, including the gnawing vermin in VII Passus, identifiable human body components provide the reader with a point of identification.

In contrast, descriptions of the higher numbered Gaudia are far more elusive. Of VI Gaudium, the narrator notes simply that “[n]oo eyrthely mon saw ever seche syght / [a]s the angels that flewyn in the eyre / [a]mong the beymus that wer soo feyre.”62 He describes a sight that no earthly man has ever seen by speaking of flying angels, which no earthy man has ever seen either. Though heavenly paradise pleases Tundale so much that it “[m]ade [hym] forgette clene / [a]ll odur joyes that he had seyn,” the reader is not privy to any tangible images.

Although Foster advocates the “demonstration of God’s tempering of justice with mercy” as the principal reason for the poem’s popularity, we see in VI Gaudium that the most over occasions of God’s mercy are far less tangible than Tundale’s experiences in X Passus. The pedagogical focus in Tundale, I would argue, lies in the Passus, in the “grotesque and horrific.”

PAN 48

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Tundale, 17-19.

61

Rob Meens. “Frequency and Nature of Early medieval Penance.” Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages. Ed. Peter Biller and A.J. Minnis. (Suffolk: A York medieval Press Publication, 1998): 53.

62

Tundale, 2010-2012.

Works Cited Aquinas, Thomas. Summa Theologica. http://www.newadvent.org/

summa/. 2008.

Baynum, Caroline Walker. Fragmentation and Redemption: Essays on

Gender and the Human Body in Medieval religion. New York:

Zone Books, 1991.

Biller, Peter, and A.J. Minnis. ed. Handling Sin: Confession in the Middle Ages. Suffolk: A York Medieval Press Publication, 1998.

Braswell, Mary Braswell. The Medieval Sinner: Characterization and

Confession in the Literature of the English Middle Ages. London

and Toronto: Associated University Press, 1983.

Bynum, Caroline Walker, and Paul Freedman. Last Things: Death and

The Apocalypse in the Middle Ages. Pennsylvania: University of

Pennsylvania Press, 2000.

Carruthers, Mary J. The Book of Memory: A Study of Memory in Medieval Culture. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Cavanaugh, William T.. Torture and the Eucharist: Theology, Politics, and

the Body of Christ. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2000.

“Drede.” Middle English Dictionary. http://quod.lib.umich.edu/cgi/m/ mec/med-idx?type=id&id=MED12558.

Firey, Abigail. A New History of Penance. Boston: Leiden, 2008.

Foster, Edward E. ed. Three Purgatory Poems; ‘The Gast of Gy’,

‘Sir Owain’, ‘The Vision of Tundale’. Michigan: Medieval

Institute Publications, 2004.

---. Visions of Heaven and Hell Before Dante. New York: Italica Press, 1989.

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Gardiner, Eileen. “The Translation into Middle English of The Vision of Tundale.” Manu-scripta 24 (1980): 14-19.

49

Goldhammer, Arthur, trans. The Birth of Purgatory of Jacques Le Goff.

Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984.

Hayes, Dawn Marie. Body and Sacred Place in Medieval Europe, 1100 1389. New York: Routledge, 2003.

McNeill, John T., and Helena Margaret Garner. Medieval Handbooks of

Penance; A Translation of the Principal Libri Poenitentiales and

elections from Related Documents. New York. Octagon Books, 1965.

Mortimer, R.C.. The Origins of Private Penance in the Western Church.

Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1939.

O’Meara, John, trans. The City of God of St. Augustine of Hippo. Trans.

John O’Meara. New York: Penguin Books, 1983.

Ross, James Bruce, and Mary Martin McLaughlin, ed. The Portable

Medieval Reader. (USA, Penguin, 1977.

Rubin, Miri. Corpus Christi: The Eucharist in Late Medieval Culture.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991.

- - -. Medieval Christianity in Practice. New Jersey: Princeton University

Press, 2009.

PAN 50

THE GOOD FEMINIST Almod贸var on Rape KAITLIN DOUCETTE

28 min.

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The Good Feminist: Almodóvar on Rape

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In order to present the nuances and complexity of feminine postmodern living to claim a mastery of female narrative, Pedro Almodóvar was forced to sacrifice a few ladies along the way. Often employing the female body as the site of sexual violence, his catalogue is replete with instances of sexual brutality that trouble concepts of contemporary heterosexuality. The impossibility of reciprocal, malefemale romantic pairing is implied by the persistent theme of sexual violence that regulates Almodóvarian heterosexual couples; veritably, Almodóvar loses faith in the normative dyad (Urios-Aparisi 200). To complete this vision of his newly proposed heterosexual couple, Almodóvar does not shy from representing the ultimate transgressive act of sexual violence: rape (Projansky 1). From his debut feature film, Pepi, Luci Bom and Other Girls on the Heap (1980) onwards, the director continually re-elects to deconstruct the viewer’s traditional affective responses to and imagistic associations with rape in film. Two films in his later career –Kika (1993) and Talk to Her (2002) – center upon the rape of a woman and imagine the violative act in a way that betrays the viewer’s culturally conditioned response to celluloid sexual transgression. Largely dismissed critically as Almodóvar’s low-art homage to John Waters-esque indulgence, Kika does posit some serious feminist problematics by sustaining comedy through a twenty-minute graphic rape sequence. Talk to Her, a sophisticated and critically acclaimed opus of Almodóvar’s recent career, too represents rape in a counter-normative way: by constructing a narrative that would elicit not only sympathy, but alignment with the perpetrator. For even those who read both sequences while maintaining all the sensibilities that a good, postmodern feminist should, the question remains: what are the theoretical implications of that which we consent to be entertained by?

Following the theories of Sarah Projansky’s seminal book Watching Rape, this essay will endeavour to defend Almodóvar’s use of rape in these films as a productive narrative device. By inverting the codes which perpetuate rape’s dominant form of cultural circulation, Almodóvar does not wish to mock the act itself (and, more importantly, its real effects) but the ways in which these depictions provide limiting frameworks for “assigning truth and perpetuating knowledge” (Marcantonio 23). Perhaps all too optimistically, this essay relies on the basic premise that Almodóvar’s more positive renderings of rape are not an attempt to undo its true affects but rather, serve to take away some of the power rape narratives have in informing cultural consciousness. Though rarely consensual, sex in the Almodóvarian world is generally employed as a means of literally stripping away layers of identity to reveal a character’s “true” essence: that is, that their identity is self-constructed and performed (Guse 427). Posited within the normative frame of heterosexuality, these constructions of rape, which rework and illuminate the codes of body, voice and gender, do serve as a form of revelation. However, Almodóvar’s conceit does not betray the women’s narratives

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he has dedicated his artistic life to cultivating: these celluloid rapes birth the films’ female agency.

Although Kika is devoid of the homoerotic and queered dynamic so common to the Almodóvarian universe, the film still manages to depict some strange sex. Only heternormative, the sex in the film prior to the rape is relatively tame by even Almodóvar’s standards; graphic yes, but generally normative in its representation of heterosexuality and traditional gender and power dynamics. By way of contrast, the graphic, lengthy rape scene heightens spectatorial anxiety in a story that, up until this point, only reveals the after-effects of body trauma, not the violence itself. During the scene of sexual violence, Paul is prototypical rapist: he embodies cultural paranoia of rape via a strangely violent drifter. Paul enters unlawfully into the domicile to find his sleeping victim (Kika) and immediately leaps atop her and proceeds to violate her. As could be anticipated theoretically (Projanksy 21), in the instance of the rape sequence, the depiction of Kika’s violated crisis body led to a feminist critical backlash (Smith “Future Chic” 165) and was deemed an incongruent moment within Almodóvar’s larger profeminist filmic narrative. Moreover, the film was so massively chastised because it elicited an involuntary and uncontrollable response from the audience (Williams 270) in a particularly troubling scene: it got people laughing at rape. Following the framework of Linda Williams’ essay “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess”, a discussion of the rape sequence will be undertaken in relation to the interstice between gender, body and affective response.

Like William’s genres of excess, the rape scene in Kika relies on its power to excite the viewer (Williams 268). Almodóvar, the proven master of genderbending characters, upends normative depictions of masculinity and femininity in a previously unseen way. So highly coded are the bodies of Kika and Paul that the rape scene is a hilarious and fantastical clash of normative gender dynamics.

Harkening back to his genre of choice, melodrama, the director renders the rape in an affective way. But unlike the mimesis of tragedy that melodrama elicits, here Almodóvar wishes to use the affective capabilities of film to contrast the violative and transgressive reality of rape. The melodramatic lapse in realism (Williams 269) are the bodies of Paul and Kika which allow this response to occur. As a composite of exaggerated male signifiers, Paul, the escaped convict and “famous porno actor” is constructed as a comedic version of normative rapist (Projansky 113). So overabundantly male is Paul that he is given a real-time twenty minute sequence to try to break his record in orgasmic transgression; this is both “fantasy component” (Williams 277) and regulative force within the rape scene. Subject only to his lust, Paul otherwise commands both audience attention and dominates the other characters. Employing both common (the knife) and more disturbing (lubricated mandarin slice) phallic signifiers, Almodóvar confirms the aggressive power (Urios-Aparisi 190) and penetrative abilities of what which lays hidden deep in Kika. Upon arrival of the police, Paul is entered into phallic competition

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but arises as the veritable alpha male. In the dying moments of the rape sequence, Paul is threatened by the embodied phallus of contemporary life, the gun, but is unyielding. As a result, one of the police ends up on the heap; mounting Paul and slapping his thrusting buttocks with limp-wristed ineffectuality, it is only the integration of same-sex contact that breaks the rapist’s lust. Hovering over the balcony about to extend his male dominance into the outer diegetic world, Paul finally delivers the devastatingly normative money shot: he ejaculates on the forehead of the cyborgic, female Scarface. Though masculinity pervades the scene, it does not obscure Kika’s hyper-feminine rendering and the body politics therein.

One must be reminded, however, that not only are the tenets of Williams’ melodrama enacted within the sequence but, rendered violently literal are the sex and violence of the remaining body genres: pornography and horror. Literally obscured by the pervasive phalluses of the sequence, lays the transgressed site, Kika’s body, which too is rendered a hyperbolic parody of gender. All legs and breasts is the film’s title character and it is her fetishistic denotation by these body parts that conflates her with their metaphorical associations; she is simultaneously the good nurturer and sex object (Urios-Aparisi 195). However, though Almodóvar delivers the signifiers of her gender, the site of gyonic transgression remains unseen. Within the frenzied visibility of the rape seen, the site of Kika’s sex remains stubbornly invisible (Smith “Matador...” 66), softening the blow of the on-screen sexual aggression. During the rape, it is Kika’s nonchalant attitude and playful banter with Paul that betrays the violation done to her. Attempting to appeal to his sense of morality, Kika scolds her aggressor: “What you’re doing is very bad. This isn’t a film; is an authentic rape”. It is in this moment that the viewer is reminded that Kika the film and Kika the person are one and the same; this is a film and this rape is so inauthentic. Imagined with purpose, Kika’s violation is all about the comedy, the mediated relationality and missed connections that the film concerns itself with (Almodóvar qtd. in Troyano 104). Just as Williams’ body genres rely upon the measure of audience bodily response they elicit (Williams 270), so does the metafilmic framing of the rape sequence rely on audience affective response. By signaling rape’s potential for subjective decimation during the public revelation of Kika’s sexual transgression, Almodóvar successfully demonstrates the traumatic impact of rape while offering an example of positive rape survival.

Revisitation of the site of trauma, posited as a re-rape, is often framed as a more violative attack on character than the initial transgression (Projansky 9). Projection of the rape in the televisual screen “means two rapes” according to Almodóvar (qtd. in Troyano 103) and it is the heightened visuality and public humiliation delivered via the airing of the rape footage that pains the ever- resilient Kika. The shame, however, that Kika feels in relation to the rape tape should not be interpreted as a wish to bury the trauma: “I don’t want to forget. I don’t want

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my rape to sell more quarts of milk”. Suddenly, mother’s milk seems a gross signifier given the threat of impregnation by rape. However, pain or shame is only attached to the rape after it is made the fodder of public consumption. Though Kika does take part in the cleansing rituals of showering as many rape survivors do (Projansky 108), her blasé attitude in relaying the rape to her husband Ramon demonstrates the possibility for a positive outcome. Truly, as this essay will later detail, Kika is a rape survivor, one that bounces back in the hyperbolic optimism that is so character-appropriate.

Like Kika, Talk to Her too “dares to focus on the taboo of rape” (Vighi 118). However, this time the act is “connect[ed] with the question of sexual difference” (118). Unlike Paul, the rapist of this film is one as his name would imply, benign: Benigno is the kindly nurse and primary caretaker for Alicia, a comatose women. Even more dissimilarly from Paul, this rape is not a random occurrence arising from opportunity: Benigno is not only Alicia’s caretaker but he has also stalked her prior to her disabling accident. However, Benigno’s coding allows him to remain true to his name, as it is through this character that Almodóvar returns to his discussion of gender and sexual fluidity. Coded as feminine, Benigno’s inner transgressive phallic potential is masked and subsequently, his rape of his comatose patient, Alicia, is rendered sympathetically.

A character who is developed throughout Talk to Her, Benigno’s perspective is privileged over that of Alicia. The viewer, never delivered Alicia’s account of the rape, nor a sense of physical or psychic trauma that may have transpired, mourns once Benigno is dispelled from the narrative. Although as expected virtue is restored in Almodóvar’s masculine melodrama (Scott), the morality of Talk to Her is not pleasing to the viewer. Rape is forgivable for Benigno because, unlike in Kika, there is no visual incarnation of the transgression. The crucial intertext, Almodovar’s short homage to silent films called The Shrinking Lover, further robs the mute Alicia of voice and, in so doing, follows the fundamental suppositions laid by Michel Chion in “The Voice in Cinema.” Although Alicia’s mutism arises as a result of her physical inability to speak, she may still be considered as a “guardian of the secret” (Chion 96). In this case, the secret of Alicia is her very inaccessibility. As he is unable, both pre and post come to a psychic, mutual understanding with Alicia, Benigno gains access to the object of his desire through the only facet of her being he knows: her physicality. Just as Benigno affirms to Marco many times, the nurse does “talk to her”; in lieu of sexual violation we are given enunciation, inflecting narrative cinema with his visualized pleasure (Ohi). However, Benigno’s visualization of events does not embody the mythic, prolific and assaultive male gaze: the fantasy of The Shrinking Lover is devoid of any bodily or psychic trauma. The enunciation of the metafilmic rape of Alicia imagined as the shrinking lover’s desire for the true communion of bodies and beings implies Benigno’s transgressive intent; he only wants to gain a shade of that which his filmic proxies share.

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Once the lover has shrunk, Almodóvar is allowed to reimagine the female body topographically, as a space that embodies the dream of all lovers, to “walk[...] about the body of the person [they love]” (Almodóvar qtd. Ohi).

In creating this bodily landscape, “Almodóvar tries to convince the viewer that Benigno and Alicia share this world, that a reciprocity exists between them that was born of their intimacy” (Novoa 228). Benigno’s role as caretaker of Alicia does privilege a form of intimacy, but it is, as his name implies, a benign one. Clearly appropriating the silent character as his surrogate -- “he’s a little bit overweight, like me” -- Benigno is allowed to elucidate his perspective on his non-consensual sex with Alicia: for him, it is the ultimate act of convergence with another being.

Bodies, especially those of females, can be conceptualized as containers (UriosAparisi 184) and it is the fantastic “vaginal spelunking” (Ohi) of Alfredo that demonstrates the impossibility of true bodily communion, especially in relation to the transgressive imposition of Benigno. While both Amparo, the victim of The Shrinking Lover, and Alicia do not consent to the penetration of their bodies, the crucial difference between the two instances is Amparo’s consciousness.

Upon her receiving of Alfredo, Almodóvar is sure to cross-cut to her pleasured expression. However, it is exactly that which separates the women that allows Benigno’s actions to be rendered sympathetic. Compounded with the “ambiguous sign[age]” of the rape, the viewer forgives Benigno’s transgression because of the “all-important detail of the unconscious status of his female victim” (Vighi 81); her inert body and dormant mind are unharmed by his rape. Evidenced by later narrative events, however, Benigno’s actions do have ramifications upon Alicia but are not treated as psychologically or physically traumatic partially due to his queer rendering.

As Chion predicts, encounters with the mute Alicia illuminates questions of identity, origin and desire (Chion 96). However, the subject of this revelation is not the rape victim, but the transgressor; the audience grows to sympathize with Benigno’s pathetic misunderstanding of bodily love as sexual transgression.

The “warm embrace” of Benigno’s associated space not only renders a specific atmosphere, but response to him; he is warm, nurturing, feminized (Almodóvar qtd. in Ohi). It is these associations that Almodóvar dedicates the majority of the film to developing that are not lost during or after the rape. Though Benigno’s massaging of Alicia’s body may be seen as sexual during his retelling of The Shrinking Lover, it is ultimately palliative; Benigno is still framed as caretaker first and rapist second. Unlike Kika’s Paul, Benigno “lack[s] in both malice and in violent, dangerous masculinity” (Novoa 231). Here, though the rape is literally an “unspeakable event” (Projansky 90) from a female perspective, it is not altogether unfeminized. Benigno, one of Almodóvar’s chimerical queer figures, has his sexuality repeatedly called into question during Talk to Her. While the rape of Alicia may seem to answer this question, Benigno is neither posited firmly as hetero nor homosexual; to borrow the film’s language, he is oriented towards

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Alicia, and her only. Phallic power seems to be slippery substance for Benigno, who can grasp it only in a moment of non-malevolent action to attempt to mimic to the best of his capabilities that which he sees on screen. Though he differs from Paul in this regard, the two rapists fulfill a similar narrative function.

Although the choice of labeling these rapists as mothers is as disconcerting as it is difficult to reconcile with their latent penetrative capacities, it is through rape that the birthing capacities of these men is unleashed. Benigno and Paul, such different transgressors in respect to their abilities to wield masculinity, both fulfill a quasi-maternal function as they literally and figuratively release their respective women’s agency from a state of passive dormancy. Conceived in the immediate wake of the Francoist regime, Kika did adhere to the “ultra-traditional gender roles of the era” (Zecchi 146) and, as a result, it is difficult to imagine the phallically resplendent Paul as motherly. Certainly, Kika’s rape scene does not embody, in intent or visualization, the drive of “men’s desire to gain access to motherhood [in] traditional narrative” (Novoa 234). However, the excessively explicit comedic rape of Kika perversely liberates its title character; in its mimesis of the bodily transgressive birth, Paul’s violation of Kika initiates her ability for agency and self-actualization. This is not to say however, that Kika escapes the heterosexual dyad. As if an unapologetic result of her nature, Kika bounces back from both the rape and murders of her diegetic world only to drive off into the sunset with a new man. It is here finally that Kika occurs; the story is no longer centered on the woman’s psychopathic male counterparts, but is a narrative that originates with and is driven by her. Literally taking the wheel, Kika chooses heteronormativity within the coincidental framing of her encounter with the man on the side of the road. The final moments of Kika finally embody, in character and narrative, the “ideal state of mind” (Levy) that Almodóvar conceptualizes she and it as. While he waits for the dying moments of the film to unleash Kika’s dormant potential and do so through the controversial move of rape, Almodóvar ultimately releases of her from destructive heterosexual relationships by awakening her agency.

Through his caretaking and lovemaking, Benigno loses himself in a female body and becomes its extension; “however, it is he who gives this body life, fulfilling a quasi-maternal nourishing function.” (Novoa 233). Ultimately contained to a masculine body, Benigno “pregnant with Alicia [...], lacks only in some way of giving birth to her, of returning her to this world” (Novoa 223). Her awakening, brought on by her impregnation and subsequent birth-giving, comes as a result of Benigno’s rape. Though after awakening Alicia’s body is visibly afflicted by the trauma of her coma, there is no indication of the effects of the rape.

Her voice is returned and, in a fitting Almodóvarian coincidence, she is reunited with Marco at a dance performance. The exchanges of glances between them, compounded with Alicia’s active use of voice to engender caring and concern towards Marco, foreshadows the restoration of the normative dyad in Talk to Her. However, as the return of heterosexuality is premised by the restoration and

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use of female agency, a shift occurs. Through his relations with Alicia, Benigno awakens Marco to an ideal heterosexuality; as the title indicates, reciprocity in the normative dyad is a result of communication. Though “MARCO Y ALICIA” is unrevealed by the director, as it is premised on this communicative reciprocity, it may be seen as a progression of heterosexuality within Almodóvar’s film.

Calling into question the viewer’s own morality, Almodóvar begs the audience to weigh the unlived comatose life of Alicia against her existence as a survivor of rape. Through the transgression’s lack of effect on Alicia, Almodóvar posits rape as a troubling solution. Rape rights the wrongs of Talk to Her: it restores Alicia’s voice and bridles the harmful potential of Benigno’s masked masculinity by dispelling him from the narrative. However, as the viewer is left only with a conscious smiling Alicia and Marco, the dying moments of the film embody the happy heterosexual ending largely missing from Almodóvar’s catalogue.

Though Alicia and Kika are raped by very different men, their compounded transgressions indicate a much larger shift within the Almodóvarian world. Whereas heterosexuality is all too often abandoned in his filmic world, here Almodóvar allows these women to suffer its ultimate transgression and arise both empowered and happy within the normative dyad. The queered Benigno and hyper-masculine Paul play with the familiar Almodóvarian language of gender, voice and body through their transgression and push the theoretical conceptualizations of these codes to new, controversial territory. Rape, rendered laughable in Kika and rapist-sympathetic in Talk to Her, forces the viewer to be scrupulous of Almodóvar’s intent. However, the master of female post- modern filmic narrative is not the chameleonic misogynist of feminist nightmare. The Spanish director uses these rapes and the viewer’s affective response to provide instances of female transgression that are not altogether devastating. Rape allows Almodóvar to voice his feminism and, in so doing, he unleashes the raped female’s powerful agency supplying new potentials for the heteronormative dyad.

Although the post-structuralist framing of Projansky’s book denotes that the emotive affects of public discourses have real material effects (17), by no means should the productive use of rape in these narratives be interpreted as an endeavour to soften or mock the affects of real rape. Perhaps all too optimistically, this essay aligns itself with Almodóvar’s history of female narrative in the hopes that his use of rape serves to take away some of the devastating power of both real and simulated rape. Kika and Alicia are not rape victims, but rape survivors; their rapes are rendered in an ironically affective way that, one hopes, belays the empowerment afforded to rape in its devastating cultural renderings onto those transgressed in this way. While rape does not function in these instances as the “narrative event that brings out a latent feminism in the woman [...] who experiences [it]” (Projansky 21), it does awaken Alicia and Kika to their feminine agency.

Like all things in the Almodóvarian universe, rape is merely a performance that is undertaken in order to reveal true self. Almodóvar does not betray his strong women

by raping them, but defends both them and more true heroines, real rape survivors.

Works Cited Almodóvar, Pedro. Kika. Perf. Veronica Forque, Peter Coyote and Victoria Abril.

El Deseo S.A, 1993. Film ----. Talk to Her. Perf. Javier Camara, Dario Grandinetti and Leonor Watling. El Deseo S.A, 2002. Film.

---- and Ela Troyano. “Interview with Almodóvar: Kika.” Pedro Almodóvar: Interviews. Ed. Peter Burnette. Mississippi: Mississippi UP, 2004. 102 109. Print.

Chion, Michel. “The Voice in Cinema.” ENGL 318 WebtCt Online Readings:

94-106. Web. Guse, Annette. “Talk to Her! Look at her! Pina Bausch in Pedro Almodóvar’s

Hable Con Ella.” Seminar: A Journal of Germanic Studies 4.3 (Nov.

2007): 427-440 (Article) Levy, Shawn. “Kika: You Can’t Keep a Good Woman Down.” Film Comment

New York 30.3 (May 1994). Web. Nov. 2010.

Marcantonio, Carla. “Undoing Performance: The Mute Female Body and

Narrative Dispossession in Pedro Almodóvar’s Talk to Her.” Women &

Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 17.1 (March 2007): 19-36.

Print. Nov. 2010.

Novoa, Adriana. “Whose Talk Is It? Almodóvar and the Fairy Tale in Talk to Her.”

Marvels & Tales 19.2 (Nov. 2 2005): 224-248. Web. Nov. 2010.

Projansky, Sarah. Watching Rape: Film and Television in Post-Modern Culture.

New York: NY UP, 2001. Print.

Scott, A.O.. “The Darkest of Troubles in the Brightest of Colours.” New York Times (Nov. 3 2006). Web. Nov. 2010.

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Ohi, Kevin. “Voyeurism and Annunciation in Almodóvar’s Talk to Her.” Criticism

51.4 (Fall 2009). Web. Nov. 2010.

59

Smith, Paul Julian. “Introduction”, “Matador (1986): Power, Pleasure, and the

Frenzy of the Visible.” and “Kika (1993): Future Chic.” Desire Unlimited.

London: Verso, 2000. 1-9, 65-79, 165-171. Print.

--------. “The Emotional Imperative: Almodóvar’s Hable Con Ella and Television

Espanola’s Cuentame como paso.” MLN 119.2 (March 2004) 363-375.

Web. Nov. 2010.

Urios-Aparisi, Eduardo. “The Body of Love in Almodóvar’s Cinema: Metaphor

and Metonymy of the Body and Body Parts.” Metaphor and Symbol 25.3

(November 2010): 181-203. Web. Nov. 2010.

Vighi, Fabio. “Ethics of Drive: Beauty and its Enjoyment from Rohmer to Pasolini.” Sexual Difference in European Cinema: The Curse of Enjoyment. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. 57-96. Print.

Williams, Linda. “Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess.” Refiguring American

Film Genres. Ed. Nick Browne. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998. 242 88. Print.

Zecchi, Barbara. “All About Mothers: Pronatalist Discourses in Contemporary

Spanish Cinema.” College Literature 32.1 (Winter 2005). 146-164. Web.

Nov. 2010.

DOUCETTE 60

THE SPARK AND THE SOUL Mary Shelley’s Critique on the 1816 Vitalism Debate JAMES HUGH KEENAN CAMPBELL

7 min.

61

The Spark and the Soul: Mary Shelley’s Critique on the 1816 Vitalism Debate

CAMPBELL 62

Throughout the Romantic period, scientific and artistic communities unified in their attempts to define the nature of life, with opposing camps proposing fundamental theories of vitality as either a vital “spark” which invigorated the body, or as the natural result of the body’s organized functions. This argument came to a head between 1816 and 1820 with the ideologically loaded vitriolic debate between surgeons John Abernethy and William Lawrence. Abernethy supported the conservative, theological theory of a “superadded” physical element separate from the body, while Lawrence argued for the more progressive and materialist view where the physical element was produced by the sum of the body’s functions. The debate became religiously and politically charged when Abernethy began to argue that his Vitalist perspective was grounded in morality, for he supported the existence of a mind or soul separate from the body. It was argued that Lawrence’s materialism, in contrast, inherently supported atheism and, by association, a French revolutionary politic. Published in 1818 in the midst of this debate, Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein explicitly engages with these two theories. Victor Frankenstein’s incredible scientific breakthrough is not simply the creation of a man, but rather his discovery of a process that can create the “vital spark” of life (or, in Abernethy’s terms, a process that can create a soul).

These religious terms became the basis of Mary Shelley’s critique upon the debate and its experimental practices. Thus, while Frankenstein engages with the “vital spark” model on a pragmatic level, the story also works to sever the conservative ideological implications that inspired Abernethy’s arguments.

There is little doubt that the debate over Vitalism – and especially the real and hypothetical experiments designed to empiricize the discussion – had a profound influence upon Mary Shelley and her narrative. In the author’s introduction of the 1831 publication, Shelley traces her inspiration for the story to a conversation between Lord Byron and Percy Shelley to which she was a “devout and silent listener” (Shelley viii). The two spoke of “the nature of the principle of life” (viii) - taken as a specific reference to a potential vital element - “and whether there was any probability of its ever being discovered and communicated” (viii).

Byron and Shelley discussed an experiment they – incorrectly – believed was performed by Dr. Erasmus Darwin that involved bringing vermicelli to voluntary motion. This sparked a thought in Mary that “perhaps a corpse would be reanimated... perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth” (viii).

Furthermore, Mary’s husband, Percy, and her father, William Godwin, were both thoroughly involved with the Vitalism debate through their literary works and social relationships. Percy met both his future wife and William

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Lawrence when Godwin introduced him to the “Bracknell circle”, a social group of intellectuals who engaged in group vegetarianism “motivated by their interest in radical politics and medicine” (Ruston 86). Lawrence became Percy’s personal doctor and psychiatrist in 1815, and the two became close over the following three years, turning the Shelleys’ “joint scientific speculations along a more controversial path,” as historian Richard Holmes would later describe (Holmes 311).

These controversial ideas, and the sensationalist experiments that investigated them, inspired the horrific images that populate Frankenstein. The graphic awakening of Victor Frankenstein’s monster, with the electric seizing of deceased muscle, actually took place in London in 1803, in the form of a brutal experiment by Giovanni Aldini. Six hours after the hanging of the murderer Thomas Forster, Aldini publicly applied electricity from a voltaic battery to the man’s corpse with the intention of re-animation. A journalist at the scene reported, “the jaw began to quiver, the adjoining muscles were horribly contorted, and the left eye actually opened ... the arms alternately rose and fell ... the fists clenched and beat violently the table on which the body lay, natural respiration was artificially established” (qtd. in Holmes 317). Fifteen years later, the reminiscent scene in Frankenstein would describe “I saw the dull yellow eye of the creature open; it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs,” echoing the same three uncanny moments from Forster’s voltaic revival. This horrifying event scarred the scientific community; “animal galvanism” experimentation was banned and Aldini was deported from England. Aldini evidently had a profound effect on Mary Shelley and her tale of the “modern Prometheus;” as the final quote of the report reads, “vitality might have been fully restored, if many ulterior circumstances, had not rendered this – inappropriate” (qtd. in Holmes 317).

Despite this inspiration, Victor Frankenstein is not simply a proxy for the madman Aldini, as Shelley’s narrative also draws from the ideas of other, albeit less horrifying, figures who were central to the Vitalism debate. The moment of profound inspiration during M. Waldman’s lecture mirrors Mary Shelley’s own experience attending a lecture by Humphrey Davy with her father in 1812.

Waldman’s characterization of the investigatory scientists as they “penetrate into the recesses of Nature, and show how she works in her hiding-places,” clearly draws inspiration from Davy’s famous foretelling of how man would “interrogate Nature with Power ... as a master, active, with his own instruments” (Shelley 27; qtd. in Holmes 326).

Following Waldman’s lecture, Frankenstein begins to aggressively engage with numerous fields of scientific discovery, ultimately focusing on the issue of vitality. He reflects, “whence, I often asked myself, did the principle of life proceed?” (30). After devoting countless hours to studying the decay of corpses, Frankenstein describes how, “I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation

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upon lifeless matter” (31). The monster also specifically uses the rhetoric of vitality when he later cries, “Cursed, cursed creator! Why did I live? Why, in that instant, did I not extinguish the spark of existence which you had so wantonly bestowed?” (97). On the surface, Victor seems to solve the debate once and for all when he actually succeeds not only in discovering the vital element, but also in his ability to recreate it. Shelley’s narrative specifically engaged with Abernethy and Lawrence’s divergent opinions on vitality when she wrote, “I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet” (32).

At its most basic level, the debate between Abernethy and Lawrence was based on the relative supremacy of the superadded vital element and the body’s natural organization. Lawrence was not a dogmatic materialist: he allowed for the possibility that a hypothetical vitality might be empirically discovered, and he did discuss “vital properties,” though he considered these inferior to functional organization. These vital properties were not discrete physical – or metaphysical – substances as Abernethy imagined them. Lawrence viewed them as states of being specific to living matter, such as irritability – a tendency to respond to stimuli – or sensibility – the ability to perceive stimuli. Fundamentally, Lawrence defined life as “the assemblage of all the functions, and the general result of their exercise,” and these “functions” as “the purposes, which any organ or system of organs executes in the animal frame” (Introduction 120). The vital properties fit into this model as “the means, by which organization is capable of executing its purpose” (Introduction 120).

Influenced by French materialists such as Xavier Bichat – who famously defined life as “the sum of the functions by which death is resisted” – Lawrence came to believe that bodily organization was the fundamental vivifying principle (qtd. in Holmes 312). He believed that the organic structures of the body were not set in motion by any separate force or substance, but that these structures inherently functioned because of their cooperative nature. In his lectures, Lawrence characterized organic matter in contrast to inorganic matter in terms of this cooperative complexity. In 1816’s The Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology, Lawrence wrote,

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“Thus a single grain of marble has the same characters as an entire mountain. A living body, on the other hand, derives its character from the whole mass, from the assemblage of all the parts. This character is altogether different from that of its component particles” (Introduction 124).

Abernethy, on the other hand, held the belief that life functioned like electricity - as a physical force separate from the materials affected. Irritability – one of the vital properties discussed by physiologists of the time – was the “effect

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of some subtile, mobile, invisible substance, superadded to the evident structure of muscles, or other forms of vegetable and animal matter, as magnetism is to iron, and as electricity is to various substances with which it may be connected” (Enquiry 39). Unlike William Lawrence, John Abernethy viewed the body as simply an “aggregate mass; it is as we express it, common matter, it is inert; so that the necessity of supposing the superaddition of some subtile and mobile substance is apparent” (Enquiry 41). As a result, Abernethy felt that a belief in the existence of a vital substance was perfectly logical, as long as one also believed that bodily organization was irrelevant to the matter.

In Frankenstein, Shelley works under the assumption of Abernethy’s “superadded” vitality. On the “dreary night of November,” Victor Frankenstein superadded the vital element into the lifeless form of his monster. (34) Dr. Frankenstein did not remove death, or craft a body that naturally set itself in motion but rather he infused it with the “spark of life.” In that moment, all of the horrific experiments with voltaic batteries were reborn in the monster, who demonstrates three signs of infused life which illustrate three vital properties from the debate: the opening of the “dull yellow eye,” the hard breathing, and the “convulsive motion” of its limbs demonstrate sensibility, respiration and the previously discussed irritability respectively (35).

However, by the time of Frankenstein’s publication in 1818, Abernethy’s theories had become much more than simple anatomical models, as social, political and theological implications had charged the issue and brought it before the public eye. It was widely believed that Abernethy’s vital element could be the human soul, or at least a force to mediate between body and spirit (Holmes 317).

Its existence could empirically validate theological ideas of the separate mind, positing an exterior morality that governed the actions of the body (Ruston 17).

These implications of Abernethy’s model, whether valid or problematic, took hold of the public imagination and fundamentally altered the terms of the debate. What had been a scientific, empirical disagreement began to critically engage religious and social institutions.

Thus, although Lawrence only meant to challenge the status quo within the scientific community, the ideas he interrogated came to symbolize the entire conservative institution. When Lawrence dangerously put his arguments in atheistic terms, saying, “it seems to me that this hypothesis or fiction of a subtle invisible matter ... is only an example of that propensity in the human mind, which had led men at all times to account for those phenomena, of which the causes are not obvious, by the mysterious aid of higher and imaginary beings,” he did not realize the level upon which his radical arguments would be threatening (Introduction 174). As Sharon Ruston explained in her analysis of the debate, “if physiological studies can prove that it is ‘natural’ for humans to be controlled and regulated by a superadded principle, the legitimacy of governing bodies is justified” (Ruston 17). Once established, anyone who questioned Abernethy’s

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theories was referred to as, at the very least, a sceptic or, more commonly, an atheist and a radical. The Quarterly Review, a dominant conservative voice of the time wrote that, “Mr. Lawrence strives with all his powers to prove that men have no souls!” (qtd. in Holmes 318).

While Mary Shelley’s novel engaged Abernethy’s scientific model, Victor Frankenstein’s experiment with vitality thoroughly critiques the ideological implications Abernethy tied to his theories, and severs many of these ties.

Abernethy believed that the vital element represented a soul, and that this was the seat of morality and the mind. He lectured, “Thus even would psychological researches enforce the belief which I may say is natural to man; that in addition to his bodily frame, he possesses a sensitive, intelligent and independent mind” (Enquiry 95).

Shelley utilizes this model of the separate mind but shatters the idea that this element is the “soul”, or that it could be the inherent seat of morality. The monster’s “bodily frame” is a chimera of adult limbs and organs and yet his mind is that of a newborn child. Victor’s spark has been bestowed, and yet the monster still is infantile. The monster must develop morality from his experiences in the world, and nothing is inherently a part of him. Abernethy’s physiological model of morality can justify exterior governance and severe punishment by asserting that an immoral human has a flawed vital element, but Shelley’s Frankenstein presents a societal model to challenge this explanation.

Thus the monster is a test of the legitimacy of a human-made vitality or soul, and therefore an experiment in the creation not just of a humanoid animal, but of a thinking, reasoning, moral human being. Unlike the vital elements of regular human beings, the monster’s spark was crafted by man and not by God. The monster’s horrible existence and cruel actions however, cannot be traced to any inferiority in Victor’s handiwork, for the monster begins his existence thinking like any other human being. Despite inhabiting an ugly adult body, the monster explores and engages with the world on a simple child-like level. In 1817, when Mary was both wrestling with the nature of Frankenstein’s monster and pregnant with her own child, she attended Percy’s medical consultations with William Lawrence (Holmes 331). Lawrence’s materialist ideas concerning the mind and the soul would come to influence the development of the monster. The monster begins his life with the naive optimism of a child, but quickly learns fear and then hate from the world he lives in. Within this story we see the clear influence of Lawrence’s then-radical notions: “But examine the ‘mind’, the grand prerogative of man! Where is the ‘mind’ of the foetus? Where is that of a child just born? Do we not see it actually built up before our eyes by the actions of the five external senses, and of the gradually developed internal faculties?” (Lectures pp6-7). There are no evident flaws in Victor Frankenstein’s manufactured vital element - his work is equal to that of God. The monster however is forced to develop his mind in a harsh environment, without any parental care or even

common human decency. As a result, all of the flaws and deviations – excluding aesthetics – which separate Frankenstein’s monster from those who may be called his “fellow humans” are the direct result of how they treat him, allowing Shelley’s narrative to stand as a subtle yet defiant criticism of the conservative religious and governance models that use static assumptions of morality as justification for oppressive levels of external control.

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Works Cited Abernethy, John. An Enquiry into the Probability and Rationality of Mr. Hunter’s Theory of Life: Being the Subject of the First Two Anatomical Lectures Delivered Before the Royal College of Surgeons, of London.

London: Longman, Hurst, Rees, Orme, and Brown, 1814. Print.

Holmes, Richard. The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Beauty and Terror of Science. New York: Vintage, 2010.

Lawrence, William. An Introduction to Comparative Anatomy and Physiology: Being the Two Introductory Lectures Delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons, on the 21st and 25th of March, 1816. London: Callow, 1816.

Print.

Lawrence, William. Lectures on Physiology, Zoology and the Natural History of Man, Delivered at the Royal College of Surgeons. London: Printed for J. Callow, 1819. Print.

Ruston, Sharon. Shelley and Vitality. Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Internet resource.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein: Or, The Modern Prometheus. 3rd ed. London: Colburn and Bentley, 1831. Print.

Williams, Raymond. Marxism and Literature. Oxford [Eng.: Oxford University

Press, 1977. Print.

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NOSFERATU: A SYMPHONY OF HORROR

AND THE THREATENING REALITY OF GENDER ROLES IN THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC JENNA WHITNALL

89 min.

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Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror and the Threatening Reality of Gender Roles in the Weimar Republic All contemporary filmic and literary interpretations of Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) have functioned to firmly fix the dark-romance association of vampires with the sexual and the sensual in the minds of readers and viewers in today’s society. Even early examples, such as Tod Browning’s Dracula (1931), which famously cast Bela Lugosi in his iconic lead role as a sophisticated, gentlemanly, and highly-sexualized vampire, have drawn on sexual metaphors from Stoker’s original work. The marketing for this film, in fact, highlighted not the terror or horror of the story, but instead, the romantic aspect, with a tagline reading “The story of the strangest passion the world has ever known!”1 Skimming any Draculabased academic text, it becomes clear that almost every film version of the story since Browning’s depicts a similarly sexually charged villain. One must, as Paul Hogan points out, turn to the earlier, and, in fact, original film adaptation of the Dracula character to find one that is void of sensuality. F. W. Murnau’s Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror (1922), an unauthorized film adaptation of Stoker’s novel, changes the names of Stoker’s original characters to avoid copyright issues, but is nevertheless the first veritable on-screen appearance of Dracula. As Hogan describes: “Count Orlock, [Murnau’s Dracula or Nosferatu], is totally devoid of sexual appeal- he is, in fact, coldly repellent, almost insectoid in appearance. Orlock’s domed head, pointed ears, and hideously skeletal fingers contribute to an image that is a far cry from the authorized interpretation that Lugosi would bring to Broadway five years later.”2

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The so-called removal of all of Nosferatu’s sexual appeal, and the narrow focus on the sexuality of the vampire figure alone as significant (as opposed to including the other characters), has encouraged many scholars to contextualize Murnau’s film in a very different way—most popularly, as a prophetic prediction of the rise of Nazism that would occur soon after the film’s release. In surveying the canon of scholarly critique on Nosferatu, and examining how modern-day scholars have disbanded previous readings of this work as one that finds its significance in these roots, I will argue for a contemporary reading of the work, one that considers other aspects of Weimar Republic society. Specifically, by examining the “feminized” performances of the masculine characters in the films, the “masculinized” 1 David J. Hogan, “Lugosi, Lee and the Vampire Lovers,” in Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film, edited by David J. Hogan (London: McGarland & Company, Inc. Publishers, 1953), 138.

2 Ibid,138.

performance of the lead feminine character in the film, Ellen, and finally the neutralized gender of Count Orlock and Nosferatu, it will become clear that the fear this film plays out is one that corresponds heavily with the growing unease in Weimar Republic society over the rising power of the woman, and the threat this posed to the hegemonic male.

The dominant and still widespread reading of this film has its roots in the earliest waves of post-WWII trauma. The most notable scholar to write on the political contextualization of the film was Siegfried Kracauer. With his text From Caligari to Hitler, published in 1947, he constructed the Nosferatu character as a “tyrant” and argued that Murnau’s film, along with most other notable Expressionist films of the period, was linked to the rise of Hitler, Nazism, totalitarianism and perceived attitudes about the “invading Jew” that later grew to be so powerful.3 This reading ties the Eastern, hooked-nose “other” that is Orlock, and his bringing of his rats and the plague into German society, to the sociopolitical attitude towards the outsider that was rising in German society at the time.

This argument, although acknowledged as an important part of early German film history, cannot be assumed to be unquestionably correct, as it often has been by modern scholars. Thomas Koebner suggests that this popular reading of the film as demonstrative of Murnau’s anti-Semitism, and therefore as a pre-cursor to what was to come during the Second World War, is invalid. Koebner points to Murnau’s intimate friendship with Hans Ehrenbaum-Degele as a reason why it is unjustified to read the film in such a way, asserting that Ehrenbaum-Degele’s father, who was Jewish, and mother, who Murnau cared for deeply, took great care of Murnau for most of his youth, treating him like a second son.4 Thomas Koebner suggests that these experiences could not have left Murnau unaffected. He dispels the oft-cited reading of the film by saying:

3 Siegfried Kracauer, “The Postwar Period: Procession of Tyrants,” in From Caligari to Hitler:

A Psychological History of the German Film, edited by Leonardo Quaresima (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947, 2004), 77-88, and whole work for thesis.

4 Thomas Koebner, “Murnau- A Conservative Filmmaker? On Film History as Intellectual Histor,” in Expressionist Film- New Perspectives, ed. Dietrich Scheunemann, (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2003), 118.

5 Ibid, 118.

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“Those experiences should have immunized Murnau against the Zeitgeist-anti-Semitism. To consider the rats in Nosferatu as symbols for a Jewish threat from the East therefore seems to be rather absurd. The contemporary reviews lack any reference to a Jewish theme. Such a blunt imagery of abhorrence only spread during the Third Reich. It was a scientific fact that rats were carriers of the pest. The fear of the plague and anti-Semitism, therefore, do not go hand in hand.”5

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Instead, a more appropriate reading of the film might take into account— as scholarship has with almost every other film version of Stoker’s original novel— what the film adaptation has to say about the question of sexuality and of gender.

For why would this story be chosen as one to be interpreted into film at this precise moment in history if not for some comment that its highly sexualized themes might make on the rising societal importance of gender and sexual discourses?

Judith Mayne’s essay “Dracula in the twilight: Murnau’s Nosferatu,” asserts that, in examining film adaptations, it is necessary to understand the historical perspective surrounding the period of the film. For her, the questions center around “why certain kinds of works were adapted at certain periods in film history, for example, or how the turn to literary sources was often an attempt to attract idle-class audiences to movie theatres…”.6 The published collection of essays as a whole seems to argue that in most cases of film adaptations, the literary stories are summoned to contemporary culture because their original messages and themes seem to be relevant to viewers at the time. With this in mind, one must not forget that for Victorian readers of Stoker’s original Dracula, the threat of the monster was one that is thematically and metaphorically linked repeatedly to deviant sexual behavior, and specifically, unbridled female sexuality, which for the restrained sexual and social codes that characterized the Victorian era did indeed present a great threat.7 The threat of unbridled sexuality was also present, as I will soon discuss, in various other historical periods during which female gender roles were redefined, including the Weimar Republic. Although previous scholars have only tangentially treated this correspondence between the large theme of sexuality in the novel and the discourse at the time of the release of the film, I will argue that evidence in the film makes it obvious that it is an essential relationship to observe in reassessing Nosferatu’s meaning. First, we must establish a firm understanding of the social atmosphere of Germany at the time in regards to gender.

In order to do so, I will contextualize the film not as one that was released in the pre-WWII period, as Kracauer did, but rather as one that was released in the post-WWI period. The First World War was a war of attrition whose battles came increasingly to be fought by citizen soldiers as the years progressed. During the war, devastating casualties occurred on both sides. The German population, whose leaders had demanded the endless sacrifice of husbands, sons, fathers and brothers in order to sustain the futile war effort, was especially affected. After the war, the drastically decreased population of men resulted in an increasingly important role for women to keep the economic and political systems of the country running.8 6 Judith Mayne, “Dracula in the twilight: Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922),” in German Film &

Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, ed. Eric Rentschler (New York and London: Methuen, Inc., 1986), 25.

7 For a full discussion of this argument, please see Jenna Whitnall, “Taboo: Dracula and Stoker’s Forbidden Sexual Metaphors,” in Sprinkle: A Journal for Sexual Diversity Studies vol. 1 (2009), accessed 2 Dec 2011: http://freireproject.org/files/Whitnall_Dracula.pdf.

8 Brian Peterson, “The Politics of Working-Class Women in the Weimar Republic,”

Women had, as they had in every participating country, gained many fundamental rights during the war, when the lack of men at home required them to work wartime factory jobs, bringing them out of the realm of domesticity and into the urban working world. One concrete example of their rising power is that women were granted the right to vote in Germany by the revolutionary government in 1918.9 This, as well as other acquired rights, had a significant effect on the female psyche at the time, in terms of what a woman could and could not, or should and should not do. In turn, it had an extreme effect on the male psyche, as the German hegemonic male had always, as detailed by a variety of texts, understood his own role in relation to “others”.10 With drastic changes in the female role, men too had to reevaluate their roles.

As Brian Peterson states in his study of the politics of working-class women in the Weimar Republic, “the growing radicalism of working women during the latter phases of the First World War…was checked by the expulsion of women from exactly those sectors of employment which were most conducive to radicalism.” This was an effort to balance out roles and restore gender performativity11 to a “normal” status in the post-war period. There was some question as to exactly how to classify this post-war “new woman”. Linda Frame’s feminist work “Gretchen, Girl, Garconne? Weimar science and popular culture in search of the ideal New Woman,” details exactly that, applying Foucault’s notions of the “bio-politics of population” as well as other scientific work at the time to describe how concerns about the “masculinized” modern woman in Weimar Germany emerged out of the earlier fear that “women’s forays beyond husband and family would ultimately threaten reproduction, society, and the human race”.

12 In 1927, the Berlin bourgeois newspaper 8-Uhr-Abendblatt divided women into three categories: the naive “Gretchen” type, the American-influenced, independent “Girl”, and the “Garconne”, a type whose mental and sexual power, as the report states, “often gives rise to conflict ... Uniting a sporting, comradely male entrepreneurial sense with heroic, feminine devotion, this synthesis--if successful--often makes her so superior to the man she loves that she becomes

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Central European History vol.10 (1977), accessed 5 December 2011: doi:10.1017 S0008938900018355, 89.

9 Ibid, 89.

10 Simone De Beauvoir, “The Second Sex (1953),” in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader (2nd Edition), ed. Anthony Easthope et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 52.

11 Here, I am invoking the concept of gender is something that is discursively and sociologically produced and not innate, as understood through Judith Butler’s, 1991 text “Imitation and Gender Insubordination”. See Judith Butler, “Imitation and Gender Subordination,” in Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay theories, ed. D. Fuss, (New York and London: Routledge, 2001), 13-31.

12 Lynne Frame, “Gretchen, Girl, Garconne? Weimar science and popular culture in search of the ideal New Woman,” in Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, ed.

Katharina von Ankum (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997), 14.

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troublesome.”13 Looking to Nosferatu, Wilhelm Galeen’s writing of the characters, Murnau’s directing of the characters, and the actors’ portrayal of the characters, while considering the above concepts which were so integral a part of the national consciousness at the time, it is impossible to ignore what the film would have meant to contemporaneous audiences.

As I stated earlier, this gender crisis did not only involve the feminine role, but also, in reaction, a redefinition of what the masculine role was and exactly how it should be performed. In Thomas Elsaesser’s text, which revisits Kracauer’s original work, he disagrees with the original reading and instead proposes that it made generalizations about the German people from the perspective of a certain class of historical spectator, while insisting on the value of Kracauer’s observation, that many films from the early 1920s dealt with specifically male anxieties, as a correct part of his work as a whole.14 In fact, he states that, “the idea that definitions of masculinity and male identity were in crisis during he Weimar years is itself… a cultural-historical cliché”.15 This much is certainly obvious based on the feminized character of Hutter in the film. Hutter, played by Gustav v. Wangenheim, is not only a buffoon--constantly eating, laughing, and acting in a naïve and foolish manner--but additionally, in his utter ineffectuality and impotence, he is rendered effeminate. The traditional male role of powerful protector, for example, is not something he is capable of--the most stark example of this being the fact that when Ellen is being attacked by Nosferatu in the ultimate scene, he turns to the rationality of the paracelsiast, Doctor Bulwer, to save her instead of standing guard by her bedside. His acting movements and physical behavior in each scene further construct his ineffectuality and femininity. As Janet Bergstrom points out, “he is frequently made to step slowly backwards, and then drape himself across a chair, a bed, or some other piece of the décor,” like the traditional swooning female.16 She goes on to say that because Jonathan’s body is always decorated and softened by his costumes, his posing in such a manner (Fig. 1) makes him appear as “a male figure arranged for us to see.”17 This aligns with her reading of Weimar cinema as one whose national audience was highly knowledgeable of art-historical conventions, therefore making it appropriate that this assessment should invoke concepts of “the gaze” as scholars like Laura Mulvey have elaborated--Hutter is to be gazed upon and therefore objectified, 13 “Drei Frauen stehen heute vor uns. Die drei Typen: Gretchen, Girl, Garconne”, Uhr-Abendblatt, 4 June 1927, in Ibid, 12.

14 Thomas Elsaesser, “Weimar Cinema, Mobile Selves, and Anxious Males: Kracauer and Eisner Revisted,” in Expressionist Film- New Perspectives, ed. Dietrich Scheunemann (Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2003), 40.

15 Ibid, 40 16 Janet Bergstrom, “Sexuality at a Loss: The Films of F. W. Murnau,” Poetics Today, vol 6, No. ½ (1985), accessed 6 December 2011: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1772129, 197.

17 Ibid, 197.

Fig. 1: The softened feminized, pose of Hutter attracts the objectifying gaze of the spectator.

18 Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinem,” in A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader (2nd Edition), ed. Anthony Easthope et al. (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004), 170.

19 Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror, DVD, Directed by F. W. Murnau (1922), Germany: Prana-Film GmbH; Germany: 2001.

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stripping him of his power and therefore his masculinity.18 Where, then, is this power displaced to in the film? As in the Weimar Republic, in the absence of the power of men, the woman assumes the powerful position and with it a “masculinized” performance of the feminine gender role.

Throughout the film, Ellen undeniably exerts more power and potency than Hutter, her husband. She is, in fact, arguably the only source of real power and real knowledge in the film; whether through her psychic connection with Nosferatu, or her basic intelligence, she is the only one (besides Knock) who seems to connect the so-called plague with the arrival of Nosferatu. Ultimately, she is the only one who seems to realize that Nosferatu’s defeat will end the suffering in Wisborg.

As the inter-title states, the book of Vampire, which she deceives her husband by reading, makes it plain that “No one can help [Wisborg] unless a sinless maiden makes the Vampire forget the first crow of the cock—If she was to give him her blood willingly”.19 In being the only person who can defeat the menace that is the plague and that is Nosferatu, she is the only character in the film that has any true power to save society. Furthermore, in giving herself deliberately, albeit reluctantly, to Nosferatu--in an arguably sexual manner, wherein she invites him into her bed chamber to penetrate her while her husband is away--she delivers

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the ultimate blow to Hutter’s potency and masculinity. Considering the political and social fears present in the Weimar republic at the time, it is impossible not to see Ellen as an on-screen manifestation of society’s worst fears about the “new woman”.

Another important aspect to note is that the terrifying and feared Nosferatu character, as scholars like Hogan asserted in my introduction, is almost entirely desexualized. He does not necessarily represent the normative male role, as his bloodlust (which replaces his sexual lust) does not discriminate between male and female providers—he sucks the blood from Hutter’s finger in his castle with as much fervor as he does the blood from Ellen’s neck. Thus, I argue that he represents a manifestation of the threat of the ever-decreasing binary between male and female gender roles in the Weimar Republic—a character and a concept not only to be feared, but furthermore, one that hegemonic men must eradicate in order to solidify their positions in society. Following this argument, not only Nosferatu, the androgen, but also Ellen, the powerful new woman, must be destroyed in order for Wisborg—or, in the metaphor at hand, the Weimar Republic—to live happily ever after.

This ending that Galeen and Murnau chose for the film represents a drastic alteration to the ending of the novel that Stoker originally wrote, in which Jonathon Harker and Mina are left to live long, prosperous, and happy lives after eradicating the vampire—and with him, all traces of subversive sexual behavior in Mina. This ending, however, would not work given the political and social atmosphere of the time in which the new rights and powers women had gained throughout the post-war period could not just vanish in a puff of smoke like Nosferatu. Instead, the film, in order to stabilize the fear and anxiety created by this strong female character, and the threat posed by the androgynous Nosferatu annihilates both characters, suggesting for its viewers at the time of release that this too is what needs to be done in real life society. Thus, by contextualizing the “feminized” Hutter, the “masculinized” Ellen, and the desexualized Nosferatu within the social and political gender crisis that pervaded the time period in which it was released, it is clear that the real fear this film plays out is one that corresponds heavily not with the unknown threat of the outsider, but a threat that was very present and active within Germany and the Weimar Republic.

Works Cited Bergstrom, Janet. “Sexuality at a Loss: The Films of F. W. Murnau.” Poetics Today, vol 6, No. ½ (1985), 185-203. Accessed 6 December 2011. http:// www.jstor.org/stable/1772129.

Butler, Judith. “Imitation and Gender Subordination.” In Inside/Out: Lesbian Theories, Gay theories, edited by D. Fuss, 13-31. New York and London: Routledge, 2001.

De Beauvoir, Simone. “The Second Sex (1953).” In A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader (2nd Edition), edited by Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan, 51-54. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Elsaesser, Thomas. “Weimar Cinema, Mobile Selves, and Anxious Males: Kracauer and Eisner Revisted.” In Expressionist Film- New Perspectives, edited by Dietrich Scheunemann, 33-73. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2003.

Frame, Lynne. “Gretchen, Girl, Garconne? Weimar science and popular culture in search of the ideal New Woman.” In Women in the Metropolis: Gender and Modernity in Weimar Culture, edited by Katharina von Ankum,12-40.

Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1997.

Hogan, David J. “Lugosi, Lee and the Vampire Lovers.” In Dark Romance: Sexuality in the Horror Film, edited by David J. Hogan, 138-164. London: McGarland & Company, Inc. Publihsers, 1953.

Koebner, Thomas. “Murnau- A Conservative Filmmaker? On Film History as Intellectual History.” In Expressionist Film- New Perspectives, edited by Dietrich Scheunemann, 118-123. Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2003.

Mayne, Judith. “Dracula in the twilight: Murnau’s Nosferatu (1922).” In German Film & Literature: Adaptations and Transformations, edited by Eric Rentschler, 25-40. New York and London: Methuen, Inc., 1986.

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Kracauer, Siegfried. “The Postwar Period: Procession of Tyrants.” In From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, edited by Leonardo Quaresima, 77-88. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1947, 2004.

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Mulvey, Laura. “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema.” In A Critical and Cultural Theory Reader (2nd Edition), edited by Anthony Easthope and Kate McGowan, 167-76. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Nosferatu: A Symphony of Horror. DVD. Directed by F. W. Murnau. 1922, Germany: Prana-Film GmbH; Germany: 2001.

Peterson, Brian. “The Politics of Working-Class Women in the Weimar Republic.”

Central European History vol.10 (1977), 87-111. Accessed 5 December 2011. doi:10.1017/S0008938900018355 Stoker, Bram. Dracula. Originally published in 1897. New York: Dover Publications, 2000.

Whitnall, Jenna. “Taboo: Dracula and Stoker’s Forbidden Sexual Metaphors.” In Sprinkle: A Journal for Sexual Diversity Studies vol. 1 (2009). Accessed 2 Dec 2011: http://freireproject.org/files/Whitnall_Dracula.pdf

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“BIOLOGICAL, PATHOLOGICAL DETAILS” H.D. and Biography SUZANNE BOSWELL

56 min.

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“Biological, Pathological Details”: H.D. and Biography

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H.D.’s reputation as a feminist writer rests on her creation of a woman’s mythology, her lesbian narratives, and her questioning of 20th century gender roles (Friedman, “Creating” 389). Yet in her prose – especially in her non-fiction – H.D. spills considerable ink chronicling the achievements of male cultural icons like Sigmund Freud, Ezra Pound, D.H. Lawrence, and Kenneth Macpherson.

Although H.D. knew and admired plenty of women, including Marianne Moore and Bryher, she chose not to write about them, adding praise instead to already well-established figures. Moreover, H.D. wrote biographies, a genre which, insofar as it reinforces the status of already culturally acclaimed figures, is considered a particularly conservative medium (O’Brien 126). In this light, H.D. seems like a handmaiden to the male domination of literary culture, a “recording angel,” in Kenneth Macpherson’s words (H.D. Tribute 117). Yet, H.D. was not just a passive scribe. For H.D., breaking men’s exclusive ownership of culture involved interacting with both culturally acclaimed figures, like Freud and Pound, and culturally accepted forms, like biographies. Indeed, close examination of her non-fiction biographical texts Tribute to Freud and End to Torment, along with her fictional biography– the opening section of her novella Nights – reveals that while H.D. was using a conservative medium to write about famous men, her aims were uncanonical. In her three biographical works, H.D. breaks with the conventions of realistic biography by creating works that are based on engagement rather than examination; she uses this new form to bring women into the confines of the traditionally male canon.

All of H.D.’s biographical writings transgress basic conventions of the genre. A biographer should produce a non-fiction work that fits the realist mode: narrative time should be linear, the biographical subject should only have one self, the narrative should present objective facts, and the narrator should be an unseen presence (O’Brien 125). From the litany of complaints H.D. received while she was writing her biography of Pound, one might assume she had never read the rules: “Do you expect me to go into biological, pathological details?”

H.D. asks one person with astonishment (Torment 16). In fact, not only did H.D. tend to ignore a great deal of “important” details in her biographies, she also defied realistic conventions by presenting multiple versions of people and events, and by distorting normal temporality. H.D’s defiance of the genre’s conventions is particularly intriguing because biographies are often read as conservative, patriarchal narratives. Since the majority of biographies are written about men – H.D. herself notes the deluge of narratives appearing about Pound, Freud, and D.H. Lawrence – they tend to reinforce male domination over culture. The biographer, moreover, is associated with the male role of the scientist: they search for an objective, “biological” truth about their subject to unveil to the public, while remaining detached and observant (O’Brien 129). By contrast, the subjective

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biographer in H.D.’s writings – H.D. in End to Torment and Tribute to Freud, and the fictional John Helforth in Nights – actively participates in the narrative of all three texts. Each also constantly confesses his or her lack of knowledge and understanding of the biographical subjects. H.D.’s biographical writings thus defy the traditional objective and realistic conventions of the form; she clearly had little interest in rendering yet another detached revelation of a great male cultural figure.

Indeed, by shifting her focus away from hard data, H.D. produces biographies that are based not on a passive examination, but rather on the biographer’s engagement with the subject. For H.D., a “logical, textbook manner,” was insufficient to chronicling the “lively content” of her relationships with her subjects (Tribute 137). The most direct explanation of H.D.’s preferred methodology appears within the pages of Tribute to Freud: “I do not wish to become involved in the strictly historical sequence. I wish to recall the impressions” (14).

All of H.D.’s biographers follow this model. John Helforth of Nights, for example, cannot rid himself of the image of Natalia Saunderson leaving her muff and her watch on the lake. In a normal biography, Helforth would explain the manner of Natalia’s death, and move on; here, even when he has described the event in its chronological place, he returns to it again and again. In Tribute to Freud, H.D. the biographer vividly recalls Freud telling her: “I am an old man, you do not think it worth your while to love me” (16). Later in the narrative, however, readers discover in one of H.D.’s diary entries that it was H.D. – not Freud – who originally said the line. Impressions, not facts, hold sway over these two biographers. Why this preference? The key lies in the word H.D. used to describe her conversations with Freud: “lively.” Since this is a static fact, it requires no active participation by the reader or the biographer. It is, in a sense, “dead” history.

An impression, on the other hand, is a sign of a continued, “lively,” engagement with history; as H.D.’s mis-remembrance of Freud demonstrates, impressions are formed and reformed over time. Furthermore, impressions create engagement by continuing to affect people long after the original historical event has passed. For example, H.D.’s decision not to write End to Torment as a linear history of her time with Pound, but rather as a diary of her current recollections and impressions of her history with Pound, shows how she still grapples with their relationship forty years later. In all of these cases – Helforth’s remembrance of Natalia, H.D.’s mis-remembrance of Freud and her diary of Pound recollections – H.D. does not give her readers a conclusive story, but a process of engagement.

H.D. further moves away from the detachment of objective biography and towards a biography of engagement by highlighting the collaboration between the biographer and the biographical subject. H.D. wants biographers to engage with their biographical subjects; Tribute to Freud, H.D.’s remembrance of her time with Sigmund Freud, most successfully demonstrates this desire for collaboration.

As H.D. explains, from the outset she and Freud were not merely Professor and

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analysand, but they rather “came together to substantiate something” (Tribute 13).

The characterization is apt – H.D. loses her smelling-salts and the incident feels less like a part of the analysis than a project Freud and H.D. are working on together: “I ‘accidently’ let it fall on the Professor’s carpet [...] His air is mocktriumphant as he returns it to me [...] He knows that I know the symbolism of the ‘lost’ umbrella” (144). Both are active participants in the process; they know the meanings of their actions, and enjoy playing out their scripted parts as analysand and Professor. H.D. therefore chooses not to describe Freud’s typical methodology, instead highlighting the uniquely collaborative nature of their sessions. She thus places the narrative focus on their relationship rather than on Freud as an individual. Even the construction of the narrative reflects their engagement with one another: H.D interlaces scenes from the analysis with remembrances from both her past and Freud’s. Her youthful discovery, for example, that there are slugs’ larvae under a log serves as a metaphor for the impact of Freud’s ideas on the unconscious: “I did not know what they were or what they might portend. My brother and I stood spellbound at this disclosure” (21). The scene records a perfect collaboration – one where H.D.’s experiences engage with Freud’s ideas. Here, Tribute is a biography that centers on the exchange between the biographer and the biographical subject.

Like Tribute to Freud, End to Torment focuses on the engagement between H.D. and her biographical subject, Ezra Pound. Here, however, the results are less successful and the narrative is haunted by the pair’s failed collaboration. End to Torment shares many traits with Tribute to Freud. Both involve H.D. looking back at a relationship with a great man; neither one is a conventional biography that chronicles an interaction rather than one person’s life. But where Freud and H.D. came “together to substantiate something,” Ezra and H.D. “went through some hell together, separately” (Torment 26). The two move in parallel, yet there is little mutual engagement. In a moment characteristic of their interactions, Ezra writes letters to H.D. that are “indecipherable or untranslatable” (Torment 24). Indeed, although there is an attempt to communicate, the two cannot meet each other halfway. As a result, their interactions are marked by force: Ezra spends his time manhandling H.D., pushing her into cars and dragging her out of shadows. Even H.D.’s decision to write the biography begins with an act of violence: Doctor Erich Heydt “injected or reinjected (H.D.) with Ezra” without her permission (Torment 11). Ezra and H.D.’s relationship stands in opposition to the “lively” interaction she enjoyed with Freud. In fact, H.D. reinforces Ezra’s lack of engagement with her by associating him with death: she repeatedly describes him as being in a state of “rigor mortis” (Torment 16). That Ezra is, in the context of his relationship with H.D., metaphorically dead, cuts off all possibilities for their mutual interaction.

But H.D. still desires an engagement with Pound: she finds herself haunted by the ghost of their child, of the “collaboration” she and Ezra never had. Indeed, throughout End to Torment H.D. holds onto the possibility that something will

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happen: that this ghost will be “resurrected” once Pound is released from St. Elizabeths. Unfortunately, when he does leave, H.D. recognizes that he is just as stuck in stasis as before: “he seemed to have walked out into life as he left it twelve years ago”(Torment 44). Although the narrative continues for another twenty pages, H.D.’s remembrances of Pound slow down – she stops trying to engage with him. Instead, H.D. focuses on his follower Undine, an artist who does respond to H.D.’s overtures by writing her letters and drawing her pictures based on H.D.’s poetry. Although End to Torment is, like Tribute to Freud, a biography that focuses on H.D.’s engagement with her biographical subject, the collaboration is less than a success.

Ezra Pound’s metaphorical death may have doomed the possibility of collaboration between him and H.D. in End to Torment, but in H.D.’s novella Nights, it is precisely Natalia’s death that forces John Helforth, her reluctant biographer, to engage with her on her own terms. Unlike Pound or Freud, Natalia is not imbued with cultural authority; she is a fringe figure whose suicide barely warrants a mention in the Sunday paper. Had she come to John, an editor, to publish her book, he would have, as he tells his readers, refused to accept the manuscript as written. Her text was far too shocking and raw for public presentation; in order to make it suitable for publication, John would have suggested “a complete recasting of the themes” (Nights 21). Here, John fits the traditional image of an editor – which is not far from that of a biographer – in his ability to define and control his subjects. Yet, when the narrative begins, readers realize that John’s biographical subject exerts a tremendous influence on him, even if it is from beyond the grave. He first announces that he cannot “do better than use the names in this manuscript as Natalia Saunderson used them” (Nights 3). Then after thirty pages of biographical introduction, John presents the reader with Natalia’s text, untouched and unedited. Why these drastic reversals? Just as in H.D.’s two nonfictional biographies, the focus is not merely on Natalia’s life, but also on her biographer’s process for understanding that life. Natalia’s suicide forces John to engage with her, rather than to dismiss, or try to reshape her as he had before. He can no longer “dismiss her with logic” because her suicide takes her outside of the realm of normal human understanding (Nights 20). Again and again, John’s writing returns to the moment of her death, trying to rationalize the senseless, to understand how she made “two parallel lines meet” (Nights 10). For John, evidently, part of his new engagement with Natalia involves publishing her manuscript. Natalia’s death thus allows her to resist John’s attempts to control her, creating a collaboration between biographer and subject that crosses the borders of the afterlife: a text that includes both John’s musings and Natalia’s unedited writings. Although Tribute to Freud, End to Torment, and Nights each explore the process of collaboration from a different angle, all three are biographical texts that defy generic conventions by focusing on active engagement rather than passive examination.

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By reconfiguring her biographies to focus on engagement, H.D. uses male authority figures to bring women back into the cultural limelight. John Helforth compares Natalia to a “man who for men, would drag fire down from heaven” (Nights 27). In her biographies, H.D. is a writer who, for man, would drag women up into “cultural heaven.” John Helforth, Sigmund Freud and Ezra Pound are all a part of mainstream cultural production; they write or edit cultural artifacts (books, poems etc.), and act as gatekeepers, choosing certain people to enter the exclusive club of the cultural canon. In the mid-20th century, gatekeepers by and large kept women and women’s interests out of mainstream culture. H.D.’s biographies of engagement break the seal of exclusivity, since the narratives are just as much about the woman as they are about the culturally approved man. Indeed, H.D. and Natalia’s presence in works by or about male cultural authorities implicitly raises their profile. H.D.’s technique of engagement elevates Natalia into the cultural sphere because John decides to publish her book. Engagement also elevates H.D. into the cultural sphere because it allows her to depict a woman – herself – as being a critical figure in the lives of two culturally authoritative men. Moreover, since these collaborative biographies are as much about the biographers as they are about the biographical subjects, they also bring women’s lives into the male cultural sphere. In Tribute to Freud, for example, H.D. reveals many autobiographical details about her early childhood and her family. A woman’s childhood stories would usually not be given much attention by the canon, but by putting these stories in a biography of Freud, H.D. immediately gives them a certain amount of cultural credibility (Russ 41). H.D.’s biographies of engagement thus allow her to raise women up into the “cultural heaven” of the men.

In addition to bringing women into the male cultural sphere, H.D.’s biographical writings also highlight women’s artistic productions. Since women are often excluded from the cultural canon, their works tend to be ignored or forgotten much more quickly than those by men. Adrienne Rich, a renowned American poet, remembered that when she was in college during the 1950s, H.D.’s works were difficult to find, despite the fact that she was still alive: “in her long, late poems [...] she was reaching out beyond the destruction of World War Two for mythos of the female [...] None of this was known to me then” (99).

In her nonfictional biographical writings, H.D. deliberately fights against this erasure of women’s writings by calling attention to them. H.D. mentions in End to Torment that “most of the tributes to [Pound’s] genius, his daemon or demon, have come, so far, from men (Torment 41). Instead of continuing to discuss his male biographers, however, she takes a paragraph to describe the works of the three women associated with Pound: “Eva Hesse with the German translations [...] Sister M. Bernetta Quinn whose “The Metamorphoses of Ezra Pound” I found so illuminating [...] Mary [...] with her Italian translation of her father’s cantos” (41). H.D.’s attention to these women is particularly important, since it recognizes

“[T]he tone of his voice [...] made that spoken word live in another dimension, or take on another color as if he had dipped the grey web of conventionally woven thought [...] into the

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them as independent artists, and not just as Pound fans with a dash of creativity.

H.D. also uses her non-fictional biographies to draw attention to her own work; in End to Torment, H.D. pairs a discussion of Ezra Pound’s cantos with a description of her own “cantos” – Helen in Egypt: “Thinking of Ezra’s work, I recall my long Helen sequence” (41). Here, she equates her own transgressive reworking of the Trojan sequence with the work of a mainstream (if controversial) poet. In Tribute to Freud, meanwhile, H.D. discusses “Notes on Thoughts and Visions,” a work she herself suppressed on the advice of the sexologist Havelock Ellis. By recreating the visions and the thought process that went into “Notes,” H.D. manages to bring into public view ideas she would otherwise have trouble publishing; by placing them in a biography on an eminent psychoanalyst, moreover, she gives them a certain weight. H.D. thus takes advantage of the platform provided by the biographical genre to bring more attention to the cultural productions of women.

Not only does H.D. use her non-fiction biographical writings to bring women and their artwork into the cultural canon, she also uses them to retell stories of male achievement. Even if H.D. constructs her biographies based on the engagement between the biographer and the biographical subject, she still decides what is, and what is not written about Ezra Pound and Sigmund Freud in her narrative. Just how H.D. uses her control over Pound and Freud’s images is especially significant: in chronicling their great artistic and scientific achievements, she associates them with women. In End to Torment, H.D. firmly ties Ezra Pound to fertility – the inherently gendered and feminine – when she has “scattered grain” fall from his head for the benefit of the young poets and artists he mentors (36). An even more striking image appears when H.D. discusses Pound’s Cantos: “I see [...] the poet appropriating the attributes of the famous founder of Rome – or rather of the legendary wolf (lupus or lupa) who rescued and saved that founder [...] a savior and a lover rather than an outlaw” (Torment 24). Here, H.D. mentions a male figure – Romulus – that she could link to Pound – but she deliberately turns away from that option, and chooses to associate Pound with the female wolf that nursed Romulus and Remus. Pound’s artistic achievements are thus tied to female heroines (like the wolf of Rome) and feminine traits – nurturing, love, fertility. H.D. does exactly the same thing with Freud, associating him (to his displeasure) with her mother rather than her father, and then calling him “a midwife to the soul” (Tribute 116). Yet perhaps H.D.’s most interesting association comes after Freud shows her the statue of Pallas Athena, who has “lost her spear” (69). Much has been made of H.D.’s borderline anti-Semitic response, but little critical attention has been devoted to the lines immediately following Freud’s pronouncement:

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bubbling cauldron of his own mind in order to draw it forth dyed blue or scarlet, a new color to the old grey mesh, a scrap of thought, even a cast-off rag, that would become hereafter a pennant [...] to lead an army” (69).

In this sequence, Freud is practicing a traditionally female craft – he is working with cloth and dye. H.D. therefore casts Freud’s greatest accomplishment – his re-creation of the way humans think of the psyche – as the result of a woman’s work. H.D. uses her control over her male subjects in her biographical writings to associate male accomplishments with female heroes and female attributes – yet another way in which H.D. re-engages the female into the male-dominated canon.

Although H.D. uses biography, a traditionally conservative form, in Nights, Tribute, and End to Torment, she does so for rather un-conservative reasons. In her three biographical works, H.D. breaks with the conventions of realistic biography by creating works that are based on engagement rather than examination; she uses this new form to bring women into the confines of the traditionally male canon. Sharon O’Brien argues that more women should write biographies because women’s lives have been “erased, unrecorded or misrepresented [...] and biography can be a powerful means for re-inscribing women in history” (128). H.D. would certainly concur, but she also saw that women writing the biographies of men, as she did in Tribute to Freud and End to Torment, or women writing from the perspectives of men, as she did in Nights, could restore women into mainstream culture. Thus, H.D. was not just the “recording angel” imagined by Kenneth Macpherson, but someone who was consciously engaging with the cultural forms of her day. Near the end of “Writing on the Wall,” she quotes Matthew Arnold’s sonnet to Shakespeare: “I had not intended to include it in these notes, but perhaps my subconscious or unconscious mind recognized an intellectual family likeness” (105). Her choice is apt: like H.D., Arnold wanted to engage with Shakespeare, not merely record him; to use him to create new artwork, not merely replicate old forms.

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Works Cited Friedman, Susan Stanford. “Creating A Woman’s Mythology: H.D’s Helen in Egypt.” Signets (see #8). Print. (373-405).

H.D. End to Torment. New York: New Directions Books, 1979. Print.

- - -. Nights. New York: New Directions, 1984. 3-24. Print.

- - -. Tribute to Freud. New York: New Directions Books, 19

74. Print.

O’Brien, Sharon. “Feminist Theory and Literary Biography.” Contesting the

Subject:Essays in the Postmodern Theory and Practice of Biographical Criticism. Ed.William H. Epstein. Indiana: Purdue University Press.

Web. (122-129).

Russ, Joanna. How to Suppress Women’s Writing. Great Britain: The Woman’s

Press Limited, 1984. Print.

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FEMINIST TRAGEDY

The “Real” and Surreal In Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls ZOË ERWIN-LONGSTAFF

2 min.

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Feminist Tragedy: The “Real” and Surreal In Sarah Kane’s Blasted and Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls In Raymond Williams’s seminal work, Modern Tragedy, various types of tragedy are identified: “Tragedy proper,” “Liberal Tragedy,” “Private Tragedy,” and so on. Understandably, however, in light of the time of its first publication (1966), Williams does not identify a category of “Feminist Tragedy” or suggest what that might entail. Nevertheless, by the 1980s and 90s, plays were being written that clearly problematized a patriarchal emphasis on war and violence and investigated the market forces that were supposedly liberating women. In this light, it is what Raymond Williams has to say about Bertolt Brecht’s rejection of the tragic that applies to what he might have said about tragic feminist theatre.

To Williams, Brecht spurns classical tragedy, positing that since the “political system is the main source of suffering, . . . instead of sympathy there must be direct shock” (191). Both Caryl Churchill’s Top Girls (1982) and Sarah Kane’s Blasted (1995) exemplify this ideal of modern tragedy, especially insofar as they employ shock techniques to shed light on the compromised position of women and their sensibility in a world that devalues who and what they are. Both are decidedly political plays, responding to immediate political issues that were in the air at the time the plays were written. Furthermore, and as I will argue in this essay, they both embrace the “surreal” as a way of representing the impossibility of a redemptive feminism.

I. The Real and The Surreal

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Both Top Girls and Blasted employ similar techniques of mixing realistic settings and characters with those that remain ungrounded in time or space.

The unveiling of these surrealities is different in the two plays, with Top Girls beginning in a dreamlike space populated by odd historical figures and fictional characters, and Blasted opening in a very realistic expensive hotel room in Leeds with two entirely plausible protagonists.

Throughout Blasted, the hotel-room setting doesn’t change, but midway through the second act we learn that the hotel has been “blasted by a mortar bomb” (Kane 247). There is a gaping hole in one of the walls and dust everywhere, as if the play’s title applies to what has happened to the conventional realism of the first act. Nevertheless, the surreal setting we are confronted with has some eerie echoes of what came before. So then what gets “blasted” is our playgoer’s comfort of watching something that we can no longer assume is realist. Indeed, we have been thrust into a warzone where extreme acts of terror and gratuitous cruelty are taking place. This de-contextualization is all the more effective in

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representing the atrocities of war. Cate, whose innocence and vulnerability is emphasized in the initial scene, is now transformed beyond victimhood and, by somehow escaping from the soldier, now seems much more capable of fending for herself. This overturn of Ian’s dominance, together with the dystopian setting, heightens the extreme suffering and hideousness of wartime conditions. The audience is shocked into considering how they would conduct themselves in this sort of extreme situation. As Kane herself has suggested, “I think the first half [of Blasted] should seem incredibly real and the second half even more real.

Probably, by the end, we should be wondering if the first half was a dream” (qtd. in Carney 286).

Similarly, the otherworldly dimensions in Top Girls help accent the real and ground the play’s overwhelming reality. Marlene’s “top girl” status is shown to wonderful effect in the first act’s dinner party, where we see her as a supremely competent hostess, crisply giving orders to the waitress (“I’d like a bottle of Frascati straight away, if you’ve got one really cold,”) while schmoozing with the other top girls as they arrive (Churchill 5). Indeed, though we eventually find out that they are all gathered to celebrate Marlene’s recent promotion, Marlene seems more like someone entertaining clients rather than talking amongst friends. She engages only in casual small talk, never revealing personal information about herself. She displays polite modesty, asks leading questions, and fulfills other hostess duties such as appropriately calling for drinks and ordering food as the party ebbs and flows.

The scene that ensues is all the more riveting because the odd collection of historical and fictional women who assemble—Marlene’s guests—seem totally absorbed in and accepting of the oppressive conditions that in their different ways they have had to contend with. Thus, Nijo the Japanese courtesan reacts defensively when Marlene, somewhat provocatively, asks if she was raped by the Emperor: “Of course not, Marlene, I belonged to him” (Churchill 7). Such acceptance of oppression runs throughout the whole first act; Pope Joan, for example, quite directly repudiates any interest in heresy. This drives home the point that the “top girls” are a fragile social category, heir to all the frailties and limitations that gender imposes on women, despite their occasional ability to circumvent those limitations as they channel their success and lead remarkable lives. The true exception, of course, comes in the figure of Dull Gret, the subject of a Brueghel painting, who describes her descent through hell: “I come out my front door that morning and shout till my neighbors come out and I said, ‘Come on, we’re going where evil come from and pay the bastards out’” (Churchill 35).

That the original 1982 production of Top Girls at the Royal Court had the same actress playing both Gret and Angie is significant in that they are two characters rejecting complacency.

As for Marlene herself, she is entirely bereft of community. She and her underlings at the employment agency, Win and Nell, drift from one unrewarding

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affair to another. Not surprisingly, there is no sense of collective “we” in the first scene, and throughout Top Girls, no sense of community or of a shared fate among successful women is deemed possible, or even desirable. It is individual triumphs which are represented by the odd collection of guests that Marlene has invited to her party. Nor is it coincidental that stories of wretched brutality and cruelty figure in their most casual utterances. This seems appropriate, as Churchill is subtly evoking the advent of Thatcherite Britain. Indeed, Marlene’s explicit mention of Thatcher as a talisman of success later in the play brings both the triumphs and vicious exploitation of this curious collection of top girls into sharper relief.

II. The Pathos of Feminism What the feminism of the day is achieving for women is summed up in the way that Margaret Thatcher figures so prominently in Marlene’s idea of success. “I think the eighties are going to be stupendous,” she exults to her sister, Joyce.

JOYCE. Who for?

MARLENE. For me. / I think I’m going up up up.

JOYCE. Oh, for you. Yes, I’m sure they will.

MARLENE. And for the country, come to that. . . . She’s a tough lady, Maggie. I’d give her a job. / She just needs to hang in there. . . . First woman prime minister. Terrifico. Aces. Right on. / You must admit.

Certainly gets my vote. (Churchill 96)

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In this individualistic vision of feminism, pathetic men like Howard, Marlene’s office rival who expects promotion by virtue of his gender, are pushed off their perch. This is only fair, but the lack of community that is inherently part of the market-driven Thatcherite world does little more than impose bitterness on the women who enter it.

In other words, Marlene represents what “clever” girls and women can achieve in the dog-eat-dog world of Thatcherite Britain, but it is a complete inversion, Churchill suggests, of the kind of values that should be held up by feminists. By contrast, the female protagonist of Blasted, Cate, is representative of the female communal values of nurturing and unstinting love. Though it is not immediately apparent, we are eventually able to discern that Cate has come to the hotel room with Ian not because they are in a relationship or because she wants anything out of him, but simply because he is sick. They used to be lovers, and despite his having spurned her, she is concerned for him. Thus, while Cate indubitably displays a certain amount of guile in the power-play that unfolds between herself and Ian, we understand her as the vulnerable party. We are forced

to ask why she joined him in the hotel room, and the answer is a disturbing one.

Ian is able to exploit Cate’s natural propensity towards nurturing, to play upon her innocence. While it would be comforting to view Ian as a manipulative genius, an evil exploiter, Kane presents us with the possibility that Ian actually believes in the misogynistic views he espouses; for instance, that he is entitled to Cate’s sexual favours because her femininity and tenderness has excited his lust. Consider the following verbal assault, which comes as Cate recovers after passing out in the face of Ian’s aggression. “We don’t have to do anything,” Ian states reassuringly.

Then he abruptly changes tactics. “That wasn’t very fair,” he says.

CATE. What?

IAN. Leaving me hanging, making a prick of myself.

CATE. I f-f-felt.

IAN. Don’t pity me, Cate. You don’t have to fuck me ‘cause I’m dying, but don’t stick your cunt in my face then take it away ‘cause I stick my tongue out.

CATE. I-I-Ian IAN. What’s the m-m-matter?

CATE. I kissed you, that’s all. I-I-I like you.

IAN. Don’t give me a hard on if you’re not going to finish me off. It hurts.

CATE. I’m sorry. (Kane 223)

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Most disturbing of all is the implication that Cate herself, on some level, believes Ian is right. Why, in light of her bitterness over their breakup, has she allowed herself to be enticed to his hotel room? Why, despite some strategic resistance, does she allow herself to be browbeaten into giving Ian a handjob?

And then, after his ejaculation, she asks if he feels better and then apologizes for having initially resisted. While Cate is at times able to subvert Ian’s domination, laughing at his nudity to the point where he feels it necessary to put his clothes back on, and successfully evading his sexual advances on certain occasions, ultimately these assertions of will prove futile. For even in his weakened state, Ian still manages to rape Cate. And then in his misogynist fury he also bites her genitalia, to the point where blood overwhelms her urination. (“I can’t piss, it’s just blood.” [Kane 242]) These scenes of sexual exploitation throw into relief the inadequacy of feminist ideals of self and sexuality in a context of extreme bigotry and violence.

In Top Girls it is the character of Angie that serves in this way. Her isolation from her family is reflected first of all in her interaction with Kit, who at times attempts to bully Angie but in turn is bullied by her. Angie refuses to accept the miserable hand she has been dealt, and is desperate for connection with her “real” mother, Marlene. She daringly travels to London to make contact. There she is much impressed by Marlene’s worldly success, and by the way Marlene deals with Mrs.

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Kidd, Howard’s wife. Yet, for all her longing for escape, Angie is clearly not equipped to see through the shallowness of Marlene’s life.

Angie’s importance lies in the fact that she embodies the future of British womanhood. Her hopeful yearning, and the fact that she is able to lick the menstrual blood of her friend Kit without flinching, suggest a freedom from conventional girlhood restraints and an openness to experience. She is certainly not enclosed in conventional ideas of her class or gender. Yet, she is clearly a tragic figure, for, like the vast majority of English women in the 1980s confronted with Thatcherite role models like her “aunty” Marlene, Angie lacks the kind of consciousness necessary for the creation of more humane, feminist-inspired communities. Nor, for that matter, does she have the self-regarding willfulness and cleverness–the pushiness, as Marlene herself puts it–to make it into the world of “top girls” opportunities. Such is the bleak anti-feminism epitomized by this most arresting and tragic of Churchill’s cast of characters.

Cate and Angie serve similar purposes in their respective plays. In both characters, innocence and immaturity is connected to their exploitation (in Cate’s case) or their disappointment and rejection (in Angie’s). That they both are essentially homeless and associate with people who are largely inappropriate by virtue of their age and status is especially significant. Cate, for her part, is redeemable by virtue of her tenderness towards Ian and especially towards the baby. She genuinely feels a sense of responsibility for the baby, which nevertheless dies. In effect, she forgives Ian for his sexual transgressions. At the end she feeds Ian, then sits with him, sucking her thumb, a persistent habit indicative of her youthful innocence. The larger point is that limited as her actions are, she represents a contrast to the monstrous violence and cruelty represented by both the soldier and Ian. Similarly, Top Girls ends with Angie showing her vulnerability by reemerging in the kitchen and suggesting to Marlene that she has had a frightening dream. Both these endings—the yearning and hopefulness of Angie and the nurturing and tenderness of Cate—leave the impression that these characters will be ineffectual in the political worlds into which they have been thrust.

III. Dramatizing the Political Both Sarah Kane and Caryl Churchill create theatre that dispenses with the idea of the “well-made play.” We can see this in Churchill’s strategic rejection of normal chronology, with the third act of Top Girls coming an entire year before the second—an inversion that allows us to anticipate Marlene’s eventual rejection of Angie, her birth daughter. For her part, Kane, as Sean Carney suggests, is determined to disturb the very medium of the theatre and the playgoer. Blasted, Carney writes, “seems at war with the substance of theatre itself, provoking

theatre to ask questions about its own nature” (288). While Churchill depicts the tainted feminism of Margaret Thatcher’s Britain, Kane saw it as her political responsibility to expose on stage what theatrically is normally obscured. She was likewise determined to create theatre, as she provocatively put it, that she herself would want to direct. Kane herself reflected on an experience she had in the midst of writing Blasted that fundamentally altered the structure of the play. The experience involved seeing a television news program on the civil war in Bosnia.

I thought this is absolutely terrible and I’m writing this ridiculous play about two people in a room. What’s the point of carrying on? So this is what I wanted to write about, yet somehow this story about the man and the woman is still attracting me. (qtd. in Carney 286).

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This suggests the overwhelming reality in Kane’s mind of the practices of violence, cruelty and chaos. She uses these dimensions to blast apart the ordinary lives and sensibilities of the English audience. There is nothing in Blasted that explicitly suggests the genocidal horrors of the early 90s in Bosnia.

Nevertheless, by imposing a warzone on a comfortable English setting and showing her characters under the extreme duress of inexplicable cruelty, Kane is able to bring home the reality of the most extreme kinds of actions that were then the reality in Bosnia.

Before the literal blasting of the hotel, the surreal is introduced in the form of an unidentifiable soldier. The vileness of Ian’s character as it plays out in the first act is matched and surpassed in a kind of abstract, decontextualized way by this soldier figure, whose inhumanity towards Ian is all the more threatening because we are told nothing about him, or about the war he is engaged in. The soldier immediately intimidates Ian, easily taking away his gun and demanding food; he acts more and more aggressively, eventually urinating on the hotel bed.

Up until the eruption of the bomb the audience might feel some catharsis in seeing Ian bullied. Kane, however, denies us this relief when in Act Three the intimidation is amplified beyond any understanding of justice and moves into the realm of the impossibly repulsive. The motivations of the soldier’s cruelty come as a shock to our moral sensibilities. He rapes Ian because his girlfriend was raped, he sucks Ian’s eyes out of their sockets and then eats them because he is hungry. As raw brutality unfolds before our eyes, we are provided with little way of making sense of these acts. Soon enough, the hotel is ripped apart. We discern that the setting is no longer in Leeds, Kane’s way of bringing home to her audience that the British are ill-equipped to deal with the realities of war. This serves as a reminder of how inadequate the outside world’s response is to the Bosnian genocide. Even Ian, who is a journalist, has no knowledge of the war that suddenly surrounds him, or where the soldier is from. Ian here represents the English audience in general, the comfortable Westerners who can stand aloof

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from the hideous tragedies of Bosnia.

IV. Conclusion Both Top Girls and Blasted produce Brechtian shocks, and both loosely locate the sources of evil in the late 20th century in politics. According to Raymond Williams, this kind of theatre involves a rejection of tragedy, at any rate on Brecht’s part. Yet I would still insist that, in their own Brechtian-influenced ways, the two plays under review are examples of the tragic. Tragic, because in their different ways, both Churchill and Kane push us to acknowledge that the politics of modern war and modern class relations do not allow for the kind of tender, nurturing, anti-individualistic community-focused sensibilities that a feminist politics must embrace.

Works Cited

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Carney, Sean. “The Tragedy of History in Sarah Kane’s Blasted.” Theater Survey

46.2 (2005): 275. Research Library, ProQuest. Web. 25 Nov. 2011.

Williams, Raymond. Modern Tragedy. London: Chatto & Windus, 1966.

Modern Drama Plays of the ‘80s and ‘90s. London: Metheun Drama, 2001. Print.

RIMBAUD GOES RAMBO Politics and Nothingness DANIEL GURIN

5 min.

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Rimbaud Goes Rambo: Politics and Nothingness

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Arthur Rimbaud, frequently cited as the first “modern” poet, by reputation a fellow traveler of one of history’s most promising socialist revolutions, the 1871 Paris Commune, at the ripe age of nineteen, apparently grown out of such adolescent enthusiasms as art and politics, excoriated his own work as “absurd, ridiculous, disgusting” and took up a career as a card-carrying imperialist profiteer (Mendelsohn 1). As precocious at middle-aged bourgeoisfication as he was at youthful avant-gardism, one might say, except that unfortunately his work never really shows evidence of serious commitment to progressive causes. Despite for instance Alain Badiou’s insistence that “None of the [French] intellectuals [of the time were] more admirable than Rimbaud and Verlaine, declared partisans of the Commune” (Badiou 176), contemporaneous Rimbaud poems that refer to the Commune read more like parodies of Rage Against the Machine lyrics than works of partisanship. As a sixteen-year old, Rimbaud reportedly responded to the news of the Parisian workers’ seizure of power by proclaiming “Order is vanquished!” down the streets of his provincial town. He was probably in Paris fraternizing with Communard irregulars in April or May 1871, but when the forces of the old regime started shelling the city he beat a hasty retreat, and upon returning home already had other things on his mind, writing to a former teacher, “so many workers are dying even as I write you! … I’m encrapulating myself to the hilt. Why? I want to be a poet and I’m working to make myself a seer” (Robbe 75-80). Rimbaud in his youth was preoccupied with his own ambition, and even if he realized by his last works of 1872-4 that this aloofness could limit his artistic range it seems only to have intensified. He could not bring himself to align himself, as he saw actual partisans in Paris align themselves, with a higher principle. In A Season in Hell the Commune is the figurative ground on which the writer fights a losing battle against his own nihilism.

This inner struggle comes through most clearly in the poet’s emphatic proclamations of his own moral disorientation, the whirlwind exclamations of “tumult, transgression, mobility, hyperbole, leveling, hypersensoriness, iconoclasm” that Terry Eagleton considers manifestations of the Commune spirit but which are darker and more ambivalent than he makes out (Eagleton xi). In Hell’s “Mauvais Sang” section for instance the poet presents the following rather jaded summation of a Commune-like “leveling” ethos: “Who shall I sign up with?

Which brute shall I worship? What holy image shall I desecrate? Whose heart shall I break? What shall I espouse? Whose blood shall I trample?” (Rimbaud, A Season in Hell, 145.) This playfully evil outburst neither backs nor criticizes the mindset it depicts but rather delineates an underlying philosophical problem, one that may be contextualized in the discourse of “freedom” in the French revolutionary tradition. Revolutions naturally tend to be provoked above all by desire for what Isaiah Berlin famously called “negative liberty,” i.e. freedom

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from external constraint: hence the 1789 French Revolution’s Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen guaranteed the rights of “liberty, property, security and resistance to oppression,” and the Central Committee of the National Guard’s Declaration of 19 March 1871 asserted that “the people of Paris have shaken off the yoke that the others tried to impose on them.” The blindspot of these stirring words – or at least an aspect of life over which their drafters felt no authority – is that they give no prescription for positive freedom, i.e. the capacity for self-actualization. Once the battle for negative freedom is won – as it once seemed to have been in France’s first revolution, and again when Rimbaud was in Paris during the Commune’s height – what next, not just for the state, but for individual lives? Emancipatory politics provides no obvious answer, as even the far-left philosopher Alain Badiou emphasizes: “Struggle exposes us to the simple form of failure (the assault did not succeed), while victory exposes us to its most redoubtable form… the interiority of nihilism, and the unbounded cruelty that can come with its emptiness” (Badiou 32). This paradoxical winner’s bitterness is what Rimbaud evokes, and it may indeed have been an undercurrent of the Commune euphoria as he experienced it as, in the interlude between the old army’s expulsion and return, angry young men prowled the city with a surplus of directionless energy. This basic problem of what to do with one’s freedom is not however restricted to revolutionary situations, and in the spatially and temporally ambiguous context of Hell, Rimbaud’s flurry of rhetorical questions takes on existential significance. The cynical referent of “brute” (“bête”) for God and the juxtaposition of the carefree “Who shall I sign up with?” and “What shall I espouse?” (in the French, more obviously cynically, “Quel mensonge [lie] doisje tenir?”) with the violence of “What holy image shall I desecrate?” and “Whose blood shall I trample” (which is itself more disturbingly nonchalant in the French with “marcher” in place of trample) express intense recognition of the ultimate arbitrariness of moral associations and decisions. If God is dead, as Nietzsche would announce ten years later, on what basis other than animal self-interest does one conduct life? The problem is of course still with us but would have had special urgency in the context of the general nineteenth-century crisis of belief, and of Rimbaud’s upbringing in a Catholic society by a single mother notorious for her devoutness (Franklin 1). Clearly enough from his poetry Rimbaud was an apostate by his late teens, but rather than finding a replacement faith in the progressive ideals of the Commune, he took them as a shattering symbol of life’s core aimlessness and meaninglessness.

Of course a recognition of the contingency of moral beliefs does not necessarily lead to nihilism – philosopher Simon Critchley identifies projects of social emancipation such as the Commune as one of the key philosophical counters to nihilism (Critchley 54) – but Rimbaud at least in the early parts of Hell seems too traumatized by the perceived collapse in stable value to make such sophisticated calculations. In for instance “Mauvais Sang” he seems to

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compulsively, even at the risk of incongruousness, underscore the impossibility of absolute moral standards: I saw myself in front of an angry crowd, before a firing squad, weeping in misery because they hadn’t understood, and then forgiving them! Like Joan of Arc! – “Priests, teachers, masters, handing me over to justice is a mistake. I was never one of you; I was never a Christian; I belong to a race that sang at the gallows. I’ve no grasp of the laws; no moral sense; I’m an animal; you’re making a mistake…” (147)

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Among the multiple layers of irony in this strange parable, which presumably reflects the author’s experience of Commune violence, the first that should be clarified is that the poet is probably not here identifying with the victims of the infamous Semaine Senglante, the bloody crackdown that followed the old regime’s reinstatement, a maneuver which would not have drawn accusatory “angry crowds.” A more likely historical source for the image would be the summary executions of old regime figures such as the old regime generals Lecomte and Thomas, who had before the Commune purportedly ordered their troops to fire on the uprising workers’ National Guard. The Joan of Arc or Christ-like figure with whom Rimbaud seems to identify, in other words, is most likely a reactionary one.

What really makes the passage provocative, though, is that it does not exactly posit some facile moral equivalence, or urge some enlightened modicum of empathy with the enemy, but actually projects Rimbaud’s own self-identity onto the doomed figure: the “race that sang at the gallows” seems to refer back to “my ancestors the Gauls” mentioned at the beginning of the section, and an obtuse “animal” is how the poet repeatedly presents himself throughout the poem – “Once a hyena, always a hyena,” he has the Verlaine character scold (139)) – again giving the historical material an existential shading. If you do not consider yourself “one of” the people among whom you live, as Rimbaud imaginably did not, what a priori reason do you have to abide by their moral code? Does anyone really “grasp” the moral laws under which they live, or do they just conform to them for pragmatic or emotional reasons? These questions were of course the basis for Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, completed about fifteen years after Hell. In the context of French politics they might again point to omissions in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen, which refers to the rights of the “social body” without exactly spelling out that body’s formative basis, or in the National Guard’s March 19 Declaration, which with similar ambiguity refers to the triumph of “the people of Paris.” Is the membership criterion adulthood, or religion, or language, and if so is it met by an assertively blasphemous boy-poet determined to revolutionize the language – and if not, why should he be accountable to their laws? For Badiou the way out of this dilemma is through a kind of leap of faith by which the individual spontaneously chooses to declare allegiance to a political

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“event” – of which the Commune is his archetypal example – proving thereby “that he or she can go beyond the bounds… set by individualism (or animality – they’re one and the same thing)” (Badiou 234). Rimbaud seems to hesitantly respond: what argument is there against just staying an animal?

Rimbaud clearly was familiar with contemporary philosophers’ attempts to answer such questions, as in his letters and work he frequently borrows Hegelian and Marxist jargon, but whatever his initial attraction to such schools of thought they seem to have ultimately left him feeling empty. Shortly after returning from the Commune in May, he appropriated Hegel for his own famously grandiose personal ambitions, providing in a letter a précis of his theory of history (“The universal intelligence has always thrown out its ideas, naturally…”) and implying himself to be a Hegelian “great man” of such world-historical proportions as to dialectically demote all precursors, deemed mere “Functionaries, writers; author, creator, poet, that man has never existed!” (Rimbaud 238). Critic Jeremy Harding calls these letters “manifestos for a Commune-like shakeup of poetry” (Harding xxiii). They also constitute a sort of counterpart to the Commune in the sense that a counter to nihilism alternative to social emancipation, according to Critchley, is individual transformation, and if the Commune was an example of the former, then Rimbaud’s self-transformation into a great poet via his famous “rational derangement of the senses” would be an example of the latter. Unfortunately, this plan seems to have failed Rimbaud so utterly that toward the end of Hell he seems not only to abandon it but to relinquish his very human individuality: “I thought I had acquired supernatural powers. Well, now I must bury my imagination and my memories” (185). It is as if the Commune’s failure to mark a clear turning point in history’s dialectic meant to Rimbaud that he no longer had an opening as the dialectic’s “great man” spokesman, or at any rate the “universal spirit” could no longer serve as his muse. He seems equally bitter about the prospect of playing the vanguardist to the Marxist strain of dialecticism, despite the optimistic takes of some critics on such vitriolic passages as, “I abominate all trades. Professionals and workers, serfs to a man! Despicable. The hand that guides the pen is a match for the hand that guides the plough” (141). Kirsten Ross rapturously paraphrases, “I will be a worker––but only at the moment when work, as we know it, has come to an end” (Ross 71), an interpretation of which the best that can be said is that it is not strictly ruled out. In general, however, Rimbaud’s references to “work” tend to be ironic – in a letter sent after escaping Paris’s bombardment, after mentioning the massacre of workers, he justifies having abandoned them because, “To work now, never, never; I’m on strike” (Rimbaud 236), and moreover nothing in Rimbaud’s abomination of “trades” in Hell implies expectation of a Marxist revolution.

Primarily there is self-undercutting negativity: professionals and works are both despicable; the writer’s hand is a match for (“vaut”) the ploughman’s, that is, equally worthless and despicable. The reformulation of this comparison at the end of the poem achieves a nobler, more Romantic tone, but the meaning remains

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cynical: “The battle in the mind is as ferocious as the battle of men; but the vision of justice is for God’s eyes only” (187). If justice is for God’s eyes only – the French “le plaisir de Dieu seul” makes it sound, likely with deliberate humour, as if morality were some hedonist superfluity – then in the name of what is the battle being fought? It is Rimbaud’s more sublime version of “shoot ‘em all and let God sort ‘em out.”

According to critic Gabriel Josipivici, the French Revolution raised the expectations of subsequent generations of European youth, so that “educated and ambitious young men” such as Rimbaud were no longer content with serving as “badly paid tutors to the children of aristocrats, or as minor civil servants, when in their heart of hearts they felt it was their destiny to be Napoleons” (Josipivici 40-1). It is this Enlightenment faith in social mobility rather than the leveling imperatives of the Commune in which Rimbaud finally seems to find solace. In Hegelian terms one might say that the backlash from the dashed hopes of a more fully egalitarian society was a reinvigorated individualism, at least in the case of the adaptable Rimbaud, who after all had claimed as his motto “je est un autre,” and perhaps found an adventurous career in Africa as amenably Napoleonic as the mantle of a great-man poetic channeler of the zeitgeist. In Hell the incipient calculus behind this course change appears in a passage that stands out because it seems an unusually earnest depiction of the poet’s actual thought process: “Quick! Are there other lives to be led? The rich man – wealth has always been common property – sleeps fitfully” (149). In the first clause on one level Rimbaud might just be asking himself, “what other characters might I impersonate in this poem?,” but the subsequent sociological observation about the ruling class’s state of mind during a time of revolutionary ferment makes the question seem less innocently literary, as if Rimbaud were seriously wondering whether, his plans for literary greatness having seemingly foundered, he might as a Plan B have a shot at nouveau richesse. In the French there are no parenthetical dashes and the thought about the rich man’s sleep is its own sentence, “Le sommeil dans la richesse est impossible,” which then leads to a second thought that “La richesse a toujours été bien public,” and it is tempting to detect here a little knee-jerk embarrassment about the possible self-exposure: “I wouldn’t actually want to be a rich man, even if it weren’t such a bad time for the rich, property is theft, man, we are the 99%!” In this moment Rimbaud seems to sense where nihilism leads, to the naked self-interest Badiou fears, and the poet balks, at least outwardly. A couple sentences later though, he cautiously reaffirms his hardheaded skepticism of normative morality – “Farewell to chimeras, ideals, errors” (149) – and so the back-and-forth continues through the poem, always one sardonic metaphor away from despair in all value. If there is some positive meaning to be found in the latter sections it is not at any rate through the collective politics of the Commune.

As far as Rimbaud’s political or class affiliations go, the most apropos remark is perhaps that of sociologist Mark Greif, who describes contemporary middle-class college graduates as initially being content with chic, low-paying internships that

allow them time to pursue high-cultural-capital hobbies – such as art or political activism – only to eventually “learn the superior economic rationality of trying to recover their earlier class positions by reentering conventional white collar work” (Greif 162) Thus by 1880. the enfant terrible who scandalized Paris could boast to his mother, “I have the complete confidence of my employer.”

Works Cited Badiou, Alain. The Communist Hypothesis. Trans. David Macey and Steve Corcoron. New York: Verso, 2010.

Critchley, Simon. Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford:

Oxford, 2001.

“Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.” Human Constitutional Rights Documents. 26 August 1789. <http://www.hrcr.org/docs/frenchdec.html> Eagleton, Terry. “Forward” to The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune. New York: Verso, 2008.

Franklin, Ruth. “Arse Poetica.” The New Yorker 13 November 2003.

Greif, Mark. “Epitaph for the White Hipster” in What Was the Hipster: A Sociological Investigation. New York: n+1 Foundation, 2010.

Harding, Jeremy. “Introduction” to Arthur Rimbaud: Selected Poems and Letters.

New York: Penguin, 2004.

Josipivici, Gabriel. What Ever Happened to Modernism? New Haven: Yale, 2010.

Mendelsohn, Daniel. “Rebel Rebel.” The New Yorker 29 August 2011.

Rimbaud, Arthur. “A Season in Hell” in Arthur Rimbaud: Selected Poems and Letters. New York: Penguin, 2004.

Ross, Kristin. The Emergence of Social Space: Rimbaud and the Paris Commune.

New York: Verso, 2008.

“To the People.” Marxists.org. 19 March 1871. < http://www.marxists.org/history/ france/paris-commune/documents/to-people.htm>

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Robb, Graham. Rimbaud. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2000.

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CHRIST’S UNKNOWN BRIDE

The Reformation and Religious Anxiety in the Poetry of John Donne MORAG SANTINI

28 min.

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Christ’s Unknown Bride: The Reformation and Religious Anxiety in the Poetry of John Donne

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Perhaps more than any other poet, the work of John Donne reflects the crippling anxiety and fear of error prompted by the major religious shift of the English Reformation. Yet it also revealed just how fully alive, constant and utterly central religion was in people’s lives. Donne’s Catholic upbringing left him with a profound attachment to the rituals and practices of the Catholic Church, but it also left him furious with extremists on both sides of the religious spectrum that fought to instil increasing distrust between Protestants and Catholics. His painful conversion to Protestantism allowed him to find a religion that he believed better fit his more intellectual sensibilities, but he never ceased to be plagued by doubts about his faith. In a sense Donne was a microcosm of the English religious experience during those tumultuous years, and his writing provides a glimpse into the psychological trauma of the change in the basic structures that invested life and society with meaning. His poetry reveals a desire to somehow reconcile both the Catholic and the Protestant elements of his character, and find a way for the old religion to inform and live on through the new. But it is also a constant search for new ways to express his profound religious devotion, as his conversion caused him to question the adequacy of the established modes of religious thought. His poetry ultimately exposes a religion that is deeply grounded in earthy humanity, and pleads against the harsh dogmatism that denies religion this humanity.

In many ways, Donne’s family was emblematic of the Catholic experience during the Reformation. The Donnes were one of the most prominent Catholic families in England, and their history was inextricably bound up with the Catholic ordeal. Donne’s great-great-uncle was St. Thomas More, perhaps the premier Catholic martyr of the English Reformation. This was a family history of tragedy and defiance that weighed heavily on Donne, and in his early years the pressure of that inherited legacy was probably immense.

It is often assumed that his lineage made him a fairly militant Catholic in his youth. This idea seems borne out by a particular early portrait of Donne, which given the climate of the years following 1588 comes off as astonishingly daring. The portrait, dated 1591, shows the eighteen year-old Donne dressed in the fashion of the time (Edwards, 37), grasping a sword in his right hand and with a cross dangling from his right ear. The motto in the upper right hand corner is in Spanish, and reads ‘antes muerto que mudado’ – “sooner dead than changed.”

The image defiantly flaunts the young Donne’s Catholicism, while the choice of Spanish for the motto seems deliberately provocative. In 1591 Donne would have been starting out as a law student at Thavies Inn in London (Stubbs 25), and it is easy to imagine him as a teenager – having recently left Cambridge where his Catholicism meant he was denied an actual degree – angrily asserting his beliefs

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and heritage. Yet there might be more to the portrait than meets the eye. David Lawrence Edwards speculates on its origins, and suggests that Donne may have posed for it more to please his deeply Catholic mother than out of a personal sense of defiance (37). He also comments on the motto itself as potentially prophetic: it seems to be taken from La Diana, a work by Jorge de Montemayor, where it is a vow of romantic love spoken by a woman who ultimately proves unfaithful (Edwards 38). Whether Donne was aware of this irony is uncertain, but the suggestion of infidelity is possibly a hint that Donne had already begun to have reservations about his allegiance to Catholicism, and was already dwelling on those questions of devotion and faith that would obsess him throughout his life, finding voice regularly in his poetry.

While the 1591 portrait suggests a young man devoted to his faith, his poems produced in the 1590s such as Elegy V and the Satires – which can be dated by their references to specific events of the time – make it clear that he had already begun the long process of questioning and study that would lead to his conversion from Catholicism to Protestantism. This conversion is at the core of the tensions and anxieties that riddle Donne’s poetry. It was an extremely long and probably torturous process that would have been made all the more painful given his family history. His decision to convert to Protestantism was motivated by genuine belief, but the questions of fidelity and devotion raised by the conversion would haunt him throughout his life. The motives for the conversion were most likely very diverse; ranging from doctrinal questions to the undeniable fact that Protestantism would make life much easier for the highly ambitious Donne. But one major catalyst seems to have been the death of his younger brother Henry in 1593. Henry was studying law at the Inns of Court in London when he was arrested for harbouring the Catholic priest William Harrington. Hatred of the Jesuits meant that the Catholic clergy were dealt with increasingly harshly, and that harbouring them was also a serious offence. Harrington was executed, while Henry Donne was imprisoned in Newgate. The plague outbreak of 1592 to 1594 meant that time in Newgate was effectively a death sentence, and Henry soon died of bubonic plague. This event was perhaps the final straw for Donne. His experience of a life of recusancy had consisted of: “Hearing of his uncle’s clandestine activities, living in hiding for much of his career at the universities, watching lives pass fruitlessly through stubborn non-conformity and losing his brother for the sake of a rebel priest” (Stubbs 91); it is no surprise that he became disillusioned.

But Donne’s conversion cannot be explained simply as a response to grief and anger, just as it cannot have been a move of pure convenience motivated by the desire for advancement, as P.M. Oliver believes. Instead John Stubbs’s view appears the most reasonable: in the wake of his brother’s death Donne likely felt more and more strongly that the sectarian problem was the responsibility of the oppressed Catholic minority as well as the repressive Protestant regime (91).

A passage in Biathanatos vehemently reinforces this sentiment, as Donne recalls

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in bitter terms the religious world of his family: “… I had my first breeding and conversation with men of suppressed and afflicted Religion, accustomed to the despite of death, and hungry of an imagin’d Martyrdome” (Coffin, Complete Poetry, 317). It was this ‘imagined Martyrdom’ that Donne rejected, and with it the intransigence that he believed had contributed to much of the suffering he, his family and the Catholics of England had faced. While Henry’s death was certainly a major factor in causing Donne to question his Catholic faith, those questions were most probably already in his mind before the tragedy.

Much of Donne’s early writing contains a vehement anti-polemical streak. Donne’s ‘Satire III’ is the strongest example of this discourse, ridiculing the tendency of some to naively follow what “A Philip, or a Gregory,/ A Harry, or a Martin” taught them (The Major Works, 31, 96-7). The poem insists that religion must be a careful and considered choice rather than simply inherited. In his rejection of blind orthodoxy, “Donne tried instead to imagine a land of his own, an internal topography” (Stubbs 94), in which he could find his own genuine beliefs through intense, devoted study and self-questioning. He is appalled by figures like the poem’s Crants, who: “Loves her only, who at Geneva is called/ Religion, plain, simple, sullen, young,/ Contemptuous, yet unhandsome; as among/ Lecherous humours, there is one that judges/ No wenches wholesome, but coarse country drudges” (The Major Works, 30, 50-54). Crants is blindly, unquestioningly devoted to a religion Donne views as cold and ascetic, one that seems to get its drive more from self-righteousness than genuine spirituality. But fanatical Catholics receive just as much of Donne’s ire as fanatical Calvinists.

They are ridiculed through the figure of Mirreus, who looks for true Religion in the rags of Rome, “Because he doth know/ That she was there a thousand years ago” (‘Satire III’, Major Works, 30, 43-47). Donne’s frustration with religious absolutists also finds voice in ‘Satire II’: “As controverters, in vouched texts, leave out/ Shrewd words, which might against them clear the doubt” (Major Works, 24, 101-102), a reference to controversialists who would quote selectively from Biblical texts in order to further their doctrinal arguments.

The Satires provide vital insight into Donne’s state of mind during his conversion, but this anti-polemical tone did not abate when that conversion was complete. In 1610 he wrote Pseudo-Martyr, an essay that shows how deeply felt his anger was. It is a very problematic and controversial work, regarded by some as a disingenuous attempt to win favour with James I and establish Donne’s new Protestant credentials following his conversion. Donne certainly simplified the issues, particularly the question of the Oath of Allegiance. The Oath, which could be demanded of any citizen, denied the Pope’s authority over the King, and Donne still argued Catholics ought to be able to take it with a clear conscience.

Yet a letter to his friend Henry Goodyer the year before reveals a more complex understanding of the problem presented by the Oath: “In the main point in question, I think truly there is a perplexity (as far as I see yet), and both sides

Contemplative and bookish men, must of necessitie be more quarrelsome than others, because they contend not about matter of fact, nor can determine their controversies by any certaine witnesses, nor judges. But as long as they goe towards peace, that is Truth, it is no matter which way (‘Biathanatos’, Coffin, Complete Poetry, 319).

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may be in justice and innocence, and the wounds which they inflict upon the adverse part are all se defendado [in self defense]” (Selected Letters, XXXI, 46).

John Carey quite rightly asserts that: “When Donne put forward this medley of superstition and assertion, which tallied so conveniently with James I’s theory of the divine right of kings, he was using, at best, only half his mind” (Carey 33). Yet there is sincerity to Pseudo-Martyr; it is not an anti-Catholic work, but an antiextremist one, exposing Donne’s powerful strain of bitterness towards militant, uncompromising Catholics. It is a rebuke of the impossible and unrealistic demands of the Papacy expressed in Regnans in Excelsis. But most of all it is a rebuke of the Jesuits who were working furiously to counter Catholic conformity, deepening the divisions between Catholics and the rest of the English population.

Whatever the motivations or calculations behind it, the process of Donne’s conversion must have been intensely traumatic. His experience as he recounts it in his poetry allows a glimpse into the general state of mind of English society at the time. This is not to say that religious controversies and divisions had not existed before. It is a fallacy to imagine that England before the Reformation was a land free of religious doubt and controversy. But the controversies of the Reformation were more extreme than what had been seen before, and they altered not only what the English believed but also the very fabric of their society and everyday lives. Donne argued that the best way to cope with these worrying divisions was to approach religion from a highly intellectual and rational standpoint. He therefore emphasises the intense process of study that led to his conversion: “I had, to the measure of my poor wit and judgement, surveyed and digested the whole body of Divinity, controverted between ours and the Roman Church” (‘Pseudo-martyr’, Coffin, Complete Poetry, 328). This idea of having to ‘survey the whole body of divinity’ is indicative of the deeply entrenched scholarly side of Donne’s character, and the fundamentally intellectual nature of his conversion.

The sentiment of ‘Satire III’ that religious belief cannot simply be a question of convenience or upbringing is repeatedly expressed in later devotional works, which often detail his attempts to reconcile the multiple worldly versions of the church and uncover and understand the ‘true’ Church. ‘Truth’ is the ultimate goal, but it stands: “On a huge hill,/ Cragged and steep… and he that will/ Reach her, about must, and about go” (Satire III, Major Works, 29, 79-81). Indeed, it— “truth” – is reached by getting away from dogma and indulging in long, personal contemplation of the Bible and devotional works – a very Protestant notion in and of itself. It is questionable whether this ‘Truth’ can ever actually be attained, but it is the process of studying and searching for it that matters:

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For Donne, this thorough questioning and examining of different philosophical perspectives on religion was a process that was never complete, even though he eventually chose a Church. The Protestant belief system seems to have been the best fit for him, but this does not mean he felt completely secure in that choice of religion. ‘Satire IV’ emphasises the importance of accounting for different interpretations of Christian doctrine. The speaker is asked to name the man he believes to be the world’s greatest linguist, to which he carefully responds by listing representatives of the three main religious groups in England: “Beza then,/ Some Jesuits, and two revered men/ Of our two academies, I named” (Robbins, Complete Poems, 402, 55-57). ‘Beza’ refers to a controversial Genevan Calvinist, while the ‘two academies’ suggest Oxford and Cambridge, therefore the Anglican Church (although this term is something of a misnomer as the Church of England had not yet stabilised into the ‘Anglican Church’ as it is known today).

This stress on open-mindedness was partly why Donne found the Catholic Church no longer reflected his beliefs. He argued that he had not left the ‘Catholic Church’ in its true sense, i.e. the ‘true’ church, as the Church of England represented a natural progression of the Christian religion. By contrast, the position of the contemporary institution of the Roman Catholic Church was: “A denial of the historical moment, a failure to adapt to an evolution in the Christian Church that was truly ‘Catholic’, universal” (Stubbs 92). The Pope had been left behind as the Church moved forward, and Donne was trying to move with that change.

However, Donne’s poetry makes it very clear that he did not leave the Roman Church behind completely. His deeply intellectual and individualistic attitude to religion goes hand in hand with a powerful attachment to more traditional forms of religious imagery, grounded in an understanding of spirituality that is simultaneously earthy and mystical, and very Catholic. The imagery and style of Donne’s poems also hearken back to a strongly Catholic aesthetic. The loss of major religious institutions, such as the dissolution of the monasteries under Henry VIII, changed the physical landscape and practical presence of religion, a change echoed in the references to ‘ruined abbeys’ of ‘Satire IV’. Donne found it very difficult to let go of these stable and comforting aspects of his old religion, and he was not the only one. With each new generation Protestantism became further entrenched in English society, yet it was a banner under which a wide range of beliefs could stand. The deliberate ambiguity of the Elizabethan prayerbook meant that interpretation varied from church to church and parish to parish, and while many defined themselves as Protestants, they held on fiercely to their old rituals and sacraments. Eamon Duffy, in his argument for the continuing hold of Catholicism over the English population, cites the complaint of the prominent Puritan William Perkins around 1590 that most of the ‘common people’ remained papists at heart, who often made such remarks as: ‘It was a good world, when the old religion was, because all things were

cheap’, that ‘a man eates his maker in the Sacrament’, that they might swear by Our Lady ‘because she is gone out of the countrey’, that they had believed in Christ ‘ever since they could remember’ (Duffy 591).

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However, Perkins also noted the commonly held view to be: “It is safer to doe in religion as most doe,” in Duffy’s view a paradox that stands as: “The key to understanding the Reformation in the English parishes” (Duffy 591). This paradox was a constant source of anxiety. Choosing to protect oneself in this life by following the officially sanctioned religion could mean condemning oneself in the next.

At the centre of all this anxiety was the fundamental fear of erring in one’s faith, and therefore facing damnation. Donne’s insistence on individual reasoning and study as the most solid basis for religious conviction fit well with the Protestant emphasis on personal reading of the Bible rather than reliance on the interpretation of one’s priest. Yet the comforting rationality of this approach to faith belied its more disturbing implications: that the burden of potential heresy now rested on the shoulders of the individual. The basic fact of Christendom’s division was deeply disturbing for people, as it was impossible to forget the fact that one’s beliefs were always being brought into question. Furthermore, there was a major psychological shift between Catholic and Protestant forms of worship that often added to these fears. Richard Sugg describes Protestant piety as a ‘lonely affair’ that transferred: “A considerable weight of spiritual responsibility onto the shoulders and into the heart of the lone Protestant individual”, whereas “A Catholic priest had effectively taken responsibility for one’s confession of sin, and as indicated dished out simple penances” (Sugg 108). Catholicism allowed for greater sharing of the spiritual burden, and a basic ritual for absolution, but Protestantism required a greater internalisation of belief and repentance, and of the Church itself, with no reaching out to priests or icons (Sugg 109). This greater responsibility carried with it the great fear of damning oneself through lack of vigilance or piety.

The negative psychological effects of the Reformation were heightened by the loss of Catholic rituals and traditions. These provided a sense of stability and continuity to daily religious life, and the English people tended to try to hold onto them as much as they could. Rituals were comforting in the assurance they provided of order in the world, and they were vital to the way people interacted with their faith. The repetitive activity of ritual, infused with meaning by those who participated in it, was about granting access to the sacred and serving as a conduit between the human and the divine. It was a way for people to engage with the idea of the Holy (seen as beyond the realm of full human understanding), in a structured and relatively clear manner. Sacred objects in Catholicism often took on the very quality of the Holy they were supposed to represent, the bread and wine in Communion being the primary example. Much of the debate about

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the nature of ritual was based on the nature of language itself, hinging on a question of the literal versus the metaphoric. This debate was at its most vital in the case of Communion. The Catholics believed that there really was a miraculous transformation in which the bread and wine became the actual body and blood of Christ. Protestantism tended to treat it as a symbolic moment intended to remind the congregation of Christ’s supreme sacrifice. The Protestant service was therefore deprived of the true presence of the divine, or the miracle of transformation. This loss: “Reduced the magical or miraculous qualities of the ritual (as well as the power of the priest)… it may well have felt to some that they lost a dynamically vibrant, supernaturally immediate version of religious communion” (Sugg 108).

The experience of religion in the Reformed Church lost a lot of its mystical power and awe, as well as the sense of communal participation in the miracle. Donne’s strong belief in the literal power of language was an indication of his lingering ties to the Catholic tradition, and the continued pull of its more immediate and powerful form of ritual.

Death rites were among the most important of these rituals, and people clung to them perhaps more than anything else. Sixteenth and seventeenth century England was a world in which Hell and damnation were extremely real, and everpresent in people’s minds. The contemporary idea of Hell is aptly expressed in Donne’s ‘Divine Meditation X’, in the speaker’s hope: “That valiantly I Hell’s wide mouth o’erstride” (Robbins, Complete Poems, 539, 4). Hell was indeed imagined as a gaping pit that lay invisible beneath the fabric of life, and common belief held that one was constantly in danger of falling into it. As a result, it was a world in which the need for certainty and assurance of salvation were paramount, and this need often required external as well as internal confirmation.

The Elizabethan funeral service was an example of the ambiguity of the prayerbook, as it made clear references to predestination and God’s choice of the ‘elect’, yet also stipulated that the minister assert the ‘sure and certain hope’ of salvation of all who died (Duffy 590). Average English parishioners typically insisted upon this assertion of salvation for all, and their need for reassurance was echoed by James Pilkington, the bishop of Durham, who argued that: “The comely using of these [assurances] in God’s church is a great comfort to all Christians, and the want of them a token of God’s wrath and plague” (cited in Duffy 590). Pilkington essentially implies that were the priest to pass over this promise of salvation, he would effectively be suggesting that the dead person was indeed damned by God. These conflicting ideas of death and salvation feature regularly in Donne’s Holy Sonnets, which imagine both a joyful reunion with God and a fearful test of faith: I dare not move my dim eyes any way, Despair behind, and death before doth cast Such terror, and my feebled flesh doth waste By sin in it, which it towards hell doth weigh;

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Only thou art above, and when towards thee By thy leave I can look, I rise again; But our old subtle foe so tempteth me, That not one hour I can myself sustain; Thy grace may wing me to prevent his art, And thou like adamant draw mine iron heart (‘Holy Sonnet XIII’, Major Works, 179, 5-14).

The speaker can only resist the devil and damnation with God’s help and grace, a common theme in the sonnets. The wording of ‘By thy leave I can look’ is telling in its supremely deferential attitude to God, and emphasises the awe and fear inherent in the notion of communing directly with God. It raises the Calvinist question of agency, as Donne both seeks and rejects a sense of control over his own salvation. He must actively resist sin in order to be saved, yet his ability to resist it depends on God giving him ‘leave’ to do so. At times Donne seems to want to embrace the extreme Calvinist notion of utter helplessness; if his fate is already decided then he is freed from any responsibility. Yet it is clear from the speaker’s agitation that he cannot really believe he has no role to play in his salvation. The problem, central to many popular concerns about religion, is he does not know how much depends on him. The poem ends on a hopeful note, predicting that the speaker will be granted God’s grace, and in resolving itself thus it is reminiscent of the cherished promise of the funeral rites: that salvation is possible for all. However, according to Calvinist thinking one had to believe in one’s own salvation for it to be true, as such a belief was a sign of grace. Donne’s hopeful conclusion is in part an effort to convince himself that he will be saved, as hope itself may be the mark of salvation.

This deep fear of damnation was heightened by the rejection of the concept of purgatory in Protestant theology. With it parishioners lost a vital part of their sense of control over their own salvation and the salvation of others. A soul in purgatory could be prayed for, and through the prayers of those still living eventually gain access to Heaven. This belief had of course led to exploitation, as people often paid large sums of money to have services and prayers devoted to dead loved ones. Indeed the clerical corruption that stemmed from the belief in purgatory was an important impetus for the Reformation. Yet it softened the awful finality of death and the fear of immediate damnation, and allowed people to believe they weren’t completely helpless. The much-debated question of Predestination in the English Church added to this sense of helplessness, and to the deep anxiety over one’s fate. The idea that there was a set group of the ‘Elect’, and that some were condemned to Hell no matter what they did in their lives, meant that Protestants had to look for signs of grace within themselves, and try to find some internal conviction that they were among the Elect. For many this was too heavy a burden: “They knew themselves to be mercenary, worldly, weak, and they looked to religion, the old or the new, to pardon these vices, not

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to reform them” (Duffy 591). The preservation of more traditional aspects of the funeral rites and other rites of passage therefore became “A frequent bone of contention between traditionally minded parishioners and Protestant clergy” (Duffy 590). The laity were anxious to keep hold of the traditions and rituals that they understood and ascribed meaning to, traditions which gave them a sense of greater agency and control.

This longing to hold on to both the comforting and miraculous elements of the old religion is consistently expressed in Donne’s poetry. His use of poetic form is a complex indicator of his ties to both sides of the religious spectrum, and reveals much about his response to the Reformation and his own conversion.

With his Holy Sonnets he adapted a very traditional form of poetic expression to create remarkably eloquent and intricate examinations of spirituality. The traditionalism of the sonnet form itself suggests an attempt to rediscover an older mode of being through poetry. The language of the sonnets alludes strongly to the Petrarchan origins of the form, and treats the relationship between the speaker and God in terms of the romantic ideal of the Petrarchan love relationship. Yet the sonnets are also very English in their structure. Donne uses the same style as Sidney, Wyatt and Shakespeare (Robbins, Complete Poems, 521), replacing the traditional Italian cdecde or cdcdcd ending sestet with a quatrain and rhyming couplets constructed on cdcdee or cddcee. Thus Donne still places himself within the more recent English tradition. However, he reworked the typical focus of the sonnet from romantic love to divine love, transforming an old form of romantic poetry into a new form of religious poetry. This new religious poetry also uses the vocabulary of eroticism to describe the experience of spirituality in a highly physical, earthy manner. Donne’s choice of the restrictive sonnet form, with its firmly entrenched rhyming structure and set iambic pentameter, reflects his powerful desire to control and restrain his own character. The sonnets force him to remain within the bounds of a set structure. He must adapt himself to fit their demands rather than allowing his expression and language to run wild wherever it wants to go.

That desire for structure is a deeply Catholic desire, one that arises from the loss of Church structure and hierarchy in the Protestant world. With their focus on structure and control the Holy Sonnets seem to reproduce the old rituals and practices of the Catholic Church and its fixed, complex hierarchy. In turning to this kind of poetry Donne is trying to stabilise himself, to constrain his imaginative power within a stable model, one that he can struggle with and use to test himself, yet one that still lays out a clear path to follow. This poetic model could then also serve as a model for worshipping, a kind of guiding structure in the absence of the more traditional formulas. Poetry has effectively replaced the Catholic priest as the mediator that helps to bring Donne closer to God. But his intent is complicated by the fact that the control required for the sonnet form is also necessary for the Protestant mode of worship. The idea of constant personal

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observation, of searching for signs of grace and having to take responsibility for one’s individual relationship with God, asks for a great deal of self-awareness and stability. Thus the sonnet form could also be a way of reconciling the two systems of worship, allowing Donne to adapt to the practices of his new religion through the structural framework of his old one. Donne did not always seek to constrain himself, as such control did not come naturally to him. In much of his poetry he frees himself from such restrictions, using relatively free verse that does not appear to conform to specific poetic conventions and allows him to let his mind and his language run rampant. The control of Catholicism provided an institutional form of support to help Donne keep his thoughts in check. But in his experiments with the sonnet as a form of devotional poetry he forced himself to practice a new kind of self-control, one bound to familiar and traditional structures but also demanding greater personal discipline. Through the sonnets Donne was perhaps trying to teach himself to be a Protestant.

This search for structure is repeated throughout Donne’s religious work.

‘La Corona’ follows the traditional seven-part circular form of the ‘Corona of our Lady’ and ‘Lord’ outlined in Roman Catholic handbooks, although the form was also popular with English poets (Robbins 475). It places even more demands on the poet than the basic sonnet form, as its seven sonnet stanzas must begin with the line of the preceding stanza. Moreover, Donne’s rhyme scheme for each octave follows the standard Petrarchan abbaabba, an extremely restrictive structure. Meanwhile ‘Of the Cross’ is less complex, but still very traditional with its regular iambic pentameter and rhyming couplets. The poem is commonly taken as a response to heated debate over the use of the symbol of the cross, with puritans calling for its complete elimination, particularly in cases of baptism when the priest made the sign on the forehead. According to Theresa DiPasquale Donne tried to model many of his poems on the sacraments, and here attempted to recreate the cross, presenting the poem itself as a sacramental sign (30). He claims that it is impossible to banish the symbol, as it is found constantly everywhere he looks, and can be created anywhere, “Who can deny me power and liberty/ To stretch mine arms, and mine own cross to be?/ Swim, and at every stroke thou art thy cross;/ The mast and yard make one where seas do toss./… All the globe’s frame, and sphere’s, is nothing else/ But meridians crossing parallels” (Robbins, Complete Poetry, 470, 17-24). The rhyming couplets themselves form kinds of crosses in their regular back and forth and their two-by-two structure, emphasising the speaker’s insistence that the image of the cross is everywhere.

Donne’s religious poems were a way for him to recover some of the lost ritual and sacrament of Catholicism. But more than this they sometimes seem to want to function as a kind of ‘literary sacrament’ for his readers who could “Receive divine poems as ‘visible means and seals of grace’” (DiPasquale 29). Thus the poems effectively become sacraments themselves. The personal loss Donne sustained in his conversion is repeated in the wider loss afflicting the English

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Church, as it rejects those sacramental elements that Donne still holds dear. His poems are an attempt to try to preserve the sacraments in a form that is better suited to Protestant ideals, and so he creates holy objects out of language and ideas rather than physical matter.

‘A Litany’ is also specifically connected to traditional practices. The continued use of the litany itself in the Elizabethan prayer-book was a point of contention for the ‘godly’, who saw it as another vestige of ‘popery’ and wanted it removed from services (Duffy 590). Donne reintroduced in his ‘Litany’ a number of invocations preserved under Henry VIII but removed from the prayer-book under Edward VI and Elizabeth. These were the invocations to the Virgin Mary, the Angels, the Patriarchs, the Prophets, the Apostles, the Martyrs, the Confessors, the Virgins and the Doctors of the Church (stanzas 5-13). This last – the Doctors of the Church – had only ever been part of the Roman Catholic litany. P.M. Oliver views these invocations as evidence that Donne felt the contemporary Anglican litany was somehow ‘defective’. Yet he also notes Donne’s care not to cause further controversy; in stanza 5 to the Virgin the poet carefully clarifies that the saints intercede on their own rather than as a response to human requests (Oliver 86): “Our zealous thanks we pour: as her deeds were/ Our helps, so are her prayers” (Robbins, Complete Poetry, 502, 43-4).

Still, simply depicting the Virgin Mary as an intercessor in man’s fate is in itself a distinctly Catholic notion, and exemplifies Donne’s continual attempts to integrate Catholic and Anglican thinking (Oliver 87) in order to ease the transition between the two. The poem’s invocations serve as a reminder of the traumatic consequences of Protestantism’s rejection of icons and of worship of the saints. These practices were seen as idolatry by the reformers, but they offered a mediated form of personal interaction with the divine that was not so overpowering and terrifying a prospect as the notion of direct Communion with God himself. The saints provided a clear link between humanity and divinity, as they had been human themselves. It was deeply comforting to imagine that there was a particular saint who watched over you, and had the ear of God to plead for you. Through poems like ‘A Litany’ Donne attempted to internalise the external, comforting Catholic structure of worship he had been raised with, and transform it into something more acceptable to Protestant belief.

Donne’s efforts are reminiscent of the basic need for all Catholics at the time to adapt their religion and religious practices to the reality of their circumstances. His religious poems are about the human experience of faith lived on a day-to-day basis, and the constant struggle of maintaining that faith. They are an attempt to create new devotional aides, replacing the dialogue with Catholic priests as mediators between the individual and God, and even substituting for a dialogue with God himself. The speakers’ attempts to engage God in some kind of communication or exchange are always answered by his internal reasoning through the poem, not by any external force. The divine poetry is therefore

entirely human, an account of how the humanity responds to spirituality while revealing the powerful emotional bonds that both Catholicism and Protestantism held over the imagination. In this respect Donneâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s poetry is a vital source for any historian of the English Reformation. It provides invaluable insight into the psychological effect of religious division and upheaval, and serves as a fascinating demonstration of how people interacted with their own faith.

Works Cited Arshagouni Papazian, Mary (ed.). John Donne and the Protestant Reformation.

Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2003.

Brigden, Susan. New Worlds, Lost Worlds: The Rule of the Tudors, 1485-1603.

London: Penguin Books, 2000.

Carey, John. John Donne: Life, Mind and Art. London: Faber and Faber, 2008 (first published 1981).

Coffey, John. Persecution and Toleration in Protestant England 1558-1689.

Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Ltd, 2000.

DiPasquale, Theresa M. Literature and Sacrament: The Sacred and the Secular in John Donne. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1999.

Doerksen, Daniel W. Conforming to the Word: Herbert, Donne, and the English Church Before Laud. London: Associated University Presses, 1997.

Duffy, Eamon. The Stripping of the Altars. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1992.

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Donne, John: - Selected Letters. P.M. Oliver (ed.). Manchaster: Carcanet, 2002.

- The Complete Poems of John Donne. Robin Robbins (ed.). New York: Longman, 2010.

- The Complete Poetry and Selected Prose. Charles M. Coffin (ed.). New York: Modern Library, 2001.

- The Complete Poetry of John Donne. John T. Shawcross (ed.). Garden City, NY: Anchor Books, 1967.

- The Major Works. John Carey (ed.). New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.

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Evans, Gillian R. “John Donne and the Augustinian Paradox of Sin”. The Review of English Studies, vol. 33, no. 129. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982.

Edwards, David Lawrence. John Donne: Man of Flesh and Spirit. New York: Continuum, 2001.

Frontain, Raymond-Jean and Malpezzi, Frances M. (eds.). John Donne’s Religious Imagination. Conway, AR: UCA Press, 1995.

Guibbory, Achsah (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to John Donne. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.

Hirst, Derek. Authority and Conflict: England, 1603-1658. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1986.

Manning, Roger B. “Elizabethan Recusancy Commissions”. The Historical Journal, vol. 15, no. 1. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1972.

Marotti, Arthur F. Religious Ideology and Cultural Fantasy: Catholic and AntiCatholic Discourses in Early Modern England. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005.

McLain, Lisa. Lest We Be Damned: Practical Innovation and Lived Experience Among Catholics in Protestant England, 1559-1642. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Oliver, P.M. Donne’s Religious Writing: A Discourse of Feigned Devotion. New York: Longman, 1997.

Ross, Malcolm. Poetry and Dogma: The Transfiguration of Eucharistic Symbols in Seventeenth Century English Poetry. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1954.

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Shell, Alison. Oral Culture and Catholicism in Early Modern England. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

Stubbs, John. John Donne: The Reformed Soul. New York: Norton, 2006.

Sugg, Richard. John Donne. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007.

Targoff, Ramie. John Donne, Body and Soul. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008.

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The Contributors SUZANNE BOSWELL is a U2 English Major with a minor in History. Her main academic interests are in speculative fiction and Victorian literature. In order to satisfy her love of spaceships, cyborgs and gender theory, she plans to write her Honours thesis next year on feminist science fiction in the 1970s and 80s. She spends most of her free time searching vainly for her lost thesaurus.

JAMES HUGH KEENAN CAMPBELL is an amalgamation of his two eccentric grandfathers, James Campbell (a crafter of nuts and bolts) and Hugh Keenan (a tuberculosis de-epidemic-er) (Ryan: You change that to doctor if this needs to be more professional. “Needs” being the operative word.) A U3 student majoring in English: Cultural Studies and Psychology, James enjoys reading too much into Poe’s vague foreshadows of Freudian thought and the American mass media’s ritual deployment of cognitive heuristics. James has written six short stories and one folk opera, but this is his first analytical paper to be published.

KAITLIN DOUCETTE is a U3 student majoring in Cultural Studies and minoring in Communications.

Her theoretical interests tend towards questions of the treatment of bodies in media, text, and film. She wishes to further nurture this interest through future studies in Food Sciences and will begin her sommelier certification while completing her degree in the fall.

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ZOË ERWIN-LONGSTAFF is in her final year as an Honours student in Drama and Theatre. This year she was fortunate enough to direct two plays: the first, Michel Tremblay’s “Albertine in Five Times” for TNC Theatre; the second, Noel Coward’s “Hay Fever” for Players’ Theatre. She is also the current president of the Department of English Students’ Association. Her greatest ambition is to direct “Top Girls.”

DANIEL GURIN is an English literature major in his final year. He is hoping to become a famous writer. His writing has elsewhere appeared in the undergraduate history journal and on his blog.

JAMES LOCK will receive his undergraduate degree in English Literature this year. His academic work focuses on gender, relativism, making funny things seem too serious, and making serious things seem too funny. He is proud to publish a paper that does all four at once. He would be even more proud if writing things could pay the bills so, you know, get in touch.

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JENNIFER YIDA PAN is in her final semester of undergraduate study in Honours English Literature. She has a minor in German language, as well as various interests in theoretical mathematics and sciences. In the fall, she intends to pursue English graduate studies with research interests in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century literature, as well as cultural theory and discourse analysis.

She is the founder and president of Encore Exposition, a federally incorporated nonprofit organization based in Montreal that aims to support the arts and promote fine arts performances in senior residences. In her spare time, she likes to practice violin and challenge her kitten to soccer matches (simultaneously, of course).

KEVIN PAUL is in his final year of an undergraduate degree, with a major in cultural studies and a minor in philosophy. His academic interests include the politics of visual culture, broadly conceived, as well as the use of new media in radical political movements. Outside of class, he is active in the Quebec student movement, helping to coordinate the general strike of winter 2012 at the national and local levels.

MORAG SANTINI is in her final semester of a Joint Honours degree in English Literature and History. After she graduates she plans to return home to New Zealand for a year before hopefully going on to pursue a Masterâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s in International Relations, location yet to be decided. She enjoys food thatâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s been cooked by other people, fantasising about being able to sing opera, and falling over in the ocean.

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JENNA WHITNALL is a U3 Art History student with a minor in Cultural Studies. She enjoys meandering through the canon of modernist critical theory and allowing select scholarly texts to anachronistically influence the way she sees the world around her. She loves to stroll around Paris in the footsteps of Baudelaire, views London through the lens of a Hogarth print, and is dazed by the paralytic effect of the aura when standing before a truly great work of art. Her favorite hobbies are food-writing, photography and travel. While she previously wrote for Leacockâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s Magazine, she is now developing her own personal food and travel blog and is contemplating a career in journalism.

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