The Channel 2014-15 by The Channel

The Channel

The McGill University Department of English Undergraduate Journal Volume 8 | 2014-2015

The Channel

The McGill University English Department Undergraduate Journal Volume 8 | 2014-2015 Coordinating Editor Clara Nizard Editorial Board Katherine Brenders Penelope Kerr Emily Martin Jacob Wald Print Design Emily Martin Web Design Katherine Brenders Cover Photograph Jenn Jesmer

Dear Readers... We are proud to present the 2014/2015 edition of The Channel Undergraduate Review. Since its inception in 2008, The Channel has aimed to incorporate the work of all three streams of McGill University’s Department of English – Literature, Drama & Theatre, and Cultural Studies – into an exciting, vibrantly intellectual collection. Covering a remarkable swath of literary and cultural history, the eight essays featured in this volume engage with their objects of study in creatively critical ways. We are proud to put forward this selection, in the belief that it encompasses some of the most imaginative, dedicated work being done in our department this year. Ranging from literary analysis to cultural commentary to performance studies, the essays collected here are representative of the sheer breadth of study of undergraduate students in English here at McGill. We thank the brilliant writers, editors, and various helpers that brought The Channel to life this year for its eighth volume. Special thanks to Jenna Moore for her tireless support and acquisition of funding, which made this volume possible. Enjoy! The Channel Editorial Board

P.S. Like what you see in this issue? We’d love to hear from you! Email us at: channelundergraduatereview@gmail.com if you’d like more information on how to get involved! You can also visit our website at: http://englishjournal.mcgill.ca/ to learn more about the Channel and access previous issues.

M B

Contents Formal Classical Music as a Promise of Unity in The Voyage Out, The Waves, and Between the Acts By Katherine Horgan

The Molten Core: Embodied Perfromance and Texts in Translation By Shanti Gonzales

A “Soldier’s Kiss”: Renaissance Reconfigurations of Hercules By Rachel Newman

In The Presence of Adah: the Transnational Feminist Voice in Second-Class Citizen By Brigid Savage

My Narcissistic Shame: Performing Intimacy in “Intimacy with Fear” By Laura Orozco

The Printed Bandit: Orality and Print Culture in A Gest of Robyn Hode By Philippe Mongeau

Lucas Beauchamp: Faulkner’s Challenge to the Racial Binary in the American South By Jesse Conterato

Philanthropy, Fallen Women, and the 1880s Novel: Reader Subjectivity in Gissing and Harkness By Caroline Boreham

Contributors Caroline Boreham Caroline Boreham is an English Honours student with a minor in French in her last year of study at McGill. Her honours thesis is on three Victorian novelists – all of whose first names happen to be George. She will be beginning a Masters in translation at Concordia next fall.

Shanti Gonzales Shanti Gonzales is a second year Drama/Theatre student with a minor in Anthropology. When she’s not frolicking around theatres playing dress-up and make-believe, she’s playing dress-up and make-believe everywhere else. She also enjoys making and consuming the following: coffee, art, music, literature, and witticisms. She is the founder and executive artistic director of CoffeeSpoons Theatre, a community theatre project based in Boston, MA

Jesse Conterato Jesse is a fourth year Arts & Science student with a major concentration in Physics and minor concentrations in English Literature and Social Studies of Medicine. He is academically interested in the way these areas of study overlap with, inform, and enhance one another. Beyond school, he enjoys photography, medicine, and being outside.

Katherine Horgan Katherine Horgan is a U3 undergraduate student, with a double-degree in English literature and Music, with a minor in Classical language. Her current work is with the poetry of Edna St. Vincent Millay, and explores Millay’s classicism. She is also interested in classical conceptions of madness, and their influence on Renaissance portrayals of insanity. Her preferred poetry is any that involves shepherds. Katherine’s hobbies include whistling and reading the diaries of 17th century landowners. She loves opera and ballet, and hopes, someday, to be less annoying about it.

Laura Orozco Laura is a U3 student working towards a double major in Psychology and Theatre Studies. She is interested in investigating storytelling and performance as tools for self-advocacy, care, and connectivity.

Philippe Mongeau Philippe Mongeau is a U3 Arts student majoring in English Literature and minoring in Art History. His academic interests include – but are certainly not limited to – Book History, Queer Theory and, of course, Medieval Studies. He hopes to eventually gain entry in the University of Toronto’s Master’s of Library and Information Studies program. Meanwhile, he enjoys reading, writing, and working part-time at the McGill University Bookstore.

Brigid Savage Brigid Savage is a third year Cultural Studies student, minoring in Indigenous Studies. Brigid was raised in Toronto, but now resides in the Plateau. Her studies have led her to an interest in women of colour as cultural producers, muses, and bosses. She likes red and pink candy, watching soul-crushing films and running her food blog.

Rachel Newman Rachel is a 3rd year undergraduate student in the English literature and History Joint Honours program. Some of her favourite scholarly interests include: Shakespearean comedy, ancient Greek mythology, French Revolutionary history, and Victorian novels, with a dash of Lord Byron now and then to mix things up. When she’s not writing papers, she enjoys horseback riding, long walks on the beach back home in Florida, Regency novels, and all things Jane Austen and Downton Abbey. She also likes cats.

Formal Classical Music as a Promise of Unity in The Voyage Out, The Waves, and Between the Acts By Katherine Horgan From this I reach what may be called a philosophy; at any rate it is a constant idea of mine; that behind the cotton wool is hidden a pattern; that we–I mean all human beings–are connected with this; that the whole world is a work of art; that we are parts of the work of art. Hamlet or a Beethoven quartet is the truth about this vast mass that we call the world. But there is no Shakespeare, there is no Beethoven; certainly and emphatically there is no God; we are the words; we are the music; we are the thing itself. And I see this when I have a shock. (Moments of Being 72)

ost studies of Virginia Woolf and her relationship to music analyze this quote at some point. Many scholars, such as Emilie Crapoulet, reference it to illustrate that “Woolf ’s musicality is inherent to her own artistic vision” and related to “why she felt the need to write literature” (Crapoulet 3). What they often neglect to include is the context of the quote, which Woolf gives just before: I still have this peculiarity that I receive these sudden shocks… And so I go on to suppose that the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer. I hazard the explanation that a shock is at once in my case followed by the desire to explain it. I feel that I have had a blow; but it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order; it is a token of something real behind appearances. (Moments of Being 72) She specifically refers to the “shocks” she receives as “revelation[s] of some order,” and it is this “revelation” that she connects with music. Music often makes its way into Woolf ’s novels when she is describing the revelatory moments experienced by her characters, or their “shocks,” as she might call them. Most notably in The Voyage Out (1915), The Waves (1931) and Between

the Acts (1941), the “shocks” her characters experience function as pivotal moments within the works and are always accompanied by music. Specifically, Woolf references Baroque, Classical, and Romantic composers strongly associated with musical form and formal composition: Bach, Handel, Mozart and Beethoven. Woolf seems to have viewed the strict harmonic and formal order of the music of these composers as a useful way to express the “revelations of order” behind the “cotton wool of daily life.” The Voyage Out (TVO), The Waves (TW) and Between the Acts (BTA) offer an abundance of “cotton wool” in the mass of detail and experience their characters are expected to sift through. The characters all express anxiety about the lack of unity and order in their lives and Woolf relieves their anxiety at clearly marked moments of revelation: Rachel’s performance at the party in TVO, Rhoda’s epiphany in TW, and the finale of the pageant in BTA. These revelations are all triggered by music, specifically the formal music of the aforesaid composers. In this music, even though there may be dense musical ornamentation, or “cotton wool,” underneath the surface is a clear harmonic plan that leads to a unified resolution. In their moments of revelation, Woolf ’s characters see this musical promise of unity as one that applies not only to themselves, but to human civilization in general. I argue here that Woolf ’s understanding of music was sufficiently complex to draw on the characteristics of formal classical music to convey these “revelations of some order.” In TVO, TW and BTA, these musical “shocks” promise a “token” of unity and order that Woolf ’s characters take as a source of hope for the unification of humanity. To do this, I will first examine Woolf ’s knowledge of music and her conception of it as a medium, with a view to establishing her intellectual appreciation of formal composers and the structure of their music. I will then apply this knowledge to the revelatory scenes in TVO, TW, and BTA, first establishing a need for order and unity in each novel, and then untangling the musical and metaphorical language Woolf uses to provide her characters with a resolution of this need. In her pamphlet, Virginia Woolf: A Musical Life, Emilie Crapoulet provides a comprehensive account of Woolf ’s musical education, proving that it was by no means insignificant. From an early age, Woolf was taught to play the piano and could read music. While both Clive Bell and Leonard Woolf believed that Virginia Woolf “had no technical knowledge of music” (Crapoulet 9), the Stephens owned both a piano and a harmonium, upon which the seventeen year old Virginia played fugues with her sister Vanessa (Crapoulet 9). The girls had both piano and singing lessons, even if these lessons were “far from satisfactory and no doubt contributed to certain disillusionment with the musical profession” (Crapoulet 10). In her analysis of Woolf ’s diaries, Crapoulet remarks that Woolf ’s knowledge of musical terms indicates “that she was far from being musically illiterate” (Crapoulet 11). As

an adult, Woolf took great pleasure in attending frequent concerts, taking careful note of her musical experiences in her diary. She also went to performances of contemporary music, attending Stravinsky’s ballets with Vita Sackville-West (Lee 495) and even Strauss’ Salome (Sutton 20). Woolf had a number of musical friendships, most notably with her composer-contemporary Ethel Smythe, with whom she frequently spoke about music: “I want to talk and talk and talk– About music” (The Letters of V.W. 4:145). Perhaps her most significant musical relationship, however, was with the gramophone. Virginia Woolf ’s gramophone listening habits indicate that her musical taste tended to be conservative. The Woolfs owned their own gramophone, and Virginia Woolf would frequently listen to Beethoven string quartets on it, a practice that had a famous impact on TW (Crapoulet 5). Leonard kept a “Diary of Music Listened To” and the most frequent entrants are Beethoven and Mozart, followed by Bach, Haydn, and Brahms1 (Sutton 11). Woolf ’s taste in music was, though educated, decidedly old-fashioned; all of the composers Woolf listened to the most, with the exception of Brahms, died at least fifty years before she was born. Emma Sutton observed this pattern and concluded that, “attention to Woolf ’s musical life has also surely been hindered by the perception that her taste in music was considerably, even embarrassingly, more conservative than her knowledge of the visual arts, literature, philosophy and science” (Sutton 17). There is a difference, however, between taste and knowledge. While Woolf did know about and attend the performances of her composer contemporaries, her listening practices show that she was attracted to the music of Baroque, Classical and Romantic composers and their formal compositional techniques. All of Woolf ’s favorite composers are associated with particular musical forms. Bach, as a Baroque composer, was known for his use of counterpoint and fugue, as well as of dance forms (e.g. minuet, gavotte). The sonata form2, critical to the instrumental3 works of Mozart and Beethoven, provided a system of thematic repetition and harmonic order focused on cadential arrival. In the operas 1 Woolf lived during what music historians call the Late Romantic and Modern periods of music. The generally accepted timeline of musical periods, with some overlap, is as follows: Renaissance 1400-1600, Baroque 16001760, Classical 1730-1820, Romantic 1810-1880, Late Romantic 1880-1900, Modern 1880-1940. Purcell, Bach and Handel are considered Baroque composers, Mozart and Haydn Classical composers, Beethoven a late Classical and Romantic composer and Brahms a Romantic/Late Romantic composer. 2 Sonata form is a musical form generally used for the first movements of Sonatas, Concerti, and Symphonies. It is made up of an Exposition (where the theme is introduced in its entirety in the home key), the Development (where the melody is often transposed to a closely related key, and the theme is fragmented, developed and varied) and the Recapitulation (where the theme returns in its entirety, in the home key). Frequently, a coda will follow the Recapitulation, but this is not essential to the form. 3 Concerti, sonatas, symphonies and chamber music (string quartets, etc.).

of Handel, Purcell and Mozart, traditional operatic conventions4 lend structure to a lengthy production. The precise formal and harmonic principles with which Woolf ’s preferred composers wrote, organized, and structured their work. All of the music Woolf links with her “revelations of some order,” then, has historical and traditional ties with strict musical form. Woolf, in her writing, saw these musical forms as tools for organizing her ideas and structuring detail. When writing her biography of Roger Fry, which she began in October of 1935 (A Writer’s Diary 228) and wrote until 1940 (overlapping with her writing of BTA), she says, “there was such a mass of detail that the only way I could hold it together was by abstracting it into themes, I did try to state them in the first chapter, and then bring in developments and variations, and then to make them all heard together…” (qtd. in Crapoulet 6). The strategy she adopted to write Fry’s biography is based on the musical idea of sonata form. Woolf tried to “state them [the themes] in the first chapter,” as a Classical composer would state the musical theme in the Exposition of a sonata form, “then to bring…developments and variations,” to the themes, as in the Development of a sonata form, “and then to make them all heard together,” as in a Recapitulation. In her composition of Fry’s biography, Woolf saw the sonata form as a way to organize “a mass of detail” and create a coherent work. By “making them [the themes] all heard together” at the end of the work, Woolf seeks to create a unified impression of her friend Roger Fry through the use of musical form. This is a unification strategy that Woolf had adopted before in TW: “It occurred to me last night while listening to a Beethoven quartet that I would merge all the interjected passages into Bernard’s speech & end with the words O solitude: thus making him absorb all those scenes & having no further break” (The Diary of V.W., 3:339). Woolf has decided here to adopt the musical idea of Recapitulation in order to “merge all the interjected passages” of TW into Bernard’s speech. Through her use of the sonata form, Woolf, in her fiction as well as her nonfiction, sees a way to create unity by structuring her writing with formal musical techniques. In her writing about music, however, Woolf is wary of the problems inherent in converting music and its effects into words. On music criticism, Crapoulet describes Woolf as being “acutely aware how, very often, musical criticism is undermined by ‘vague formulas, comparisons, and adjectives’ as exemplified by ‘the descriptive notes in the concert programme’ which all but ‘hopelessly’ lead one ‘astray’ in our appreciation of music” (Crapoulet 24). Emma Sutton seconds 4 Baroque and Classical operas were structured by musically and stylistically distinct songs: Aria (an expressive melody with full musical accompaniment, used for a character’s meditation or reflection) Recitative (effectively pitched speech with sparse musical accompaniment used to move the plot of the opera) and Arioso (somewhere between Aria and Recitative – not a very clear definition, but it’s not a very clear distinction).

this observation, quoting Woolf as saying in her diary that “all descriptions of music are quite worthless, & rather unpleasant; they are apt to be hysterical, & and to say things that people will be ashamed of having said afterwards” (qtd. Sutton 15). It seems that this awareness led Woolf to think about representing music through metaphor rather than adjectives and similes. A good example of Woolf ’s metaphorical treatment of music can be found in BTA: “But not the melody surface sound alone controlled it; but also the warring battle-plumed warriors straining asunder: To part? No…they crashed; solved; united” (BTA 128). Here, Woolf is describing harmony working against melody in a musical piece; the “warring battle-plumed warriors straining asunder” represent dissonant harmonies under the “melody of surface sound” which push to resolve, and finally “crash[];solve[];unite[],” as dissonant harmonies resolve5 at a cadence6. In the traditional music of Woolf ’s preferred composers, harmonic resolution at a cadence is a point of unity, when all of the musical voices in a piece agree. Clearly, Woolf ’s understanding of music is complex enough to extend beyond surface description of melody; she can metaphorically express the musical functions of harmony, dissonance and resolution in her work to create an impression of unity. It is just such unity that Rachel Vinrace seeks with the people around her in TVO. People puzzle Rachel: “Why did they do the things they did, and what did they feel, and what was it all about?” (TVO 34). When Rachel asks people directly to explain their feelings and motivations, however, she is usually met with rebuff. Rachel concludes from these communication failures that “To feel anything strongly was to create an abyss between oneself and others who feel strongly but perhaps differently. It was far better to play the piano and forget the rest” (TVO 34). Rachel, in pursuit of honesty, finds that verbal communication separates people, rather than unifying them. This inability to unite herself with others through communication frustrates Rachel, who “blaze[s] into indignation once a fortnight, and subsid[es]”(TVO 35), accepting her lot, and determining that “nobody ever said a thing they meant, or ever talked of a feeling they felt, but that was what music was for” (TVO 35). Rachel sees this inability to communicate as something that prevents unity, and she seeks a solution to this problem through music. For Rachel, music promises a way of establishing order, and by extension unity. The music she chooses to practice, however, is all “old music–Bach and Beethoven, Mozart, and Purcell,” and the specific piece, “a very difficult, very classical 5 “The point of emergence from musical uncertainty, such as incompleteness, dissonance or ambiguity, onto a point of comparative certainty, completeness, or of single implication. Resolution implies relaxation, as when consonance succeeds dissonance” (Rushton “Resolution”). 6 “The conclusion to a phrase, movement or piece based on a recognizable melodic formula, harmonic progression or dissonance resolution; the formula on which such a conclusion is based” (Rockstro “Cadence”).

fugue in A” (TVO 58)7. Fugue is one of the most complex and rigid functions of musical composition, with lines entering at fixed points and interacting through counterpoint8. Woolf expresses Rachel’s performance of the fugue metaphorically in terms of architectural construction: “an invisible line seemed to string the notes together, from which rose a shape, a building. She was so far absorbed in this work, for it was really difficult to find how all these sounds should stand together” (TVO 58). Here, Woolf applies the metaphor of construction to the “work” of making music. For Rachel, playing formal music is a process of finding “how all these sounds should stand together” in a unified structure. Through music, she creates order, unity and space for herself. At the party, Rachel creates order not only for herself, but for the party guests. By popular demand (the musicians have left, and the party guests wish to continue dancing) Rachel begins to play dance music, starting with an air by Mozart. Dance music is by nature very rhythmical and repetitive; in order to dance well and together, dancers must be able to anticipate the beat patterns. Rachel, aware of this, marks “the rhythm boldly so as to simplify the way” (TVO 185), and tells the party guests to “invent the steps” (TVO 185). Everyone begins to lose themselves in the dance: “Once their feet fell in with the rhythm they showed a complete lack of self-consciousness” (TVO 186). All of the disparate people, including those who do not dance, join in the rhythm and become one entity. They lose consciousness of themselves as they are unified by the rhythm of the dance. For a moment, through Rachel’s performance of formal dance music, these disparate characters unite and dance together in rhythm, even if the dance will end, and ultimately they must scatter. This is not the only moment of concord the dancers experience. After everyone has tired of dancing, Rachel begins playing Bach: “some of the younger dancers came in…and sat upon… the chairs round the piano…As they sat and listened, their nerves were quieted; the heat and soreness of their lips, the result of incessant talking and laughing, was smoothed away” (TVO 187). The party guests have danced through the night, and as they listen to Rachel play at dawn, they relax and as a unit see the same image: “a building with spaces and columns succeeding 7 “Type of contrapuntal composition for particular number of parts or ‘voices’…The point of fugue is that the voices enter successively in imitation of each other, the 1st voice entering with a short melody or phrase known as the Subject…When all the voices have entered, the Exposition is over. Then (normally) there comes an Episode or passage of connective tissue (usually a development of something that has appeared in the exposition) leading to another entry or series of entries of the Subject, and so on until the end of the piece, entries and episodes alternating.” (The Oxford Dictionary of Music “Fugue”) 8 “The ability, unique to music, to say two things at once comprehensibly…A single ‘part’ or ‘voice’ added to another is called ‘a counterpoint’ to that other, but the more common use of the word is that of the combination of simultaneous parts or vv., each of significance in itself and the whole resulting in a coherent texture.”(Oxford Dictionary of Music “Counterpoint”)

each other rising in the empty space.” Not only is the audience unified in their vision of the music, but they see “the whole of human life advancing very nobly under the direction of the music” (TVO 187). Music provides direction for the audience; Bach’s music, because it is ordered harmonically to come to a resolution, has given the audience confidence that humanity moving forward “under the direction of music” will also unify. After this revelation, they are at peace and “desire nothing but sleep” (TVO 187). Through the act of performing formal music, Rachel has illuminated a path for the audience and given them confidence in the direction of human progress; if humanity advances under the guidance of music, it must ultimately resolve. From the beginning of TW, Rhoda, like Rachel Vinrace, feels like an outsider; she struggles to find a place for herself in society. She expresses this fear of exclusion when, as a child at school, she is left behind to finish a math exercise that she could not complete: “The world is entire, and I am outside of it, crying, ‘Oh, save me, from being blown for ever outside the loop of time!’” (TW 13). Rhoda is terrified of the idea of being left outside the “loop of time” and excluded from the unity of the world, which has “seal[ed]” and become “entire” without her. She is also incapable of imposing any order upon her own experiences. In her nightmares Rhoda feels “stretched, among these long lights, these long waves, these endless paths, with people pursuing, pursuing, pursuing” (TW 18). The possibilities of these “long lights” and “endless paths” overwhelm Rhoda and she cannot wake herself up; she has no control. From childhood, Rhoda feels doomed to a life devoid of order, isolated from the rest of the world. Rhoda’s epiphany, then, involves a revelation of a world order that includes her. For Rhoda, “life emerges heaving its dark crest from the sea” with “intermittent shocks, sudden as the springs of a tiger” (TW 45). Her epiphany is just such a “shock.” Reeling from Percival’s death, she desperately tries to overcome the terror of the present moment, and seeks a place where she can “recover beauty and impose order upon [her] raked, [her] disheveled soul” (TW 117). In desperation she goes to a music hall and hears a string quartet. Woolf, in the first draft of TW, specifies in the margin that the quartet is by Beethoven (‘TW’ the First Holograph Draft 255), who was famed for his string quartets: ‘Like’ and ‘like’ and ‘like’–but what is the thing that lies beneath the semblance of the thing…There is a square; there is an oblong. The players take the square and place it upon the oblong. They place if very accurately; they make a perfect dwelling-place. Very little is left outside. The structure is now visible; what is inchoate is here stated; we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood

them upon squares. This is our triumph; this is our consolation (TW 118). Rhoda, like Rachel, experiences the music through architectural metaphor; she visualizes the “square” and the “oblong” as being ordered by the music, they existed previously. The musicians have taken these pre-existing shapes and combine them to “make a perfect dwelling-place”: an ordered intellectual space which Rhoda can inhabit, fulfilling her need for inclusion. Her thought process extends the act of musical construction from “the players” to “we.” It is not only the players who make these “perfect dwelling places,” but all humanity: “we are not so various or so mean; we have made oblongs and stood them upon squares.” The musicians have come to represent humanity creating order for itself, and that the structure we create is “our consolation.” Beethoven’s music, through its order and structure, has articulated for Rhoda what was before “inchoate:” music is a microcosm of human creation, as a piece of music makes sense as a whole, though made of various parts (the “square” and the “oblong”), so too is humanity “not so various,” but part of a whole, creating order for itself. This realization brings “the sweetness of content overflowing” to Rhoda’s mind and “liberates” her “understanding” (TW 118). The knowledge that “beneath the semblance of the thing” (TW 118) there is the thing itself, the structure, not only comforts Rhoda, but brings her to a new level of understanding. In her article, “Transforming Musical Sounds into Words: Narrative Method in Virginia Woolf ’s The Waves,” Elicia Clements argues that Woolf ’s use of architectural language in Rhoda’s epiphany (the “square” and the “oblong”) ground it in the mundane, “insisting that content and form are indissoluble” (Clements 174). She reads Rhoda’s epiphany as one of “‘consolation’ and ‘sweetness,’ but…not one of transcendence” (Clements 174) I disagree; Rhoda’s epiphany is transcendent because it does not apply only to her, but to humanity at large. In her argument, Clements loses the forest for the trees. She has placed too much emphasis on the “propitious associations between Opus 130 and The Waves” (Clements 163); in her haste to catalogue the similarities between the two works, she has missed the parallels between the act of constructing formal music and the act of constructing human experience. She says of the epiphany, “Music is the subject-matter described through this architectural imagery in Rhoda’s quartet segment, but her experience also enacts the merged characteristics of Beethoven’s Cavatina” (Clements 174). Clements has misread Woolf ’s words; it is not the music that Woolf describes through architectural imagery, but the act of music making, which she expresses through the metaphor of construction. This distinction is the difference between a superficial visual representation of musical form and a

complex musical metaphor. Rhoda sees the musicians, through their construction of music, as symbolic of humanity creating structure, order and unity. It is not the specific string quartet that matters, but the artistic principles behind the act of formal musical composition. Rhoda’s experience during the string quartet is no mere passing thought, or comforting image, but a transcendent revelation of mankind’s power to unify itself. Like Rhoda, the audience in BTA receives its revelation at a performance. Miss LaTrobe’s play thus far, however, has been anything but a comforting experience. At the end of the play, the audience is still recovering from the “malignant indignity” (BTA 126) of being revealed to themselves in Miss LaTrobe’s mirror when a voice from the gramophone accosts them: “Look at ourselves, ladies and gentlemen! Then at the wall; and ask how’s this wall, the great wall, which we call, perhaps miscall, civilization, to be built by (here the mirrors flicked and flashed) orts, scraps, and fragments like ourselves?” (BTA 128). The gramophone demands to know how, will humanity, being mere “orts, scraps, and fragments,” combine to form a civilization? The gramophone presents a problem of organization, and appropriately gives an answer through organized music: “was it Bach, Handel, Beethoven, Mozart or nobody famous, but merely a traditional tune9? Anyhow, thank heaven it was somebody speaking after the anonymous bray of the infernal megaphone” (BTA 128). It seems that at this point, the music of these composers, or any music at all, is more coherent than the aggressive “bray” of the gramophone. The music begins: “the first note meant a second; the second a third” (BTA 128). Here, Woolf begins by re-enacting formal musical composition; the composition of formal music has rules dictating which notes may be used to accompany a given note. When a composer chooses one note, it necessitates the use of another. The composer works with these rules to create his composition, much as a poet uses strict rhyme schemes in certain types of poetry. This composition technique creates harmony in the gramophone’s music and the piece becomes more complex: “Then down beneath a force was born in opposition; then another. On different levels they diverged” (BTA 128). The tension in the piece increases; lines of music “oppos[e]” one another and “diverge,” creating a need for release. Woolf, as she describes this increase in musical tension, slyly re-assigns her pronouns. “They,” previously used to refer to the notes making up “the force born in opposition” is replaced by “ourselves:” “On different levels ourselves went forward; flower gathering some on the surface; others descending to wrestle with the meaning; but all comprehending, all enlisted” (BTA 128). Woolf, in this passage, makes humanity and music interchangeable. If this is true, then humanity must also be subject to music’s laws: “from chaos 9 Traditional folk tunes are often highly formal because they must be simple enough for anyone to sing. Frequently, they are in strophic form, where there is a refrain, interspersed with different verses.

and cacophony measure; but not melody of surface sound alone controlled it; but also the warring battle-plumed warriors straining asunder: to part? No. Compelled from the ends of the horizon; recalled from the edge of appalling crevasses; they crashed; solved; united” (BTA 128). The “chaos” and “cacophony” of humanity now must be brought to measure, as music dictates; and although the “warring battle-plumed warriors [strain] asunder” humanity is compelled, as a formal piece of music is compelled to a cadence, to unite. After this revelation of order, the audience, like Rachel’s audience in TVO and Rhoda in TW is soothed and they relax: “some relaxed their fingers; and others uncrossed their legs” (BTA 128). The gramophone’s question has been answered; the audience takes comfort from the promise of resolution that music has provided them. In all three of these novels, Woolf has developed the parallel between structure and unity of formal musical composition and human experience. Woolf planted the idea of music making as a process of construction, conveyed through architectural metaphor, in TVO. What may initially seem to be a clever bit of imagery gains import in TW, when the act of musical construction and unification by musicians becomes a means for unifying humanity as a whole. The idea, however, reaches its full potential in BTA, when Woolf equates the distinct musical notes of a piece with human beings and activity, subjecting humanity to the laws of formal music. The audience has literally become the music. The “token” of unity, then, that formal music promises is that, despite the internal dissonance and conflict of a formal musical piece, there is an underlying plan; dissonant harmonies drive to a release and unify at a cadence. By equating music with humanity, Woolf offers that same promise of unification to her characters in their “shocks.” Through these moments of revelation, Woolf has realized her own philosophy: “we are the words; we are the music” (Moments of Being 72).

Works Cited A Writer’s Diary: Being Extracts from the Diary of Virginia Woolf. ed. Leonard Woolf. York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co, 2003. Print. Clements, Elicia. “Transforming Musical Sounds into Words: Narrative Method in Virginia Woolf ’s ‘The Waves.’” Narrative 13.2 (2005): 160-181. JSTOR. Web. 21 Nov. 2013. “Counterpoint.” The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed. rev. Ed. Michael Kennedy. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 7 Dec. 2013. Crapoulet, Emilie. Virginia Woolf: A Musical Life. London: Cecil Woolf, 2009. Print. The Diary of Virginia Woolf. ed. Anne Oliver Bell and Andrew McNeillie. Vol. 3. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, Inc, 1980. Print. “Fugue.” The Oxford Dictionary of Music, 2nd ed. rev. Ed. Michael Kennedy. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 7 Dec. 2013. Lee, Hermione. Virginia Woolf. New York: Random House Inc, 1996. Print. The Letters of Virginia Woolf. ed. Nigel Nicolson and Joanne Trautmann. Vol.4. London: The Hogarth Press, 1978. Print. Rockstro, William S. et al. “Cadence.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 8 Dec. 2013. Rushton, Julian. “Resolution.” Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford University Press. Web. 7 Dec. 2013. Sutton, Emma. Virginia Woolf and Classical Music. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013. Print. Woolf, Virginia. Between the Acts. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co, 2008. Print. --. Moments of Being: Autobiographical Writings. 2nd edn. ed. Jeanne Schulkind. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co, 2002. Print. --. The Waves. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Co, 2006. Print. --. ‘The Waves’: The Two Holograph Drafts. Ed. J. W, Graham. Toronto and Buffalo: Toronto University Press in association with the University of Western Ontario, 1976. Print. --.The Voyage Out. New York: Oxford University Press, 2009. Print.

The Molten Core: Embodied Performance and Texts in Translation By Shanti Gonzales

t is often argued that a text must be heard in its original language in order to be fully understood. Language is full of cultural memory. The culture of a people is encoded in the very structure of their language. For example, the Spanish language is saturated with religious threads, concepts of gender, and Spanish (or Latin-American) nationalism. All of that is directly visible in the very grammatical structure, vocabulary, and sound of the language. To elaborate, in Garcia Lorcaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s La Casa de Bernarda Alba, the audience who receives the show in Spanish is already better acquainted with its context than an audience receiving a translation. In translation, the performer has that much more (religion, gender politics, nationalism) to teach the audience, or there must be a prerequisite of understanding. The story of Bernarda Alba is inherently linked with Spanish identity. Without that understanding of Spanish religion, gender norms, and nationalism, the play simply does not resonate with as much potency. As a result, any actor attempting to play an English-language version of this show could be impaired from the start. Or could it be that there are themes that donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t need to be taught, accessible on a deeper, language-less, human-to-human level? In this paper I will analyze the importance of encoded cultural memory to a text, but I also argue that the body, in performance, changes the text â&#x20AC;&#x201C; that embodiment captures themes that translate regardless of language or regional culture. I will explore concepts of embodied cultural memory, introduce basic linguistic theories of language acquisition, ask questions regarding the idea of universality in art, analyze the body as medium, and explore how the body affects/ perpetuates/enriches language-less themes in performance. Language, Cultural Memory, and the Problem of Translation I will continue to use La Casa de Bernarda Alba as a case-study to explore the importance of language in transmitting cultural memory. When polled in class, most of the seminarians agreed that there was something they could not quite

place in my Spanish reading of the text, but it was that “something” that seemed to enrich whatever it was that I said. That “something,” which the body is able to experience but unable to articulate on a semantic level, begs to be explored. Language is perhaps one of the best embodiments of culture. It is developed by a people in reaction their daily experiences and communicative needs. Consequently, it is full of reference and citations that are directly relevant to its specific culture. For example, the Spanish language evidences the culture’s relationship with religion, gender, and nationalism: historically speaking, Spain is a Catholic nation. However, the country had major conflicts with the Muslim world, and from the eighth century was seized and held under Muslim rule. With the reestablishment of Catholicism at the end of the fifteenth century, the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella instituted the Spanish Inquisition, a method of regulating the Catholic faith by forcing Jews and Muslims to convert or leave. As a result, that stalwart promotion of Catholicism, or more generally, themes of oppression and revolt, became an integral part of Spanish culture. Fascinatingly enough, there are still many relics of the Islamic influence on the country’s formation. For example, the extremely common Spanish phrase “ojalá” can be translated to “I hope” or “God willing.” The root here is a reference to Allah, the deity of the Muslim faith. Even the preposition “hasta”, which translates to “until” in English, is directly traceable to the Arabic word (hata). This inherent cultural dichotomy between oppressor and oppressed translates particularly well in the story of La Casa de Bernarda Alba, a play in which each character is a victim of oppression. Spanish is a gendered language. Each and every noun has a gender, and it is immediately recognizable to any native speaker when something is gendered incorrectly. Understandably, Spanish-speaking countries are finding contemporary conversations about gender equality problematic–it is more difficult to equate the genders when the very language they communicate in denotes difference. The journal Sex Roles (Pappas) reported that, on average, countries where gendered languages are spoken ranked lowest on the scale of gender equality. It should come as no surprise, then, that the issues of gender explored in La Casa de Bernarda Alba resonate particularly well in the Spanish Language. Spanish is the second most widely spoken language in the world after Mandarin Chinese, with approximately 425 million Spanish-speakers and 20 countries that claim it as its official language (CIA). In being so widespread, the language itself is full of variation. Each country has its own Spanish, and these differences are immediately detectable in conversation. In fact, Spanish speakers from different parts of the world will have trouble understanding each other at times! For example, Spaniards speak Castellano and have the “Castilian accent”, where consonants such as a soft “c” and “z” are pronounced with a “th”, in a lisping sort of manner. Across the Atlantic, Mexicans are known to speak slowly (my grandmother always said

that Mexicans “sing their language”). Further, Dominicans speak incredibly fast, and Cubans “eat”, or don’t pronounce, the ends of words. The list goes on and on. As a result, the kind of Spanish spoken affects its context – if the play is produced in any Spanish other than the “official” Castellano, the “enforcer” undertones of Bernarda’s speech are lost. This issue of original language in terms of the textuality of a piece is visible everywhere in performance studies. Another salient example can be found in Chekhov, where translation is critical, as Western audiences have especially struggled with Chekhov’s style. Much of Chekhov’s message and intent in the original Russian exists in the silence. It is said that silence is much more meaningful in Russian than in English. Western audiences simply don’t have the same understanding (and comfort with) silence. So of course, Chekhov’s plays, full of meaningful pause and stillness, would have been received with confusion and boredom by the Western world. (Schmidt qtd in Gonzales 6). As “themes are implied, intertwined, and multilayered” through the medium of the text (Weber & Mitchell 121), any interference with the author’s product serves to interfere with his or her intended meaning. This conjures Derrida’s idea of différance, where he illustrates the gap between author and recipient: “Utilizing the same structure of repetition, nothing guarantees that another person will endow the words I use with the particular meaning that I attribute to them” (Reynolds). If this is true, then even the repetition of the same words in the same dialect of the same language of the author’s “original” text cannot guarantee the meaning that will be perceived. It comes as no surprise then that translation is extremely problematic for the interpretation of the text: According to Culler (1976), languages contain concepts which differ radically from those of another, since each language organizes the world differently. When we compare languages we find that different cultures have identified similar social observations and according to their knowledge and experience coin their own phrases. So we can conclude that the disparity among languages are problematic for translators and the more different the concepts of languages are, the more difficult it is to transfer messages from one language to the other. (Adelnia and Dastjerdi 879) Idioms are a particularly problematic issue for translators, and serve as a metaphor for the difficulty of translation as a whole: “Idioms are linguistic expressions or lexical items representing objects, concepts or phenomena of material life particular to a given culture. They are necessary to any language in order to keep the local and

cultural colour of that language” (Adelnia 1). It is that “local and cultural colour” that encompasses the richness of a language’s communicative power. There are many different types of idiom, including colloquialisms, slang, proverbs, allusions, and phrasal verbs. Translators are taught to treat idioms with the utmost sensitivity and reverence – they are worth much, much more than the sum of their parts. There must be some commonality in it all, though. We are all human beings utilizing language as a systematic means for communication, are we not? Fundamental linguistic theories highlight the similarities in the human acquisition of language. Noam Chomsky is a particularly influential figure in the field of linguistics. Through his work, he found that “humans have an innate endowment unique to them and specific to the development of the linguistic capacity” (Gillon 8). He discovered that ethnicity has nothing to do with what language a person ultimately speaks–a Korean child adopted by a French family will learn French just as well as a native-born citizen, nor will they have a predisposition toward the Korean language. Most interestingly in terms of this paper, Chomsky developed his theory of “universal grammar,” where he explores the idea of a universal language acquisition device in the human brain that shapes the way languages were developed, are learned, are spoken, and continue to develop. This raises the question: what else is universal in human communication, specifically that which is connected to language (i.e., text)? In interpreting a text, I have developed a metaphor that I call the “Sediment Metaphor.” A text is layered, with the layers moving in a downward motion, much like the sediment of the earth or Dante’s description of the circles of Hell. Each layer conveys distinct information about the meaning of the text. 1. The topmost layer is the actual language of the text: the poetry, semantics, rhythm and speech patterns, et cetera. 2. The next layers include the politics of the text, in the environment in which the text produced, or in the text iself: issues of race, gender, economics, history, et cetera. 3. Beneath all of that is a molten core of what’s left. What exactly is left? I posit that what underlies the textual layers of context are the universally human themes that resonate regardless of linguistic or political distinctions. It is this “molten core” which makes it possible, regarding John Osbourne’s Look Back in Anger, for a young woman of colour in 2014 to not only understand, but also identify with the struggle of a misogynist white man in post-war England.

The Pursuit of Meaning “Translation is used to transfer meaning from one language to another” (Adelina 879). Language is used to transfer messages, meaning, from one person to another. Language is one of many tools that we use in order to attempt to communicate. As Derrida points out, the very act of communicating a language distinctly alters the message that one may try to send; in other words, there is a distinct différance between the written and the audible. What exactly happens when we take communication off the page and put it in the body? “What I hide by my language, my body utters” (Barthes 45). The body, in any form of communication, onstage or off, serves as a particularly potent medium of communication. As the meaning we seek to communicate originates within our bodies, it seems only reasonable that the body itself communicates these ideas naturally and richly. David Michael Levin points to the body as “medium of semantic grace, a medium that encloses, and is capable of releasing, a purely sensuous power to signify” (126). The body itself is the primary medium through which we may give tangible form to body-less ideas. However, in being a medium, the body also adds to the communication – the performance, if you will – of an idea. As Levin puts it: “[The truth of the human body] originates in the body; it is the body’s ownmost capacity… to receive, as well as bestow, significance” (131). In and of itself, the body colours the significance of the work, and that colour, the fingerprint of the body on the piece, becomes visible just as brushstrokes become visible in the pigment of a painting. This tactile materiality of the work, and the recognition of it, signals the shift away from traditional modes of representation and toward the appreciation of “the gestural performance by itself [constituting] the being of the work” (Levin 122). This feeds directly into performance theory: what is performance, exactly? According to Levin, performance is “simultaneously the performance of a type, and the type itself ” (128). It is a truly reflexive mode of communication where the artist’s hand becomes part of the art itself. If the art-making, present progressive, is such an integral part of the art, then it can only be assumed that performance, and its embodiment, can only exist in the present moment. It exists at Peggy Phelan’s “vanishing point” (Schneider 65). Yet, much of performance exists at the juncture with the theatrical–namely in the vestiges of past expression: archival texts. How can the present-ness of the performance exist simultaneously with the past-ness of the text? Rebecca Schneider explores this very problem: “In the theatre the issue of remains as material document, and the issue of performance as documentable, becomes complicated – necessarily imbricated, chiasmically, with the live body”

(65). However, she goes on to comment on the act of communicating history itself, originating in the body itself, just like any message or meaning intended for communication–she sees “any knowing of history as body-to-body transmission” (74). Embodied communication was historically, and remains, the primary way of communicating the stories that comprise cultural histories. Diana Taylor elaborates on this idea: It would be limiting to understand embodied performance as primarily transmitting those written “essential facts” written in the codices or painted books. The codices communicate far more than facts. The images, so visually dense, transmit knowledge of ritualized movement and everyday social practices. Many other kinds of knowledge that involved no written component were also passed on through expressive culture. (17-18) She continues: “embodied expression has participated and will probably continue to participate in the transmission of social knowledge, memory, and identity pre-and postwriting” (16). If the theoretical goal in transmitting history is to preserve it exactly as it was, Taylor’s view is problematic. Embodied performance of an idea, as we’ve seen, changes and shapes the idea itself in its very perpetuation. The children’s game “Telephone” demonstrates a simplified example of this transfer-dilemma. With every iteration, the message changes. Are our histories then not constant, lost to the continuously changing (and perhaps even unreliable) methods of embodied communication that approach the limits of our communicative capability? Perhaps instead we should embrace this supposed shifting and evolving of our stories. Levin calls upon the choreography of Twyla Tharp as an example. Her work includes influences from all walks of dance history, from social dances like the Charleston to ballet to traditional cultural dance from all over the world. While she calls upon all these historical types, she does not claim to be recreating those types at all; instead, as Arlene Croce puts it, “what Tharp’s dances present is “the stylistic residue” of her sources, and “not the things themselves” (Levin 134). Levin goes on to add “[Tharp] has found a way to present her dancers so that their bodies will be revealed as ontological guardians, capable of being the semantic “sedimentations” of antecedent styles” (136). His use of the word “sedimentations” is key–each layer builds upon the last, and each adds something new to the whole. Sediment provides a wonderful metaphor for the repetition because it is foundational. The repetition and sediment are the underlying structure system for everything that is built on top of it. If the environment layers to the body of the earth, and that resonates in the very foundation of the planet, it must be significant. To apply this metaphor to performance, each live performance of a piece stirs the piece into alive-ness by mixing the art of the

work into the living body, consequently resonating in performer and audience alike. Something interesting–and indeed, completely new–happens when historical modes of communication are created in a contemporary body. The contemporary body colours these communications in unique ways. Indeed, “repetition without change merely brings about the death of meaning and the end of that tradition” (Levin 136). Perhaps, then, it is this uniqueness that is to be embraced. It leads to “the rare pleasure of discovering our past” (Levin 136). I would argue that instead of “discovering” already constructed pasts, in embodied communication we are reconstructing, and indeed revivifying our pasts. It is this witnessing of history coming to life again that is so “pleasurable” to the human being, bound to a linear, forward-moving concept of time. In the way present-tense performance interprets cultural histories existing in the archive–this dissonance between past and present–we approach the “core level” of the aforementioned “Sediment Metaphor.” In this dissonance we find a narrative of commonalities existing across temporal boundaries: the commonalities in the performative difference, or différance, of embodied performance are the themes that resonate in the body, across linguistic, political, and cultural boundaries. It is the human embodiment that translates to all, without the problematic act of literal translation. Auslander states: “In discussion, we often treat acting as philosophers treat language – as a transparent medium which provides access to truth, logos or a grounding concept (such as the playwright’s vision, the directors concept, or the actor’s self ) which functions as a logos within a particular production” (29). Herein lies the problem; the actor’s body, in and of itself, is not a clear window to be looked through. It is just as much the art as the artistic work and message it is communicating. As Auslander puts it: “the performing actor is an opaque medium, an intertext, not a simple text to be read for ‘content’” (29). This equating of acting and language brings us quite easily back to the problem of performing La Casa of Bernarda Alba in any language other than the original Spanish. The problem, as Auslander pointed out, is that we are prone to squinting through the artistic medium in search of the intended meaning. And a translated text would then, as a window to the “meaning,” bend the gaze in different ways that may not even end at the same picture. Is that a risk that we can take in good faith? Are we comfortable with distorting the historical significance of the piece? Of course, I would argue for performing the piece in the original Spanish, in order to preserve so much of the authorial content that is woven into the language itself (level 1 of my Sediment Metaphor). However, I would not be so quick to condemn any other translation of the piece. For, if the piece is to be performed, we will see that nothing is completely constant between performances. The bodies

themselves are what create the performance, not necessarily the language. It is this deeper, corporeal meaning and significance that makes the performance resonate. And it is the dissonance between historical text, and historical setting, and its embodiment in contemporary bodies that not only “sounds again and again” (Schneider 75), but has sounded for the almost 80 years it has been in circulation. What resonates, and therefore, what is truly significant, is the witnessing of Adela’s struggle performed in a body contemporary with our own. It is the echo of Bernarda’s angry tirades in our own 2014 ears. It is the present tense performance that makes the past tense history tangible for us. And it is this temporal dissonance that conjures an overarching narrative of meaning, the constant that threads through all interpretations of a text: refreshed, re-created, and revivified with each iteration of a performance.

Works Cited Adelnia, Amineh, and Hossein Vahid Dastjerdi. “Translation of Idioms: A Hard Task for the Translator.” Theory and Practice in Language Studies 1.7 (2011): 879-83. Print. Auslander, Philip. “Just Be Your Self: Logocentrism and Difference in Performance Theory”. In Acting (Re) Considered: Theories and Practices. Ed. Philip Zarilli. London: Routledge, 1995. Barthes, Roland. A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments. New York: Hill and Wang, 1978. Print. CIA World FactBook. Central Intelligence Agency, 22 June 2014. Web. 5 Dec. 2014. Gillon, Brendan S. «Chapter One.» Language, Linguistics, Semantics: An Introduction. McGill U, 2009. 1-10. Print. Gonzales, Shanti. “Brace Yourself: The Wooster Group’s Living Discourse.” (2014). Print. Levin, David Michael. “The Embodiment of Performance.” Salmagundi 31/32.Fall 1975-Winter 1976 (1975): 120-42. JSTOR. Web. 25 Nov. 2014. Lombardo, Emanuela. “The Influence of the Catholic church on Spanish Political Debates on Gender Policy (1996-2004). In Gender, Religion, Human Rights in Europe. Ed. Kari Elisabeth Borresen and Sara Cabibbo Roma. Herder. 2006. Lorca, Federico. La Casa De Bernarda Alba. Madrid: Ediciones Cátedra, 1976. Print. Pappas, Stephanie. “Gendered Grammar Linked to Global Sexism.” In LiveScience: Scientific News, Articles and Current Events. http://www.livescience.com/18574-gendered-grammar-sex-inequality.html. 21 Feb 2012. Reynolds, Jack. “Jacques Derrida.” Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy: A Peer Edited Academic Resource Scmidt, Paul. “The Sounds of Brace Up! Translating the Music of Checkhov.” The Drama Review 36.4 (Winter 1992). Print. Schneider. Rebecca. “Performing Remains Again.” In Archaeologies of Presence: Art, Performance, and the Persistence of Being. Ed. Gabriella Giannachi, Nick Kaye and Michael Shanks. London and New York: Routledge, 2012. Pp [64]-81. “Spanish Words Derived from Arabic.” Spanish Website: Maintained by Spanish Teachers. 15 Mar. 2000. Web. 5 Dec. 2014. Taylor, Diana. The Archive and the Repertoire: Performing Cultural Memory in the Americas. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2003. [Ch.] 1, “Acts of Transfer.” Pp. [1]-52. Endnotes. Pp. [279]-286.

A “Soldier’s Kiss”: Renaissance Reconfigurations of Hercules By Rachel Newman

lizabethan theatre draws heavily on the classics in reconstructions of certain heroic paradigms. In Marlowe’s Tamburlaine the Great and Shakespeare’s Antony and Cleopatra, the classical figure of Hercules is revised to create a new kind of Early Modern hero in the English Renaissance. Central to both the classical and early modern hero is the idea of defining relationships with women, as well as militaristic representations of heroism that place the hero in an enlarged cosmic struggle. Classical depictions of Hercules repeatedly explore the tension between his role as a warrior and his domestic role as husband and father. Through the characters of Tamburlaine and Marc Antony, Marlowe and Shakespeare attempt to reconcile the dual identities of warrior and lover that had been incompatible in classical literature to reflect a Renaissance ideal of the hero who is able to more smoothly negotiate the conflict between public and private spheres. Central to this discussion is the idea of the tension between private domesticity embodied by the heroes’ female relationships against their more public, militaristic lives in which they are drawn by the ideals of duty and honor. Can these two be reconciled? I would argue that Renaissance representations of Hercules attempt to make this reconciliation between the warrior and the lover possible, with varying degrees of success; a dichotomy which my paper will explore and attempt to respond to. The heroic conflict between the warrior and the lover can be extracted to a greater cultural struggle between the public and private spheres that is negotiated differently by classical and Renaissance heroes. Does the love balance out the hate, or are the two so disparate and incongruent that this isn’t even possible? (Waith 70) Understanding the hero’s complicated relationships with women brings us to certain conclusions about the differences between ancient Greek and Early Modern imaginings of the role of the woman in a Herculean hero’s life. While women in classical mythology play important roles in Hercules’ life, they seem fairly interchangeable and without distinct individuality, although new life is breathed into them through some of the classical retellings of their stories. While it would be hard to imagine Hercules without the women who surround

him, part of his problem is the lack of profound identification with any of them. Indeed, it would seem that these women–who are seemingly deficient in their own distinct personalities–become significant through their relationships with Hercules, which ultimately define them and aid in defining him. The historical and socio-political contexts of the late 16th and early 17th centuries allow for a more Christian reimagining of the importance of women. In Tamburlaine and Antony and Cleopatra, there is a closer focus on a representation of the hero grappling with a central female character who is both his inspiration and his undoing. Zenocrate and Cleopatra both exert a great deal of influence over Tamburlaine and Marc Antony’s ambition and authority serving as both distractions and motivations for these heroes. Waith’s idea that the “capacity to love” embodied by Tamburlaine and Antony is a characteristically Elizabethan value is also built on the “model of the Herculean hero” (Waith 72). Tamburlaine can be definitively likened to Hercules in his incapability of possessing a domestic life with his children and wife that is separate from his militaristic combat. Taking Euripides’ Herakles as a point of comparison, Tamburlaine also engages in the sacrificial killing of members of his family. Indeed, Zenocrate’s death is linked to Megara’s in Herakles, as both must be cleared out of the way for heroic redemption on the part of the Herculean figure. Tamburlaine’s deification of Zenocrate clarifies the question of who the gods are to Tamburlaine. This central relationship is the closest thing to a divinity that Tamburlaine has besides himself, as even on his death-bed he calls for “the hearse of fair Zenocrate” and has it placed by his “fatal chair,” serving “as parcel of my funeral” (2 Tamburlaine, V.iii.210-212). Indeed, if we are to understand the relationship between Tamburlaine and Zenocrate as the linking of love and war in one corpus, Tamburlaine’s inability to divorce the properties that he possesses of each testifies to the incompatibility of the lover with the warrior. As a military leader, Tamburlaine can be seen as quite Herculean in his ruthless and tireless pursuit of conquest and warfare (Waith 63). Like Hercules’ and his unending labors, Tamburlaine works within a constant cycle of invasion and overthrow, subjugation and terror. The repetition of conquests in Part 2 and lack of distinction in the foes Tamburlaine comes across has the effect of pitting Tamburlaine against the world. This testifies to the Herculean nature of heroism being a constant reassertion of power, with maintenance of heroism as just as important as initial victory. By translating Zenocrate into part of Tamburlaine’s warrior identity, Marlow is attempting to reconcile the Herculean warrior with the Herculean lover. Through Tamburlaine’s relationship with Zenocrate, it is clear early on that she becomes the stimulus for much of his heroic action throughout the play. When we see him for the first time in Act I, he is in the process of wooing Zenocrate using courtly speech, demonstrating his transformative power over language. He uses rhetoric

in order to elevate their courtship to a godly sphere, deifying her with “Zenocrate, lovelier than the love of Jove…Thy person is worth more to Tamburlaine that the possession of the Persian crown” (1 Tamburlaine, I.ii.87-92). His avowal of “I am a lord, for so my deeds shall prove,” is followed by a series of definitions of his determination and what he means to achieve with Zenocrate at his side. This Marlovian over-reaching classifies Tamburlaine as not only a Humanistic character, but also a Renaissance version of Hercules. His self-determination in conquest and romantic pursuit comes by virtue of his manipulation of language and rhetoric. (1 Tamburlaine, I.ii.35) If this is extended to Marlowe himself, one can see how the connection between attained power through self-determination and the manipulation of persuasive language is especially important in Elizabethan literary contexts. For Tamburlaine, love of Zenocrate is what drives him, and his desire becomes the deep-rooted motivation for material conquest and military might in the play: “thy beauty will be soon resolved. My martial prizes with five hundred men…Shall all we offer to Zenocrate, And then myself to fair Zenocrate” (1 Tamburlaine, I.ii.101-105). The power of Tamburlaine’s relationship with Zenocrate is also revealed through her ability to act as his representative in Act III of Part 1. The female battle of words that Zenocrate wages with Zabina on behalf of Tamburlaine while he is fighting Bajezeth accentuates the differences between private and public spheres of fighting. Here domestic and military versions of combat are equalized. The ritual crowning of Zenocrate through the ceremonious marriage at the end of Part 1 is a consolidation of their dually military and romantic relationship, and she operates as a mirror of his success and a representation of his victory. The bookending of both Part 1 and Part 2 with domestic tableaus of Tamburlaine and Zenocrate marks her importance for him and the ways in which he is trying to constitute a more static identity reconciling the warrior and lover through her. However, this reconciliation will ultimately be undermined through Zenocrate’s death and Tamburlaine’s spiraling out of control. In Part 1, Tamburlaine’s tenure of Zenocrate on one side and fame and honor in conquest on the other are not mutually exclusive. Indeed, there is some concern displayed early on about this relationship, as Agydas asks Zenocrate, “how can you fancy one that looks so fierce…who when he shall embrace you in his arms, will tell how many thousand men he slew?” (1 Tamburlaine, III.ii.40-43) Tamburlaine’s equation of love of Zenocrate with his martial prowess leaves the compatibility of love and war in this relationship highly questionable. By Part 2, it is difficult to tell which virtues Tamburlaine espouses more dearly. In Part 1, Tamburlaine was willing to spare Zenocrate’s father for the sake of their love, but by Part 2 he does not listen when she beseeches him to cease military pursuits, as his obsession with crowns and conquests has not been thoroughly purged, and his fixation with following up

on his word prohibits him from breaking an oath (2 Tamburlaine, I.iv.9-16). This passage embodies a share of the conflict between the warrior and the lover in one body, as Tamburlaine’s self-absorption and conceptions of duty and honor take him away from his more domestic duties as a lover, which is particularly Herculean (Waith 76). Tamburlaine’s Machiavellian transformation by Part 2 is driven by his relationship with Zenocrate. Tamburlaine’s duty, honor, self-absorption do not only function narratively to draw him away from his duties as a lover, but these various traits are indeed encouraged by Zenocrate herself. Clearly, trying to reconcile the warrior and the lover in this instance is not only impossible, but also self-destructive as the romantic pursuits are corrupted and lead to more militaristic pursuits. The death of Zenocrate is an especially interesting passage for understanding Tamburlaine’s Machiavellian qualities, as even his rhetorical power is not enough to save her from mortality: “Black is the beauty of the brightest day, The golden ball of heaven’s eternal fire…That this my life may be as short to me as are the days of sweet Zenocrate” (2 Tamburlaine, II.IV.1-38). While Techelles reminds him that “raging cannot make her live,” Zenocrate’s death is what drives Tamburlaine to further bloodthirsty conquest and barbarism, proclaiming, “This cursed town will I consume with fire, / Because this place bereft me of my love” (2 Tamburlaine, III.iv.120-138). The comparisons to Hercules here are fairly inherent; Herculean heroes frequently embody raging anger. While it is apparent that Zenocrate must die for their sons to assume their legacy, it is also evident that structurally Zenocrate’s death operates as a further impetus for Tamburlaine’s ascent into godhood. If Tamburlaine’s relationship with Zenocrate functions as part of the domestic, private sphere that the hero must engage in, his relationship with his sons and questions of inheritance also figures in this discussion. Another comparison to Renaissance heroism and classical representations of Hercules is available through Tamburlaine’s over-ambition and immortal aspirations. The notion of the hero figure as rising beyond his mortality and ascending into the world of the gods is seen a lot through Hercules. In a similar manner, calling himself “the scourge of highest Jove,” “a terror to the world,” Tamburlaine asserts his position as “greater” than God in his valiance, pride, and ambition (2 Tamburlaine, IV.iii.24, IV.i.112, 149-152, 198). In a Herculean manner, he is likened to a demigod, which is later extended to his transformation into a god itself by Part 2 (Waith 66). The mythological precedent for this type of over-reaching is not lost on Marlowe, as images of Icarus flying too close to the sun come to mind in some of Tamburlaine’s later speeches. Indeed, the idea of Tamburlaine taking on the world and the heavens themselves is seen through his speech in Act IV: “I’ll ride in golden armor like the sun,

and in my helm a triple plume shall spring, spangled with diamonds dancing in the air, to note me emperor of the three-fold world.” (2 Tamburlaine, IV.iii.115-118) Of course, we’re left with the problem at the end of the play that comes from the establishment of an order dependent on a single ruler. When Tamburlaine dies, presumably so does his work, as his son Amyras concludes: “Meet heaven and earth, and here let all things end, For earth hath spent the pride of all her fruit, And heaven consumed his choicest living fire. Let earth and heaven his timeless death deplore, For both their worths can equal him no more.” (2 Tamburlaine, V.iii.249-253) Indeed, if Tamburlaine is not a relatable or reachable figure for humans to aspire, he is nonetheless a “possibility for the imagination of humans,” for through Tamburlaine, Marlowe “has demonstrated our capacity to project imaginatively what is not us and then respond to the projection as a way of defining and affirming what is us” (Rothschild 65-66). This way of understanding Tamburlaine’s militarism and ambition helps secure what exactly it is about him that is both reachable and distant, understandable and problematic. This connection to his militarism is something that comes into conflict with the lover aspects. In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare, like Marlowe, also renegotiates the complicated relationship between the warrior and lover in the Herculean tradition. While Cleopatra is not by definition an unsuitable match for Antony, she distracts him and interferes with his ability to be the warrior that Rome wants him to be. By virtue of his relationship with her Antony is “transform’d into a strumpet’s fool,” who “hath given his empire up to a whore” (Antony and Cleopatra I.i.15-17, III. vi.1897). The idea that contact with Cleopatra degrades Antony calls attention to the problem that is posed by this relationship and Antony’s difficulty in navigating diplomatic and romantic associations between these two worlds. Antony’s sense of losing himself, which will be explored further, may be in some part due to Cleopatra’s influence over him, as the conflicting duties of being a lover and a warrior in different worlds divides his conceptions of himself (Waith 114). Even Antony proposes that a resolution could only be achieved if he and Cleopatra were to “find out new heaven, new earth,” and Shakespeare is attempting to construct through reimaginings of the heroic duty (Antony and Cleopatra I.ii.21). The idea that Antony is undone by Cleopatra, seen later in the failure of the Battle of Actium, is recognized by Antony as early as Act I. He disregards the messages from Caesar and states: “Here is my space. Kingdoms are clay…the nobleness of life is to do thus,” embracing Cleopatra and further declaring, “when such a mutual pair and

such a twain can do’t, in which I bind, on pain of punishment, the world to weet we stand up peerless” (Antony and Cleopatra I.i.40-49). This emphasizes Antony’s recognition of the problem at hand, but also it announces Antony’s attempt to reconcile this conflict. Cleopatra is a wily, powerful woman that is not only an extremely influential and charismatic ruler in the play, but also a heroine in her own right. As much as the Romans devalue and degrade her, they nonetheless recognize her attraction, especially evident in Enobarbus’ speeches in Act II: “Age cannot wither her, Nor custom stale her infinite variety: other women cloy The appetites they feed: but she makes hungry Where she most satisfies; for vilest things Become themselves in her: that the holy priests Bless her when she is riggish.” (Antony and Cleopatra II.ii.963-969) Her influence over those around her, including Antony, suggests her great rhetorical and political power within the historical contexts of the play, as well as her structural importance in the work. The idea that she stands behind Antony as a possible source of his power is expressed when she recalls how she “hooked” Antony in Act III, saying “I laugh’d him out of patience; and that night I laugh’d him into patience… whilst I wore his sword Philippan” (Antony and Cleopatra II.v.1072-1076). The challenge that Cleopatra provides Antony which alternately thrills and emasculates him is representative of their relationship as a whole, complicating Antony’s eventual choice between these two incompatible worlds and his battling identities. Cleopatra both arms and disarms him is also in play through the ritual arming scene where Eros (or the personification of love) and Cleopatra help him prepare for battle, significantly bringing together the lover and warrior mindsets. Antony’s relationship with Cleopatra allows for a potential compromise between his role as a lover and warrior because Cleopatra, while being his lover, also bolsters his warrior aspect by helping him prepare for battle. However, this reconciliation is challenged by Cleopatra’s flight in the Battle of Actium, after which Antony compares himself tragically to the heroes of antiquity and Homer, saying: “Off, pluck off: The seven-fold shield of Ajax cannot keep The battery from my heart. O, cleave, my sides! Heart, once be stronger than thy continent, 3030 Crack thy frail case! Apace, Eros, apace. No more a soldier: bruised pieces, go; You have been nobly borne.” (Antony and Cleopatra, IV.xiv.3026-3035) Placing this speech in the context of Antony’s belief in Cleopatra’s death, but just following his defeat in battle by itself seems to reconcile the conflict between a

warrior and lover, as Antony “speak[s] to a lover’s heart as well as a soldier’s” (Waith 116). Marlowe and Shakespeare’s reimaginings of the hero stress the particular importance of militaristic leadership in viewing how they operate within heroic frameworks. Tamburlaine’s heroism is twofold: his meritocratic ambition leads him to rise from the position of inconsequential shepherd to world conqueror, and he possesses the ability to create a new world order against all odds through physically enforced might and the power of language. His influence as a rhetorician comes from the persuasive power his words have over his own soldiers, his subjects, those he conquerors, and his allies: “won with thy words, and conquered with thy looks” (1 Tamburlaine, II.ii.228). The way he reshapes the meanings of words by virtue of his prestige is interesting considering Marlowe’s position as a writer coming into his own and making this a manifesto for radical poetry and a human-centered universe with language as the higher power. This causes us to question what genre Tamburlaine should be classified into, since it combines elements of medieval morality plays with new components of Marlowe’s ambition-seeking types. Marlowe seems to be creating a new method of theatre using origins of the old, just as Tamburlaine is creating a new world order built on the backs of those he conquers. This Machiavellian power hierarchy of absorbing old methods in establishing the new, and rising through the downfall of other kings distinguishes Tamburlaine as a meritocratic ruler who is inserting himself into the hereditary function of monarchy by becoming his own heir of the vanquished. The divestiture and symbolic arming, which hearkens back to classical models in Hercules, introduces the notion of the warrior waging war to make peace as a justification of war and conquest, however it is difficult to tell how far this is carried out in Tamburlaine. As much as Tamburlaine intends to create a new world order, the inheritance system he sets in place following his death challenges the novelty of his regime. By extension, one must ask how new the type of theatre Marlowe is claiming to spearhead is, and whether Marlowe and Tamburlaine are true usurpers, or have they both taken advantage of the strategic political and literary contexts they’ve inherited? The idea posited by Waith that Hercules is “revitalized” through the figure of Tamburlaine can be better understood by looking at their warrior-like similarities (Waith 63). As a military hero Marc Antony diverges a great deal from Tamburlaine and Hercules. While he offers an alternative form of government to Caesar through the union of Egypt and Rome in empire, the probability of his success is doubtful. Indeed, Antony’s struggles with self-coherence and identity solidification cast doubt upon his ability to coherently unify an empire, since he seems unable to unify his own person. Acting within the historical framework of political upheaval through a coup, there is an epic sweep to Antony and Cleopatra that corresponds to the epic conquests of Tamburlaine and Hercules’ pan-Hellenism. However, Antony’s

ability to move within the two incompatible worlds of Egypt and Rome does not necessitate his ability to unite them, and indeed it epitomizes the fragmentation within his own identity more than anything. While his Roman self emphasizes the importance of duty and honor through military might, his hesitation and lack of desire to wage war because of the distractions he’s offered in Egypt sets him up in a cycle of trying to make peace with the warring identities within and outside of himself. This attests to the Herculean notion of maintenance of power and in this way Antony falls short of the heroism that he should aspire to, as his “central problem is his own conduct towards himself ” (Gardner 19). Direct connections between Antony and Hercules are present, as Shakespeare relied heavily upon Plutarch’s assertions that Antony’s family was descended from Hercules. The idea that Antony is not living up to his full heroic potential is clear through the ways in which the Romans talk about Antony’s transformation in Egypt. In questioning Antony’s intentions in the opening scene, the Roman soldiers state: “sometimes when he is not Antony, he comes too short of that great property which should still go with Antony” (Antony and Cleopatra I.i.72). This “great property” of Antony’s heroism is constantly called into question during his stay in Egypt. Roman emphasis on definition and solidification challenges the resolution between Antony’s heroic and romantic attributes and by Roman standards this reconciliation is not possible. Antony himself expresses anxieties about his identity, saying “these strong Egyptian fetters I must break, or lose myself in dotage,” suggesting that he recognizes that his time split between Rome and Egypt is resulting in a loss of what he holds to be intrinsically himself (Antony and Cleopatra I.ii.203-205). He also recognizes his malleability in Egypt and how even his own desires replicate the fluidity of that setting. Upon hearing of Fulvia’s death he notes that “What our contempt doth often hurl from us, we wish it ours again; the present pleasure, by revolution lowering, does become the opposite of itself,” and he clearly sees himself becoming his own opposite (Antony and Cleopatra I.ii.216-220). This idea of warring against oneself is at the root of the problem for the conjoint warrior and lover. Indeed, when Antony leaves Cleopatra to return to Rome, he declares, “I go from hence thy soldier, servant; making peace or war as thou affect’st,” expressing his desire to reconcile the warrior and lover within him (Antony and Cleopatra I.iii.376-378). Even then Cleopatra mocks him, calling him “Herculean Roman,” and saying that his instability makes her “a very Antony” (Antony and Cleopatra I.iii. 396, 402-403). The paradox between the Roman need for definition against the Egyptian desire for fluidity calls into question Antony’s faltering identity as he is straddling these two vastly different worlds and worldviews. Although Elizabethan reimaginings of Hercules are attempting to resolve these difficulties of being a warrior and lover, the degree to which Shakespeare is successful in this is problematic. The play itself can be viewed as a series of attempts at Antony’s inner

reconciliation, or the “attempt to fulfill the totality of his manhood” in being a dutiful Roman soldier as well as a contented Egyptian lover (Gardner 21). Indeed, the episodic nature of the play’s structure allows for a representation of Hercules’ constant traveling and laboring (Waith 121). In his return to Egypt, Antony forsakes his efforts to readopt tradition Roman values, and he tries to “be his whole self–lover and soldier–beside Cleopatra” (Gardner 23). As the prospect of war with Caesar draws nearer, Antony declares, “if I lose mine honor, I lose myself,” and this is one way of looking at his death in the following scenes (Antony and Cleopatra III.iv.1775-1776). His degrading loss at Actium that is partially due to Cleopatra, contributes to his loss of honor and subsequent loss of himself. The importance of the “public eye” that Maecenas notes is typically Roman and it suggests that Antony is attempting to introduce some measures of Roman politicization of public life into Egyptian rule (Antony and Cleopatra III.vi.1833). Antony’s crowning of Cleopatra and the bestowal of crowns. This attempt at restoring some measure of his identity through ritual power and perceived authority in front of a crowd is what constitutes his interiority. However, in battle this will not prove sufficient. The Romans call him “adulterous,” and this isn’t only referring to his faithless relationship with Octavia, but also hints at adultery against himself (Antony and Cleopatra III.vi.1927). By the end, Antony has reached a measure of Tamburlaine’s over-confident ambition in his insistence on fighting Caesar at sea instead of on land where he is stronger. This preoccupation with the water and the possibilities that the sea offers suggests the over-infusion of Egyptian values into Antony’s predominantly Roman consciousness (Antony and Cleopatra III.vii. 1970-2000). When Antony and Cleopatra’s forces fail at sea, their soldiers lament Antony’s split identity, saying, “Had our general been what he knew himself, it had gone well,” justifying their subsequent abandonment of him through his abandonment of himself (Antony and Cleopatra III.x.2094-2095). Antony himself bemoans this loss of himself, saying, “I have fled myself…my very hairs do mutiny…I have lost command,” of himself as well as his forces (Antony and Cleopatra III.xi.2118, 2124, 2134). Although Antony attempts a resurgence of power with “I am Antony yet!” he is unable to carry this out and only through his Stoic suicide is he able to reassert his true self and regain authority over his body and his fate: “our terrene moon is now eclipsed; and it portends alone the fall of Antony” (Antony and Cleopatra III.xiii.2364, 2440). The enigmatical passage in the later scenes of Act III when the soldiers see something and mark that “tis the god Hercules, whom Antony loved, now leaves,” suggests that his attempts to embody a Herculean heroism are ultimately unsuccessful (Antony and Cleopatra IV.iii.2603-2604). Before his death, he claims “the shirt of Nessus is upon me,” and he commands the “hands that grasp’d the heaviest club” to “subdue” his “worthiest self,” as his inability to carry

out Hercules’ power is what kills him (Antony and Cleopatra IV.xii.2953-2957). His rage before his death- “Teach me, Alcides, thou mine ancestor, thy rage” (Antony and Cleopatra IV.xii.2954) - likens him to Hercules’ anger in Women of Trachis upon his perceived betrayal by Deianira, and Antony’s temper certainly places him on the level of a Herculean hero (Waith 119). His final call for death comes in his recognition that “here I am Antony, yet cannot hold this visible shape,” and even his attempts to kill himself cannot be completely carried out until he is reunited with Cleopatra, suggesting the hope of ultimate unity of both their love and his identity in death if not in life (Antony and Cleopatra IV.xiv.2993-2994). Antony’s militaristic heroism is complicated by the ways in which he is torn between Rome and Egypt, and this conflict between the public and the private is exactly what constitutes the inconsistencies between the warrior and the lover which Antony is only able to resolve through death. The “world conqueror” Antony used to be is answered through conquest of himself (Waith 115). Tamburlaine and Antony and Cleopatra are about creating a new world order against all odds- for Tamburlaine this is a vast empire through material conquest and for Antony and Cleopatra this is about uniting Egypt and Rome as an alternative government to Augustus Caesar. However, Hercules doesn’t create an empire. In myth, Hercules’ labors for the good of humanity, killing monsters and performing the tasks set out for him by both worldly and godly rulers. While he travels broadly and creates a Pan-Hellenic identity and reputation, this has more to do with his mythologization during his lifetime than any kind of selfish ambition. However, Hercules can be understood to have a globalizing influence, and his “vastness” is exploited through characters like Tamburlaine and Antony (Waith 63). Hercules is certainly implicated in the warrior versus lover conflict, but his warring mentality does not come from fighting humans, but rather monsters. Is perhaps Renaissance heroism too self-interested and prone to corruption? The evolution of the use of “the military conqueror” as the favorite protagonist of Elizabethan tragedy, as seen in Tamburlaine and Marc Antony as reimaginings of a Herculean hero adds to this (Rothschild, 64). Of course, one must take into account the Christian perspective that Marlowe and Shakespeare are relying on. From the Elizabethan-Christian outlook, mankind has already been saved and now it falls to the duty of the hero to fight those who don’t believe in a Christian God. The monsters that the Herculean hero fight against now are human- they are the foreign, the Muslim enemy, or the familiar, homogenized enemy. However, the idea of the Herculean hero as “associated with the ideal of freedom” is certainly played out through a figure like Tamburlaine (Waith 64). The Christian manipulations of heroism as well as the Renaissance inclusion of militarism to Herculean heroes adds new layers of understanding how Hercules is to be understood in this age and past ones. Marlowe and Shakespeare

both draw on mythological focus points in constructing their heroes, but there the vastly different values of these periods in historical contextualization complicates our relationship to the hero. Through Elizabethan theatrical heroism there is a Humanistic emphasis on the potential of human beings and the idea of man being the measure of all things, which is a more Christian imagining of the hero’s place in a world in which Christ has already come. Indeed, through “the tension between divine willfulness and human morality” both Marlowe and Shakespeare have nailed down the “central paradox of the Renaissance” which is the Humanistic notion of humans “self-consciously taking into their hands the shaping of their world, yet doing so with awe and fear of the human will” (Rothschild 61). Although Shakespeare and Marlowe’s reinterpretations of the Herculean figure pull away from their classical models, they continue to negotiate the conflict between the warrior and the lover Tamburlaine and Marc Antony both struggle with reconciling their military life and the domestic lives. For instance, do the deaths of Tamburlaine and Antony suggest that love and war are fundamentally incompatible? In Sophocles’ Women of Trachis as well as Euripides’ Herakles, conflict is initiated when Hercules returns home from his labors, as he is unable to assimilate back into the domestic environment once he has been constantly living with the militaristic mindset. In both of these texts the consequences are deadly, for him and those around him. We see this repeated in Tamburlaine as love of Zenocrate pushes him to constantly expand and wage war and only through death is he able to reconcile the dual warrior and lover mentality. In Antony and Cleopatra too, Antony is ultimately unable to reconcile the split identity he is warring between and only through death can be reconstitute himself and unite with Cleopatra without consequences for either of their countries. It seems that the closest that Renaissance authors could arrive at reconciling the private and public in the hero is resolution and reunion through death, which is actually more than we are privy to in Hercules. While Hercules is given his apotheosis, he is not reunited with either of his former lovers in heaven and his new immortal wife is a poor substitute for achieving what he could not manage on earth. Through literature it is clear that death, or the “unearthly consummation” of the Herculean heroes, is what ultimately enables the resolution of warrior and lover, as essentially the two are incompatible for mortals (Gardner 2).

Works Cited Euripides. Herakles. The Complete Greek Drama, ed. Whitney J. Oates and Eugene O’Neill, Jr. Trans. E.P. Coleridge. New York: Random House, 1938. Galinsky, Karl. The Herakles theme: the adaptations of the hero in literature from Homer to the twentieth century. Oxford: Blackwell, 1972. Gardner, C.O. “Themes of Manhood in Shakespeare Tragedies: Some Notes on ‘Othello,’ ‘King Lear,’ ‘Macbeth,’ ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ and ‘Coriolanus,’ ” in Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, No. 30. Jstor. Berghahn Books, 1968. 19-43 Marlowe, Christopher. Tamburlaine the Great. Ed. J.W. Harper. London: Ernst Benn Limited, 1971. Shakespeare, William. Antony and Cleopatra. George Mason University, Open Source Shakespeare, 2003-2014. Rothschild, Herbert B. “The Conqueror-Hero, the Besieged City, and the Development of an Elizabethan Protagonist,” in The South Central Modern Language Association, Vol. 3, No. 4. John Hopkins University Press, 1986. Jstor. 54-77 Sophocles. Women of Trachis. Trans. Robert M. Torrance. Houghton Mifflin, 1966. Waith, Eugene M. The Herculean hero in Marlowe, Shakespeare and Dryden. New York: Columbia University, 1962.

In the Presence of Adah: the Transnational Feminist Voice in Second-Class Citizen By Brigid Savage

econd-Class Citizen, by Buchi Emecheta (1974), follows the story of Adah, a black woman fighting to define herself against the systematized patriarchy and racial discrimination of her postcolonial setting. The novel demonstrates that not all women negotiate oppression in the same manner, but that intersections of gender, race, ethnicity and class are influential in shaping lived experiences. Because the novel depicts the life of an African woman experiencing patriarchal oppression and racism, there is a danger that the story will be taken as a representation of the supposed struggle that all African women face â&#x20AC;&#x201C; Adah at once embraces and simultaneously refutes the responsibility of this representation. The complex method in which Adah interacts with British and Nigerian culture complicates her character, segregating her from Western feminism and thus allowing her to establish an independent form of feminism, which is manifested in the novel by the Presence. Adahâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s experiences of oppression are not relegated to one location or time, but accumulate throughout her life as she moves between spaces. The intersections of class, race and gender embodied by Adah influence her struggle to define herself and resist the forces that aim to destroy her, allowing her to find her transnational feminist voice. Second-Class Citizen follows the journey of Adah as she moves her family from Lagos, Nigeria to London, England. Her aim in doing so is to obtain better economic and educational opportunities for herself and her family. When Adah arrives in London, the dreams that motivated her to migrate are quickly devastated. Second-Class Citizen was published in 1974, during the second wave of feminism, which addressed issues like reproductive rights, sexuality, family, the workplace and official legal inequalities. The movement aimed to promote the creation of social policies that would respect womenâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s rights in regard to these issues. Some postcolonial feminists have condemned the movement, arguing that it remains blind to the intersections of race and class that perpetuate the oppression of non-white

women. In her article, “Under Western Eyes,” Chandra Talpade Mohanty criticizes Western feminist texts that focus on women in non-westernized nations. She argues that such texts produce an image of the “Third World Woman” as a singular monolithic subject, which homogenizes the identities of the diverse women who emerge from distinct social and cultural dynamics. She goes on to argue that to assume the category of “women” as an already constituted, coherent group with indistinguishable desires, regardless of class and race, implies that notions of gender and patriarchy can be applied universally and cross-culturally (Mohanty 336-7). Second-Class Citizen disrupts this claim, illustrating that gender is understood based on location and culture. Emecheta begins to demonstrate this notion by introducing her readers to twentieth-century Nigeria, a colonized state (soon to gain independence) where patriarchal traditions actually predate colonization. In Lagos, the city where Adah grows up, social customs dictate that boys be given preference over girls, allowing boys additional privileges, such as formal education. In Nigerian society, the value of a woman depends on her ability to produce and care for her children. Adah is not expected to be educated or to find a job; she is expected to start a family. Adah continually resists the patriarchal systems of Nigerian culture, insisting that she be educated and choose her own husband. Even so, when she marries Francis, she becomes the property of her in-laws, and they hold the right to tell her and her husband how to behave. When Adah emigrates, she discovers that the experiences of patriarchy she faced in Nigeria are significantly different from English ones. In England, no one interferes when Adah’s husband becomes abusive. Without extended family members to regulate Francis, Adah must learn to negotiate patriarchy in an entirely new way. When the family is evicted from their flat, Adah realizes they must go see the Mr. Noble, a Nigerian landlord of questionable character. In order to get Francis to agree, Adah must use her own body and sexuality: She made sure she chose the right moment. These moments were usually when Francis was pressed with desire for her. She would encourage him to work himself up and then bring up important discussions like where they were going to live. On this particular occasion, Francis was like an enraged bull. (85) The different manifestations of patriarchy that Adah resists in Nigeria and in England suggest that patriarchal structures are contingent upon location and culture. This notion opposes that of Western feminism, which argues that patriarchy is universal and cross-cultural. Assuming patriarchy to be universal in structure across cultural boundaries is paradoxically destructive to the feminist cause. This system of understanding,

where women are perceived of as a coherent group in all contexts, structures the world into dichotomous terms such that women are always seen in opposition to men, patriarchy always implies male dominance, and the religious, legal, economic and familial systems are assumed to be created by men (Mohanty 350). Additionally, Mohanty argues that when Western feminist writing looks to address stories of third world women, they produce a paradigm where western feminists alone become the “subjects” of history and where third world women never emerge from their “object” status (Mohanty 351). Emecheta subverts this paradigm by producing an intimate narrative that is reflective of her main character. Adah is a subjective voice in that she experiences feelings, beliefs, desires and power, and these experiences are chronicled in the form of the novel, reflecting Adah’s personality and subjectivity. Just as Adah is an amalgamation of cultures, the form of Second-Class Citizen draws on stylistic features of both Nigerian and British descent. The medium of the novel is colonial, but is reimagined by postcolonial narration. Adah’s colonial education in English is reflected in the book, organized into discrete chapters and specifically written in English. Comparatively, her Nigerian influence is manifested in the development of the narrative through seasons. The most significant moments of her life are framed by the seasons, with her arrival in the United Kingdom in the spring, the birth of her child Babu occurring during the winter, and her fourth child, Dada, born during a “glorious” summer (163). Additionally, the compositional style of the text reflects Adah’s thought processes, fluctuating between expository narrations and stream-of-consciousness writing. Whenever Adah is beginning to feel afraid or uncomfortable, the text matches her panicked thoughts. The novel’s prose reflects her subjectivity, mirroring Adah’s internal dialogue as well as the manner in which she organizes her world as she balances the fighting influences of two different societies. The intersections of Adah’s identity influence the social treatment she receives once she arrives in Britain. In Nigeria, Adah is treated like a second-class citizen because of her gender. In England, she is second-class not only because of her gender, but also because of her race. In her essay, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Colour,” Kimberle Crenshaw explores how intersectional location is imperative when studying instances of violence against women of colour, specifically due to the fact that these experiences are often the product of intersecting patterns of racism and sexism. She argues that politicizing violence against women does not address women of colour’s experiences, and that both antiracist and feminist attempts to understand rape and violence against women are incomplete and further marginalize women of colour (1244). In Second-Class Citizen, Adah experiences subjugation not only at

the hands of her husband, but also by state policies that exclude women of colour from accessing social aid in the same manner as a white woman. Adah’s isolation from her community leaves her blind to some of the policies that are supposed to assist women in her situation. This isolation is partly self-imposed and partly imposed upon her by her abusive and controlling husband; “Francis did not believe in friendship […] they never read the papers, it was a waste of money, Francis had maintained. They had neither radio nor television. They were so completely cut off from any type of mass media” (95). As a consequence of her isolation, Adah is cut off from state assistance, which would allow for her to leave her husband; “if only she had known, she would have left Francis earlier. But she did not know” (160). The invisibility of aid is due to a lack of understanding on the part of the British government, which does not fully consider how the articulations of economic status, race, gender and ethnicity meet in a woman’s life to restrict her from seeking support. Adah’s journey to overcome the obstacles placed in her path by systemic racism and sexism reach a pinnacle when she is admitted to hospital to have her third child, Babu. The birth nearly kills Adah, and it is during her stay at the hospital that she reaches a critical realization. During labour, Adah remembers that she had heard or read of husbands who became worried at moments like these, in case their wives died. She realizes at this moment that Francis does not care; “To him Adah was immortal. She just had to be there, bearing his children, working for him, taking his beatings, listening to his sermons” (106). In her pain-driven haze, Adah finally recognizes her husband for what he is, and understands what he believes her to be. When Adah awakes, she is in a ward surrounded by other mothers. Her hospital stay marks a turning point in the novel, where she begins to feel a connection to the women around her: They were kind, those women in the ward […] they seemed to be telling her to look around her, that there were still many beautiful things to be seen, which she had not seen, that there were still several joys to be experienced which she had not yet experienced, that she was still young, that her whole life was still ahead of her. (111) Adah, made vulnerable by her body as it heals, is finally exposed to the lives and thoughts of other women. She quietly absorbs their experiences, and recognizes that the abuse she has suffered under Francis is undeserved. On the fourth day of her stay, the doctors remove the tube that had sealed Adah’s mouth; Adah regains the voice she had lost in the ominous shadow of her husband, “she could now talk, but could not move about on the bed, and her back was sore. She did not mind that, for was not her mouth free at last?” (114) For Adah, regaining her voice

symbolizes rediscovering her ability to resist. Despite embracing her strength as a woman, capable of surviving a painful and arduous childbirth, Adah is still quite vulnerable to the racism she perceives to be surrounding her. When leaving the hospital, Adah asks Francis to bring her a lappa with “Nigerian Independence, 1960” written all over it. She wants the women to remember where she came from, and that Nigeria was independent. By doing this, Adah is telling them that she is independent, too. Adah is extremely aware of her ethnicity as she is leaving the hospital, having internalized some of the racism that she has experienced in England. She is certain that all the other women are ridiculing her: “that the women were all laughing at her and saying ‘poor nigger!’ […] Did those women in the ward really admire her baby or were they just curious to see what a new African baby looked like?” (125) Adah is acutely aware of the differences between herself and the other women in the ward, for although they all come from the same experience of motherhood, they can never fully understand her experience as a postcolonial black woman living in the colonizer’s domain. Adah is a complex character wrought with inner battles and contradictions that make her difficult to define. She is an amalgamation of cultures and circumstances, which disrupt the notion that she represents any one people or group. In her essay, “Feminism in/and postcolonialism,” Deepika Bahri uses Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak’s “Can the Subaltern Speak?” to discuss the figure of the subaltern woman, who is inevitably condemned to be misunderstood or misrepresented by those with the power to represent (Bahri 199). Bahri argues that a postcolonial feminist perspective requires that one pay close attention to the “collusion of patriarchy and colonialism” (202). She identifies four key terms (“representations,” “Third World woman,” “essentialism,” and “identity”) that aid in establishing identity as relational and historical rather than essential and fixed (203). “Representation” has multiple and sometimes confusing connotations. First, the term may be used to describe a semiotic principle that indicates that something is taking the place for something else, or that some person or group is speaking on the behalf of some other person or group. Again drawing on Spivak, Bahris outlines her two principal definitions of representation. The first is deemed Vertreten and it means to tread in someone else’s shoes. The second is Darstellung where Dar means “being there” and stellen is “to place.” Therefore, representing is done in two ways: by proxy and by portrait (Bahri 204). In colonial texts, those who are “other” to the dominant discourse have no say in their portrayal and are condemned to be “spoken for” by those who command the authority and means to speak (204). Thus, representation is used as an ideological tool, and those with the power of representation hold the power over this tool. Second-Class Citizen gives voice to an individual who is

silenced by her environment, exploring her subjective experience and accordingly granting her the control that comes with it. When Adah regains her voice in the hospital, she begins to make the changes that allow her to represent herself, and not be wrongly spoken for by others. Adah is inherently intertextual, a web of diverse experiences and worldviews, so it is difficult to assign to her the responsibility of representing any one group of people. As a librarian, Adah’s range of knowledge expands beyond her personal experiences to include the works of a global network of authors, writing from their own individual perspectives. In her article, “Gendered Cartographies of Knowledge,” Ella Shohat argues that genders, sexualities, races, classes, nations and even continents occur not as secluded entities, but rather as a “permeable interwoven relationality” (2). Maps of knowledge are thus linked with others in the transnational age, characterized by the migration of images, sounds, goods and populations (2). It is useful to read Adah as a continuum, whose intersections of culture, race and gender influence her voice and the authenticity behind it. Her identity is complex and round, and the novel reflects this. Adah embodies neither her past (which may be defined as the local) nor her present (the global). Instead, these aspects of her character parallel and intersect, while simultaneously contradicting each other. Adah does not symbolize the western feminist movement, because the issues she faces as an immigrant woman of colour in the West are not identical to those of the white women fighting for this cause. Similarly, Adah does not exemplify Nigerian women as a cultural whole because she does not allow herself to be defined in such a limited way, as demonstrated when she tells Francis not to compare her to his Nigerian mother: “I am not your mother. I am me, and I am different from her” (172). Shohat argues that multicultural/transnational feminism works to fight against both gender essentialism and cultural essentialism simultaneously (10). One could argue that Emecheta is articulating a transnational feminist character in Adah. This is signified by what she calls the Presence. The Presence may be taken as Adah’s individual feminism, which cannot be categorized as Western or African. If we are to take the local as the feminine domain, as the motherland, then the Presence reconnects Adah to a time when she was aware of her resilience; “she was becoming aware of the Presence again – the Presence that had directed her through childhood” (150). This Presence allows Adah to regain power over her life, and to reassess her own feminist voice. She becomes more in touch with motherhood, rejoicing at the birth of her fourth child, a girl named Dada, who is “so perfect and so beautiful that she nicknamed her ‘Sunshine’” (161). Additionally, the Presence motivates her to produce her “brainchild,” a novel called The Bride Price. While she stays at

home caring for her children, Adah dedicates time to the creation of literary work, gaining the authority and the power to facilitate her own voice. Even when the physical manifestation of her expression is destroyed, Adah’s transnational voice is not silenced. When Francis reads Adah’s novel, he burns it, telling her that she keeps forgetting that she is a woman and she is black: “the white man can barely tolerate us men, to say nothing of brainless females like you who could think of nothing except how to breast-feed her baby” (167). In this moment, Francis is reminding Adah of the prejudices she faces, not only as a woman but also as a woman of colour. The reminder is unnecessary, though, because the entirety of Second-Class Citizen illustrates how intensely conscious Adah is of this discriminations. She nevertheless refuses to be suppressed any longer, and leaves him, saying that “Francis [had killed] her child. She could forgive him all he had done before, but not this” (170). By calling her novel her brainchild, Adah is aligning herself with motherhood and articulating her personal feminism, which manifests itself in her love for her biological and metaphorical children. Second-Class Citizen demonstrates how the multiplicities of intersections of identity influence the lives of postcolonial women. Adah is a multi-faceted character, a compilation of cultures that are once complementary and contradictory. Unable to settle into one category of identification, Adah presents a personalized understanding of the world that is intimately linked to her gender, race, ethnicity and class. The Presence symbolizes this unique perspective, and motivates Adah to resist her oppressors. Like the cyclical nature of the seasons, the Presence is lost to Adah during the coldest winter of her life, is reborn in the spring, and reaches its full bloom in the summer. Adah embodies a transnational feminist voice that grows stronger with every moment.

Works Cited Bahri, Deepika. “Feminism In/and Postcolonialism.” The Cambridge Companion to Postcolonial Literary Studies. Cambridge UP, 2004. Print. Crenshaw, Kimberle. “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Colour.” Stanford Law Review 43.6 (1991): 1241-299. Print. Emecheta, Buchi. Second-class Citizen. New York: G. Braziller, 1974. Print. Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Colonial Discourses.” (1984): 333-58. Print. Shohat, Ella. “Gendered Cartographies of Knowledge: Area Studies, Ethnic Studies, and Postcolonial Studies.” Social Text 20.3 (2002). Print.

My Narcissistic Shame: Performing Intimacy in “Intimacy with Fear” By Laura Orozco “I invite you to invite me to the place where you live. I invite you to invite me to explore your objects, your space... ask you questions we will negotiate what I am allowed to look at, you will show me things that are important to you, I will look inside your books, your sock drawer, you will tell me about the coffee table that belonged to your mother... we will talk about fear. We will talk about fear. We will become intimate with each other by becoming intimate with our own fear. In return, and as a way of sharing with others, I will make a performance that is a portrait of our encounter.” Adriana Disman

his is Adriana Disman’s invitation to participate in her 2014 performance encounter series, “Intimacy with Fear, or The Inside of Your Home is the Inside of you, and vice versa.” Disman invites anyone living in the Montreal area to invite her into their home to have a conversation about fear. She then plans to create a performance portrait – which the online callout says will be similar to a photographic portrait – based on this ‘encounter’ and perform it for an audience at Rats9 Gallery (Disman, dare-dare.org). The choice to call the meeting an encounter is deliberate. Disman’s invitation speaks in terms of mutuality, rather than in terms of directed performance. Disman arrives at my apartment. She is warm and informal, telling me that I am her first encounter and that she is nervous. I tell her that I am nervous too as she comes inside. I am nervous because I do not know what to expect from this encounter. Such is the nature of vulnerability. Disman is, after all, a performance artist. Our impending ‘intimacy’ is her work. Disman’s performance work engages

in investigating the “threshold of vulnerability as a catalyst for intimacy and intimacy as a catalyst for transformation” (Disman, dare-dare.org). The expectation of experiencing vulnerability with a stranger heightens my awareness of the possibility for shame that an (un)successful encounter holds. My use of the word shame here is informed from Silvan Tomkins’ definition of shame as “feelings of inferiority” and from the word’s etymological root words scham and skaman, meaning “covering the face” (Tomkins 135; Bernstein 215). Tomkins describes shame as “intropunitive,” a state of self-protective and self-punishing isolation (150). This isolation can be further understood when considering that the physical gestures associated with shame, averted eyes, covered face, turned-down head, appear in infants at an age when they “habitually [look] at [their] caregiver, who looks back and thus closes a circuit of social communication” (Bernstein 220). Shame might then be understood as self-punitive breaking of the circuit of social communication. In fact, as it is used in social work and counseling literature, shame results in individuals covering up aspects of ourselves that, if seen by others, would make us seem unworthy of connection (Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability). Where does shame come from? Tomkins points out the perpetual presence of vulnerability in the varied “idiosyncratic sources of shame” (Tomkins 149). Social work graduate research professor Brené Brown defines individuals who “have a strong sense of love and belonging” as “whole-hearted” (Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability). Brown’s research states that these whole-hearted individuals consistently both see themselves as worthy of love and belonging, and see vulnerability in relationships (which they see as neither comfortable nor excruciating) as necessary for establishing connection (Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability). However, in the absence of complete whole-heartedness, vulnerability can feel excruciating and individuals can choose to disconnect and hide. Shame can then be understood both as the antithesis to vulnerability (when it is whole-hearted), and as vulnerability’s painful outcome. Disman’s piece seems to propose an acknowledged alternative to covering ourselves up. It seems to pose both participants in vulnerable positions. I want to explore what kind of intimacy the piece could generate. As we sit down in my kitchen, Disman tells me that she got a unique feeling when she saw my email and that when she read it, she felt that I needed to be her first encounter. My vanity is spiked. I want to confirm her feelings about me. I want to be a ‘good’ participant for her, for us to experience sincere intimacy. I want to count myself among the whole-hearted because I think this interaction could be really powerful. I want to let myself be truly seen, hoping that it might create space for some kind of connection (Brené Brown: The power of vulnerability). I resolve not to cover my face and hope she does the same.

I drink tea while she drinks hot water and we ask each other questions. In my response to her callout I have told her that I plan to write about our encounter for this paper, she asks me about the paper I plan to write. I ask her about the inspiration for this series. She tells me that she borrowed the title of this project from the title of a chapter in Pema Chödrön’s spiritual guidance book, When Things Fall Apart. She reads aloud from the chapter and tells me how the text influenced her thinking in relation to the piece. There are a couple of moments of silence when we alternate between looking at each other and our mugs. I want to ask her questions but do not know where to start and am weary of prying. These moments end with one of us asking the other a question – I ask her more about her work and she asks me to expand on something I have said before – and the conversation picks back up again. After about an hour of talking about our histories and our interests she introduces the idea of interacting with the objects in room. In my email to Disman I told her that my room is the part of my apartment which is most ‘mine’ so I am not surprised that she wants to go there. We take our mugs to my bedroom, which is small. Where my kitchen was cold and hard my room is now soft and warm. The softness and warmth of the room are deliberate attempts on my end to make my room a private and comfortable home for myself. My bed is the only available sitting surface so we both sit there. If ever there was a space that could be considered a ‘vibratorium’ – a place where “[certain transcendent ‘realities’] are experienced in the tremors of the spectatorial body” – it is this space (Ridout, Vibratorium 223). It is a vibrationally intense space. It is one thing to be in this room by myself, and an altogether different thing to be here with someone I have just met. Disman’s presence in my room, asking me to share its contents with her, adds a sort of semiotic weight to everything in sight. The selection of books on my shelf becomes a sign, their titles communicating something to Disman about my reading habits and interests. Everything about my bedroom becomes symbolically and significantly readable in the same way that set and costume pieces are readable when placed on a stage. Sitting in my room I am very aware of the alternative title for this piece: “The Inside of Your Home is the Inside of you, and vice versa” (Disman, dare-dare.org). The title solidifies my room as a place, an “enclosed and humanized space” (Yi-Fu Tuan qtd. in McAuley 601). Being in my room pulls me in two conflicting instinctual directions: I want to hide and I want to reveal. Knowing that she is reading the space as “the Inside of me” makes me want to protect “the Inside of me” until I know it is safe to reveal it. Typically, I would build a feeling of safety with somebody by exchanging stories and establishing a mutual desire to know more of each other. In retrospect, Disman and I seem to have skipped the crucial building of safety that usually serves as the invitation for two people to reveal themselves intimately. However, I knew that I

was singing up for an ‘intimate’ encounter with a new person, without the usual build-up of safety. The format of the encounter seemed to me to have replaced the build-up with a formal invitation. I recognize that my commitment to embracing vulnerability in the encounter came from the implicit meanings of safety that I had read into Disman’s invitation. This reading of her invitation combined with the comfort of my room to urge me to reveal myself. The implicit logic that informed my sharing is as follows: My room is my private home. Typically only people with whom I feel “close” and comfortable come into my room with me. I have invited Disman to come into my room with me. Therefore we must be ‘close’ and comfortable. I recognize the faults in this logic but its effects are still in play. The soft surface of my bed forces us to sit informally, giving comfort priority over social decorum. Being surrounded by my belongings gives Disman endless points of inquiry into my life. I feel at a loss for things to ask her about so I answer her questions and hope my volunteering inspires her to volunteer in return. We are inhabitants of my vibratorium. In my room, Disman and I have created a situation “in which we heighten our sensitivity to our mutual becoming-for-others” (Ridout, Vibratorium 226). I am becoming an open book and she is becoming my reader. This becoming is inherently performative and related to notions of shame. Adopting a performance is a way of hiding one’s own face by replacing it with the appearance of another. The potential shame that is triggered in an individual being directly looked at by another individual in performance is clearly articulated in Nicholas Ridout’s discussion on spectatorial embarrassment. Ridout cites Henry

Berger’s thought experiment on direct theatrical address:

I imagine that as I am watching a play, at a certain moment an actor. Character looks directly at me. How shall I respond? […] If I suppose it is the actor who looks at me, I can either ignore his look or else assume he is picking me out as a momentary target in the audience; I might feel called upon to return the favor by acting alert, responsive, displeased or bored, and in doing this I am free to choose a simulation that matches my actual feeling or one that hides it. Whatever I decide to do, I am playing the theatrical role of a spectator who perceives himself to be present to the actor in a physical space of the theatre that we share and fill. But the situation changes if I imagine that it is the character rather than the actor who looks directly at me… Then… I cast myself as a fictional character… or I imagine myself absent. (Harry Berger qtd. in Ridout, “Embarrassment” 72-73) I am tempted to agree with Ridout in saying that “every possible response imagined by Berger to the experience of meeting the gaze of an actor/character in the theatre involves the complete annihilation of his self ” (Ridout, “Embarrassment” 75). I did

not enter my encounter with Disman with intent to perform – quite the opposite. But like Berger, my involvement in it led me to adjust my behaviour to fit a space that was removed from what we might consider a “social reality.” In my attempts to commit to her project, I have ended up performing for Disman. The encounter is ending. I tell her that I feel as if I have talked a lot in comparison to her and she responds by saying that she usually shares what people ask her to share. If I wanted to hear more from her I should have asked. In this moment, I am plunged into narcissistic shame. How vain of me to have become so absorbed in my own telling. This self-absorption, of the kind observed by Keren Zaiontz in her discussion of one-to-one spectatorship, has shamefully become my “primary mode of experience” (Zaiontz 407). Disman tells me that she wants to be sure that we are both closing the performance space that we have opened. If and when we see each other again our interaction will not be as it has been today. Maybe we will say hi and chat, but we will not talk about what we talked about today. I tell her that I agree and she looks relieved. In this moment, the influences of being in my room and of my commitment to embrace vulnerability are replaced by a deep shame. Instead of engaging in an act of two-directional sharing, I have been engaging in a vanitous act of performance and in doing so have failed to achieve the intimacy I had sought. More than that, the shameful product of my thorough vulnerability in the presence of a stranger has caught up with me. Although I have not been engaged in method acting, I feel caught in what Robin Bernstein describes as the paradox of method acting. Bernstein describes how method acting “demands that actors transcend shame by simultaneously baring their souls and decimating self-consciousness – and whenever that transcendence does not occur, method acting promotes shame about shame” (Bernstein 216). Like the method actor, I have shamed myself “not by failing but by succeeding in exposing [my] psychological truths and therefore [my] personal vulnerabilities” (Bernstein 216). I wonder at what Disman must be feeling in this moment and what she must have been feeling throughout our encounter. During our conversation she had seemed engaged and responsive, asking further questions and prompting responses from me. However, I am now inclined to believe that this was part of a social performance she has been putting forward for my sake. Ironically, in response to a social performance I myself have been putting on for her sake. I want to close the performance space and never return to it because suddenly, it feels false. I am returned to the knowledge that the encounter is constructed as part of a series by a working performance artist. My shame in having so thoroughly revealed myself in our place of encounter speaks to the encounter’s nature as a constructed as a performance piece. However, it certainly cannot be said that the encounter’s performativity made it a formal

theatrical performance. In the moment, my “performing” was no more deliberate or conscious than any other social performance I engage in n a daily basis (for example my performance of a student in class or of a roommate eating dinner). In that vein, I cannot say that the things I shared with Disman were in any way false. The stories I told her are true. If anything, they were truer than many of the things I might say regularly (for example, “I don’t mind” or “I didn’t see you there”). But what about Disman? The narcissistic tone of my retelling speaks to the kinds of thoughts the shameful experience generated in me but it also means that I have ignored her half of the experience. Of course, I cannot be certain that she was not performing a formal character, but that is true of every interpersonal encounter. Perhaps then the discomfort I feel with the piece comes from another aspect of its structure: the performance portrait. Disman’s invitation states that the performance portrait exists as a “way of sharing with others” (Disman, dare-dare.org). I ask her about what she means by this statement and she explains to me that the performance portrait is a way of giving back to the organization that funded this work. As part of her work, our encounter is (at least partially) necessarily inorganic in that it needs to answer to an invisible third party as part of a quantifiable financial exchange. In addition to that, Disman and I have engaged in a non-financial transaction of sorts. While there is no exchange of money between us, I have agreed to invite her to my home to share myself with her and she has agreed to be a receptive visitor in my home. Our exchange is firmly situated in a capitalist system and as such it is “an intimate economic relation: I paid to have this [woman] look at me, and [she] is paid to look. Our intimacy is always already alienated. It is a difficult intimacy” (Ridout, Embarrassment 80). In this discomfort, I recognize that my hopes for complete mutuality in our exchange may have been ill founded. I cannot say for sure if this is the case until I see Disman’s portrait of our encounter. Ultimately, my encounter with Disman could be an experimental metaphor for connective social interactions as performative and transient, as I understand them to be. We tested the water in our email correspondence and eventually agreed to create a space for possible sharing. We did not know how much we would each share or how we would feel about it. We met in a place and were affected by that place. The place shaped our interaction. We took on roles to suit the other’s needs. We shared stories and energy. We came away with tokens of our sharing, which we will use to shape our experience with others. However, by nature of it being deliberately constructed, it rings false. The piece poses an invitation to share that, in practice, leaves something to be desired. It situates us in a space that makes me the topic of discussion. Although all of these structural elements were made clear in Disman’s invitation to participate, they seemed necessary to create a kind of new social realm that allows for the kind of connective radiation of energy that Ridout proposes. Theoretically, if what is

necessary for connection is a mutual whole-hearted desire for it, then the social realm that Disman creates in her invitation will be a connectively fruitful one. Finally, it leaves us both with tangible products of our interaction but with no significant meaning with which to associate them. In embracing the role of topic of discussion, I failed to leave space for reciprocity in our encounter on Dismanâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s part and for this, I am ashamed. Currently, Disman has some photographs of our encounter, which we took together. They are a token of the vulnerability I shared with her in that new social realm and she will use them to inform her performance portrait of our encounter. I have no idea what shape the portrait will take and am somewhat afraid of it at the same time that I am looking forward to it. Perhaps the reciprocity I had hoped for will come with the portrait. We have, after all, only lived one half of the experience we set out to live. However, as I reflect on the experience thus far I cannot say whether I am left with any strong feelings of enjoyment or regret. I admit that I feel confused. I am glad that we met and will remember the experience. Our encounter was thought provoking as an exercise in performance as well as human interaction, but feels like one with limited connective consequences for the two us1. Perhaps I am inclined to say this because I am currently stewing in a bath of narcissistic shame. I am certain that the framing of our encounter as a part of her work means that Disman has limited personal investment in me and I want to match it so that we might once again connect as equals. I am pulled to declare my emotional divestment from our encounter as a way of re-establishing our relationship as uncomplicated. To return to Silvan Tomkins, I am filled with a desire to somehow bring Disman and I back onto common ground, â&#x20AC;&#x153;to recapture the relationship that existed before the situation turned problematicâ&#x20AC;? (144). I am left curious about what other questions the series as a whole will bring up.

1 Although, admittedly, the goal of the experience has never been for us to become friends.

Works Cited Brené Brown: The Power of Vulnerability. By Brené Brown. Perf. Brené Brown. TEDxHouston, 2010. Online Video. Bernstein, Robin. “Toward the Integration of Theatre History and Affect Studies: Shame and the Rude Mechs’s The Method Gun.” Theatre Journal 64.2 (2012): 21330. Project Muse. Web. 10 Nov. 2014. Disman, Adriana. “ADRIANA DISMAN: Intimacy with Fear.” Dare-dare.org. DARE-DARE, 1 Nov. 2014. Web. 17 Nov. 2014. Disman, Adriana. Personal interview. 8 December 2014. McAuley, Gay. “Place in the Performance Experience.” Modern Drama 46.4 (2003): 598-613. Project MUSE. Web. 1 Dec. 2014. Ridout, Nicholas. “Welcome to the Vibratorium.” Senses & Society 3.2 (2008): 221-31. Web. 19 Nov. 2014. Ridout, Nicholas. “Embarrassment: The Predicament of the Audience.” Stage Fright, Animals, and Other Theatrical Problems. N.p.: Cambridge UP, 2006. 70-95. Tomkins, Silvan. “Shame.” The Many Faces of Shame. Ed. Doland Nathanson. United States of America: Guilford, 1987. 133-61. Zaiontz, Keren. “Narcissistic Spectatorship in Immersive and One-on-One Performance.” Theatre Journal 66.3 (2014): 405-25. Project MUSE. Web. 20 Nov. 2014.

The Printed Bandit: Orality and Print Culture in A Gest of Robyn Hode By Philippe Mongeau

he Robin Hood tradition – the corpus of texts1 associated with the figure of Robin Hood, the social bandit – has been in existence for more than six hundred years (Knight, “Preface” xi). Scholars of the Robin Hood tradition have thus been able to explore a vast array of topics, ranging from the historical origins of the outlaw to the social background of the audience of these famous tales. One topic however, has remained relatively untouched: the material circumstances of its earliest texts. This omission is not surprising, as any account of the poems’ origin can only be based on speculation. However, in this paper, I will explore the material context of The Gest of Robyn Hode - the longest of the ballads – in its printed form. Specifically, I will explore the ways in which the medium of the printed text has affected the poem as we know it today, in order to suggest that the ballad owes its linguistic and narrative form to its existence as a printed text. A Gest of Robyn Hode poses an enigma, in that it is fraught with inconsistencies. On the one hand, the text is very literary in the sense that it is adheres to “conventional” poetic standards and structures. It features a linear narrative that is relatively easy to trace, large in scope, and which draws from traditional literary structures and traditions such as the “King and his Servant” narrative2 or Arthurian legends (Knight, “A Gest Of Robin Hode, Introduction” 83-5). On the other hand, there are multiple instances in which the text feels less meticulously constructed. The narrative structure of the poem is erratic to the point that some critics have dismissed it as “sloppy,” with a rhyme scheme and level of diction that are “unpoetic” (Knight, “A Gest of Robin Hode, Introduction” 84). Also, the text struggles to reconcile the old vision of Robin Hood, the violent, anti-ecclesiastical 1 In this specific instance, I use the word “text” in the broadest possible sense. This will not be the case later in the paper. 2 Stephen Knight explains that the “King and his Subject” genre is a trope in which a king will befriend an unruly individual as a his equal, but, usually following some sort of humiliation, the king will reveal his royal status and forgive his subject as a way of re-asserting his power”; Knight, Stephen “‘Chief Governor Under the Greenwood Tree’ Robin Hood in the Ballads” in Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1995) p. 78

outlaw, and a new, gentrified, “knightly” version of the hero. In one “fytte,” the outlaw will be holding court in Greenwood, demanding to see a “gest” before his meal (Knight and Ohlgren 17-32), and lending financial support to those both inside and outside his band of outlaws (“A Gest of Robyn Hode” 1.265-308). In an instant, however, he will venture out to steal gold from, humiliate, or even slay figures of authority, like the Sherriff of Nottingham. Where do these poetic and linguistic disparities come from? What could have pushed a scholar like Stephen Knight, one of the leading scholars of the Robin Hood tradition, to describe the poem as “encyclopedic”(Knight, “Bold Robin Hood” 27)? While there is no simple answer to such a question, I would like to focus on the text’s material circumstances, and evaluate the poem in the context of the relationship between orality and literacy in an attempt to propose an answer to this problem – albeit a speculative one. The Robin Hood tradition has its roots in an oral tradition, so it is important to understand the relationship between phonetic and textual modes of communication when examining any of the Robin Hood ballads, including the Gest poem (Gray 5-6). In his famous book, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, Walter J. Ong provides a detailed analysis of the relationship between these two modes of communication. He explains that orality is paramount; all thought in and of itself relates to it by default. The basic orality of language – its sonic aspect, which underpins all forms of linguistic communication – is permanent, and capable of producing beautiful – though not necessarily precise – works of “literature” (Ong, “The Orality of Language” 6). Although writing developed during a relatively later period in the history of humankind (Ong, “Writing Restructures Consciousness” 82), it is a technology that exponentially enlarges the potential of language by restructuring thought and converting oral dialects into visual “grapholects,” or transdialectical languages transformed by a deep commitment to writing (Ong, “The Orality of Language” 7). This process in turn allows for the expansion of vocabulary and effective communication (Ong, “The Orality of Language” 7). Moreover, writing, a [relatively] autonomous discourse, cannot be contested the way “oral literature3” can, which in turn means that the process of writing “fixes4” or “stabilizes” language (Ong, “Writing Restructures Consciousness” 778). Nevertheless, writing is artificial (Ong, “Writing Restructures Consciousness” 81). It is a solipsistic operation that requires isolation and seeks to remove language from the chaotic existential context of oral utterance, but at the same time remains 3 I use this term to describe literary works that exist in a primary oral form because it establishes a connection between the oral and the textual I seek to describe in this paper. However, as Ong explains in his book, this term is problematic, seeing as the very idea of literature is the result of our living in a literate society (Ong “The Orality of Language” p. 10). 4 When talking about the “fixity” of the written word, I do not mean to say that writing brought about a complete stabilization of language, as has been proposed by some scholars, such as Elizabeth Eisenstein. Any “fixity” brought on by writing – and, later, print – is relative, not absolute.

inseparable from orality (Ong, “Writing Restructures Consciousness” 100). In the Middle Ages, oral and written forms of literature were especially intertwined, which meant that the relationship between orality and literacy was particularly complicated. The technology of writing was not as accepted or as widely disseminated as it is today, which meant that orality still held status as the primary form of communication (Pettitt 20). The “primacy” of oral culture permeated the way people created and interacted with both manuscripts and the texts within them. Book historian Marjorie Plant explains that the texts contained in manuscripts were often dictated to the scribes responsible for their transcription (Plant 20). Similarly, in his text, “Textual to Oral: The Impact of Transmission on Narrative Word-Art,” Tom Pettitt states that the practice of “polytextuality” was then prevalent (Pettitt 19). Texts such as ballads, recalled from memory, were written down in the interest of preservation (Pettitt 28). Later on, an individual – not necessarily the scribe – would memorize the text and recite it aloud, and the story would once again become an oral one (Pettitt 20). He also explains that the texts produced by this phenomenon often left traces of their existences as oral entities (Pettitt 28), what Walter J. Ong calls “residual orality” (Ong, “The Orality of Language” 11). Earlier ballads within the Robin Hood tradition, preserved in manuscript form, are evidence of such polytextuality. A good example of the practice is Cambridge MS Ff. 5.48, which contains “Robin Hood and the Monk,” the earliest-surviving Robin Hood ballad. The small quarto, composed of 132 leaves of paper, is in fact a personal anthology enclosing several texts, which range from a poem titled Directions to Parish-priests to a prose text named Prognostications about the seasons of the year (“Ff. v. 48” 505-9). “Robin Hood and the Monk” is the final text in the collection, extending from folio 125 b to 132 b (“Ff. v. 48” 508-9). Thomas H. Ohlgren attributes the manuscript to Gilbert Plinkington on the basis of an inscription on folio 43r, and believes that this was his own personal “clerical miscellany,” a personal anthology of stories and poems he wrote down to consult or recite at a later time (Ohlgren, “‘lewed peple loven tales olde’” 33-40). Ohlgren goes on to speculate that Plinkington, a minister, was a man who liked a good joke, and preserved the poem in his miscellany in order to use it as a sermon exemplum that provided both entertainment and instruction to his audience (41-2, 51). This idea is strange, given the amount of anti-ecclesiastical violence found within the poem.5 Moreover, Ohlgren’s over-all reasoning for his attribution of Cambridge MS Ff. 5.48 is somewhat speculative. Still, “Robin Hood and the Monk” nicely corresponds to Pettitt’s conception of polytextuality. If we accept Ohlgren’s attribution of the manuscript to Gilbert Plinkington, we have in “Robin 5 Of course, Plinkington would not have had to rely draw from the text in its entirety to construct his sermons, but the extent of the violence committed against members of the clergy found in the poem is still – at the very least – cause for attention.

Hood and the Monk” a text that a scribe heard on his travels around England, wrote down, and later reintroduced into the oral tradition on a repetitive basis for his sermons (Ohlgren, “‘lewed peple loven tales olde’” 41). The ballad itself contains indicators of what Pettit would define as an “oral phase.” These signals include: narrative economy6; impersonality, a lack of comment or explanation from the author; dramatic qualities, such as dialogue (“Robin Hood and the Monk” 1. 13-62); formulaic diction such as repetition; and the narrative devices of “leaping,” the creation a disjointed form of narrative progress, and “lingering” on central scenes (“Robin Hood and the Monk” 1. 63-120). Many of these elements are also present in the Gest poem. For example, there are moments of extensive dialogue between characters, such as the one between Robyn Hood and the King in the eighth fytte: “‘It falleth not for myn order,’ sayd our kynge (...) I trowe, ayenst the Yole’” (“The Gest of Robyn Hode” 1.1621-80). As mentioned above, the diction is unsophisticated and “unpoetic.” Knight notes that there are relatively few weak or half rhymes in the poem, and the language is “limited in vocabulary and range,” which makes for equally constrained imagery (Knight, “A Gest of Robyn Hode, Introduction” 84-5). For example, the outlaws are more often than not described only as “gode”(“A Gest of Robyn Hode” 1. 29). The same applies to the “comly” King Edwaed and the “proude” the sheriff of Nottingham (“A Gest of Robyn Hode” l. 1410, l. 1265). Furthermore, there is a fair amount of “leaping” and “lingering” in the poem. The most obvious manifestation of this narrative device is the separation of the poem into “fyttes”, each of which tell a separate part of the story. The most extreme example of this “leaping,” however, is Robin Hood’s sudden death after his return to the forest from King Edward’s court: “Welcome,” they sayd, “our mayster, Under this grene wode tre.” Robyn dwelled in grene wode, Twenty yere and two; For all drede of Edwarde our kynge, Agayne wolde he not goo. Yet he was begyled, iwys, Through a wycked woman, The pryoresse of Kyrkely, That nye was of hys kynne. (“A Gest of Robyn Hode” l. 1795-1802) In the span of two stanzas, Robin returns to Greenwood, lives for twenty-two more years, and then is suddenly killed by the prioress. The transition creates the 6 The short poem begins in medias res, or, in the middle of the action: “In somer, when the shawes be sheyne (..) ‘Syn I my Savyour see”; “Robin Hood and the Monk” in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan UP, 2000) l. 1-26

impression that the death scene is not a part of any of the poem’s major narrative arcs, which in turn implies that it was a late addition to the work. It is safe to say, then, that Gest of Robyn Hode at some point went through an oral phase. The indicators of it read as narrative or linguistic inconsistencies because, as seen above, the practice of writing homogenized language and restructured thought to allow for more constructed literary forms. As a result, the poem’s past as an oral entity is responsible for many of the incongruities found within the work. Still, the poem’s having undergone an oral phase is not necessarily the sole source of the poem’s narrative issues. For one, the poem does not perfectly correspond to the criteria Pettitt details in his article. Narrative economy, for instance, does not seem to be particularly important in this poem, which distinguishes itself from other ballads in part through its uncharacteristically large scope. Moreover, without a record of performance or any form of material evidence of a poem in it’s oral form, any study tracing a work’s history as an oral entity can only be based on speculation. Finally, there is the problem of the poem not existing in manuscript form – the only sources we have for the ballad are printed texts, a fact with many further implications. Print technology brought with it a new focus on visual space, which in turn had various subtle effects on writing and language (Ong, “Print, Space and Closure” 115-6). Moveable type, the true innovation presented by Gutenberg in the 15th century, divided words into phonetic units and transformed the word from an organic tool of communication to a manufactured commodity (Ong, “Print, Space and Closure” 116). Although early print was still a mainly an auditory space, in the sense that it was still relatively unreliable with respect to the stabilization of language, the new focus on visual space confined the word to the page more than writing ever did before, making traces of “residual orality” even more evident than they had been in manuscripts (Ong, “Print, Space and Closure” 115). The advent of print and the resulting print culture also had an impact on the structuring of narratives. The sense of “noetic closure” that print creates separates the constructed speaker of a text from any sort of interlocutor. This constructed autonomy allowed for texts with fixed tones and points of view, which historically resulted in the appearance of genres of long form sequential narratives which came to occupy the same cultural position previously monopolized by drama, as well as a new “reading public” to handle these new ideas (Ong, “Print, Space and Closure” 130-2). William Caxton brought print technology to England in 1476, and almost immediately began to produce books in English to fill an undoubtedly large gap in the market (Hellinga 67). Concentrated in London, the printing press had an interesting effect on the English book trade. Lack of censorship and copyright laws at the time meant that almost anything could be printed (Plant 20). However, many texts were printed on commission (Hellinga 67), and print-makers also had to

deliver texts that were amenable to both the private reader and the public audience. Public interest was responsible for manuscript anthologies like Cambridge MS Ff 5.48 (Boffey 556), which meant that there were still some limits imposed on the kinds of books being produced. As a result, the books that appeared the most often in the first century of print contained texts that had already appeared in manuscript form, edited to convey a sense of immediacy, or at least to make them comprehensible to readers of the time (Hellinger 90). Books of a compilatory nature – such as the “authorial book,” or a new manifestation of the “single-work codex,” which contained the works of a single author or literary tradition in a single book – were especially widespread (Boffey 557-8). This trend was mostly due to the massive popularity of the works of Geoffrey Chaucer, which often appeared as compilations – publishers seeking to recreate this success appropriated this form of book in order to aid the circulation of works by other authors, such as John Lydgate, Thomas Hoccleve, and Boethius. As a result, there was little authorial intervention taking place in the production of texts: compositors and editors occupied the premier positions in the early English book trade (Hellinger 88). Earlier in this essay, I pointed out that Stephen Knight believed the Gest of Robin Hood to be an encyclopedic endeavour. In the first chapter of his book Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw he explains that the poem was not based on a single ballad, but multiple poems compiled into a single narrative (Knight, “‘Chief Governor Under the Greenwood Tree’” 75). Similarly, medieval scholar J.B. Bessinger writes that the poem may have been put together serially, with additions and modifications based on earlier texts being made on a regular basis, creating a work with a particular but well-articulated structure (Bessinger 468). The Gest of Robin Hode, then, can be considered a compilation. This is favorable because it helps explain the poem’s multiple narrative inconsistencies. The text is episodically constructed, which allowed the inclusion of references to Arthurian romances – specifically Sir Thomas Mallory’s canonical text La Morte Darthur – and “stock narratives” like “The King and His Servant” plot, as well as the combination of different, conflicting versions of the social bandit within a single poem. There is also paratextual evidence that helps support this claim. The first is a woodcut illustration of a knight riding a horse, found on the “Lettersnidjer” edition of the text, which is also found in an edition of Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales (Ohlgren, “Script to Print” 103-5). As mentioned above, Chaucer was an important figure early print culture given his influence on later publishers. It follows, then, that the illustration in the Gest poem is perhaps an attempt on the editor’s part to insert this poem in a larger tradition of literary compilations that goes back to the widely disseminated works of Chaucer. The history of the Gest poem also suggests that the text was composed with an aim to compilation. In his essay, “From Script to Print: Robin Hood and the

Printers,” Thomas H. Ohlgren explains that the Gest poem was produced by some of the major printers in the early English book trade, such as Richard Pysnson, Wynkyn de Worde and William Copland (Ohlgren, “Script to Print” 133). Each “edition” contains new modifications, depending on the printer’s agenda. The William Copland edition, for example, contains six new lines of verse, which Copland either wrote himself or extracted from another source (Ohlgren, “Script to Print” 131). What is also interesting about the timeline traced by Ohlgren is that each of the printed editions of the Gest poem relates to one another. For example, Richard Pynson printed the earliest version of the text (Ohlgren, “Script to Print” 101), off of which the “Lettersnidjer” edition – quickly supplanted by the Wynkyn de Worde edition (Ohlgren, “Script to Print” 101) – the Hugo Goes edition was copied (Ohlgren, “Script to Print” 122). Though this timeline is speculative and does not necessarily help us trace the composition of the main text itself, it does show that multiple producers were working closely with a single tradition, from which each, using different strands, was able to create a single Robin Hood poem that could then be manipulated to serve his respective editorial interests. This activity speaks to the compilatory spirit of the Gest as a whole. This spirit, in turn, is responsible for the poem’s formal dissonance, outlined above, which is best understood in the broader context of print technology and the poem’s material form. Print culture, and the popularity of “single-volume” works from the likes of Chaucer, created an environment in which a compilation like the Gest of Robyn Hode could thrive, and which likely pushed the Gest’s compiler and its subsequent editors to bring together different and ultimately conflicting aspects of the tradition. These narrative conflicts are underscored by the source material’s past as an oral entity – by the time the text was printed, the stories from which the poem originated would have gone through an oral phase, and would therefore have contained poetic inconsistencies, markers of “residual orality.”7 These moments clash with the more literary aspects of the printed text, making the narrative structure seem irregular. Print technology, through its processes of linguistic fixation and its focus on visual space, amplified the turbulence felt by the text’s residual orality. By extension, the tensions between the balladic and literary structures of the poem and the narrative inconsistencies caused by its existence as a “single-volume” anthology are also affected by this dissonance. Clearly, then, it is the very fact of print that gave A Gest of Robyn Hode its final form.

7 It is important to mention that the appearance of a written or printed version of the Gest did not necessarily put an end to the text’s “oral phase”. It may have actually contributed to furthering that oral tradition (though such a claim must be subject to more research).

Works Cited “A Gest of Robyn Hode” in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, 90-148. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan UP, 2000. “Ff. v. 48” in The Cambridge University Library Catalogue of Manuscripts, Vol. II, ed. C. Hardwick, Churchill Babington, Chas. C. Babington, W.R. Collett, Professor Abdy, Mr. J. Glover, H.R. Luard and C.B. Scott, 505-509. London: Cambridge UP, 1980. “Robin Hood and the Monk” in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, 37-48. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan UP, 2000). Bessinger, J.B., “‘The Gest of Robin Hood’” Revisited” in Robin Hood: An anthology of Scholarship and Criticism ed. Stephen Knight, 39-50. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999. Boffey, Julia. “Literary Texts” in The Cambridge History of the Book vol. III, ed. Hellinga Lotte and J.B. Pratt, 555575. London: Cambridge University Press, 2008. eBook. Gray, Douglas “The Robin Hood Poems” in Robin Hood: An Anthology of Scholarship and Criticism. Ed. Stephen Knight, 3-39. Cambridge: D.S. Brewer, 1999. Knight, Stephen “‘Chief Governor Under the Greenwood Tree’ Robin Hood in the Ballads” in Robin Hood: A Complete Study of the English Outlaw, 44-97. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1995. ---. “Bold Robin Hood” in Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography, 1-43. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2003. ---. “Preface” in Robin Hood: A Mythic Biography, xi-xix. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2003. Knight, Stephen and Thomas Ohlgren. “A Gest of Robyn Hode, Introduction” in Robin Hood and Other Outlaw Tales ed. Stephen Knight and Thomas Ohlgren, 80-85. Kalamazoo: Western Michigan UP, 2000. Lotte, Hellinga. “Printing” in The Cambridge History of the Book vol. III, ed. Hellinga Lotte and J.B. Pratt, 65-108. London: Cambridge University Press, 2008. eBook. Ohlgren, Thomas H. “‘lewed peple loven tales olde’”: Robin Hood and the Monk and the Manuscript Context of Cambridge, University Library MS Ff.5.48 in Robin Hood: The Early Ballads 1465-1560, 28-67. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. ---. “From Script to Print: Robin Hood and the Printers” in Robin Hood: The Early Ballads 1465-1560, 97-134. Newark: University of Delaware Press, 2007. Ong, Walter J. “Print, Space and Closure” Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 115-136. London: Routledge, 2002. eBook. ---.“The Orality of Language” in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 5-16. London: Routledge, 2002. eBook. ---. “Writing Restructures Consciousness” in Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word, 77-114. London: Routledge, 2002. eBook. Pettitt, Tom. “Textual to Oral: the Impact of Transmission on Narrative Word-Art” in Oral History of the Middle Ages. Ed. By Gerhard Jaritz and Michael Richter, 19-38. Budapest: Kerms and Budapest: 2001. Plant, Marjorie. “Introduction” in The English Book Trade: An Economic History of the Making and Sale, 17-34. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd., 1974.

Lucas Beauchamp: Faulkner’s Challenge to the Racial Binary in the American South By Jesse Conterato

n his 1966 discussion of William Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses, Michael Millgate challenges the actions of Isaac “Ike” McCaslin, attempting to discern why his “life is a failure” (Millgate 208-09), specifically in light of Faulkner’s statements during a 1955 interview: Having learned from the interviewer that Isaac McCaslin was her favourite among his characters, Faulkner asked why she admired him: INT: Because he underwent the baptism in the forest, because he rejected his inheritance. WF: And do you think it’s a good thing for a man to reject an inheritance? INT: Yes, in McCaslin’s case, he wanted to reject a tainted inheritance. You don’t think it’s a good thing for him to have done so? WF: Well, I think a man ought to do more than just repudiate. He should have been more affirmative instead of shunning people. (208-09) While Millgate uses this interview to examine Ike’s inadequacies, Faulkner’s words reveal significantly more, suggesting a question in response to Ike’s unsuccessful repudiation. The reader is led to ask how a man, who wishes to grapple with the issues of the American South, can be “more affirmative instead of shunning people.” An analysis of the novels Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust, in which Faulkner himself addresses these matters through his fictional Yoknapatawpha County, guides the discussion of this central question. In searching for alternatives to Ike McCaslin’s solution, the “problem” preceding his answer must first be identified. Doreen Fowler points out that Faulkner’s novels persistently uncover and impugn dichotomous social paradigms (788-89). In Ike’s instance, his difficulty lies in the white/black binary that in some sense pardons his great grandfather’s sexual exploitation of his female slaves. This binary system occupies a focal point not only in Faulkner’s work but also the

American South, and its centrality in both Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust warrants a simultaneous reading of both texts. Highlighted by the connection between these two novels, Lucas Beauchamp inhabits the boundary space between black and white. While in both texts, Faulkner illustrates and exposes the question of a white/black binary in the South, a reading of both Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust advances Lucas Beauchamp as a challenge to this social paradigm: through the nuances of financial transactions including inheritance, gift exchange, and payment, Faulkner depicts Lucas’s success in negotiating his multiracialism as an “affirmative” endeavour to confront a system of racial domination. Faulkner accentuates the dehumanization resulting from the racial binary. P.R. Broughton discusses the power of the word “nigger,” which “attempts to fix a person’s behavior and to dictate interests, feelings and even aspirations” (174-75). She points to a particularly poignant example: in labeling Carothers McCaslin’s slave and lover, Eunice, a “nigger,” Buck McCaslin is unable to recognize the human emotions at play when describing Eunice’s suicide in the plantation ledgers: “23 Jun 1833 Who in hell ever heard of a niger drownding him self ” (Faulkner, Go Down, Moses 267). In other words, when Buck’s father, Carothers, has a child with his and Eunice’s daughter, Buck does not understand that Eunice can even experience that grief. Rather, he recognizes the “nigger” as a remorseless, passionless item of property. Unlike Buck, Ike McCaslin does not strip Eunice of her humanness, yet his attempt to remedy the exploitation of black members of the McCaslin plantation is unproductive and unassertive. Having learned of the incestuous and oppressive family history through the plantation ledgers, Ike chooses to give his inheritance, the plantation itself, to his cousin, Cass Edmonds. Millgate describes Ike and his response to Carothers McCaslin’s actions and Eunice’s suicide: “Ike’s emphasis throughout is on ‘pity and love of justice and liberty,’ his attempt is to expiate through repudiation of his inheritance the sins of his grandfather … and of the whole history of the South” (207). Indeed, this is the course of action that Faulkner’s interviewer admires and Faulkner deplores. A close reading of Go Down, Moses clarifies that, by renouncing his ownership of the plantation, Ike precludes himself from the very opportunity to make revisions to the social paradigm he claims to repudiate. Ike’s withdrawal is a facade of idealism masking an act of acquiescence, and indeed his refusal to challenge the social system suggests that his actions constitute another iteration of the racial domination exerted by the black/ white binary. The profoundness of Ike’s failure to expiate his family and regional history aggressively highlights the significance of Lucas Beauchamp’s ability to cope with that same exploitation-burdened past. Lucas, Eunice’s great-grandson, is the procreative culmination of Carothers McCaslin’s abuse of two generations

of slaves. Throughout Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust, he is palpably and functionally multiracial. While biologist A. R. Templeton maintains that race itself is known to have no biological basis, he also remarks that race is nevertheless applied to humans: “Races may exist in humans in a cultural sense … [However] Humans have much genetic diversity, but the vast majority of this diversity reflects individual uniqueness and not race” (262). Faulkner’s characters attempt to trace its presence through lineage. Thus, by a pseudo-scientific, seemingly mathematical interpretation, others in Yoknapatawpha might see Lucas as approximately “half black”: Carothers is white and Eunice is black; then Tomey, their daughter, is half black, and Carothers is white; Tomey’s Turl, their son, is one quarter black, and his wife is black; therefore, their son, Lucas Beauchamp, is about half black (five eights to be precise). However, Faulkner makes clear that, in the social system that constructs race as a perfectly dichotomous trait, race can be neither biological nor mathematical. Faulkner explores multiracialism, a significant component of a racial discourse, in many of his novels; a Foucauldian analysis of multiracial characters helps to delineate the subtleties of the black/white binary. In her essay “Light in August in Light of Foucault: Reexamining the Biracial Experience,” Bethany Lam suggests an analytic method, which draws upon a Foucauldian paradigm, for a reading of Faulkner’s characters who disrupt the racial binary. Considering race to be a visual discourse, Lam argues that it is “an indicator of societal expectation for a person, to which that person more or less conforms” (50). Thus, Broughton’s claim that the word “nigger” dictates a person’s behavior, often dehumanizing him or her, agrees with Lam’s argument. In regards to multiracialism, Lam points to the clear binary structure of race in the South, which controls the abstruse race of a biracial person, such as Lucas Beauchamp, by labeling him as a member of the “lower” race (51). Thus, from Yoknapatawpha County’s dichotomous approach, Lucas is effectively black. While American society attempts to reduce a spectrum of phenotypical differences and their accompanying heritages into a binary, the individual does not necessarily conform to this pigeonholing; Lam describes the various forms of society’s normalizing response, detailing the logic of this process: [The] ambiguous status of the multiracial shows the confusion created in society by the presence of the multiracial and the threat the multiracial consequently presents to society. The multiracial compounds this problem when he explodes the racial discourse by passing, moving from one racial group to another–generally moving in the dominant society’s eyes, from lower to higher. (51) Thus, a person who is “genetically” half black, but societally purely black, will threaten society’s “entire structure” if he refuses to be categorized in the black/white

binary (Lam 52). As will be examined later on, in Intruder in the Dust, the Jefferson community threatens to lynch Lucas primarily for his racial ambivalence. Similarly, in Faulkner’s Light in August, the Jefferson community lynches Joe Christmas, whose race is remarkably both contentious and ambiguous. The threat against Lucas and violence against Joe are instances of the societal persecution predicted in Lam’s reading. Faulkner presents this interaction between the multiracial character and society in illuminating detail; Lam uses Joe Christmas as an illustrative example of a Foucauldian understanding of the biracial experience. In this example, however, it is particularly interesting that Faulkner never clarifies in Light in August whether Joe is truly biracial; nevertheless, as Lam states, “his biracialism is accepted as fact by both Joe and his society” (54). Joe Christmas is a significantly troubled character; he kills his foster father with a chair, and later on kills his lover Joanna Burden with a shaving razor. Many Faulkner scholars attribute this turmoil to his lack of a stable racial identity. Lam claims that Joe’s malaise derives from being both black and white (56). Society reacts when it discovers that Joe, unable to reconcile his purported biracialism, has been passing as white for his time in Jefferson: [W]hen his dual identity is revealed, society feels deceived and retaliates… A white murderer deserves a trial, but a black murderer who has pretended for years to be white deserves nothing better than death at the hands of the mob. (Lam 57-58) Joe Christmas, however, is decisively different from Lucas Beauchamp, despite obvious similarities. Understanding Lucas through view similar to Lam’s reading highlights how Joe and Lucas’s differences allow them to negotiate their biracialism to varying degrees of success. Lucas, in his interactions with the Yoknapatawpha community, is uniquely reconciled to his multiracialism; by Lam’s Foucauldian interpretation, Lucas would be seen as an individual who rejects all normalization. She describes the multiracial’s possible reactions: “he may defy normalization altogether and attempt to escape the prison, embracing all sides of himself and flaunting them to the rest of the world” (54). Both in Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust, Lucas exemplifies this response, as seen in Faulkner’s repetition that Lucas does not fit into the black/ white binary. In a confrontational scene with Zack Edmonds in “The Fire and The Hearth,” Lucas attempts to defy his dehumanizing label: “‘I’m a nigger,’ Lucas said. ‘But I’m a man too’” (Faulkner, Go Down, Moses 47). Lucas, in fact, clearly knows that he is violating the race binary in this clash with his white cousin, and that he is challenging normalization. He tells Zack: …because I am a nigger too, I wouldn’t dare. No. You thought that because I am a nigger I wouldn’t even mind… You tried to beat me. And you wont never, not even when I am hanging dead from the

limb this time tomorrow with the coal oil still burning, you wont never. (Faulkner, Go Down, Moses 53) Lucas makes clear here in Moses that he will embrace his multiracialism; he will fight, apparently to the death, for his biracial identity and explode the racial discourse. Similarly, Intruder in the Dust explicitly repeats that Lucas collapses the racial binary. In the first description of Lucas, Chick Mallison recalls seeing Lucas for the first time after having just fallen into a creek: what was looking out from Lucas’s “Negro skin … had no pigment at all, not even the white man’s lack of it, not arrogant, not even scornful: just intractable and composed” (Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust 7). To Chick, Lucas appears race-less as well as “intractable and composed,” which in the novel becomes Lucas’s standard description. Once in Lucas’s cabin, Chick again describes Lucas: The face pigmented like a Negro’s but with a nose high in the bridge and even hooked a little and what looked out through it or from behind it not black nor white either, not arrogant at all and not even scornful: just intolerant inflexible and composed. (Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust 13) Thus, Faulkner makes clear from the very beginning that Lucas’s existence is defined by his stubborn disintegration of racial dichotomy. While Chick Mallison is not alone in observing Lucas’s lack of race, most others in the novel see Lucas only for his refusal to be categorized as black. Lucas’s ambiguous racial status causes confusion for Chick. However, Chick, being a child, may not be as aware of the full extent of the functioning of the black/white binary. Specifically, he may not understand that the multiracial’s threat to society is controlled by placing him in the social hierarchy as the lower race. Nevertheless, Yoknapatawpha County intends to force this label onto Lucas: he cannot be neither black nor white. Soon, Chick learns what “every white man in that whole section of the country had been thinking about [Lucas] for years: We got to make him be a nigger first” (Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust 18). Chick, too, then begins to follow this same path, thinking: “If he would just be a nigger first, just for one second, one little infinitesimal second” (Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust 22). Here, as throughout Faulkner’s novels, Chick and “every white man” use the word “nigger” to define Lucas’s racial categorization. In doing so, they are also enacting society’s normalizing pressure to force Lucas back into the culture of racial domination. Faulkner does not limit the normalizing efforts of society to the white men of Yoknapatawpha County, but also illustrates how those of the “lower” race participate in social sanctioning. According to Foucauldian theory, one of the four means of exploiting power differentials and maintaining their control is silence. Lam explains, with regard to society’s construction of madness: In silence, the asylum patient finds himself cut off from

communication, isolated, and ignored until his insanity lessens … These four methods [of control] parallel methods of marginalization for the multiracial. When society ignores the multiracial or one or more of his races, it uses the technique of silence… (53) While the dominant racial population appears more aggressive in attempting to make Lucas “be a nigger,” the black population of Jefferson by no means supports him. Rather, when Lucas, accused of killing a white man, appears to have flaunted his multiracialism to an extreme, they marginalize Lucas through total silence. Chick Mallison notices several times that the black sharecroppers of Yoknapatawpha are conspicuously absent. Faulkner specifically observes that on the car ride back from the sheriff’s house while Lucas has been incarcerated for allegedly murdering a white man, “this was Monday… breakfast must be forward and the pandemoniac bustle of exodus yet still no Negro had they seen” (Intruder in the Dust 120). While their collective absence may be motivated by fear of Lucas’s lynch mob rather than by an effort to control Lucas, this trepidation can be understood through the social paradigm discussed by Lam: the dominant race, the white men of Jefferson, govern the identity of the other, its racial binary counterpart. Thus, the reaction of silence is in fact a result of the black community’s stake in their side of the binary.” The soundless isolation of Lucas by Yoknapatawpha’s black society persists in Intruder in the Dust, drawing further attention to the normalization Lucas attempts to defy. On another car ride, Faulkner describes over several pages the passing scenes of the sharecropper farmland: … always beyond and around them the enduring land … empty, vacant of any movement and any life ... [Chick] said with an incredulous an almost shocked amazement who except for Paralee and Aleck Sander and Lucas had not seen one in going on forty-eight hours: ‘There’s a nigger.’ ‘Yes,’ His uncle said. ‘Today is the ninth of May. This county’s got half of a hundred and forty-two thousand acres to plant yet. Somebody’s got to stay home and work.’ (Intruder in the Dust 146-47) This passage displays at length not only the extent to which the black population has disappeared, but also how significant their absence is to Yoknapatawpha County. First, the fields are empty, except for the one that Chick points out to his uncle; Chick’s surprise at this sighting indicates that the absence of black people in public is quite conspicuous and unusual. Furthermore, his uncle, Gavin Stevens, compounds Chick’s surprise by trivializing it: if Chick hasn’t seen another black person throughout the county that day, one person hardly makes a difference in the immensity of farming work that Stevens claims should be happening. The presence

of one inconsequential farmer evinces how significant Lucas’s racial transgression is to the whole society. In effect, this intense absence heightens the severity of the silence from the black portion of Yoknapatawpha. Society marginalizes Lucas Beauchamp from all sides of the racial binary; Faulkner foregrounds this normalizing force in his emphatic portrayal of the county’s response to Lucas’s alleged murder. Here, however, the question arises as to why Lucas so stridently works to defy normal racial categorization. Why is he different from Joe Christmas; why is he not lynched for violating the black/white binary? What distinguishes him from Ike McCaslin, who conspicuously fails to challenge racial dichotomy? And does Faulkner depict Lucas as the one who does more than repudiate, being “affirmative” in his attempt to alter the South’s racial landscape? While Lucas and Joe Christmas both explode the dominant racial discourse, Joe attempts to pass as a white man, whereas Lucas fully embraces his multiracialism. Joe is troubled, or perhaps tormented, by his racial ambiguity: Faulkner never suggests that Joe, being an orphan, even knows his own racial makeup, thus accentuating the arbitrariness of the white/black binary. Yet, despite his indeterminate place in the social structure, Joe embraces his almost capricious label, whether he is a white person or a “nigger” (Lam 57). As a result, Joe never thoroughly defies normalization, because he never fully reconciles his biracial status. On the other hand, Lucas can essentially trace his own lineage to definitively establish his genetically “half black” identity. Interestingly, Lucas’s situation is not unique, since it can be assumed that a vast number of biracial people know their histories. Therefore, Lucas’s “intractable and composed” demeanor, which starkly contrasts Joe’s angst, cannot derive simply from Lucas’s self-awareness, but rather must originate from a trait more proximal to Lucas’s character. Lucas’s ability to live and even celebrate his multiracial identity without angst or tragedy stems from the same feature that saves him from being lynched in Intruder in the Dust. In one of several unwieldy, circuitous, even comical, discussions between Chick and his uncle Gavin Stevens, Chick tries to understand why Lucas’s lynch mob has dispersed: ‘So that was why,’ [Chick] said. ‘So their women wouldn’t have to chop wood in the dark with half-awake children holding lanterns.’ ‘No,’ his uncle said. ‘They were not running from Lucas. They had forgotten about him–’ ‘That’s exactly what I’m saying,’ he said. (Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust 198) This obscure, elliptical rationalization continues for quite some time, but seemingly ends when Chick says:

‘They were not running from Crawford Gowrie or Lucas Beauchamp either. They were running from themselves. They ran home to hide their heads under the bedclothes from their own shame.’ ‘Exactly correct,’ his uncle said. ‘Haven’t I been saying that all the time?’ (Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust 202) Thus, after pages of confusion, Faulkner allows Chick to return to the astonishing truth with which he started. Specifically, Lucas has provided alternative identities to the members of the mob. Whereas before Lucas’s arrest and subsequent acquittal, the mob was a dehumanized proxy of the racial binary, Lucas, or the concept of his existence, forces them to become individuals who must take care of families and experience shame. Faulkner masks Lucas’s humanizing effects in the tangled and disordered conversation between Chick and Gavin because, against all predictions, it violates the dichotomous property of the race discourse without disfiguring the social structure. Lucas defies the mob’s extreme normalization not only despite his biracialism, but even by virtue of his absolute embrace of it; his “composed” and practical attention to the race discourse and its associated power structure enables him to succeed where Ike McCaslin’s idealistic approach fails. Ike withdraws from society, putting himself in a position of impotence. He chooses to be inoffensive to the rest of society, while assuaging his personal guilt by philosophically declining to benefit from the system of racial domination. Lucas confronts the dichotomous social paradigm with regard to neither provocativeness nor placation, as shown in his clashes with white men. For example, when insulted and threatened by a white man at a crossroads store, Lucas neither withdraws nor retaliates. Rather, he looks at the man and noisily eats a gingersnap “with no implication whatever of either derision or rebuttal or even disagreement, with no implication of anything at all but almost abstractedly” (Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust 19). While still unwavering in his assertion of his biracial identity, Lucas lives realistically, fully aware that any perceived hostility in his social transgressions could bring an end to his identity altogether. Furthermore, Lucas combats marginalization, contrary to Ike’s ineffectual effort, through tangible endeavours to overcome the white/black binary. Most importantly, he negotiates his multiracialism through deliberate management of three monetary transactions: inheritance, gifts, and payment. Faulkner portrays Lucas’s effectiveness in detail throughout Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust, thus showing specifically and concretely how Lucas thwarts Yoknapatawpha’s normalizing pressure. Lucas’s obsession with gold coins in the section “The Fire and the Hearth” of Go Down, Moses actually constitutes an important component of Lucas’s character (Bullen 198): his connection to this particular money is one of the ways in which

he attempts to make palpable his multiracial status. Carothers set aside $1000 as a legacy to his illegitimate multiracial children. Lucas demands his gold inheritance as soon as he is old enough. Ross Bullen argues that “Lucas attempts to reify his nebulous racial identity by fetishizing (and hoarding) [gold coins] that he associates with his white, McCaslin ancestry” (195). By hoarding his gold inheritance passed down by Carothers McCaslin, Lucas attempts to protect the white half of his racial makeup, and, consequently, guards himself from categorization as black. Since, as Bullen further explains, whiteness could be considered property during that historic time period (196), Lucas can connect his money inheritance with his white inheritance, and by implication, his biracialism. These two forms of currency, gold coins and whiteness, present a problem for Lucas, because both are at risk for being taken away. While Lucas could lose his multiracial identity to society’s marginalization, he can also lose his symbolic money inheritance by putting it into circulation. Bullen cites “the one drop-rule” notorious in the American South, under which “African Americans could receive a legacy of ‘whiteness’ from their white ancestors, but the social privileges attached to such a gift would be taken from them by the same technologies of the white-supremacist social order” (201). Therefore, as demonstrated by his composed demeanor, Lucas will not fully show off his white identity, or “pass” as white, in Lam’s terminology, because he wants to preserve it from normalization. Similarly, if Lucas spends the gold coins from the legacy of his grandfather (and great-grandfather), the meaning attached to the coins would be discarded with it. Thus, according to Bullen, “its immortality [is] assured by Lucas’s staunch unwillingness to spend it” (199). In effect, Lucas has the “monetary legacy that he will not spend and the white ancestry that he identifies with but cannot claim” (205). Faulkner not only establishes the connection between the gold coins and his white ancestry, but also reveals that Lucas deeply values both. For example, Bullen points out a scene from Go Down, Moses in which Faulkner describes how Lucas keeps some of the inheritance in a container, which “his white grandfather, Carothers McCaslin himself ” previously owned (Faulkner, Go Down, Moses 51), hidden in his hearth (Bullen 208). The hearth, a signifier of family and personal identity, highlights Lucas profound relationship with his double inheritance. Put simply, Lucas imposes his biracial identity into a binary system by protecting the tangible portion of his grandfather’s legacy, thereby attempting to guard his concomitant intangible inheritance. In other words, Bullen’s claim that Lucas sees “the gold coins … as a material embodiment of his abstract white ancestry” further evinces the practical and physical resistance with which Lucas challenges the black/white binary (210). In a similar manner, Faulkner establishes Lucas’s multiracial defiance by portraying Lucas’s control over other economic

interactions. Specifically, Lucas demonstrates his clear understanding of both the danger and the usefulness of gifts in forming power structures. Bullen, using Marcel Mauss’ theory of the gift, describes how “the phenomenon of gift exchange in marked by three ‘obligations’: the obligation to give, the obligation to receive, and the obligation to reciprocate” (Mauss 13; Bullen 201). Lucas carefully negotiates his multiracial status by both refusing to receive and insisting on giving gifts; in doing so, he prevents society from locating him as a member of the dominated race, and maintains his position on the dominant side of the racial binary. The gold legacy that is so important to Lucas is a primary example of how he spurns any money that is given to him as a gift. Interestingly, however, he is able to still receive his inheritance by demanding the gold coins before Ike McCaslin can give it to him. As a part of his perfunctory challenge to racial domination, Ike tries to give the money left by Carothers McCaslin to the children of Carothers’s unacknowledged son, Tomey’s Turl. Ultimately, of Tomey’s Turl’s three children, Ike is only able to give money to Fonsiba. In this case, Ike uses the gold coins as a part of the gift exchange; “for Tomey’s Turl (or his heirs), the consequence of accepting this golden inheritance is to be ‘written out’ of the official McCaslin family history” (Bullen 204). That is, by receiving the money specifically as a gift, Fonsiba can no longer claim any white ancestry. That is, Fonsiba involuntarily fulfills the obligation corresponding to the Carothers and Ike’s gift. Ike compels Fonsiba to forfeit her biracial identity by forcing her to accept the gold coins. Lucas, by contrast, demands not only his own inheritance, but also the money meant for his brother, whom Ike was unable to find. Lucas, on his twenty-first birthday, the first day he can claim Carothers’s financial legacy, approaches Cass Edmonds and says, “Whar’s the rest of that money old Carothers left? I wants it. All of it” (Faulkner, Go Down, Moses 282). In firmly asserting his right to the inheritance, Lucas authoritatively declares his biracial identity; he preemptively denies Ike the chance to dispossess his white lineage in a gift exchange, and, by the same token, defies the racial domination that Ike forces upon Fonsiba. In Intruder in the Dust, Chick Mallison finds himself stuck on the receiving end of Lucas’s gift. In the beginning of the novel, when Chick falls into a creek on the McCaslin plantation, Lucas forces him to accept a meal at Lucas’s cabin. Chick unsuccessfully tries to transform this gift into a payment by giving money to Lucas, who immediately and emphatically rejects this offer. Following that interaction, Chick feels the weight of the obligation resulting from the gift exchange: [A]nd sleepless in bed that night he knew that … he had gone out there this morning as the guest not of Edmonds but of old Carothers McCaslin’s plantation and Lucas knew it when he didn’t and so Lucas had beat him, stood straddled in front of the hearth and without

even moving his clasped hands from behind his back had taken his own seventy cents and beat him with them. (Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust 17-18) Lucas has inserted himself in the dominant role in the race binary by means of his attention to the nuances of economic exchange. Despite his socially demanded identity as a “nigger,” Lucas collapses the race binary by situating himself in the designated white rank of the social hierarchy and forcing Chick, a white boy, into the position of “nigger.” Chick’s lowered status, then, keeps him up at night thinking. As Fowler explains, “[Lucas] thwarts Chick’s attempt to establish white supremacy in terms of black subordination” (797). Chick, rather than accepting this obligation, repeatedly tries to pay Lucas back and reestablish the “normal” racial the power structure. In the ensuing gift exchange between Lucas and Chick, Lucas continues to impede Chick’s efforts, thereby disrupting the system of racial domination. First, Chick sends cigars and snuff to Lucas and his wife, but, as Chick knows, this only covers the cost of the original gift from Lucas. In order to upend the social hierarchy established by Lucas, Chick presents Lucas another larger gift, a dress for his wife. Were Lucas to accept this as a gift, he would be “beaten” by Chick into the dominated role. Faulkner writes, “at last [Chick] had something like ease because the rage was gone” (Intruder in the Dust 22). Nevertheless, Lucas outmaneuvers him not only sending a gift in exchange but, as Chick’s mother tells him, “He didn’t even bring it himself. He sent it in. A white boy brought it on a mule” (Intruder in the Dust 23). Lucas, by sending a “white boy,” takes the opportunity not only to protect the white component of his biracialism, but also to widen the gap between himself and the prescribed “nigger” identity that Chick had been trying to force upon him. Evidently, Lucas relentlessly opposes categorization throughout Faulkner’s works, whether by hoarding inheritance or by exploiting the nature of gift exchange. By the same tireless attention to the nuances of the racial power structure and its reifications, Lucas relentlessly insists on purchasing everything he acquires. Indeed, this emphasis leads to the same result as his refusal to receive gifts: he never undertakes obligations that would locate him in a dominated role. For example, near the end of Intruder in the Dust, Gavin Stevens explains to Miss Habersham about his conversation with Lucas, during which they talk about Lucas’s pistol. Stevens recounts, “‘…But why the pistol?’ and then I understood; I said: ‘I see. You wear the pistol when you dress up on Saturday just like old Carothers did before he gave it to you:’ and he said, ‘Sold it to me’” (Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust 226). Lucas thereby compounds his white inheritance from Carothers with his dominant position in the social structure by specifying to Stevens that he purchased the gun. The combination, however, of hoarding his money and simultaneously demanding

to pay could potentially create problems for Lucas; since he is not willing to spend his gold coins, he must have other means of purchasing power. In order to circumvent his “staunch unwillingness to spend” his legacy, Lucas finds several ways to keep it stored away. He illegally distills and sells alcohol for an additional source of income, as well as misleads others into thinking that he has paid them. His profitable whisky business demonstrates that he not only has the ability to buy things, but that he is financially self-reliant. That is, he does not depend on his grandfather’s money; rather he exclusively spends the money that he earned himself. Here, again, by avoiding the burden of the gift, Faulkner expresses Lucas’s pragmatic approach to negotiating his biracialism through his manipulation of financial transactions. Nevertheless, Faulkner does not portray Lucas’s successful defiance of society’s marginalization without its flaws. At the end of Intruder in the Dust, Lucas tries to pay his lawyer, Gavin Stevens. Stevens, seemingly also aware of how racial domination is reified through gift exchange and payments, subverts Lucas’s plan to pay for his services. Stevens, in the end, allows Lucas to pay a reduced fee: just two dollars, telling Lucas, ‘Expenses?’ [Chick’s] uncle said. ‘Yes, I had an expense sitting here last Tuesday trying to write down all the different things you finally told me … Of course the paper belongs to the county but the fountain pen was mine and it cost me two dollars to have a new point put in it. You owe me two dollars.’ (Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust 245) Stevens, here, minimizes the payment, letting Lucas pay for a small, humorously trivial aspect of his work. In doing so, he overturns the power structure Lucas hoped to create. Whereas Lucas wished to pay for his lawyer as a white man would, Stevens forces him into the dominated role, the “nigger’s” position by giving him a substantial discount. He further degrades Lucas’s status by forcing him to count the coins with which Lucas pays (Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust 246). Here, Lucas seemingly fails to collapse the black/white binary because Stevens successfully categorizes Lucas as black. Despite this failure, Faulkner ends the novel on a striking note, one that may allow Lucas to repossess his whiteness, and by implication his biracialism. Following Lucas’s payment, Stevens asks him, “Now what? … What are you waiting for now?” To which Lucas responds, “My receipt” (Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust 247). Lucas, having the finals word with Stevens, refuses to be categorized by continuing to uphold his equitable role in the financial exchange. In fact, while Lucas was not entirely successful in paying as an equal, he does not shun Stevens. Rather, in asking for a receipt, he affirms his own effort to keep his racial identity buoyant in a social system that tirelessly tries to repress it. This endeavour, then, is precisely what Faulkner mentions in his interview.

Lucas Beauchamp succeeds where Ike McCaslin’s idealism fails; he challenges the racial binary in his persistent declaration of his multiracial identity; he distorts the dichotomous nature of the racial paradigm. He not only embraces his racial ambiguity, in contrast to Joe Christmas, but even protects it from normalization at the hands of Yoknapatawpha. By translating the power structure that enables racial domination into a material form, Lucas exploits the subtleties of financial exchange in order to avoid marginalization that would pigeonhole his identity exclusively as a black man. Perhaps most importantly, Faulkner portrays Lucas as relentlessly forwardmoving. The final scene of Intruder in the Dust evinces this quality by demonstrating that Lucas will not skip a beat in the moment of failure. Indeed, his repeated description as being “intractable and composed” further supports this quality. The firm and progressive stance that Lucas assumes not only connects with Faulkner’s words in his interview, but also relates to sense and rationality struck upon by Faulkner’s characters. In a profound moment during yet another of Chick and his uncle’s baffling conversations, Stevens tries to explain to Chick a system of morals: ‘Eagle scout,’ his uncle said. ‘Tenderfoot is, Dont accept. Eagle scout is, Dont stop. You see? No, that’s wrong. Dont bother to see. Dont even bother to not forget it. Just dont stop.’ ‘No,’ he said. ‘We dont need to worry about stopping now. It seems to me what we have to worry about now is where we’re going and how.’ (Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust 210) Caught up in his jargon of Eagle scout and Tenderfoot, Stevens is unable to tell Chick what exactly he should not be doing, whether it’s accepting, stopping, bothering to see, or bothering to not forget. Faulkner, however, rejects this negativity, both in his interview statement and in the novel; Ike McCaslin fails because he is most concerned with not accepting his inheritance. Likewise, Chick, in his youthful wisdom, corrects Stevens’ mistake, suggesting another more affirmative option: rather than worrying about what not to do, focus on what’s next. A reading of both Go Down, Moses and Intruder in the Dust reveals, as a strong alternative to Ike McCaslin’s failed confrontation with the American South’s exploitative system of racial domination, Lucas Beauchamp, who worries more about “where we’re going and how.”

Works Cited Broughton, Panthea Reid. “Race, Blood, and Mccaslins: The Abstraction Grasped as a Fine Dead Sound.” Critical Essays on William Faulkner: The Mccaslin Family. Ed. Kinney, Arthur F. Critical Essays on American Literature (Ceal). Boston: G.K. Hall & Co, 1990. 174-79. Print. Bullen, Ross. “Blood Money: Gresham’s Law, Property, and Race in Faulkner’s Go Down, Moses.” Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue Canadienne d’Etudes Américaines 42.2 (2012): 194-215. Print. Faulkner, William. Go Down, Moses. New York: Random House, 1942. Print. ---. Intruder in the Dust. New York: Vintage Books, 1972. Print. Fowler, Doreen. “Beyond Oedipus: Lucas Beauchamp, Ned Barnett, and Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies 53.4 (2007): 788-820. Print. Lam, Bethany L. “Light in August in Light of Foucault: Reexamining the Biracial Experience.” Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and Theory 64.4 (2008): 49-68. Print. Mauss, Marcel. “The Gift: The Form and Reason for Exchange in Archaic Societies, W D.” New York and London: Norton 1990 [1950] 11 (1954). Print. Millgate, Michael. The Achievement of William Faulkner. New York: Random House, 1966. Print. Templeton, A. R. “Biological Races in Humans.” Stud Hist Philos Biol Biomed Sci 44.3 (2013): 262-71. Print.

Philanthropy, Fallen Women, and the 1880s Novel: Reader Subjectivity in Gissing and Harkness By Caroline Boreham

n his recent monograph Slumming, Seth Koven attempts to understand why slumming, the practice by which the upper-tiers of London society flocked to the urban slums with the intention of extending philanthropic sympathy and aid to the poor, so vividly captured the imagination of the “‘comfortable classes’” in the Victorian era (3). This almost compulsive fascination with slumming caught hold of the literary and social imaginations, especially in novels about fallen women. At the time when slumming became fashionable in the 1880s, the fallen woman in Victorian fiction found her meta-textual double in the figure of the middle-class female slummer, a sort of casual philanthropist. In the later decades of the nineteenth century, the landscape of British philanthropy shifted from a male-dominant space to a topography that was increasingly conceived of as “an extended version of middle-class women’s domestic responsibilities” (Livesey, “Women Rent Collectors” 90). The domestication of London’s slums during the 1880s, a decade of urgent social protest and reform, saw the visits of West End women become ubiquitous, even casual, though female slumming remained a dubious enterprise by conservative moral standards. While female novelists such as Elizabeth Gaskell have dabbled in ethnographic investigation since the High Victorian period in order to observe the communities that they depict in their fiction, these middle-class female slummers or philanthropists correspond to the demographic that Kate Flint associates with the principal consumer of the Victorian novel: the middle-class female reader (11, 49). Perhaps for the first time, the Victorian novel was not only written by novelists who had explored the ins and outs of slum living out of social concern or for the sake of representational fidelity, but also addressed to an assumed female audience who had the opportunity, if not the humanitarian imperative, to intervene in the slums as part of a broader sociological trend. As either a deliberate or an incidental result of this correlative, the Victorian novel of the 1880s registered and conscripted the new potential social function of its reading demographic. Slum novelists, or

realists committed to the representation of economic and sexual degradation in urban slums, invited their middle-class female readers to join in the philanthropic enterprises that were rapidly infiltrating London’s slums as well as the British novel. In George Gissing’s The Unclassed (1884) and Margaret Harkness’s A City Girl (1887), the novel’s implied gendered address invites an affective female response– and philanthropic project, namely the extension of sisterly sympathy and aid to fallen women. This essay will examine the narrative strategies that the slum novel developed in response to the new model of civic engagement available to middle-class women in the eighties. Gissing and Harkness’s creation of a philanthropic aesthetic hinges on the ability of their respective narratives to align the subjectivities that their novels shape both inside and outside the text, and thus develop narrative structures which, ostensibly, foster cross-class emotional responses, central to which is womanly sympathy. Female Philanthropy and Fallen Women: A Family Affair The advent of popular philanthropy, which commentators such as Livesey and Koven have connected with the participation en masse of middle-class women in the slums in the 1880s and 1890s, was by no means restricted to the assistance of fallen women. In fact, Livesey’s work on female volunteers and the London Charity Organisation Society (COS) is largely concerned with the intervention of the “lady” in the squalid living spaces of the urban poor. Likewise, Koven identifies a broad range of motives and modes of intervention which elaborate upon the compulsion of upper-class men and women “to visit, live, or work in the London slums” (Koven 1). Redeeming fallen women is, officially speaking, only one cause among many. Yet Koven’s strategy of aligning casual philanthropy with “anxieties about sex, sexuality, and gender roles” (4) has significant implications for his reading of a “cross-class sisterhood” (184) between middle-class women and their “down-trodden sisters” (183). He notes that the perceived eroticism of middle-class women’s slum visits turns their benevolent acts of sympathy into a perverse, yet strangely effective, intimacy in which “moral opposites of the same sex (the virtuous and the fallen) promiscuously embrace, each literally blackened by the contact of the other” (223). Or, in the words of Audrey Jaffe in her version of this double bind, middle-class sympathy for the poor–in both reality and fiction–implies an inherent “fear of falling” (18). The late nineteenth-century novel develops this logic of complicity and cross-class responsibility by mapping reader-character relations onto the virtuous-fallen binary, with the result that novelists such as Gissing and Harkness draw their reader, sometimes through coercion, into the subject position of the slummer.

The figure of the fallen woman pervades the discourse on female philanthropy circulating in the final decades of the century. The saturation of her image and its propensity to double the subjectivity of the middle-class woman, however, is not entirely unique to this period. Indeed, as Nina Auerbach reminds us, for decades the only respectable activity available to “philanthropically-minded Victorian spinsters” was the “reclamation of fallen women” (153). No doubt, popular association between women’s philanthropic endeavours and fallen women assured that the latter’s person and salvation would be read into any and all interventions in the slums, particularly as the visitation practice grew in both fashion and scope. Yet philanthropic–and novelistic–discourses surrounding the fallen woman figure had their own peculiar vehemence in the 1880s, possibly because of the convergence of two ideological shifts. In the first instance, public perception of fallen women changed with the development of the field of social work and the publication of sociological tracts on the urban poor; the fallen woman came to be “defined economically rather than morally” as a victim of industrial poverty (158). For Emma Higgins, “limited sympathy” for the prostitute, the professional telos of the fall, was an “unfashionable and conservative position to adopt in the 1880s” (24). Indeed, the fallen woman’s new status demanded fresh consideration. Secondly, for perhaps the first time in history, women dominated the sphere of philanthropy and humanitarian activism to the point that London’s slums came to be seen as a spatial extension of the drawing room (Livesey, “Women Rent Collectors” 87-88). The Unclassed and A City Girl attest to the notion that these two movements in contemporary thought were indissociable from one another in the cultural imagination of the period. Female philanthropy is not the principal subject of either novel. In part, Gissing and Harkness could not offer a portrait of this “new” fallen woman, the victim of circumstance, without citing middle-class female philanthropy in their argument. Novels about fallen women, insofar as they were exemplary of their historical moment, became necessarily about female philanthropy, however tangentially they represented this trend. In many ways, the novel took its discursive cues from the journalism of social reformers who specialized in the salvation of fallen women. From the perspective of these men and women, not the least of whom was the founder of the Salvation Army, William Booth, the young women visiting and volunteering in the slums in unprecedented numbers were the ideal audience for their pleas to help the fallen. Mary Jeune, a charity worker and socialite, published articles conveying this appeal in the Fortnightly Review in 1885. In “Saving the Innocents,” she argues for the contingent nature of the fallen class, writing that “a great deal can be done” for these women who are “easily reached by sympathy and kindness” (346). Her intended

audience becomes more pointedly female in her subsequent piece, “Helping the Fallen.” Advocating for cross-class friendship, she implores respectable women to “hold out the hand of fellowship, and lead the fallen back again to a pure life” (681-82), an action which she believes had only become possible within the context of renewed “sympathy and charity” for the fallen that characterized the period (672). In turn, she observes that this attitude would have been unfathomable–and unfashionable–a mere fifteen years prior. Jeune’s championing of female intervention in cases involving fallen women echoes the Victorian cultural view that held women to be naturally sympathetic subjects. As Jaffe notes in her study on sympathy and literary representation, “sympathy tends to appear explicitly as a woman’s issue” (1). Of course, sympathy was also the explicit “issue” of the nineteenth-century novel, which “formulat[ed] the ideological meanings borne by emotional response, chief among which were the social images and relations that accumulated around the term ‘sympathy’” (14). In the 1880s, the novel’s investment in mediating a sisterly relationship between the female philanthropist and the fallen woman adds yet another “social image” of sympathy to the Victorian novel’s affective catalogue. Gissing and Harkness in particular create this new sympathetic social relation, though it remains the object of novelistic fantasy. By equating the subject positions of reader and literary figure in their narrative approach to the fallen woman plot, both novelists attempt to shape fallen women into fit objects of philanthropic sympathy and intervention, at the same time encouraging their readers to take on the subjectivities of philanthropically-minded women. George Gissing’s The Unclassed Gissing’s relationship to the topics of prostitution, philanthropy, and fiction’s place in the forum of social activism was (and remains), to borrow Diana Maltz’s words, “complex and inconsistent” (26). Interpreting these topics (all of which are thematic concerns of the slum novel in general and of The Unclassed in particular) in tandem with one another rather than in isolation underscores the issue of female sympathy in Gissing’s fiction. On the matter of his fiction’s ability to incite sympathy from his female readers, Gissing commented: “It is strange how many letters I get from women, asking for sympathy & advice. I really can’t understand what it is in my work that attracts the female mind” (qtd. in Harsh 29). The author’s reservations notwithstanding, Clara Collet, a social worker and Gissing’s friend and correspondent, found that his novels had educational applications for female social reformers. She writes in the Charity Organization Review that philanthropists could become “more in touch with their fellow men through the medium . . . of

a great novelist” such as Gissing (qtd. in Livesey, “Reading for Character” 43). Though Livesey’s interest in the novel’s ability to bring female philanthropists into closer intimacy with the urban poor does not consider fallen women specifically, the following section will attempt to illustrate how the novel’s philanthropic achievement is predicated explicitly on the ability of female readers to identify and sympathize with literary representations of fallen women despite obvious moral and class boundaries. Originally published in 1884, and deemed too explicit by Victorian standards (Grylls 20), The Unclassed went much further in its representation of prostitution than any other form of contemporary writing. The novel tells the story of Ida Starr’s reclamation from prostitution after she falls in love with the struggling novelist Waymark. She is eventually restored to middle-class respectability and dedicates her life to philanthropic work in the slums. Both Paul Delany and Auerbach have commented on the scarcity of prostitutes in nineteenth-century British fiction. Yet here, the novel’s prostitute is also the female protagonist. What’s more, Ida subverts popular conceptions of prostitutes: she develops a chaste relationship with the man that she loves and insists that her profession has not “degraded” her soul (Gissing 100). In fact, the only thing that Ida and her fallen friend, Sally, can be faulted for is their inability to afford virtue–a middle-class commodity. Both women stress the economic necessity of “go[ing] out into the Strand” (127) on numerous occasions and reveal the stories of poverty and exploitation that led to their fall. In an impassioned exchange with Waymark, Ida expands on the circumstantial nature of her fallen state by denouncing the popular notion that virtue is inherent: “Give me a fortune, and to-morrow I will be as chaste as if I still sat on my mother’s knee; the past life will have gone for ever, and have left no trace, except in a clearer understanding of things” (129). Similarly, in many of the “feminist accounts of the ‘reclaiming’ of prostitutes [which] proliferated in this period” (Higgins 1), an economic definition of fallen women precedes their exculpation from moral sin. In an article run by the socialist newspaper Justice, to which Margaret Harkness contributed as a journalist in the 1880s, prostitutes were unambiguously and unapologetically identified as the victims of upper-class men “which economic conditions offer as a vicarious sacrifice for the ladies of the wealthy classes” (Willis-Harris 4). The language of victimhood is precisely what marked these women as objects worthy of sympathetic engagement and deserving of social intervention. More importantly, however, this new consideration of prostitutes as the victims of upper-class privilege made them at least as visible as the urban poor with whom they were increasingly associated. The idea that, once she has been restored to virtue, Ida’s fall would have

“left no trace” is central to the novel’s strategy of aligning the subjectivities of the female reader and the fallen character, as it underscores the instability and reversibility of a subject’s moral position. Ida and Waymark discuss the relativity of the fallen status within a meditation on narrative and plotting in The Vicar of Wakefield, a novel Waymark lends Ida as part of her project to better herself. The trope of “a girl being led astray” (Gissing 128) commands Ida’s particular attention. Narrative discourse and the idea that, in fiction, what narration elides has playful and imaginative potential for the reader provide Ida with a language able to explain the transience of her fallen status. She muses, “Suppose it all happened secretly, and there an end of it, well, wouldn’t it be the same as if it had never happened?” (128). Pursuing this line of inquiry, she articulates a powerful irony surrounding Victorian conceptions of female virtue. A girl’s character is “supposed” to be lost and her “soul . . . contaminated” (129) if she is discovered to have a lover. Yet, if it is made known that the two had eloped “secretly,” “Character instantly comes back, and the soul is made pure again” (129). In cases where sexual transgression leaves “no trace” on the woman’s body and is never publicized, a woman’s fallen self is indistinguishable from her idealized, pure self–with the result that “the fall” sheds its climactic connotation as the definitive event in the tragedy of female experience. By the very nature of its metafictional reference, this scene prompts the reader to reflect on her own identity as a consumer of fiction and therefore as a potential sympathetic subject. But it also problematizes, for its female reader in particular, the assumed sanctity of her virtue: the purity of her position as a respectable middle-class woman is drawn into the precariousness of Ida’s moral status. At least in theory, the categorical collapse between “fallen” and “virtuous” provides the narrative scaffolding necessary to make the female reader willing to sympathize with and forge an imagined social relation to the fallen woman. Once the reader’s acceptance that Ida is “as pure as any woman who lives” (129)–herself included–is assumed, the narrative possibilities of philanthropic sympathy and intervention are opened. So much so, in fact, that the attempts of Gissing’s novel to reform and influence its reader’s responses take on the form of direct address, a literalized opening of the novel’s diegesis to the consideration of the reader’s subject position. By the 1880s, the nineteenth-century novel was already accustomed to what Garrett Stewart terms “textually internalizing” its audience via apostrophe (56). In his extensive study on the trope of direct address, Stewart argues that “the mentioned reader . . . marks the site of an implicated response, however minimal, by which the reading subject is gradually taken for granted in the narrative text” (27). While this “conscription” of the reader’s affective responses in no way implies that the novel has the power to “monitor” them (19),

the narrator’s address in the 1884 edition of The Unclassed confidently singles out middle-class women while counting on both their conservative attitudes toward fallen women and their singular capacity for sympathy. By singling out the “most likely readership for novels” (Flint 49) at the expense of a wider audience, the narrator adjusts the novel’s horizon of reception in order to record and manipulate the sociological mobility and potential for humanitarian intervention which now characterized its female readers. If Gissing’s representational strategies invite the female reader to consider the likeness between herself and a woman like Ida by disturbing the differences that separate them, then his apostrophes to a “good” and “dear madam” (24, 233) redirect the reader’s assumed sympathy towards both real and imagined philanthropic intervention. Describing the effect of Gissing’s address to the second person in his spatial descriptions of the slums in The Nether World, Livesey argues that “the narrative descriptions also work to implicate the imagined reader in this humanitarian enterprise” (“Reading for Character” 59). In The Unclassed, the narrator’s suggestion to the reader is literally to put down her book (at the moment, Gissing’s) and leave the comfort of her drawing room in order to experience the desolation of the slums firsthand: “If you, dear madam, who read this in the ease of assured leisure, should ever feel disposed to vary the monotony of your life with a distinct new sensation, permit me to suggest that you should disguise yourself as a simple work-girl . . . everywhere you will be given to understand that you are altogether superfluous” (233). The ease with which a girl from a background of “leisure” can be mistaken for and treated like a “simple work-girl” has a doubling effect on the subject positions of the middle-class reader and her unfortunate “sister.” This conscriptive effect intensifies after Ida is adopted by her grandfather, a slum lord, and begins her philanthropic activities in Westminster.1 The narrator, in this instance the uncontested “author” of the novel, has difficulty maintaining the semblance of objectivity when describing the “happiness” of the slum children who attend Ida’s tea party. Rather than relying on language alone, he urges the reader to imagine the scene for themselves, adding: “If this fail in the reader, why then I will hint that there is yet a way of appreciating it,– ‘Go, and do thou likewise!’” (335). The directive shifts from a suggestion to visit the slums in order to inhabit the subjectivity of working-class women to an instruction to middle-class women to intervene on behalf of these girls as themselves. The modalities of direct address thus parallel the novel’s affective strategy towards the reader: a call to action follows from the development of a sympathetic bond between classes, or between the reader and the fallen character. 1 In the 1895 edition of the novel, Gissing relocates Ida’s tenants to the East End, as the “conditions in Westminster were much better by then” (Delany xxii).

Despite Ida’s charity work in the slums and her benevolent reign as a landlord following her grandfather’s death, Gissing does not explicitly depict or mention Ida helping a prostitute. Yet the novel channels her efforts to intervene on behalf of the children growing up in an environment of urban decay back into a discussion of fallen women. Ida takes special interest in the slum’s “little girls” and works to help steer them away from “occupations degrading to womanhood, blighting every pure instinct in the bud” (359-60). Indeed, in his introduction to his critical edition of The Unclassed, Paul Delany calls Ida’s philanthropy a form of “sexual activism” (xiv), though not quite in the sense in which Koven defines the erotic motives that fuel a middle-class desire to go slumming. Instead, the novel’s articulation of Ida’s “activism” draws on the same rhetoric that Jeune uses in her appeal to help the fallen. According to Gissing, Ida’s philanthropic interventions are successful because she possesses “that instinctive sympathy with lives [of the poor] without which it is so vain to attempt practical social reform” (359). Jeune echoes this crucial distinction between friendly sympathy and condescension. She also looks back to Gissing’s affective strategy of direct address: “You do not appeal to her from a higher moral position . . .you appeal to her as one woman to another . . . out of whose thankful heart a stream of pity and love is flowing towards her unhappy sister” (“Helping The Fallen” 678). Whether the novel imitated social activist tracts in this period or vice versa, the call for direct action from the middle-class on behalf of the fallen is a rhetorical strategy shared by fiction and non-fiction alike. It is not only difficult but also undesirable to saddle an author such as Gissing with a particular reform agenda. Critics such as Matthew K. McKean and John Goode have respectively distanced Gissing’s fiction from any investment in social reform and interpreted the “philanthropic aesthetic” of his earlier novels as uncharacteristic of Gissing’s oeuvre (McKean 28; Goode 71). Tabitha Sparks has noted that “increasingly throughout his publishing career [Gissing] focused less on using literature as an agent for social change” (610-11). The publication history of The Unclassed itself illustrates Gissing’s shifting understanding of the reforming potential of the novel form. Gissing republished the novel in 1895 after extensive revisions. As Gissing “sanitized” the novel, “editing out seemingly inappropriate scenes” (Higgins 22), he also removed Ida and Waymark’s discussion of “the relativity of morals” (Grylls 21) and nearly all instances of direct address or moments of narrative intrusion. In fact, most of the excerpts from the novel that support the thesis of this essay are excised from the 1895 edition, which Gissing distances from the original “work of a very young man, who dealt in a romantic spirit with the gloomier facts of life” (393) in his Preface. Although Gissing dissociated his novels from forms of social activism later in his career, this artistic

posture was not fully developed when he wrote the first edition of The Unclassed in the early 1880s. Furthermore, regardless of Gissing’s motives as an author, his novel explicitly impels young women to intervene in the slums on behalf of the fallen at a crucial moment for the civic engagement of middle-class women in London’s slums. At the very least, the 1884 version of The Unclassed recorded the particular sociological position of its imagined reader and, in doing so, participated in the belief of social reformers of the period that “novels could and did powerfully shape women’s perceptions of the poor and their moral sensibility” (Koven 205). In a sense, Gissing’s development as a novelist is a nearly perfect inversion of Waymark’s trajectory in the novel. The latter gives up his frivolous “art for art’s sake” motto following his encounters with the urban poor and as his feelings intensify for the restored Ida. At the novel’s close, he affirms that aesthetics and activism are not “so incompatible as some would have us think” (Gissing 379). Perhaps, then, it is not so difficult to imagine that the young man with the “romantic spirit” whom Gissing recalls in 1895 would have occupied an artistic position similar to that developed by his male protagonist. Margaret Harkness’s A City Girl Departing from Gissing’s controversial treatment of prostitution in The Unclassed, Harkness’s A City Girl initially aligns itself with Elizabeth Gaskell’s Ruth in its treatment of working-class unmarried motherhood. Indeed, Harkness draws heavily on Gaskell’s characterization of Ruth as an “unconscious” beauty (Gaskell 70). Harkness’s protagonist Nelly Ambrose seems naively unaware, at least from the reader’s perspective, of having committed a moral transgression and appears utterly unconscious of the circumstances surrounding her seduction and subsequent pregnancy. Social perceptions of unmarried mothers had changed considerably between Ruth’s publication in 1853 and A City Girl’s in 1887 (Hancock 302), but Harkness’s concerns about representing this controversial figure to a middle-class readership are in many ways the same issues that Gaskell wrestled with in the1850s: both novelists were invested in exposing the contradictions of the imagined attitude of the reader towards fallen women. Consider the following passage from Ruth in which Mrs. Pearson, a minor character whose gossip has disastrous consequences for the protagonist, attempts to articulate what she does and does not know about Ruth’s story, and the plight of the fallen generally, to another female character: “The girl? Why, ma’am, what could become of her? Not that I know exactly–only one knows they can but go from bad to worse, poor creatures! God forgive me, if I am speaking too transiently of such degraded women, who after all, are a disgrace to our sex.” (321)

This passage accomplishes two things. First, it makes the reader aware that although female readers were equipped to generalize the moral and social particulars of the fallen status, they often neglected the contingencies of individual cases. Secondly, it lays bare the challenge of the Victorian novel to reconcile sympathetic engagement to the middle-class perspective of its readers. Mrs. Pearson’s reaction flits from pathetic consideration of the “poor creatures” to cold disdain for “such degraded women,” whose transgressions implicate the virtue of her entire gender; she cannot decide whether to sympathize with or to condemn “the girl.” The example from Ruth is relevant to this discussion of A City Girl because the mid-century novel’s anxiety about middle-class women’s attitudes towards the fallen is key to understanding Harkness’s critical, if not overtly abrasive, manner of addressing the reader. Harkness galvanizes her readers into learning more about city girls like Nelly by creating affective channels in her narrative similar to the ones that Gissing develops in The Unclassed. But she also directly criticizes the popular modes of philanthropic intervention of “West End ladies” (Harkness 152), intending, it would seem, to offer a corrective along with her suggestion to engage sympathetically in the slums. Considering the effects of sentimentalism in Harkness’s fiction, Rob Breton contends that “middle-class sympathy very much bails out a helpless working class” in A City Girl (27). He argues that Harkness deliberately distanced herself from the “very male . . . and detached modes of realism” gaining popularity in the 1880s by developing an aesthetic that engaged the emotions of her readers (28). While both Breton and Lynne Hapgood relate Harkness’s sentimental aesthetic to “a sentimental commitment to socialism” (29), Hapgood also insists on the difficulty for socialist women such as Harkness of reconciling their political beliefs with their potential as women to be sympathetic agents. I would like to displace the capacity for “kindness and compassion to those in trouble” which Hapgood reads into Harkness’s biography and fiction (Hapgood 135) from critical considerations of her socialism, and ultimately re-contextualize her particular affective strategies within the discourse of female philanthropy. According to the Dictionary of Literary Biography, Harkness seems to “conceive her readers as blinded by stereotypes from knowledge of a victimized and restless working class” (Sypher 197). The pessimistic slant with which she “conceive[s]” her readers is apparent in moments when the narrator reproaches the middle-class for their limited understanding of the working girl’s life. Though Harkness’s narrator does not address her readers directly, as does Gissing’s, the reader, insofar as she is middle-class and female, is necessarily implicated by the narrator’s reproaches and asked to adjust her perceptions. Weeks after Nelly’s first outing with Arthur Grant, the “treasurer to a hospital for women and children in the East End” (Harkness 45),

she meets him by chance on the street and the two decide to spend the evening at a local theatre. As Liggins notes, Nelly’s “fondness for the theatre” would have been “perceived to be dangerous” (55) by middle-class readers. Liggins, however, by interpreting the novel as offering “a stern corrective to the pleasure-loving” Nelly (45), seems to adopt the very class perspective that Harkness is trying to change. The narrator anticipates and disparages this attitude when she intervenes to legitimize Nelly’s imminent acceptance of the offer: “Hands want holidays like other people; they feel the monotony of ‘the daily round, the common task’ quite as much as, if not more than, their richer sisters, and Nelly longed for a little change before she set about a new batch of trousers” (Harkness 56-57). Harkness explains Nelly’s desire for leisure activities with reference to her dehumanizing working conditions, rather than working-class licentiousness. If the novel offers any “corrective,” it is the one leveled at the prejudiced reader, Nelly’s “richer sisters,” not the protagonist. This ideological reorientation characterizes Harkness’s unique approach to the fallen woman narrative. The narrator demands sympathy for Nelly not because she is a fallen woman, whose morals a reader may or may not have called into question, but because she is first a working girl whom the labour system exploits and later an East End mother for whom institutional interventions are ineffectual if not absent. Harkness uses “richer sisters,” the middle-class female reader’s moniker, again a year later in her Justice article “Girl Labour in the City.” In this piece, she denounces the labour conditions of working-class “girls in the City,” who are, in her opinion, an especially exploited caste of the urban poor. As in Gissing, discussion of the living and working conditions of slum girls inevitably cedes to anxiety regarding the potential for these girls to fall precisely because of financial destitution: “Honest work is made for them almost impossible, and if they slip, no one gives them a second chance, they are kicked and spat upon by the public.” While upper-class men and low public opinion are oft-cited antagonists to the philanthropic cause of helping the fallen, Harkness echoes Gissing and Jeune as she takes issue with middle-class female callousness as the principal aggressor. Closing her article with the shaming statement “I wish that their richer sisters were not so terribly apathetic about them,” Harkness indirectly appeals to middle-class women for philanthropic intervention on behalf of the “working” girl, who is only implicitly the “fallen” one. In a manner that anticipates Harkness’s subtle way of linking capitalist exploitation and industrial poverty to the fallen woman problem in her journalism, Nelly’s fallen status remains hidden from the reader for most of the novel. Instead, the narrator’s reproaches to the reader relate specifically to Nelly’s arduous and dull life as a manual worker, or “hand,” and therefore to her poverty. In fact, Nelly’s tryst is unveiled to her employer, family, and, finally, to the reader only once she

becomes visibly pregnant; Harkness’s narrative executes Ida’s musings about the visibility of the fall. In this case, along with Harkness’s readers, the people in Nelly’s world become complicit in her transgression because, in their ignorance, they prove that if the fall does not “leave a trace,” the fallen and the virtuous woman are indistinguishable. The readers’ complicity in Nelly’s fall from virtue is particularly potent because, if the novel achieved its sentimental goals and had “won the reader’s sympathy for Nellie’s loneliness,” they had been unwittingly sympathetic to a fallen woman up until the point where “the harsh ‘sweater’ call[s] her immoral” (Sypher 197). Harkness seizes this moment as an opportunity to stress the fact that both richer and poorer sisters share a single moral condition. As Nelly’s employer “call[s] [her] by the most terrible names that had ever been invented,” the narrator informs us that “[t]here is nothing in this world so hard, so cold, as a woman who prides herself upon being virtuous” (100). The difficulty of engaging middle-class female sympathy compounds the fallen woman’s misery and is articulated to suggest the violation of some basic tenet of femininity. Once again, the novel challenges the reader by offering her an unflattering subject position: she is either to occupy the uncomfortable subjectivity of the cold, virtuous woman or reject identifying with a virtue that closes one off to womanly feeling. Furthermore, the novel’s dissatisfaction with middle-class women’s attitudes towards the fallen is articulated through a critique of condescension, a prevalent problem in philanthropic encounters between the rich and the poor. In his recent study on the “social and literary convention” (17) of condescension, Daniel Siegel argues that the “condescension scene became an emblem of the limitations of charity” (4) in Victorian literature. Novelists such as Harkness who made use of the potential for direct middle-class engagement with the fallen in the 1880s saw their anxiety about the limits of female sympathy reach a critical point in scenes of charitable condescension. Middle-class condescension engenders a type of social relation which is directly opposed to the sisterly friendship advocated by Jeune and is at the root of philanthropy’s failure to help Nelly. In A City Girl, this crisis of cross-class interaction occurs in two scenes: the first when Nelly admits her dying baby to an East End hospital and the second when she visits on the following morning to find him dead. When Nelly brings her baby to the “hospital for women and children” (Harkness 151), she and her sick child are “forgotten” (153) during the hospital visit of a “‘great lady’” whose sole reason for setting foot in the East End institution is to “get rid of ennui” (150). The head nurse panders to the visiting “rich lad[y]” because, as the narrator reveals, “she was always afraid that people were forgetting her rank” (150) and therefore finds the lady’s attentions to her ward legitimizing. While the nurse occupies a professional position at the hospital and

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the “great lady” simply makes rounds to stave off the monotony of leisure, both characters serve to illustrate the darker motives that pushed women to either seek a position or visit the poor in the East End. The great lady’s intervention, prompted by a condescending attitude, disrupts the smooth functioning of public aid as Nelly and her dying baby are sidelined in favour of the hospital’s chance to host “‘her ladyship’” (153). In fact, following Nelly’s inquiry as to whether any of the staff nurses are mothers, her plea for genuine female sympathy, “the sister did not condescend to make any reply” (153-54). Condescension as a mode of operation effectively freezes discourse by inhibiting the exchange of services–and feelings. Harkness implicates her middle-class readers more specifically in the second critical instance of condescension in the novel: the death of Nelly’s baby. Upon finding her baby’s cradle empty, Nelly demands to know what has been done with her child. Though a moment before “no one noticed Nelly” (160) enter the ward, the sister’s indifference is shattered when confronted with the “East End mothe[r’s]” fierce gaze; Nelly’s assertion of her right to equal consideration despite her poverty makes the sister “hesitate” (160). Once the news of the baby’s death had broken, Nelly “opened her mouth and showed the astonished sister what it is to be an East End mother. She made the West End lady shiver and shake . . . and she swore the most terrible oaths against childless wives and unmarried women who dared to call themselves nurses” (163). The nurse’s consistent designation as “sister” expands here to draft every “West End lady” into the receiving position of Nelly’s working-class indignation. This address to the reader repurposes the narrator’s initial apostrophe to her as one of the “richer sisters,” thus intensifying the undesirability of occupying the perspective typical of her class. While the violence done to the reader throughout this process of indirect address and conscription could conceivably alienate rather than mobilize her, this scene is, in fact, a powerful instance of a “synchronic emotive reaction that a face-to-face encounter with destitution might generate” with the view of “directly engag[ing] the reader,” an aesthetic strategy which Breton reads as constitutive of Harkness’s sentimentalism (35). In this vein, Siegel writes that scenes of condescension in literature are “frequently catastrophic,” yet it is precisely their ability to instigate narrative crises that allows them to “creat[e] new narrative problems and cal[l] for new solutions” (4). Rather than preventing sympathetic cross-class relations from forming between fallen women and their “West End ladies,” A City Girl proves the impotence of prevailing attitudes in philanthropic discourse in order to assure the development of new approaches and the future success of both practical and fictional interventions in the slums. * * *

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The British novel’s style of address took on a new valence in the 1880s. As new opportunities for philanthropic involvement opened up for middle-class women, the fallen woman novel contributed to a movement of social reform, distinct in its manner of privileging female agency. Because the women who went casual slumming in the East End corresponded to the expected demographic of the Victorian novel, the experience of reading fiction changed for philanthropically-minded female readers: they found their sociocultural identity being anticipated by and written into the very novels they held in their hands. George Gissing’s The Unclassed and Margaret Harkness’s A City Girl document the lives of two types of fallen women: the prostitute and unmarried mother. Drawing on and informing the journalistic discourse on the reclamation of such fallen women, these novels invested in a distinctly feminine potential for sympathetic engagement and attempted to channel the affective responses of their readers into cross-class friendships with both real and imagined working-class women. Works Cited Auerbach, Nina. Woman and the Demon: The Life of a Victorian Myth. Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University Press, 1982. Print. Breton, Rob. “The Sentimental Socialism of Margaret Harkness.” English Language Notes. 48.1 (2010): 27-39. Web. Delany, Paul. Introduction. The Unclassed: The 1884 Text. Ed. Paul Delany and Colette Colligan. Victoria, B.C.: ELS Editions, 2010. vii-xix. Web. Flint, Kate. The Woman Reader: 1837-1914. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993. Print. Gaskell, Elizabeth. Ruth. Ed. Alan Shelston. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Print. Gissing, George. “Preface to the New Edition.” The Unclassed. Ed. Jacob Korg. New Jersey: Associated University Presses, 1976. v. Print. ---. The Unclassed: The 1884 Text. Ed. Paul Delany and Colette Colligan. Victoria, B.C.: ELS Editions, 2010. Print. Goode, John. George Gissing: Ideology and Fiction. London: Vision Press Limited, 1978. Print. Grylls, David. “Gissing and Prostitution.” George Gissing and the Woman Question: Convention and Dissent. Ed. Christine Huguet and Simon J. James. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2013. 13-27. Print. Hancock, Catherine R. “’It Was Bone of Her Bone, and Flesh of Her Flesh, and She Had Killed It’: Three Versions of Destructive Maternity in Victorian Fiction.” Lit: Literature Interpretation Theory. 15.3 (2004): 299-320. Web. Hapgood, Lynne. “‘Is this Friendship?’: Eleanor Marx, Margaret Harkness and the Idea of Socialist Community.” Eleanor Marx (1855-1898): Life, Work, Contacts. Ed. JohnStokes. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000. 129-143. Print. Harkness, Margaret. A City Girl: A Realistic Story. Published under “John Law.” London, England: British Library, Historical Print Editions, 2014. Print. ---. “Girl Labour in the City.” Justice. March 3 1888. Microfilm. Harsh, Constance D. “Gissing and Women in the 1890s: The Conditions and Consequences of Narrative Sympathy.” George Gissing and the Woman Question: Convention and Dissent. Ed. Christine Huguet and Simon J. James. Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2013. 29-40. Print. Jaffe, Audrey. Scenes of Sympathy: Identity and Representation in Victorian Fiction. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2000. Print.

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Jeune, Mary. “Helping the Fallen.” Fortnightly Review. November 1 1885. 669-682. Print (McGill Rare Books). ---. “Saving the Innocents.” Fortnightly Review. September 1 1885. 344-356. Print (McGill Rare Books). Koven, Seth. Slumming: Sexual and Social Politics in Victorian London. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004. Print. Liggins, Emma. George Gissing, the Working Woman, and Urban Culture. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2006. Print. Livesey, Ruth. “Reading for Character: Women Social Reformers and Narratives of the Urban Poor in Late Victorian and Edwardian London.” Journal of Victorian Culture. 9 (2004): 43-67. Web. ---.“Women Rent Collectors and the Rewriting of Space, Class and Gender in East London, 1870-1900.” Women and the Making of Built Space in England, 1870-1950. Ed. Elizabeth Darling and Lesley Whitworth. Aldershot, Hants, England: Ashgate, 2007. 86-105. Print. Maltz, Diana. “Blatherwicks and Busybodies: Gissing on the Culture of Philanthropic Slumming.” George Gissing: Voices of the Unclassed. Ed. Martin H. Ryle and Jenny B. Taylor. Aldershot, Hants: Ashgate Pub, 2005. 15-27. Print. McKean, Matthew K. “Rethinking Late-Victorian Slum Fiction: the Crowd and Imperialism at Home.” English Literature in Transition, 1880-1920. 54.1 (2010): 28-55. Web. Siegel, Daniel. Charity & Condescension: Victorian Literature and the Dilemmas of Philanthropy. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012. Print. Sparks, Tabitha. “Realism after Sensation: Meredith, Hardy, Gissing.” A Companion to Sensation Fiction. Ed. Pamela K. Gilbert. Malden, Mass: Wiley-Blackwell, 2011. 603-613. Web. Stewart, Garrett. Dear Reader: The Conscripted Audience in Nineteenth-Century British Fiction. Baltimore: John Hopkins UP, 1996. Print. Sypher, Eileen. “Margaret Harkness (John Law).” Dictionary of Literary Biography. Late-Victorian and Edwardian British Novelists: Second Series. Vol. 197 (1999). 150-155. Web. Willis-Harris, W. “Prostitution.” Justice. January 28, 1888. 4-5. Microfilm.

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Copyright © The Channel: The Department of English Undergraduate Journal, McGill University, Montreal Canada, 2015. Editorial selection, compilation, and material © by the 2015 Editorial Board of The Channel and its contributors. The Channel is a McGill University academic journal with literary submissions by the undergraduate students of its Department of English. Printed and bound in Canada by Rubiks Printing. All rights reserved. Except for brief passages quoted and cited from external authors, no part of this book may be reprinted, reproduced, or utilized in any form by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying or recording, or through any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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