Journal of Undergraduate Research at The College of Saint Rose, Vol. VI

The Journal of Undergraduate Research of The College of Saint Rose Volume VI Spring 2015 Cover Design Janna Czepiel ’15 Editorial Staff and Advisory Board…………………………….…2 Editor’s Note Brian Sweeney……...…………...……...................4 Foreword: Poking and Prying with a Purpose Peter Koonz……….5 Changes in Fundamental Frequency over Time When Exposed to Frequency Altered Feedback Lindsey Brooker ’15….………………...…….……….…..7 “There is no elsewhere”: Illusions of Pluralism in Pullman’s His Dark Materials Jessica Ann Lamoureaux, ’15……………...…………….14 Introduced by Brian Sweeney Riemann Sphere and Stereographic Projection Sevil Nakisli, ’16………………….…….……………...33 Introduced by Jamal Teymouri The Devil in Plath’s Men Jessica M. Serfilippi, ’15……………...……….………...45 Introduced by Barbara Ungar The Power of a Stereotype: American Depictions of Black Women in Film and Media Brittany Ann Terry, ’15…………….…………..………71 Introduced by Karen McGrath Call for Papers………………………………………………….86

Editorial Staff and Advisory Board Editor Brian Sweeney, English Editorial Assistant Josh Bovee, English MA ’16 Advisory Board Alfred Antico, Communications Michael Brannigan, Philosophy and Religious Studies Cailin Brown, Communications Catherine Cavanaugh, English May Caroline Chan, English Alfred D. Chapleau, Criminal Justice Kathleen Crowley, Psychology Eurie Dahn, English Amanda Damiano, Communications Dave DeBonis, Communications Sciences and Disorders Jenise DePinto, History and Political Science Amina Eladdadi, Mathematics Risa Faussette, History and Political Science Theresa Flanigan, Center for Art and Design Robert Flint, Psychology Megan Fulwiler, English David Goldschmidt, Computer Science David Hopkins, Biology Dennis Johnston, Music Lisa Kannenberg, History and Political Science Deborah Kelsh, Teacher Education Jin Kim, Communications Peter Koonz, Library Ross Krawczyk, Psychology

Kate Laity, English Mark Ledbetter, Philosophy and Religious Studies Angela Ledford, History and Political Science Jessica Loy, Center for Art and Design Jeffrey Marlett, Philosophy and Religious Studies Ian MacDonald, Computer Science Karen McGrath, Communications Mary Ann McLoughlin, Mathematics Silvia Mejia, World Languages and Cultures Kelly Meyer, Academic Advising Erin Mitchell, World Languages and Cultures Mary Alice Molgard, Communications David Morrow, English Vaneeta Palecanda, English Christina Pfister, Teacher Education Richard Pulice, Social Work David Rice, English Elizabeth Richards, Communications Anne Rowley, Communications Sciences and Disorders Hollis Seamon, English Robert P. Shane, Center for Art and Design Rone Shavers, English Janet Spitz, Business Administration Ryane McAuliffe Straus, History and Political Science Jamal Teymouri, Mathematics Barbara Ungar, English Bridgett Williams-Searle, History and Political Science Elizabeth Yanoff, Teacher Education Ann Zak, Psychology Ann Zeeh, Biology

Brian Sweeney

Editor’s Note As editor of the Journal of Undergraduate Research, I am delighted to introduce these five essays which were judged the best of this year’s submissions by faculty members with relevant expertise by means of a double-blind review process. These essays represent four disciplines, and each constitutes a unique instance of what Peter Koonz, borrowing from Zora Neale Hurston, describes in his foreword as a “formalized response to curiosity.”

Thanks to all students who submitted essays for consideration. Thanks to Graphic Design major Janna Czepiel who once again designed the cover; Janna is graduating this year, and I will miss working with her on the Journal. Thanks to my resourceful editorial assistant, English MA student Josh Bovee, who copyedited each essay. Thanks to Visual Resources Librarian Jacqui Hopely, whose beautifully designed poster for the Journal has been making the rounds at campus events.

For their generous and ongoing support of the Journal, thanks as ever to Dr. Hadi Salavitabar, Provost and Vice President of Academic Affairs, and to Dr. Richard J. Thompson, Dean of Mathematics and Sciences.

Finally, I want to express my deepest appreciation to the faculty who made this issue possible: to Dr. Karen McGrath, Dr. Jamal Teymouri, and Dr. Barbara Ungar for writing introductions to the accepted papers; to Peter Koonz for his witty foreword; to Dr. Ryane Straus, the founder of the Journal, for her continued advice and support; and to the nearly 30 faculty members—along with the Director of Academic Advising—who generously agreed to evaluate our 19 submissions. Every year I reach out to my busy colleagues and ask them to review student submissions, with nothing to offer them in return but my thanks. And every year, people say yes. Thank you all.

Brian Sweeney Assistant Professor of English 4

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Foreword

Foreword: Poking and Prying With a Purpose Research is formalized curiosity. It is poking and prying with a purpose.

- Zora Neale Hurston Hurston’s pithy definition says much about the process of research and points to its ultimate source: the endless curiosity of the human heart and mind. To the uninitiated, research may appear dry and technical, conjuring up images of the postdoc in a white lab coat, red-eyed from a night poring over columns of numbers. However, as Hurston rightly suggests, research is about discovery: about scratching our imagination, coming to terms with our desire to learn more about the world around us and inside us. And far from being a solitary and individualized process, research is perhaps the most collaborative of human endeavors. For millennia we have built on the knowledge gained by those who came before.

In college, many are introduced for the first time to this formalized response to curiosity. Some struggle to become engaged in research, feeling more red-eyed than wide-eyed at the prospect of conducting a literature review, finding peer-reviewed sources, and collecting data. However, research becomes much more personalized and keeping with Hurston’s vision when we step back and ask ourselves, “What are the questions I want to ask?” This approach taps directly into our imagination and sense of curiosity and sets the stage for meaningful discovery.

That discovery, however, is likely to surprise. Research tends to lead the researcher astray. It confounds. It finds answers that were probably never considered. It makes one understand how much more there is to know – and that is terribly exciting!

History is well-stocked with examples of “accidental” research, where truly significant discoveries were made in strange and unexpected ways. A couple of examples: •

Returning from vacation, Alexander Fleming, a bacteriologist, noticed “mold juice” in a petri dish,

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Peter Koonz

•

creating a zone which had inhibited bacterial growth, and from this accident came penicillin, an effective treatment to a range of previously hard-to-treat infections.

The usefulness of microwaves came from the fortuitous melting of a chocolate bar in an engineer’s pocket when he walked in front of a magnetron.

All of which is to say that research is a delicious mess. It is never linear or a straight dash to the final product. As Hurston says, it requires poking and prying. You must be ready to fail and then get back at it. Research is inherently a process of iteration, where you travel the cycle, learning and making adjustments with each restart.

So ask the questions that are important to you. Develop a plan that you believe will bring you results. Stick with it. And most importantly, be sure to always have a chocolate bar on hand. You never know.

Peter Koonz Librarian, Neil Hellman Library

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Journal of Undergraduate Research

Changes in Fundamental Frequency

Changes in Fundamental Frequency over Time When Exposed to Frequency Altered Feedback Lindsey Brooker Communications Sciences and Disorders, ’15 Abstract: This study examined changes in fundamental frequency over time when participants utilized a frequency altered feedback device (FAF). Participants included nine typically fluent speakers and ten people with persistent developmental stuttering (PDS). Five-minute speech samples were recorded under a control condition and two trials with the use of FAF. The samples were then analyzed for overall changes in fundamental frequency and standard deviation of fundamental frequency at the beginning, middle, and end of each sample. Preliminary results indicated that there were no statistically significant differences in fundamental frequency or in standard deviation of fundamental frequency in the beginning, middle, and end of samples. However, there was a statistically significant change in the standard deviation of fundamental frequency across the overall sample.

Altered Auditory Feedback (AAF) utilizes technology to alter the way a person will hear himself or herself. For example, a speaker could wear a device that delays when he hears his own voice.

Frequency Altered Feedback (FAF) is a sub-type of AAF in which the user will hear his own voice at a higher or lower pitch. The benefit of this technology has been investigated within various speech disorders, most notably the fluency disorder, stuttering.

While some research has been conducted examining the effect of FAF on stuttering, there are no obtainable studies pertaining to the potential physiological responses to FAF. Howell, El-Yaniv, and Powell (1987) examined the speech fluency of adults who stutter and found statistically significant improvements in the occurrence of moments of stuttering, measured in percentage of syllables stuttered, when they were exposed to FAF. Likewise, Stuart, Frazier, Kalinowski, and Voss (2008) found up to 50% The College of Saint Rose

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Lindsey Brooker reductions in the average duration of moments of stuttering during a reading task when exposed to FAF. However, Ingham, Moglia, Frank, Ingham, and Cordes (1997) found that the fluency level during a reading task and during spontaneous conversation of people who stutter (PWS) was highly variable within the participant group when examining the effects of FAF. Natke, Grosser, and Kalveram (2001) conducted one of the few studies that looked at fundamental frequency changes as a result of FAF in addition to stuttering. They found that, in typically fluent speakers, FAF resulted in either a compensation reaction or an adaptation reaction. A compensation reaction is one in which there was a noticeable fundamental frequency change in the speaker, whereas an adaptation reaction can be described as one in which the speaker is physiologically unresponsive to the altered auditory feedback.

The existing research shows a number of methodological weaknesses such as a small number of subjects and a lack of control groups. For example, Stuart et al. (2008) had only twelve participants, all of whom were people who stutter. Similarly, the participants in Ingham et al. (1997) consisted of four adult males.

Likewise, as there is no best practice in the FAF setting, it is to be expected that the settings are different across the studies such as varying degrees of pitch shift and using different experimental tasks (Stuart et al, 2008; Ingham et al, 1997; Natke et al. 2001).This, in turn, may contribute to the lack of consistency in findings.

PURPOSE This study investigated possible changes in fundamental frequency and fundamental frequency standard deviation over time, rather than an average across the entire sample.

METHODOLOGY Participants 8

Journal of Undergraduate Research

Changes in Fundamental Frequency A total of nineteen participants took part in this study. They were divided into two groups: an experimental group consisting of ten people with persistent developmental stuttering and a control group including nine typically fluent speakers. The ages of participants in the control group ranged from 21 to 39 (mean [M] = 25.5, standard deviation [SD] = 5.5). All control group participants were females. The age range for participants in the experimental group was 20 to 74 (M = 33.8, SD = 19.4). The experimental group was made up of eight males and two females.

Procedures Approval from the institutional review board at The College of Saint Rose was obtained before running participants. Participants were first required to pass a hearing screening. Then, they were recorded during three spontaneous speech tasks, each approximately five minutes of connected speech: the first without any exposure to FAF to establish a baseline measure, the second with exposure to FAF experiencing a 50Hz shift up, and the third with exposure to FAF and a 50Hz shift down. Fundamental frequency analyses were conducted on all recordings, in order to document possible pitch changes.

Samples were broken down into beginning, middle, and end segments and analyzed for fundamental frequency changes and changes in fundamental frequency standard deviation using voice analysis programs, including Praat (Boersma & Weenink, 2013) and CSL (KayPENTAX, 2011). After collecting and extracting this information, analyses of variance were conducted in order to determine the significance of the findings.

RESULTS Analyses of variance were conducted to examine the effect of group, shift (up and down), and time (beginning, middle, and end) on both fundamental frequency and standard deviation of The College of Saint Rose

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Lindsey Brooker fundamental frequency. Results showed no significant effects on fundamental frequency for shift or time: F(2, 152) = 0.83, p = 0.44, and, F(2,152) = 0.00, p = 1, respectively. However, results did show a significant effect for group: F(1, 152) = 184.46, p = 0.00.

This is to be expected as the control group was made up of exclusively women and the experimental group consisted of mostly men, and male and female voices naturally have significantly different fundamental frequencies. There were no significant effects for the interactions of time and group: F(2, 152) = 0.06, p = 0.94, time and shift, F(4, 152) = 0.05, p = 1, group and shift, F(2, 152) = 0.11, p = 0.90, or time, group, and shift, F(4, 152) = 0.03, p = 1.

The other analysis of variance revealed a significant effect for group: F(1, 152) = 9.69, p = 0.00, and shift, F(2, 152) = 3.19, p = 0.04, on standard deviation of fundamental frequency. There was no significant effect for time: F(2, 152) = 0.13, p = 0.89.

Additionally, there were no significant effects for the interactions of time and group, time and shift, group and shift, or time, group and shift: F(2, 152) = 0.11, p = 0.90, F(4, 152) = 0.30, p = 0.88, F(2, 152) = 0.25, p = 0.78, and F(4, 152) = 0.26, p = 0.90, respectively.

Tukey’s Honestly Significant Difference (HSD) post-hoc tests were conducted as a result of the significant p values. These data are illustrated in Tables 1 and 2 below. The Tukey groupings revealed significant differences in standard deviation of fundamental frequency between the control group and the experimental group (see Table 1). Significant differences were also noted in the Tukey groupings for all participants in standard deviation in fundamental frequency between baseline and downward shift conditions (see Table 2).

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Changes in Fundamental Frequency TABLE 1 Group: Tukey Results for Standard Deviation Group

Mean

Control Group

38.53

A

Experimental Group

34.86

B

Note: Means that do not share a letter are significantly different

TABLE 2 Shift: Tukey Results for Standard Deviation Shift

Mean

Baseline

38.71

A

Upward Shift

36.21

A

Downward Shift

35.16

B B

Note: Means that do not share a letter are significantly different

CONCLUSION Exposure to FAF may lead to fundamental frequency standard deviation changes in connected speech samples. However, there are no significant changes over a distinct period of time in five minute The College of Saint Rose

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Lindsey Brooker conversational samples (beginning, middle, and end). This implies that alterations to fundamental frequency standard deviations are occurring during connected speech, but these adjustments are not related to a specific duration of the sample. The significant differences in fundamental frequency in group can be attributed to gender differences as participants in the control group were all females and participants in the experimental group were mostly males.

The significant differences found in standard deviation of fundamental frequency suggest that, generally, people with persistent developmental stuttering tend to make fewer alterations to fundamental frequency during connected speech in all conditions regardless of FAF feedback, as compared to fluent speakers. Also, exposure to FAF may lead speakers to make fewer adjustments overall to their fundamental frequency over the course of a connected speech task. It is possible that this phenomenon occurs because the subjects suffering from persistent developmental stuttering have all been in treatment for their disfluencies for an extended period of time. They are therefore trained to alter their speech in order to sound more fluent. The exposure to FAF may trigger this learned behavior to alter one’s speech, resulting in a more monotone voice production, or less natural sounding speech.

The resulting lack in speech naturalness may present one of the main reasons for why FAF is not widely embraced by people who stutter and not commonly used in the context of everyday life.

This supports the importance of offering effective treatments that offer more than just improved speech fluency skills. This could be achieved by expanding the scope of treatment goals to go beyond the minimization of moments of stuttering, but rather also improving the fluent parts of speech by giving the client tools that will help in improving the overall naturalness of his or her speech.

Further research must be conducted to investigate and verify the notion established herein by showing that FAF truly results in adaptation for individuals who stutter across the board.

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Changes in Fundamental Frequency Data collection continues in order to increase sample size and therefore validity and reliability of results, as current results may be the consequence of a small sample size. Additionally, the authors hope to continue recruiting adults who stutter with varying levels of disfluency in order to accumulate a more representative sample.

References Boersma, P. & Weenink, D. (2013). Praat: doing phonetics by computer [Computer program]. Version 5.4, retrieved 20 May 2013 from http://www.praat.org/.

Howell, P., El-Yaniv, N., & Powell, D. (1987). Factors affecting fluency in stutterers. Speech motor dynamics in stuttering (pp. 361-369). New York: Springer Verlag.

Ingham, R., Moglia, R., Frank, P., Ingham, J.C., & Cordes, A. (1997). Experimental investigation of the effects of frequency-altered auditory feedback on the speech of adults who stutter. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 40, 361-372.

KayPENTAX. (2011). Computerized Speech Lab (CSL™), Model 4500 [Computer Program]. Version 3.4.

Natke, U., Grosser, J., & Kalveram, K.T. (2001). Fluency, fundamental frequency, and speech rated under frequencyshifted auditory feedback in stuttering and nonstuttering persons. Journal of Fluency Disorders, 26, 227-241.

Stuart, A., Frazier, C.L., Kalinowski, J., & Voss, P.W. (2008). The effect of frequency altered feedback on stuttering duration and type. Journal of Speech, Language, and Hearing Research, 51, 889-897.

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Jessica Ann Lamoureaux

Introduction to “‘There is no elsewhere’: Illusions of Pluralism in Pullman’s His Dark Materials” Twenty-four centuries ago, Plato advocated censoring the stories Greek children were told about the gods, arguing (through Socrates) that childhood “is the time at which the character is being formed and the desired impression is more readily taken” (Republic II). Although the lasting power of texts read in childhood has long been recognized, only in the past thirty years or so has children’s literature become a sustained object of scholarly analysis. From Peter Hunt’s Criticism, Theory, and Children’s Literature (1991) to Robin Bernstein’s Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights (2011), literary scholarship has increasingly considered the ways texts transmit—or decline to transmit—dominant cultural values across generations.

Jessica Lamoureaux joins this scholarly conversation with her analysis of Philip Pullman’s critically acclaimed young adult fantasy trilogy His Dark Materials (1995-2000). Pullman’s inventive trilogy is filled with allusions to other literary texts, from the Book of Genesis and Paradise Lost to the English Romantics and C. S. Lewis. For many critics, these allusions serve the trilogy’s ambitious aim to critique certain ideological dualisms dominant in Western cultures and embedded in certain canonical texts, including texts often first encountered in childhood.

Lamoureaux brings to her analysis of Pullman’s trilogy an ear for allusion and knowledge of literary history that enable her to reexamine this critical consensus. Questioning the tendency to read Pullman’s trilogy as radically subversive of binaristic thought, Lamoureaux argues that the trilogy is itself built upon an inflexible binary opposition between secular reason and (a highly Eurocentric conception of) religion. Lamoureaux concludes that Pullman’s trilogy affirms the primacy of the very Western values it ostensibly critiques.

Brian Sweeney Assistant Professor of English 14

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Illusions of Pluralism in Pullman’s His Dark Materials

“There is no elsewhere”: Illusions of Pluralism in Pullman’s His Dark Materials Jessica Ann Lamoureaux English, ’15

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials is often received as a series that breaks down traditional binaries in order to make way for new, plural understandings of reality. Pullman’s work has been variously described as “powerful,” “universal,” “dazzling”; it enjoys praise from both reviewers and academic critics (“Introduction” 13, Hatlen 75). The trilogy examines and deconstructs binaries upheld

by Western Christianity, including (and especially) the either/or natures of knowledge and ignorance, religion and secularism, and good and evil. These lofty delineations are embodied in theological interpretations of the tension between the forces of Good and Evil, localized as the battle between Satan and God for the soul of every human being. At the root of this cosmic struggle – and of all human suffering – are Adam and Eve, our “first parents”, who are tempted by the serpent in the Garden of Eden and fall from their state of grace, bringing original sin into the world. Pullman, building upon centuries of invention and reinvention, takes this myth and inverts it to serve as the backbone of his anti-theocratic stance: if knowledge is sin, then how can grace be anything but ignorance? Further, if any organized religion actively suppresses knowledge, how can it hope to espouse any sort of truth?

In no way is this argument a new one. Pullman builds upon a tradition that goes back to the Romantics, beginning with William Blake’s blasphemous rereading of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Milton’s retelling of the Edenic myth consists of twelve books, each containing hundreds of lines, which elaborate tremendously on the original 46 line telling in Genesis, Books II and III. Milton sought to “justify the ways of God to men” – to explore God’s motives and glorify them (Milton I: 26). Blake takes this reading The College of Saint Rose

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Jessica Ann Lamoureaux and upends it, suggesting that Milton was “a true Poet and of the Devil’s party without knowing it” – that Milton’s republican ideals find a powerful representative in Satan, whose discourse eclipses and negates any of the pious, religious meditations within Paradise Lost (Blake 6). Pullman, hundreds of years later, is in no way uncertain about his own stance on the matter. Notoriously, he stated in an interview, “I am of the devil’s party and I know it” (de Bertodano, qtd. in Squires 119). Pullman embraces Blake’s reading and uses it to explore multiple worlds in which traditional binaries have begun to fall apart – especially those binaries that are prevalent in the world of protagonist Lyra Bellaqua, where “the Church” has evolved into a theocracy that enjoys hegemony in the West. His Dark Materials is not just a trilogy that challenges deep-seated religious ideals. It is a series that targets and exposes the dangers of unquestioned power and unchecked ideological indoctrination in any population, but especially in children. This is the crux of the problem. In denouncing what he sees as the underhanded tactics of authors who rely on subtextual religious indoctrination (C. S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien), Pullman illustrates and endorses a new ideology of his own, presenting it as natural, superior – concepts that Louis Althusser indicates as pieces of an ideology’s ability to appear as if it is the only option. There is no escape from ideology in the trilogy, but instead a transition into a different ideology; Pullman must offer a substitute if he intends to truly impact a child’s perception of the world through his work, and that substitute ends up being little more than an inversion of the first.

His Dark Materials is an ambitious attack on binary understandings of the world. It sets up an ideological frame that rejects dualism and embraces a world where multiple viewpoints coexist. In the same turn, however, the trilogy slams the door on multiple ways of knowing and seeing that are grounded in spiritual or religious belief rather than secular or scientific fact, dismissing them as inferior and ignorant. Although at the end of the trilogy the characters are ready to embrace the “Republic of Heaven,” this very Republic excludes any ideologies that existed before it. In 16

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Illusions of Pluralism in Pullman’s His Dark Materials order to hail new subjects into its ideology, the Republic specifically targets Western Christian ideology and conveniently ignores all others. His Dark Materials is not a celebration of pluralism. Pullman’s attempt to create a system where all living beings can coexist must ultimately fail because of his single-minded pursuit of a single religious ideology. His deconstruction begins to fall apart as soon as he makes the decision to vilify a religion instead of a religious institution; by attacking one faith, he negates and contradicts what appeared to be the major thrust of The Golden Compass, half of The Subtle Knife, and the interpretations of his liberal critics – essentially, that a binary understanding of the world is incompatible with modernity, and humanity must adapt and adopt an ideology capable of embracing pluralism if it intends to work towards a state of mutual understanding and peace.

I: DARK MATERIALS, MULTIPLE WORLDS, AND THE EDENIC FRAME His Dark Materials is crafted around Romantic interpretations of Milton’s Paradise Lost, with Lord Asriel, its Satan figure, featuring prominently as Byronic hero. The epigraph to The Golden Compass explicitly connects Pullman’s and Milton’s texts. In this epigraph, the reader finds Satan perched on the edge of Hell, gazing out into primordial chaos all around him. He sees “the womb of nature and perhaps her grave,” where the four Aristotelian elements of water, earth, air, and fire battle eternally – that is, “Unless the almighty maker them ordain / His dark materials to create more worlds” (Milton II: 911-920). Not only does this quote give the trilogy its title, but it intimates one of the great secrets guarded by the Church in Lyra’s Brytain: there are multiple worlds out there in the abyss, and they are closer to each other than previously imagined.

Quickly, it becomes evident that these kinds of Church secrets will play central roles in the events that draw Lyra closer and closer to her fate as a new Eve. Pullman depicts a world where the Church regulates and controls all aspects of life; it ruthlessly strives The College of Saint Rose

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Jessica Ann Lamoureaux to uphold religious doctrine, suppressing all secular thought that would appear to contradict it. The reader is presented, then, with the binary opposition between religious and secular truths, and the trickiness of mediating the conflicts between personal belief and physical fact. Lord Asriel, Lyra’s father and the first adult to reveal the full scope of the Church’s intentions, tells Lyra that there are “uncountable billions of parallel worlds. The witches have known about them for centuries, but the first theologians to prove their existence mathematically were excommunicated fifty or more years ago” (The Golden Compass [GC] 376). The Church, a bloated, police-style organization willing to commit countless atrocities in the name of its God (i.e., severing children from their souls before leaving them in the Northern wilds to freeze to death), is obsessed with maintaining the status quo; even its experimental theologians (scientists) are afraid to report anything heretical and struggle to abide by the “authorized” interpretation of Dust, what the Church has identified as the physical evidence of the Fall of Man and original sin (GC 274, 371). Again, Asriel is the reader’s only glimpse into the mind of the Church. When Lyra challenges this authorized reading, citing her own interpretation of the Fall as a metaphor, he puts things in mathematical, secular terms: “think of Adam and Eve like an imaginary number, like the square root of minus one: you can never see any concrete proof that it exists, but if you include it in your equations you can calculate all manner of things that couldn’t be imagined without it” (GC 372-373). The Church, functioning as it does based on ancient scripture, can’t help but initiate a literal reading of Biblical events in order to legitimate its own existence. Again, the reader is forced to confront the tension between this dystopian theocracy and the “enlightened” thinkers who are willing to challenge it; clearly, sympathies are unlikely to fall with any organization of this ilk, especially one willing to ignore progress and discovery in order to maintain its own power.

The other worlds, then, pose a unique threat to the hegemony of the Church, and the Church responds to this threat 18

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Illusions of Pluralism in Pullman’s His Dark Materials through indoctrination and policing performed by its agents from the Magisterium. Challengers to the Church’s absolute power are silenced, and unauthorized ideas are suppressed. Even at Bolvangar, the seat of the Church’s greatest atrocities, experimental theologians are uneasy with discovery. As one states, Lord Asriel’s speculations and experiments with Dust weren’t taken seriously because “without authority they might well be heretical.” (The Amber Spyglass [AS] 74). Pullman’s depiction of a theocracy in which obedience is demanded and independent thought forbidden recalls Satan’s critique of Heaven in Paradise Lost. Just as Satan wages war against the Kingdom of Heaven only to be vanquished to an eternity in Hell, Lord Asriel, his counterpart in His Dark Materials, mounts a new war thousands of years later to end conflict between consciousness and an oppressive God. Asriel struggles against multiple repressive holy bodies in his fight for knowledge and awareness – for consciousness itself. Asriel’s ally Stanislaus Grumman – John Parry, Will’s father – sums up the struggle in this way: Every advance in human life, every scrap of knowledge and wisdom and decency we have has been torn by one side from the teeth of the other. Every little increase in human freedom has been fought over ferociously between those who want us to know more and be wiser and stronger, and those who want us to obey and be humble and submit.

(The Subtle Knife [SK] 320) Grumman echoes Milton’s Satan, describing knowledge and freedom as the ultimate aim of human existence. In his first speech to his fallen host, Satan explains that “Peace [with Heaven] is despaired, / For who can think submission? War then, war / open or understood, must be resolved!” (Milton I: 657-662). To him, submission to God is unacceptable, even if it means an end to eternal conflict. God is a tyrant – He will not step aside for progress, and so He must be eliminated. The second piece of Grumman’s argument is plucked from Satan’s first glimpse of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. When Satan discovers that The College of Saint Rose

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Jessica Ann Lamoureaux the tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is forbidden to them, he says, Why should their Lord Envy them that? Can it be sin to know?

Can it be death? And do they only stand By ignorance? Is that their happy state, The proof of their obedience and their faith? (IV: 516-20) This ignorance, which Asriel believes is mistaken by the Church for innocence, is at the root of what makes humans easy to control.

Knowledge, then – of themselves, of other worlds and their inhabitants – is what Asriel’s Republic of Heaven is built upon.

Serafina Pekkala, queen of one of the witch clans allied with Lyra, reinforces these ideas when she tells Mary Malone that “[Xaphania] and the rebel angels, the followers of wisdom, have always tried to open minds; the Authority and his churches have always tried to keep them closed” (AS 479). Opening the worlds to one another opens minds and hearts to the huge spheres of knowledge kept from them by their isolation; closing them limits the reaches of knowledge and, in theory, hems in conscious thought.

This vision of enlightened universal exchange is not viable for long. These multiple worlds are cut off from each other by a plot contrivance meant to add a sense of realism to Pullman’s fantastic trilogy. As the children discover, unless contact between worlds is severed, all life in every universe will be jeopardized. Lyra and Will learn from Xaphania that Dust is leaking from the windows between the worlds; if they wish to save consciousness, every window must be closed. Only the window that opens the world of the dead may remain open. Asriel’s plan for the Republic of Heaven will inevitably fail, not because of any inherent flaw, but because the doors between the universes must be shut. This in itself might be tolerable to the children, but there is more: their daemons (souls) will be unable to live regular lives outside of the worlds where they were born. Like Grumman, the children will sicken and die within ten years of leaving the worlds where they belong. The larger ramification of this revelation is that a collective of like20

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Illusions of Pluralism in Pullman’s His Dark Materials minded individuals living together in Asriel’s Republic of Heaven is impossible. If the inhabitants of the worlds want their battle not to have been in vain, they will have to build the Republic back in the worlds from which they fled, because for them “there is no elsewhere” (AS 363). This is the final message Pullman leaves with his reader: the Kingdom of Heaven is over, and so Lyra “shouldn’t live as if it mattered more than this life in this world, because where we are is always the most important place” (AS 518). There is no elsewhere – the Republic can’t be formed in another world, because then its inhabitants would shortly die and the scheme would fail.

There is no elsewhere – life must be lived to the fullest in the present, because once it is over, there is nothing else.

II: BEING IN UNCERTAINTIES Thus Pullman communicates the secular ideology of Dust in terms that directly oppose it to Christianity. There is only here. There is only now. Pullman, again drawing upon ideas raised in Paradise Lost, leaves his characters and his reader with the understanding that they carry worlds and ideas within them. Like Satan, who realizes in his misery that “within him Hell / He brings and round about him, nor from Hell / One step no more than from himself can fly / by change of place,” Lyra and the others carry the Republic with them in their own worlds and will never truly leave it (Milton IV: 20-23). Pullman turns Satan’s eternal punishment into a consolation prize: whereas Satan is trapped in Hell and forced to carry it with him, Pullman’s characters see opportunity to continue their mission in their ability to take the Republic wherever they go. Alone, cut off from their allies and without their leader, the members of the Republic of Heaven will struggle against the remaining arms of the Church, spreading their message of truth so that all might know freedom from the land of the dead.

This new duty is the culmination of three books of intense philosophical exploration and innovation. In the last line of The Amber Spyglass, Lyra tells her daemon, Pantalaimon, that the rest of The College of Saint Rose

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Jessica Ann Lamoureaux their lives will be devoted to building the Republic of Heaven. This is meant to leave the reader feeling joyous, excited, maybe even obligated. The Republic can grow in any heart, and its message can certainly take root in the ashes of the Authority’s Kingdom – possibly a nod to Blake, who writes in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell that humans have forgotten that “All deities reside in the human breast” (11). Critics have described this as an escape from the right/wrong, good/evil ideological conception of dualism that the Church in Lyra’s world and some forms of Christianity in our world cling to. Millicent Lenz affirms this interpretation of the text, stating that “Pullman’s fantasy portrays young protagonists transcending the dualism of good and evil and learning to live creatively in the face of life’s contradictions, complexities, and most potently, their own mortality” (Lenz 47). In light of this, it would appear that Pullman’s trilogy is an affirmation of the multiplicity of human nature – of “negative capability,” which John Keats defined in a letter to his brothers as the ability to be “in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (Keats, n. pag.). Mary Malone, a scientist from Will’s world, specifically refers to this state as the best one for communicating with Shadows; essentially, she affirms that by embracing ambiguity, the human mind is capable of reaching out to consciousness itself (SK 88).

The ability to hold good and evil in balance – to see them as shades of meaning instead of absolutes – is something His Dark Materials suggests as an alternative to the dangerous absolutism inherent in so many religious ideologies. The trilogy has been gently leading its readers in this direction all along, setting up the complexity of human nature through individuals like Marissa Coulter, Lyra’s fanatical mother, who heads the General Oblation Board’s experiments on children at Bolvangar. As the story progresses, Mrs. Coulter’s latent motherhood rears its head, and her motivations become more complex: when she learns that the Church plans to destroy Lyra before she can be tempted and plunge the world into sin, she kidnaps her to keep her safe. In the end, 22

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Illusions of Pluralism in Pullman’s His Dark Materials when she sacrifices herself to rid the world of Metatron, God’s Regent, she is described only as “Lyra’s mother” – a complete role reversal (AS 409). Mrs. Coulter comes to represent the ambiguity of being human. She shifts from being a terrifying, frigid presence to a fierce, protective mother, illustrating exactly how impossible it is to confine the whole gamut of an individual’s personality into a system of dichotomous oppositions. This is the view Lenz endorses and that Mary Malone preaches: as the scientist explains it, “good and evil are names for what people do, not for what they are. All we can say is that this is a good deed, because it helps someone, or that’s an evil one, because it hurts them. People are too complicated to have simple labels” (AS 447). Dichotomous thinking is reductive and relies too much on essentialism to get its points across; if humanity wishes to progress, it must accustom itself to ways of thinking that lend themselves to an and/both approach instead of either/or.

In this sense, Pullman departs from many traditional binaries; just looking at the wide array of characters and events in his novels is proof enough of that. In this universe, the female half of the binary is active, wise, good. But it does not negate the male half. Just as Salmakia and Tialys are equally fierce when it comes to fighting, Lyra and Will are equally important to the preservation of the universe. Furthermore, spirit and form are presented as inseparable: as the Shadows explain to Mary Malone, “matter and spirit are one” (AS 249). Lyra’s conception of the human in triplicate – body, daemon, and ghost – deemphasizes the importance of one’s presence in the afterlife, because the physical body is just as important as any spiritual remnant that will linger after death. The binaries themselves don’t matter, but the ambiguities between them – the scope of possibility between one and the other – open up a discussion of whether or not anything can truly be an absolute. Anne-Marie Bird identifies these three binaries (i.e. good/evil, male/female, spirit/matter) as central to the Fall myth and suggests that Pullman, in deconstructing them, creates something that “defies binary logic – that is, a concept that The College of Saint Rose

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Jessica Ann Lamoureaux includes both the physical and the metaphysical, and yet somehow also goes beyond their scope” (Bird 190). She states, “Dust […] offers Pullman a means of fusing together and thus equalizing everything in an attempt to replace our ‘either/or’ way of thinking with the notion of ‘and’ and ‘both’” (190). This equalizing echoes mainstream liberal pluralism, which proposes a system where all ideologies can coexist in an open forum of discussion. In the end, however, is any of this really accomplished over the course of Lyra’s journey? Can any ideological system based on absolutes – absolute good, absolute evil, absolute Truth – escape the othering and exclusion involved in binary, dichotomous thinking?

III: TRUTH AND LIES Although Pullman’s deconstruction of traditional binaries suggests an understanding and acceptance of pluralist thought, his narrative appears only to orchestrate a transition from one dualist ideology to another – to replicate the indoctrination he so abhors in other literature for children and adolescents. Yes, the characters are complex enough that none of them are truly good, bad, or neutral.

Yes, the villain is ambiguous and changes as the story evolves. But what about the ideological struggle that forms the crux of the plot?

Pullman doesn’t offer an ending where all world views can coexist; in fact, he doesn’t address any religions other than Christianity.

Pullman attempts to cover this by explaining, in an interview, that “the reason that the forms of religion in the books seem to be Christian is because that’s the world I’m familiar with” (Roberts n. pag.). Pullman’s remark justifies a Eurocentric understanding of the world on the basis of one’s limited exposure to other cultures – interestingly enough, a process perpetuated by a series like His Dark Materials that limits its own intellectual discussion to Western Christian belief and Western secular-humanist philosophy.

Although it is in Lyra’s world that the religious confrontation primarily takes place, it is suggested that in all worlds there is so much resistance to the Authority that Lord Asriel is able to gather 24

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Illusions of Pluralism in Pullman’s His Dark Materials an army to rival Satan’s rebel angels at the time of the Fall. All other religious ideologies are conveniently excluded. Pullman doesn’t abandon ideological dualism or embrace a pluralist ideology: he just shifts the attack to one ideology, identifying it as the biggest problem that faces humanity.

Louis Althusser’s theory of ideologies and ideological apparatuses can be useful to conceptualizing this problem.

Ideologies are everywhere, but they present themselves as natural and without beginning or end. Althusser states: Assuming that we do not live one of these ideologies as the truth […] we admit that the ideology we are discussing from a critical point of view, examining it as the ethnologist examines the myths of a “primitive society,” that these “world outlooks” are largely imaginary, i.e. do not “correspond to reality.” (693) Embedded in Althusser’s argument is the concept of “truth.” If we assess truth as a relative concept, it is easy to examine ideologies that are different from our own. This idea made sense to these people under these circumstances; as Althusser states, because we do not live the ideologies we examine we are capable of removing ourselves and studying them from an anthropological standpoint.

Ideologies based in dualist thought, like Christianity, create a separation between adherents and non-adherents– us and them.

Pullman is an unapologetic atheist. As stated previously, on multiple occasions he has spoken out against what he sees as religious indoctrination in children’s literature, especially in C. S. Lewis’s The Chronicles of Narnia. As Bernard Schweizer succinctly puts it, Pullman “insists that the sacred is no excuse for the perpetuation of untruth” (170). Pullman advocates a kind of absolute truth based in an empiricist understanding of lived events.

It is more important to live your life and make your own “true stories” than it is to cling to a religion that might not even be real.

Still, it is a mistake to assume that a system based on absolute truth is any sort of departure from dualist thought. Truth is balanced only by lies; it rules out all personal belief and negates everything The College of Saint Rose

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Jessica Ann Lamoureaux but ontological evidence. An ideology based on measurable truths – like those Lyra receives when she reads the alethiometer – must, by virtue of being a “worldview,” posit that all ideologies grounded in belief are unfounded, empty, and without meaning. As Anne-Marie Bird puts it, The trilogy, therefore, appears to be simultaneously pulling in two directions as, while striving for the communion of everything in Dust, it demonstrates the hazards of such a system, going to considerable lengths to persuade us that totalizing discourses can be sustained only by the evils of repressing or excluding what does not fit. (194) Pullman replaces one totalizing discourse with another totalizing discourse, inverting the binary so that the “positive” side is occupied by his own secular humanism. Moreover, for a man so vehemently against what he sees as underhanded indoctrination in children’s literature, Pullman is quick to perpetuate that tradition once his own beliefs are the ones on offer. Pullman identifies “Christianity” – or at least, the forms with which he is familiar – as one of the strongest ideological threats to individual thought.

Religious indoctrination, then, is the quickest and surest way to cultivate new subjects to ensure the continued presence of organized religions. Reading Althusser reveals this to be an outdated understanding of where power lies in the modern West.

He points out that the twentieth century saw a dramatic decrease in the ideological strength of religious thought and a shift to educational ideological state apparatuses and literature as the great methods of ideological indoctrination. Literature for children and young adults is, in and of itself, a means to create a certain kind of subject. Culture, which influences and is influenced by literature, reflects and projects the values espoused in many mainstream books. There is no world outside of ideology, but only a different ideology – countless ideologies, each naturalized to a point where their edges vanish. Pullman, in attempting to strike down religious ideology, merely substitutes a different ideology of his own – in a

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Illusions of Pluralism in Pullman’s His Dark Materials way, reproducing the methods of indoctrination that so disgust him.

For his own part, Pullman appears unaware of the inherent contradictions and ethnocentric suppositions in the ideology he proposes. In an interview with journalist Laura Barton, he explains that the infallibility of sacred texts inevitably leads to the abuse of power and the subjugation of a religion’s adherents. “This is what happens, always, when you have an organization whose authority derives from something that may not be questioned,” he explains.

In truth, Pullman makes no mystery of his views on all organized religions – he speaks about them quite freely. In another interview, Pullman states: When you look at organized religion of whatever sort – whether it’s Christianity in all its variants, or whether it’s Islam or some forms of extreme Hinduism – wherever you see organized religion and priesthoods and power, you see cruelty and tyranny and repression. It’s almost a universal law. (Roberts n. pag.)

Not only is this reductive, it is inflammatory. Pullman suggests that the abuse of power in organized structures of belief is a foregone conclusion. By neglecting to introduce any world religions besides Christianity into the plot of His Dark Materials, Pullman gives the Christian religion the most weight in the ideological tussle. By creating a universe where Christianity is challenged only by free will and consciousness, Pullman also identifies Christianity as the most convincing of all the religious untruths and dismisses the rest, including forms of Christianity developing in Africa and Asia that would appear unfamiliar to the Western eye. Pullman perpetuates a Eurocentric interpretation of the world despite the inclusion of the Tartars – Siberians – and a company of African soldiers under the command of their king (GC, AS). The Gyptians – Pullman’s take on Roma travelers – are the only real ethnic minority that the children encounter and interact with for any length of time. His Dark Materials is unable to shake thousands of years of othering; it perpetuates Eurocentric ideas and ideals, naturalizing Western The College of Saint Rose

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Jessica Ann Lamoureaux secular thought as the fount from which the text’s intellectual framework springs. Even in worlds of fantasy – worlds where anything could happen – white Europeans are the driving force in a rebellion that spans entire universes. If there were not multiple worlds – if the story took place only in Lyra’s corner of the universe – perhaps a world where only Christianity developed would be conceivable. After all, if we are, in fact, talking about the multiple worlds theory, then there is a world where probability and chance worked out to produce just such a system. But to move into our own world and to present only Christian religious agents is to naturalize an exclusionary, Western point of view. There are agents of the Authority in most of the conscious realms. Conversely, there is not even a mention of competing religious thought, not unless it somehow pertains to the life-affirming, truth-embracing ideology of Dust.

Thus Pullman’s trilogy is not so much about plurality as it is about reversing the greatest untruth of all: Christianity, that “very powerful and convincing mistake” (AS 441). Pullman goes to great lengths to create a space where many different worldviews can coexist. In order for this to be accomplished, however, Pullman must leave one last dichotomy undisturbed: religion/secularism.

Again, Bird offers the most succinct explanation: “the trilogy seeks to reject both dualistic and pluralistic interpretations of the world, while simultaneously, and paradoxically, demonstrating that there are many different and perhaps incommensurable things that constitute a world” (197). Pullman denounces dualism, then attempts to market a dualist ideology in pluralistic terms so as to distance it from religious belief. In Pullman’s new world, there is no room for religious ideology because it is untrue and cannot be empirically verified. This is the point at which it becomes clear that Pullman’s ideological framework is incompatible with the pluralist values it celebrates.

This contradiction is in no way new to religious conversations. In a 2007 article examining liberalism and secularism, Stanley Fish observes that “the liberal state is 28

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Illusions of Pluralism in Pullman’s His Dark Materials committed to tolerating all religions while allying itself with none” (Fish, n. pag.). Essentially, he argues that liberalism as an ideology can only tolerate religions that accept the partitioning between church and state – all others are “unreasonable,” seeing as they would seek to upend the status quo and impress their beliefs upon the population. “At first glance,” he says, “this makes perfect sense.

After all, why should we tolerate the unreasonable?” The sense it makes, however, “depends on ‘reasonable’ having been defined as congruent with the liberal values of pluralism and moderation, and ‘unreasonable’ having been defined as any viewpoint that refuses to respect and tolerate its competitors, but seeks to defeat them.”

Pullman goes to great lengths to demonstrate why any ideological apparatus with as much power as the Church is not only obsolete but also dangerous. The thinly veiled instances of sexual abuse, fanatical religious violence, and the suppression of “every good feeling” throughout His Dark Materials are obvious jabs at the Roman Catholic Church (AS 50). Pullman has made no mystery of his feelings regarding the institution on the whole: in the Barton interview, he says, “I hope the wretched organization will vanish entirely” (n. pag.). According to Fish, Pullman’s vision of a world based on truth falls into the “unreasonable” category – it actively seeks to defeat other religious worldviews, usurping them by virtue of its own authority. Pullman’s Dust is defined against the organized Christian religion; as Fish would say, it is “defined by what it sees as [religious ideology’s] errors” (n. pag.). Dust does not foster a world of and and both – instead, it establishes a system that defines itself based on what it is not.

CONCLUSION Pullman’s sweeping reinterpretation of theological texts is weakened by its exclusion of non-Western religions. By placing Christianity at the center of his text, Pullman’s critique contributes to the perception of Western primacy and perpetuates the idea that all important ideas, religious or secular, emerge from the heart of The College of Saint Rose

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Jessica Ann Lamoureaux Europe. Although the series makes it clear that the good/evil, spirit/matter, and male/female dichotomies are obsolete and incompatible with the modern world, it does not embrace pluralist thought, instead adding to the weight behind the religion/secularism debate. His Dark Materials, although a staggering example of fantasy literature that can be enjoyed by readers young and old, is not the break from dualist thought that critics routinely claim it is. It is an inversion, yes, but it preserves at all costs the most important of all binaries: the idea that somehow knowledge, conscious thought, and wisdom stand opposed to the shackles of religion. This line of reasoning, embedded deep within the narrative of the text, is what eventually prevents it from reaching a climax that celebrates all life and all ways of living. At the close, Lyra is alone in her own world. Despite all that she has seen and done, all that she has shared, she is still boxed into an ideology that presents itself as natural, normal, and without beginning and end – there is no elsewhere.

Works Cited Hatlen, Burton. “Pullman’s His Dark Materials, a Challenge to the Fantasies of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis, with an Epilogue on Pullman’s Neo-Romantic Reading of Paradise Lost.” His Dark Materials Illuminated. Eds. Millicent Lenz, Carole Scott. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005.

75-94. Print.

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.”

Literary Theory: An Anthology. Eds. Julie Rivkin, Michael Ryan. Massachusetts: Blackwell Publishing, 2004. 693702. Print.

Barton, Laura. “Philip Pullman: ‘I hope the wretched Catholic Church will vanish entirely.’” The Guardian. The Guardian, 18 April 2010. Web. 15 June 2014.

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Illusions of Pluralism in Pullman’s His Dark Materials Bird, Anne-Marie. “Circumventing the Grand Narrative: Dust as an Alternative Theological Vision in Pullman’s His Dark Materials.” His Dark Materials Illuminated. Eds. Millicent Lenz, Carole Scott. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. 199-211. Print.

Fish, Stanley. “Liberalism and Secularism: One and the Same.”

New York Times. New York Times, 2 September 2006.

Web. 8 June 2014.

Keats, John. “[On Negative Capability: Letter to George and Tom Keats, 21, ?27 December 1817].” Poetry Foundation.

Poetry Foundation, 13 October 2009. Web. 8 June 2014.

Lenz, Millicent. “Story as a Bridge to Transformation: The Way Beyond Death in Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass.”

Children’s Literature in Education 34.1 (2003): 47-55.

Project Muse. Web. 2 May 2014.

-----. Introduction. His Dark Materials Illuminated. Eds. Millicent Lenz, Carole Scott. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. 1-15. Print.

Milton, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. Gordon Teskey. New York: Norton, 2005. Print.

Pullman, Philip. The Amber Spyglass. New York: Yearling, 2000.

Print.

-----. The Golden Compass. New York: Yearling, 1995. Print.

-----. The Subtle Knife. New York: Yearling, 1997. Print.

Roberts, Susan. “A Dark Agenda?” Surefish. Surefish, November 2002. Web. 24 June 2014.

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Jessica Ann Lamoureaux Schweizer, Bernard. “‘And He’s A-Going to Destroy Him’: Religious Subversion in His Dark Materials.” His Dark Materials Illuminated. Eds. Millicent Lenz, Carole Scott.

Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2005. 160-173.

Print.

Squires, Claire. Philip Pullman, Master Storyteller: A Guide to the Worlds of His Dark Materials. New York: Continuum, 2006. Print.

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Riemann Sphere and Stereographic Projection

Introduction to “Riemann Sphere and Stereographic Projection” A sphere is defined mathematically as the set of points that are all the same distance r from a given point in three-dimensional space.

This distance r is the radius of the sphere, and the given point is the center of the sphere.

The stereographic projection is a particular mapping that projects a sphere onto a plane. This mapping is a one to one and onto which preserves angles locally and in this paper the domain and the image are in the complex plane. In another ways you can say that stereographic projection is a way of picturing the sphere as the plane. Stereographic projection establishes a correspondence not only between the points of the sphere and the plane, but also between points outside the sphere and circles on the plane. For a point outside the sphere, the polar plane intersects the sphere along a circle. Under stereographic projection, this circle is transformed to a circle on the plane, which is also considered as the stereographic image of the point outside the sphere onto the plane.

Riemann sphere is a way of representing every point on a plane as a point on a sphere. This is done by first centering a sphere on the origin and taking a point on the complex plane (z = x + iy ) and join this point to the North pole of the sphere. This creates a straight line which intersects the sphere at a single point at the surface of the sphere. Therefore every point on the complex plane (z = x + iy) can be represented as a unique point on the sphere (z= x + iy) where there is a one-to-one mapping between the two.

The only point on the sphere which does not equate to a point on the complex plane is that of the North Pole itself. See the diagrams and notations on the paper.

From the above relations, Sevil Nakisli shows that Riemann Sphere and Stereographic projection can be extended to the complex plane and a point at the infinity by showing its bijection between the points on the sphere and the points on the

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Sevil Nakisli complex plane. Her approach is done cleverly by finding these points and using examples to find these bijections.

Jamal Teymouri Associate Professor of Mathematics

Riemann Sphere and Stereographic Projection Sevil Nakisli Mathematics, ’16 Abstract: In this study, I describe the Riemann sphere and stereographic projection. By using the extended complex plane and the complex plane plus a point at infinity, C ∪ {∞}, I show one-to-one correspondence between points on the sphere, the points on the complex plane, and the equations used to find these corresponding points. In the second part of the study, I introduce two examples. In the first example, given a point on the complex plane, I find the corresponding point on the sphere. In the second example, given the point on the sphere, I find the corresponding point on the complex plane.

Definition: The Riemann Sphere is the unit sphere S = {(α ε R : |α|=1}, and x, y plane represents complex plane, C. Each point A ε C corresponds to a point α ε S by stereographic projection to the North Pole N (Fig.1).

3

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Riemann Sphere and Stereographic Projection Figure 1:

The set S = {(x, y, z): x2+y2+z2=1}, intersect x-y plane in the unit circle when z=0, x2+y2=1 is the unit circle in complex plane contained R3.

For some reason, it is more convenient to use points on a sphere rather than points on the plane to visualize operations involving complex numbers. To see how this is achieved, look at Figure 2. Here a sphere having unit diameter is placed directly over the origin of coordinates of the complex Plane. Each point in the complex plane (A, B, G) is made to correspond to a point on the surface of the sphere (α, β, γ) in the following way: 1) A straight line is drawn from the North Pole of the sphere N(∞) to the point A in the plane.

2) The point α, to which A is mapped, is the point where the above straight line intersects the surface of the sphere.

The mapping of points A on the plane to points α on the sphere is called stereographic projection. The sphere itself is called the Riemann sphere.

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Sevil Nakisli Figure 2:

If we ignore the North Pole, we see that the stereographic projection defines a one to one mapping of points on the complex plane, C with points on the sphere, S. No point on the complex plane maps onto the North Pole of the Riemann sphere. However, points near N correspond to points on C very far from the origin. If we introduce a new improper point, ∞, our plane will be extended complex plane, C ∪ {∞}. We will consider our complex plane C contained in R3 in the form of x+iy+0z, (x, y, 0).

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Riemann Sphere and Stereographic Projection Figure 3:

If we look at Figure 3, we can see that if we move higher up on the sphere, we keep approaching the North Pole but we never reach the North Pole by these lines which are intersecting the sphere.

In that sense, when we move far away, we get closer to the North Pole. The North Pole represents the point at infinity. So, we think of the point of ∞ as the North Pole. That is the correspondence of points in C ∪ {∞} with the points on the sphere.

In this way, there is a one to one correspondence. But notice here; we have accounted all the points on the sphere except the North Pole.

We can take any point in the complex plane sitting in R3 and join it to the North Pole of the sphere by a straight line. That straight line hits the unit sphere at some point.

If we take any complex point on the sphere and join it to North Pole and project it to the complex plane, there is a unique point on the complex plane obtained by joining the intersection point of the sphere and the North Pole.

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Sevil Nakisli

The equation for straight line z is S L= t (0, 0, 1) + (1-t) (x, y, 0) , Point of North Pole

t∈ R

any point on the complex plane

That gives us a straight line connecting (0, 0, 1) and (x, y, 0) in R3.

The point of intersection of this line with the sphere is α which will be obtained generically as follows: SL = t [0, 0, 1] + (1-t) [x, y, 0] = [0, 0, t] + [(1-t) x, (1-t) y, 0] α= [(1-t) x, (1-t) y, t]

(distribute t over addition) (add two vectors)

Point on the sphere

When we substitute this point in unit sphere we get S = (1-t)2 x2 + (1-t)2 y2 + t2

(substitute α in to x2+y2+z2=1)

S = (1-t)2 [x2 + y2 ] + t2=1, where x2 + y2=| A |2, which is the square of the modulus of the complex number A. S = (1-t)2 | A |2 + t2 =1 When we solve the equation for t; (1-t)2 |A|2 = 1 - t2 , t≠1

(there is no complex number which intersects the point (0,0,1). We connect a complex number to the number (0, 0, 1). This does not mean that it intersects it)

1 - t2 =(1-2t + t2 ) |A|2

(expend (1-t)2 )

1 - t2 =(|A|2 - 2t |A|2 + t2 |A|2 ) (|A|2 - 2t |A|2 + t2 |A|2 ) -1 + t2 = 0 38

(distribute by |A|2 ) (put everything on one side)

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Riemann Sphere and Stereographic Projection (|A|2 + 1) t2 - (2|A|2 ) t + ( |A|2 – 1 )=0

(factor out t2 and t )

-[-2(|A|2 )] ± sqrt[(-2(|A|2 )2 -4(|A|2 + 1) (|A|2 – 1)] t=

.

2 ( |A| + 1 ) 2

(apply quadratic formula)

2(|A|2 ) ± sqrt[4 |A|4 -4(|A|4 – 1)] =

.

(organize inside of the radical)

2 ( |A| +1 ) 2

2(|A|2 ) ± sqrt[4 |A|4 - 4 |A|4 + 4] =

.

(organize inside of the radical)

2 ( |A| +1 ) 2

2(|A|2 ) ± 2 =

.

(2s are common)

2( |A| +1 ) 2

2( |A|2 ± 1 ) =

.

(factor out and cancel 2s)

2( |A| +1 ) 2

( |A|2 +1 ) t1 =

- =1

(as we stated earlier, t≠1, this cannot be the root)

( |A| +1 ) 2

( |A|2 – 1 ) t2 =

(x2 + y2 –1 ) =

( |A| +1 ) 2

(t2 is the only root) 2

2

(x + y +1 )

If we substitute t into α, we get the point in terms of x, y, and complex variable A.

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Sevil Nakisli

α = ( 1-

( |A|2 – 1 )

(|A|2 – 1) x ,

1-

( |A| +1 )

( |A| +1)

2

2

( |A|2 – 1 ) y, 2 ( |A| +1 )

)

(substitute the roots into α=[(1-t)x, (1-t)y, t])

If we want to write α completely in terms of x and y, we substitute x2 + y2 into |A|2, and get

α=(

2x x2 + y2 +1

x2 + y2 –1

2y ,

,

x2 + y2 +1

α1

x2 + y2 +1

α2

)

α3

If we want to write it completely in terms of complex number A, we must remove the appearance of x, y and get α=(

A+A ,

,

|A| +1

|A| +1

α1

α2

2

| A |2 – 1

-i(A - A ) 2

)

(A is the conjugate of A)

|A| +1 2

α3

Where; A + A = (x+iy)+(x-iy) = 2x A - A = (x+iy)-(x-iy) = 2iy (-i)(A–A) = 2i(-i)y = 2(-1)( i2)y=2(-1)(-1)y (multiply both side by -i) (-i)( A – A ) = 2y α is the intersection point of the line, joining the North Pole and point A on the complex plane, with the unit sphere.

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Riemann Sphere and Stereographic Projection Conversely, if we are given a point α = (α1, α2, α3) on the sphere, S, then we can find point A on the complex plane.

Figure 4:

What we do is we draw a straight line connecting (0, 0, 1) and the point α, and we project it onto the complex plane. It gives us the intersection with the complex plane and that can be found by α1 + iα2 A= -, 1 - α3 α is assumed to be (α1 , α2 , α3) and α3≠1 (since α3 correspond to the North Pole (0,0,1).

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Sevil Nakisli 2x

2y

x2 + y2 +1

+ i(

x2 + y2 +1

) .

A=

2

2

x + y –1 1-

x2 + y2 +1

-

By this kind of association, corresponding to each point on the sphere, there is a point on the complex plane and, corresponding to each point on the complex plane, there is a point on the sphere, because there is a one-to-one correspondence between points on the sphere and the points on the complex plane.

One-to-one correspondence is given by drawing, geometrically, a straight line passing through the North Pole and the point on the complex plane, or, in the other direction, by joining the North Pole and any other point on the sphere which will be projected on the complex plane to get the complex number.

Example 1 Given A = 1+2i, find the corresponding point α=(α1, α2, α3) on the unit sphere.

A is a point on the two dimensional complex plane C. Write A in three dimensional C∪{∞} plane as A = 1+2i+0 which is the same as A=(1,2,0) Draw a line, NA, from North Pole to the point A. NA = t*(0, 0, 1) + (1-t)*(1, 2, 0) (equation of the line from N to A) α = [(1-t), (2-2t), t]

(coordinates of α on the sphere)

S = (1-t)2 + (2-2t)2 + t2 = 1

(substute α1, α2, α3 into sphere equation of x2, y2, z2=1)

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Riemann Sphere and Stereographic Projection = t2 - 2t + 1 + 4t2 - 8t + 4 + t2 - 1= 0 = 6t2 - 10t + 4= 0

(expend) (add likewise terms)

= 3t2 - 5t + 2= 0

(divide by 2)

= (3t-2) (t-1)= 0

(foil)

t=2/3 is the only root α = [(1- (2/3)), (2-(4/3)), (2/3)] α = [(1/3), (2/3), (2/3)]

(since t≠1) (substitute 2/3 into t) (coordinate of α)

Figure 5:

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Sevil Nakisli Example 2 Given β = (-2, 3, 1/2) on the unit sphere, find the corresponding point B = x + iy, on the complex plane C. Draw a line, Nβ, from North Pole to the point β then project the line to the complex plane to point B. β1 + iβ2 B=

1 - β3

-,

-2 + i3 B=

-,

(substitute -2, 3, 1/2 into β1, β2, β3 in formula B)

1 – 1/2 B = -4 + 6i

References Osler, T. J. An intuitive introduction to complex analysis http://www.rowan.edu/open/depts/math/osler/Introductio n%20to%20Complex%20Analysis/ComplexAnalysisDow nloads.html (updated 2005).

Gokhman, D. Stereographic projection, Riemann sphere, and chordal metric http://zeta.math.utsa.edu/~gokhman/ftp/courses/notes/spr s.pdf (updated 1996).

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The Devil in Plath’s Men

Introduction to “The Devil in Plath’s Men” In our English capstone course, “Satan in Literature,” we explored the literary history of the figure of Satan, using Elaine Pagels’s The Origin of Satan to trace its development from the Old Testament to the New: from a role in God’s court, the satan, or accusing angel, to an increasingly important antagonist to Jesus. Pagels delineates the way the earliest Jewish sect of Christians separated itself from other Jews by demonizing them; then, as Christianity spread primarily among pagans, by demonizing pagans; then, by demonizing heretics within the Church; and finally, during and post-Reformation, by demonizing other Christian sects. We also considered psychological accounts of demonization, primarily Freud’s notion of denial and projection, and Jung’s notion of the Shadow.

Jessica Serfilippi’s paper focuses on the American poet Sylvia Plath, who has come to be seen as a kind of proto-feminist saint, particularly among feminists in the U.S. This has entailed a corollary demonization of her late husband, Ted Hughes: for his philandering; for editing all traces of it out of Plath’s most famous and posthumous work, Ariel; and for burning some of Plath’s work after her suicide. Hughes was a well-known British poet, and, across the pond, the opposite demonization of Plath as “insane” is common, particularly among male literary critics.

Serfilippi bravely wades into these stormy seas and considers the demonic male imagery in several of Plath’s most famous poems, which are most controversial for her association of her father and husband with Nazis, along with devils, vampires, and so forth. Serfilippi does an excellent job of reading this imagery poetically, remembering Plath’s penchant for mythologizing (and fictionalizing) the material of her own life. She artfully considers Plath’s many allusions to God and Satan, Jesus and Lazarus, Heaven and Hell, Nazis and Jews, demons and angels. She attempts to remain impartial, considering also, more briefly, Hughes’s book of posthumous poems to Plath, Birthday Letters, as The College of Saint Rose

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Jessica M. Serfilippi well as their daughter, Frieda Hughes’s, defense of both of her parents. However, it comes as no surprise (since Serfilippi is herself an American feminist) that she finally lands rather squarely in Plath’s camp.

Barbara Ungar Associate Professor of English

The Devil in Plath’s Men Jessica M. Serfilippi English, ’15 Sylvia Plath, arguably one of the most famous American poets, is best known for her technical mastery, proto-feminist perspective, and use of her personal life in her work. Her problems with her father, Otto Plath, and husband, fellow poet Ted Hughes, are mythologized within her poetry. One of her most well known poems, “Daddy,” depicts her father as a Nazi and vampire, her husband as his replica, and herself as their victim. In “Lady Lazarus,” Nazi imagery is also prominent, alongside other demonic imagery. Similar, yet more intense, demonic imagery is present in “Fever 103°.” Ted Hughes reveals his awareness of Plath’s depiction of him, not only as a replica of her father, but also as a devil, in his book of poetry, Birthday Letters. In his book, written to and about Plath after her suicide, he describes his demonization in his own poems, such as “The Shot,” “Black Coat,” and “The Bee God.” Hughes not only responds to Plath’s depiction of him through his poetry, but also through his editorial decisions in Plath’s posthumously published book of poetry, Ariel, by removing poems she had originally intended to include in the book. It is clear, through a psychoanalytic and feminist reading, that Sylvia Plath casts not only her father, Otto Plath, and her husband, Ted Hughes, as devil figures, but also all men, which Ted Hughes in 46

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The Devil in Plath’s Men turn responds to in his own poetry and through the decisions he made while editing Ariel.

“Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Fever 103º” all appear in Plath’s final and posthumously published volume of poetry, Ariel, which was edited by Hughes, who edited both the UK and US versions of the book. Frieda Hughes, their daughter, edited the restored edition of Ariel in 2004. This version is laid out in the order Plath intended, with all of the poems she had included. In the introduction to the restored edition, Frieda Hughes does not describe her father as malicious in his editing of Ariel–– she in fact states that “[i]t appeared to me that my father’s editing of Ariel was seen to ‘interfere’ with the sanctity of my mother’s suicide, as if, like some deity, everything associated with her must be enshrined and preserved as miraculous” (xviii). It seems as if she believes that Ted Hughes’s editing of Ariel was a way of honoring and preserving Plath. Frieda Hughes mentions that her father left out poems that were about family and friends to keep them from becoming offended by the sometimes vicious way Plath depicted them in her poetry (xvi). Frieda Hughes further portrays her father’s choices as his way of honoring and showing love toward Plath, yet in Lynda Bundtzen’s article, “Poetic Arson and Sylvia Plath’s ‘Burning Letters,’” the choices Ted Hughes made while editing Ariel are shown in a much different light.

According to Bundtzen, when Hughes put his own version of Ariel together, he seemed to erase “all of the poems from Plath’s own version of Ariel that were explicitly about their bad moments” (448-449). Hughes also burned two of Plath’s journals, which “many critics regard... as committing an act of desecration worse than Hitler’s burning of the books” (236). Hughes has faced endless criticism for the way he handled Plath’s work and legacy, and “he has responded in a myriad of ways–– at times with scorn, defensively, at others with cool detachment, as if he were only her editor” (236). Frieda Hughes once again defends her father in her introduction to the restored edition of Ariel by reminding readers

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Jessica M. Serfilippi that her “mother’s copyright, which fell to him on her death... he used to directly benefit my brother and me” (xvii).

Frieda Hughes and Lynda Bundtzen paint different pictures of Ted Hughes, yet they create similar images of Plath.

Bundtzen states that Plath held multiple burnings not only of her own work about Hughes, but also of “papers from Hughes’s attic study,” along with all of the letters from her mother (240). Frieda Hughes states that Plath “had on two occasions destroyed my father’s work, once by ripping it up and once by burning it” (xviii).

Yet Frieda Hughes did not despair at this image of her mother, but rather found the humanity in her actions. She writes that it reminded her that her mother “was a human being” and these fiery outbursts were “the exception, not the rule” (xviii). Bundtzen offers one insight into Plath’s motivation to burn Hughes’ works; she states that it seems as if “Plath meant to cast a spell, to exorcise a demon” (240). Plath’s rage and burning of her husband’s belongings can be seen as just that–– an exorcism of him, her personal devil, from her life. Plath’s poetry cannot be used as a timeline or historicization of her relationship with Hughes; keeping this in mind, it is here that the complexity of the relationship between Plath and Hughes becomes of the utmost importance, and it is here that her poetry should speak for itself.

“Daddy” is probably Plath’s most famous poem. It is known for its venom and precision as the speaker claims her father is a Nazi, “[c]huffing me off like a Jew./ A Jew to Dachau, Auschwitz, Belsen” (32-33). Throughout the poem, Plath’s own relationship with her father and her husband, Ted Hughes, is closely examined. She begins the poem by claiming “[y]ou do not do, you do not do/ Any more, black shoe” (1-2). This image, as Jahan Ramazani writes in her article, “Daddy, I Have Had to Kill You: Plath, Rage, and the Modern Elegy,” calls upon the Mother Goose nursery rhyme, “There Was An Old Woman Who Lived In a Shoe,” which invokes a childish image of the speaker (1150).

Susan Bassnett claims, in Sylvia Plath, that the poem has a “nursery rhyme rhythm” and “furious energy,” suggesting that Plath’s use of 48

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The Devil in Plath’s Men childish sounding words and her allusion to the nursery rhyme makes the poem even stronger (88). Following this pattern, in the first stanza, she uses “Achoo,” (5) and later on, in the ninth stanza, these child-like sounds reappear: “[w]ith your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo” (42). Even her repetition of words, such as “wars, wars, wars” (18) and “the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you” (49-50) are child-like in their repetitiveness. The “oo” rhymes and rhythms that Plath uses throughout the poem, such as “[y]ou do not do, you do not do/ Any more black shoe” (1-2), “dozen or two” (21), and “stuck me together with glue” (62), also add to the other childish words and repetitions. Her use of childish words, sounds, and repetitions all strengthen the image of the speaker expressing her rage at her father and provide a stark contrast to the adult content of the poem.

The poem is centered around the image of a daughter killing her father, and subsequently her husband, whom she claims is a double of her father when she states “I made a model of you” (64) and later “I said I do, I do” (67). In her book, Chapters in Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath, Judith Kroll states that the father figure in the poem “must first appear as godly. But the speaker soon shows that she now attributes his godliness in part to his authoritarianism and personal inaccessibility–– qualities which become intensified through his death, and which later became transferred to... her husband” (123). As Kroll suggests, the father figure in the poem, when closely examined, is not at first the devil he becomes by the end of the poem. Although the speaker states, “Daddy, I have had to kill you” (6) on the first line of the second stanza, when she continues, it seems as if she is speaking from grief.

The speaker claims, “[y]ou died before I had time,” (7) and that she “used to pray to recover you” (14). The poem takes its dark turn after her search for her father leads her through a “Polish town/ Scraped flat by the roller/ Of wars, wars, wars” (16-18). She claims “I thought every German was you” (29). The speaker then begins to see herself as Jewish; she “began to talk like a Jew./ I may well be

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Jessica M. Serfilippi a Jew” (34-35). The speaker here is embodying conflicting forces–– her father’s German-ness, and her mother’s supposed Jewishness.

Plath’s mother was not Jewish, which creates a fine divide between the details in the poem Plath pulled from her own life and those details she fictionalized. This is further exposed in an interview Plath did about the poems in Ariel with the BBC in December 1962. Plath states of “Daddy” that the speaker’s “case is complicated by the fact that her father was also a Nazi and her mother very possibly part Jewish. In the daughter the two strains marry and paralyze each other” (Ariel: The Restored Edition 196). As Guinevara Nance and Judith Jones state in their article on the poem, “The fact that the girl herself is ‘a bit of a Jew’ and a bit of a German intensifies her emotional paralysis before the imago of an Aryan father with whom she is both connected and at enmity” (76). It is in this section of the poem–– roughly stanzas four through eight–– that the speaker seems in transition. She is realizing how her father has hurt and oppressed her; she is building up to her realization that he is not God, but in fact a Nazi, or a devil.

It is in the ninth stanza that the father figure turns into an authoritarian figure, or more specifically, a Nazi. The speaker claims she has “always been afraid of you” (41). The father figure turns from a God to “a swastika/ so black no sky could squeak through” (46-47). A stanza later, the poem turns back to the speaker’s personal life, as she states, “You stand at the blackboard, daddy./ In the picture I have of you/ A cleft in your chin instead of your foot// But no less a devil for that” (51-54). The man who was called a Fascist a few lines before is now the speaker’s father once again, but clearly the relationship has shifted–– he is a devil, and “the black man who// Bit my pretty red heart in two” (55-56). As if it wasn’t already clear enough, the parallels to Plath’s own life become even clearer in the last four stanzas of the poem. The speaker recalls how she was “ten when they buried you” (57) and at “[t]wenty I tried to die/ And get back, back, back to you./ I thought even the bones would do” (58-59). Andrew Wilson, in his 50

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The Devil in Plath’s Men biography of Plath, states that Plath was eight when her father died, and at the age of twenty she attempted suicide for the first known time (30, 218). These parallels in “Daddy” are no mistake, though Plath keeps a layer of fiction between herself and the speaker. Plath and the speaker were not the same age when their fathers died and Plath was not Jewish. Plath has only partially cast herself into the role of the speaker, who sees her father as a Nazi, as someone who has oppressed her for so long that the only way to free herself is to kill either herself or him. She extends these feelings toward her husband, as well, whom she casts as her father’s double.

In the next stanza, she states, “I made a model of you,” (64) and in the following stanza, the speaker says “I said I do, I do” (67). The “oo” sounds in “you” (64) and “I do, I do” (67) once again bring back the childlike rhymes right as the poem is intensifying. After this, the speaker angrily tells her father, “So daddy, I’m finally through” (68). This model that she has created appears to be Ted Hughes, her husband. She goes on to call him a “vampire who said he was you/ And drank my blood for a year,/ Seven years, if you want to know” (72-75). This is clearly a reference to Hughes, for the couple had been together for seven years by the time Plath wrote “Daddy.” Here, she casts her father and husband as vampires whom she must kill with “a stake in your fat black heart” (76).

The way the speaker kills her husband and father in the final stanza seems to be magical, and similar to exorcism. As Nance and Jones describe in “Doing away with Daddy,” the speaker’s method of killing her father and husband in the poem is “more akin to magic than murder, since it is through a combination of exorcism and sympathetic magic that she works to dispossess herself of her own fantasies” (75). The idea of Plath “exorcising” her father and husband from her life in the poem, instead of brutally murdering them, is furthered through the magical elements in the poem. Nance and Jones also state that “[b]oth psychoanalysis and the religious rite of exorcism have regarded this process of confrontation with the ‘trauma’ or the ‘demon’ as potentially The College of Saint Rose

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Jessica M. Serfilippi curative” (76). The speaker uses the poem to free herself of these devils who have haunted her for so long. Nance and Jones liken the speaker’s final words to an attack on Satan; they see the “final exorcism [as] reminiscent of exorcism rites [during] which the pride of Satan is attacked by calling him vile names the daughter declares, ‘Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through’” (78). The speaker’s final words to her father have enough venom to defeat the pride of Satan himself. It seems as if the speaker summons her strength through the rage she expresses leading up to the stabbing of her father.

The attack on the speaker’s father can be read as an assault on patriarchy. As Mary De Jong states in her article, “Daddy” “can be perceived as a childish or mad exaggeration of a patriarch’s tyranny,” which allows it to be read as a feminist poem (34).

Indeed, the rage the speaker expresses toward her “daddy” is not simply personal. In the tenth stanza, she exclaims, “Every woman adores a Fascist,/ The boot in the face, the brute/ Brute heart of a brute like you” (48-50). Here, the speaker seems to be likening the men women love to Fascists. While she does not outwardly state that all men are Fascists, she does state that every woman adores a Fascist, while the men who are Fascists remain unnumbered.

Through the context of the poem, the speaker’s father, who has previously been likened to a Nazi, can be read as a Fascist. The “you” at the end of this stanza, which reads, “[b]rute heart of a brute like you” (50), seems to connect to the “you” which refers to the father at the blackboard, thereby connecting her father to the image of the Fascist. Since her father is later connected to her husband, the same comparison can be extended to him. When she goes on to say her father is “no less a devil,” (54) she extends the idea of these men being Fascists to the implication of them being devils. As the poem progresses to the fifteenth stanza, the speaker states “[i]f I’ve killed one man, I’ve killed two” (71). This casual violence does not only kill her husband and father, but seems to extend toward all men, as well. If she’s killed one man, then two, killing another does not seem impossible.

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The Devil in Plath’s Men Lisa Narbeshuber, author of the article “The Poetics of Torture: The Spectacle of Sylvia Plath’s Poetry,” also sees “Daddy” as a feminist poem. She states that “[m]ore than an attack on the male (or in particular her husband or father), her poetry confronts the mentality of the status quo that accepts the ideology of the individual and notions of the natural, or even the personal, self” (187). Here, Narbeshuber discusses how the poem extends from the father and husband to the system of the patriarchy itself. When the speaker kills her father and husband, she kills the system that has oppressed her and allowed men to have power over her.

Through her poem, she brings down the “panzer man” (45). Her victory is one all women can, and do, share in. In the last stanza of the poem, the speaker describes how “the villagers never liked you./ They are dancing and stamping on you./ They always knew it was you./ Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through” (77-80). This scene comes directly after her magical killing of her men. The villagers can be interpreted as women rejoicing in the slaying of “daddy,” or the men who oppress them. The speaker has the honor of killing the man, the symbol of the patriarchy, but all women share in this victory with her. They all dance on his grave and celebrate in this exorcism of a devil who has plagued them for so long. By the close of “Daddy,” Plath has temporarily put her personal demons to bed, along with the oppressive demon that is the patriarchal system.

In “Lady Lazarus,” the speaker once again connects herself to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust through Nazi imagery similar to that found in “Daddy.” The speaker compares her skin to a “Nazi lampshade” (5), and tells “Herr Doktor” (65) (“Mr. Doctor” in English) that she knows she is “your opus,/ I am your valuable,/ The pure gold baby// That melts to a shriek” (67-70).

Through this imagery, a feminist reading of the poem comes naturally. Throughout the entire poem, the speaker is discussing how she is a female version of Lazarus–– she has risen from the dead (or near dead, more accurately) multiple times. In the second and third stanzas, she compares herself to material goods that carry heavy connotations; she calls herself a “sort of walking miracle, my The College of Saint Rose

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Jessica M. Serfilippi skin/ Bright as a Nazi lampshade,/ My right foot// A paperweight,/ my face a featureless, fine/ Jew linen” (4-9). The “Nazi lampshade,” as Barbara Ungar explained in an informal email interview, seems to be an allusion to the fact that lampshades were made from the skin of murdered concentration camp prisoners, and the “Jew linen” follows the same vein, although its meaning is less clear (4/25/14).

She knows she is a valuable object in the eyes of Herr Doktor and Herr Enemy. At the start of the poem, she describes herself in terms of physical objects, which can be read as symbols of oppression. She is seen by the men in the poem as their creation, as a valuable; not only is she seen as something that is theirs to possess, but she is seen in terms of value and physical objects (“gold baby”). Throughout the poem, the speaker’s body parts are also commodified by the men. She describes a “peanut-crunching crowd” (26) watching as the men rebirth her again, unwrapping her “hand and foot––/ The big strip tease” (28-29). Later in the poem she states that “[t]here is a charge// For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge/ For the hearing of my heart... // And there is a charge, a very large charge/ For a word or a touch/ Or a bit of blood// Or a piece of my hair or my clothes” (57-64). Disturbingly, the speaker seems to be put on display as part of some exhibit.

Every part of her is valuable, and can make a profit–– yet she is not the one “selling” herself. As Laura J. Dahlke explores in her article, “Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus,’” the speaker is “disembodied–– becoming a hand, a knee, skin and bone” (235). She becomes his ‘pure gold baby,’ (69) a perfect image of male possession” (235). She is being sold by Herr Doktor, a man. She is nothing more than an object–– a valuable, a way to make money, useful for a strip tease–– to them.

Through these images, the speaker draws a connection between the oppression of women and the way they are seen as objects that men can create and own. The speaker goes on to describe herself in terms of physical objects once again at the close of the poem. In the fourth to last stanza, she states of Herr Doktor, “You poke and stir./ Flesh, bone, there is nothing there––// A cake 54

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The Devil in Plath’s Men of soap,/ A wedding ring,/ A gold filling” (74-78). The speaker describes herself in terms of these everyday objects right before telling “Herr God, Herr Lucifer/ Beware” (79-80). She appears to have turned the use of objects as a way to describe women into something that propels her toward power. She recognizes that only these objects remain in her place, until “[o]ut of the ash/ I rise with my red hair/ And I eat men like air” (82-84). She has taken herself and left in her place the objects she was likened to by the men. By defining herself in terms of objects once again, she frees herself from the way the men have described her, and can then turn and conquer the men who have oppressed her.

The soap, wedding ring, and gold filling can also be seen in a much more satanic light when viewed not as every day items, but as looted items from the Holocaust. As Barbara Ungar explains, during the Holocaust, the Nazis took the fat from the bodies of their murdered Jewish victims and turned them into “‘Oil of Pure Jew,’” and it’s likely that soap was made the same way (4/25/14).

The prisoners’ wedding rings were stolen, and prisoners were also forced to sift through the ashes of cremated murder victims to find the gold from their fillings and wedding rings (4/25/14). With this information, the images in the poem suddenly take on an even more satanic tone–– not only is the speaker their prisoner, but she is their “pure gold baby” (69) who has been melted down to a “shriek” (70). They “poke and stir” (74) through her ashes, using her remains to make soap, stealing her wedding ring, and her gold fillings. The speaker uses the images to show how she has been stripped of everything by Herr Doktor (4/25/14). He has used and raided her of everything she is for so long, causing her to resurrect herself at the end and declare she will “eat men like air” (17).

Maureen Curley expands the feminist reading of the poem by noting, in her article on the poem, that “[t]he stanzas replicate the number of days in a lunar cycle and the number of days in a normal menstrual, reproductive cycle. The reproductive cycle echoes the creativity of the female poet” (213). She also notes that “Plath is able to regender a male Lazarus into a female voice” (213).

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Jessica M. Serfilippi Lazarus originally appears in the New Testament and is raised from the dead by Jesus. In Plath’s poem, the speaker is a “smiling woman” (19) who is raised from the dead by Herr Doktor. Dahlke states in her article, “Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus,’” that “[u]nlike the biblical story of Lazarus, in which a loving deity uses power for good, Plath’s “Lady Lazarus” reveals a struggle for power with a cruel deity that ends in annihilation” (234). In the Bible, Jesus raises Lazarus because Lazarus has been faithful to him, yet in this poem, Herr Doktor uses Lady Lazarus and the miracles of her rebirths for his own gain. The speaker is clearly fighting him throughout the poem, and her victory is obvious and triumphant at the end. This victory seems to echo the larger triumph of resurrection that is central to Christianity. Jesus’ resurrection symbolizes the victory of God over Satan. Jesus’ death on the cross and resurrection three days later allows humans to enter Heaven instead of being trapped in a part of Hades/Hell. The number three also echoes here–– Jesus rose on the third day, opening a space in Heaven for humanity, saving them from Satan, and the speaker in “Lady Lazarus” defeats the men who are using her by rising again after her third attempt at death.

Dahlke notices that the speaker “uses the generic ‘men’ rather than speaking directly to Herr Doktor. In the face of her enemy’s power, she becomes incapable of confrontation. The men she promises to eat are abstract people, not the specific man” (2356). While Dahlke sees this as a failure, it can also be read as a victory–– the speaker addresses God and Lucifer, two powerful male figures, at the close of the poem. Susan Van Dyne, in her article “Fueling the Fire: The Manuscripts of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus,’” also mentions the use of hell imagery in connection with the speaker’s power over the male figures in the poem. She states that “in performing her suicidal act ‘so it feels like hell,’ she’ll rival Lucifer in her ability to suffer; and in arranging her own resurrection, she demonstrates she can do without God’s intervention” (142). The speaker is outdoing Lucifer through her suffering and pain, and she’s raising herself from her suicide 56

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The Devil in Plath’s Men without God’s help. Therefore, the speaker’s expansion to all men in the last stanza can be read not as fear, as Dahlke suggests, but rather as an abundance of courage. She not only feels able to take on her specific oppressor, but she outdoes both God and Lucifer and seems to find the strength to bring down the patriarchal system which oppresses her. Surely Herr Doktor is included in her address at the end, even if he is not singled out. The speaker ultimately raises herself from the death she experiences under Herr Doktor’s oppression, and even has the courage to tell God and Lucifer to beware of her. If there is a Jesus figure here, it is the speaker herself, performing her own miracle. This is another way that Plath has crafted this poem as a feminist victory–– it is the woman who raises herself from the dead.

“Lady Lazarus” can also be examined from a psychoanalytic perspective. Some of the foremost details in the poem are the suicides the speaker describes. Although the first near death experience the speaker mentions––”[t]he first time it happened I was ten./ It was an accident” (35-36)–– does not correlate with what is known of Plath’s life, the second mention of suicide does. The speaker states that “[t]he second time I meant/ To last it out and not come back at all./ I rocked shut// As a seashell./ They had to call and call/ And pick the worms off me like sticky pearls” (37-42). This description seems very similar to Plath’s suicide attempt in August of 1953; according to Andrew Wilson’s description of her first attempt in his biography on her, Plath took nearly a full bottle of sleeping pills and made her way into a crawlspace in the basement of her house (219). She was discovered by her brother, Warren, who “heard a moan coming from the basement” (219). Plath had injured her face while in the crawlspace, and a close family friend, Richard Larschan, recounts in Wilson’s book what Plath’s mother told him: “‘the wound was infested with maggots... Knowing that, the image in her poem ‘Lady Lazarus,’ where she talks about people having to pick worms off her like sticky pearls, makes sense’” (219). The very intimate detail of the maggots on Plath’s head can also be seen as a parallel The College of Saint Rose

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Jessica M. Serfilippi between her life and that of the speaker in the poem. Plath’s ability to live through her first suicide attempt seems akin to the speaker’s ability to rise after her suicide attempt, as well, which is what makes her a Lady Lazarus. As Barbara Ungar suggests, the “Herr Doktor” could also be the doctors who worked to put Plath back together after her suicide attempt (4/15/14).

As the poem moves forward, the conflict between the speaker and the man in the poem–– Herr Doktor, or Herr Enemy– – becomes clearer. The speaker of the poem is outraged at the way she has been turned into Herr Doktor’s possession and victim.

Parallels can be drawn between Ted Hughes and Herr Doktor; as Susan Van Dyne states in her article on the poem, “the speaker wants to separate herself from her fused identity with Hughes, eliminate the threat of his superior position, and finally appropriate male powers to herself in a consuming gesture of her own fierce territoriality” (137). Throughout the poem, it is clear that the speaker resents her place in Herr Doktor’s world; she realizes her value to him, and is thus able to free herself from him. There is one detail that truly points toward a reading of Herr Doktor as the speaker’s husband–– the wedding ring. The wedding ring is mentioned in the list of items left in the speaker’s wake. It is sandwiched between two other items: “A cake of soap,/ A wedding ring,/ A gold filling” (76-78). The fact that it’s mentioned between soap and a filling suggest that the ring has become as meaningless and trivial to the speaker as the soap and filling. By leaving behind the ring, she is freeing herself of her husband, Herr Doktor.

Parallels can also be drawn between Herr Doktor and Plath’s father, for, as Barbara Ungar explains, Plath’s father was of German descent and in Germany, as a professor, would have been addressed as “Herr Doktor” (4/25/14). Judith Kroll expands on the connection further by stating that she sees the poem as being one of rebirth (155). She thinks the speaker’s “first two ‘deaths,’ whatever else their meaning, were implicitly attempts to mend her relationship with her dead father (a type of ‘Herr God’ and “Herr Lucifer’); finally death becomes her means of escaping such ‘gods’ 58

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The Devil in Plath’s Men while liberating herself” (155). This certainly seems possible–– it is reminiscent of the speaker in “Daddy,” who sees her suicide attempt as a chance to get back to her dead father. The speaker’s address to God and Lucifer also seems to connect to the conflicting view of the father in “Daddy.” In “Daddy,” the speaker appears to see her father as both a god and a demon, so her address to both God and Lucifer at the end of “Lady Lazarus” appears to be functioning in the same way–– her father is both her god and her devil. Although the obvious attempt to return to her father, found in “Daddy,” is missing in “Lady Lazarus,” the connections between Herr God, Herr Lucifer, and Otto Plath, and Herr Doktor and Ted Hughes are still visible.

“Fever 103°” seems to contain no connections to Otto Plath, but there are a few connections to Ted Hughes within the poem. The poem is a conglomeration of less personal, broader feminist views and very personal images, and thus must be explored with both feminist and psychoanalytic theories in mind. The poem begins by questioning what “pure” (1) means and quickly moves into the speaker dismissing the “tongues of hell” (2), calling them “dull, dull as the triple/ Tongues of dull, fat Cerberus/ Who wheezes at the gate” (3-5). The speaker not only dismisses hellfire, but also the terrifying guardian of Hell from Greek mythology, Cerberus. She imagines him as wheezing and “licking clean” (6) the sins of her fever. This intimate act of Cerberus cleansing her of her fever suggests that the speaker is already intimate with hell and its demons, which suggests that her lover later in the poem is indeed a demon himself. The fire imagery continues throughout the poem.

The speaker describes the “tinder” (8) as crying, and there is an “indelible smell/ Of a snuffed candle!” (9-10) hanging in the air, causing the smoke to “roll” (11) from the speaker. Not only is the speaker surrounded by flames, but she herself has smoke coming off of her, implying that she is on fire and quite possibly already in hell because of the way she is treated by her lover.

Plath places a reference to the atomic bombing of Hiroshima within the poem, as well. The speaker describes a The College of Saint Rose

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Jessica M. Serfilippi “ghastly orchid” (20), stating that the “[r]adiation turned it white/ And killed it in an hour.// Greasing the bodies of adulterers/ Like Hiroshima ash and eating in./ The sin. The sin” (23-27). The bombing of Hiroshima is certainly an event that can be described as an atrocity from Hell. The speaker connects the radiation to the beginning of the poem, where she is questioning purity, as well.

She states that the “[r]adiation turned it white” (23), and whiteness is typically associated with purity. This seems to be suggesting that the bombing turns the sinners pure because they have paid for their sins, yet it seems that the only way they can pay for their sins is through death. There is also the gruesome description of the “bodies of adulterers” (25) being greased “[l]ike Hiroshima ash” (26). This image expands to all adulterers–– it seems as if the speaker is marking the adulterers with the ashes of the murder victims of the Hiroshima bombing. This also relates to the affair Ted Hughes had with Assia Wevill, which was ongoing as Ariel was being written.

After this mention of adultery, the poem then takes on a sexual tone which not only invites a closer feminist reading, but suggests that the poem turns sexual due to the speaker’s attempt at keeping her husband by her side instead of with his mistress. The speaker addresses her lover, who could be read as her husband, as “Darling” (28), and tells him “all night/ I have been flickering off, on, off, on./ The sheets grow heavy as a lecher’s kiss” (28-30).

While this can be read as the speaker describing her fever, the loving address to her husband and the sensuous description of the bed sheets being as heavy as a “lecher’s kiss” (30) imply a more sexual meaning. The speaker appears to be in bed, with her lover, who is causing her sexual “flickering” (29) throughout the night.

Then, after “[t]hree days. Three nights” (31) the speaker is “too pure for you or anyone” (34). Julia Gordon-Bramer, in her essay, “‘Fever 103°’: The Fall of Man; The Rise of Woman; The Folly of Youth,” states that this period of three days and three nights carries religious connotations: “[a]s Christ was said to be in the tomb for three days and three nights, it takes at least ‘Three days. Three 60

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The Devil in Plath’s Men nights’ to reach this point of distillation” (93). The speaker seems to be comparing herself to Christ, saying that once she rises from this fever, she will become too perfect for any other living being, even, and perhaps especially, her lover.

Gordon-Bramer states that “Plath talks about her won body as the enemy in the twelfth stanza” (91). It seems as if after she has become pure, her newfound purity hurts even her. The comparison to Christ is furthered as the speaker compares the hurt she feels from her lover’s body to how the “world hurts God” (36).

She seems to see herself as a light, as Christ is sometimes described as the “Light of the World;” she states that she is “a lantern––// My head a moon” (36-37). With her newfound purity, the speaker does not lose her sexuality. There is importance in the fact that the speaker states “[a]ll by myself I am a huge camellia” (41). As Gordon-Bramer explains, the flower “is considered to be a flower of lovers” (98). Right after this, the speaker describes herself “[g]lowing and coming and going, flush on flush” (42), which seems to carry the same sexual connotations as earlier, when she described herself as “flickering, off, on, off, on” (29), expect this time there is no lover except for herself. She is her own lover, and she does not have to lose her sexuality to be considered pure.

Gordon-Bramer further describes the poem as “about dissolving the physical body and sinful ego, to rise into oneness with God” (91). This certainly seems true, for in the second to last stanza, the speaker is greeted with kisses from “cherubim” (49) and she rises to “Paradise” (54). As Judith Kroll writes, the “speaker initially experiences her high fever as a kind of hellfire or as flames of punishment, and then, by free association, the poem gradually rises both in temperature and seriousness” (178). Although the poem is already serious at its opening, it seems to take a darker and much more serious turn in the ninth stanza, when the speaker uses Hiroshima as a comparison. From there, it seems as if she transcends the hell she spoke of before, and, as Gordon-Bramer suggests, the speaker seems to become one with God, or maybe even transcends God himself (91). Kroll states that the poem is The College of Saint Rose

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Jessica M. Serfilippi “only one of several poems in which fire brings a purity equivalent to transcendence” (179). This seems true, as the speaker states that she is “going up” (43) and that she “may rise” (44).

She not only literally transcends the earthly realm and her lover, as she describes receiving “kisses, by cherubim” (49) instead of her lover, but she transcends all men. At the end she states “Not you” (51), seemingly to her lover, and adds “nor him// Nor him, nor him” (51-52). Kroll identifies the speaker as “a virgin who ascends to Paradise” (180). Gordon-Bramer states that “[w]hile Milton and God condemned woman to subservience, Plath, as Eve, enjoys her new knowledge and vision of herself. Femininity and ‘whatever these pink things mean’ are of no consequence. Instead of being shunned from Eden, Plath claims it: ‘To Paradise’” (102).

Kroll’s idea of the speaker being a virgin who ascends to Paradise is interesting because the speaker of the poem seems to be very sexual, and even once she has emerged from the hellfire, she does not seem to leave her sexuality behind. The speaker herself states that she is “a pure acetylene/ Virgin” (79), which seems to be a mockery of sorts, since acetylene is a pungent gas. She later sees her old “selves dissolving, old whore petticoats” (53), yet it seems to be tongue-incheek, especially with Gordon-Bramer’s comment, that “Plath has a bit of fun with Milton and his old-world, paternalistic views at the end of ‘Fever 103°’” (102). Plath appears to be claiming the previously patriarchal Eden for herself while not losing her sexuality at all. She emerges from the hellfire, leaves behind her husband and the rest of men, and becomes so pure that they cannot even touch her–– she has indeed achieved Paradise.

Although he is not exactly demonized in “Fever 103°,” Ted Hughes appears to be the lover, one of the adulterers, who is not only being punished, but who can no longer touch the speaker, his lover, since she has become too pure for him. This is one of the kinder poems about him–– in “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus” he is undeniably demonized. Hughes was aware of the way she depicted him in her poetry and responds to her depictions of him in his own book of poetry, Birthday Letters, which contains, with few 62

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The Devil in Plath’s Men exceptions, poems solely addressed to Plath. When read all together, they seem to be a narrative of their time together, which Hughes visibly romanticizes. As Neil Roberts states in his book on Hughes, “Birthday Letters changed for ever the narrative of Hughes and Plath’s personal and literary relationship, and presented Hughes himself as the exponent of a confessional mode of poetry that he had previously disdained” (198). Although the book wasn’t published until 1998, there “is evidence” that Hughes was working on the poems which appear in the book “as early as 1973” (198).

As Dianne Hunter states in her article on the book, “the Letters recount how Sylvia was possessed by her father, who thereby came to possess her husband” (141). Hughes does write about Plath’s demonic depiction of him in quite a few poems, the first noticeable one being “The Shot.” The poem begins with “[y]our worship needed a god” (1). He claims that “[y]our Daddy had been aiming you at God/ When his death touched the trigger” (7-8), implying that her father was her God before he died, and his death kept him in that position; Judith Kroll, when writing about “Daddy,” agrees (123). She also states that as the father figure loses his godliness, the satanic qualities the daughter associates with him are transferred to the husband (123). Hughes seems to agree; toward the end of “The Shot,” he writes, “your real target/ Hid behind me. Your Daddy,/ The god with the smoking gun. For a long time/ Vague as mist, I did not even know I had been hit” (3135). The speaker did not know that his wife had associated him with her father until it was too late. As Neil Roberts states, “It is quite true that Otto Plath looms large in poems such as ‘The Table,’ ‘The Shot,’ ‘Black Coat’ and ‘The Minotaur’, and that Hughes frequently represents himself with figures of passivity and unconsciousness” (205). This is certainly true in “The Shot––” the speaker does not even realize that he has been turned into her target, let alone hit by her shot. He takes on a passive voice and through the poem lets it seem as if Plath is to blame–– she is the one demonizing, and she is doing so to a passive man without

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Jessica M. Serfilippi proper cause. His lack of an aggressive voice seems to make Plath out to be an unstable villain who demonizes without reason.

As Neil Roberts mentions, Hughes also uses his passive voice in “Black Coat” (205). The poem seems to begin with self reflection, then turns to a memory of a photo of Plath feeding “a wild deer/ With potato crisps” (23-24), and then turns into a reflection upon Plath’s demonizing of Hughes. The speaker states that he “had no idea” (27) that he had become the “double image” (36) of her father. He blames her “eye’s inbuilt double exposure/ Which was the projection/ Of your two-way heart’s diplopic error” (37-39) from which “[t]he body of the ghost and me the blurred see-through/ Came into single focus” (40-41). The speaker is very passive and does not blame himself at all for this “double exposure” (37). He claims that he “did not feel/ How, as your lenses tightened,/ He slid into me” (46-48). The tone of the poem is melancholic, almost remorseful, but it’s not self-remorse–– it rather feels like remorse for how the speaker’s wife behaved, not remorse for his own behavior that could have triggered this reaction within her. The speaker, and Hughes, are escaping any blame that could be placed upon them through the melancholic tone of the poem.

The same evasion of blame carries over into “The Bee God.” The poem opens with the speaker’s surprise: “When you wanted bees I never dreamed/ It meant your Daddy had come up out of the well” (1-2). Throughout the poem, the speaker describes watching his love with her bees, and soon realizes this is her way of being with her father, something he only seems to realize once it is already too late. He sees her “[b]owed over your bees/ As you bowed over your daddy” (13-14), and her and her “Daddy there in the heart of it” (17). He even blames the bees, or her dead father, stating “[y]ou did not want me to go but your bees/ Had their own ideas” (23-24). The speaker evades all blame, placing it on his lover’s dead father through the bees. He cites the bees as carrying out her “Daddy’s plans” (28). His doubling with her father seems to begin once “the first bee touched my hair” (29). He describes his lover as rushing to save him “from what had been decided” (38).

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The Devil in Plath’s Men The speaker “thought [he] was safe” (41), only to have “[a] lone bee, like a blind arrow” (44) who came from “the God of the Bees” (48) sting him, apparently “[d]eaf” (49) to the cries of his lover.

The speaker stops blaming his lover for a moment and directs the blame toward her dead father.

As Carl Rollyson states in American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath, Plath’s father was a scientist who studied bees and it is well-known that Plath wrote multiple bee poems about him (8).

Through this poem, Hughes uses Otto Plath as a means of escaping the demonization Hughes himself faces alongside Otto Plath in Sylvia Plath’s poetry. Hughes seems to be turning the blame on Plath in each of the poems examined here, only absolving her from this blame at the end of “The Bee God” by fully placing it on Otto Plath. Hughes faced criticism for the way he depicts Plath within the pages of Birthday Letters. He is accused of placing “relentless emphasis on Plath’s father-fixation” and not focusing on the other factors that played into her mental state and poetry (Roberts 201).

This is clearly visible in “The Shot,” “Black Coat,” and “The Bee God.” Hughes evades all blame, all demonization. He throws it back on Plath and seemingly blames it on her mental state, which he appears to attribute solely to her issues with her dead father instead of taking into consideration the problems she faced as not only a woman poet living with mental illness, but also as his wife, living in his literary shadow, as well as with the knowledge of his affair with Assia Wevill. By doing this, he attempts to invalidate her demonization of him, but perhaps he only proves it further. Instead of admitting to the ugly moments between the two of them, he romanticizes their relationship and blames Plath’s mental state and her obsession with her dead father. This certainly plays into the satanic image Plath draws of Hughes within her own poetry–– that vampiric lover.

In “Daddy,” “Lady Lazarus,” and “Fever 103°,” Sylvia Plath ruthlessly attacks Ted Hughes and Otto Plath. Her attack on them can be broadened to an attack on the patriarchal system which confines her, as well. Hughes responds to Plath’s attacks The College of Saint Rose

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Jessica M. Serfilippi through his edits of Ariel and in his own poetry, but fails to address the most important issues between them, and through the manner of his response lends credence to Plath’s characterization of him as demonic. Plath’s use of demonic imagery in her poetry about both the men within and outside of her personal life is part of what has turned her into such a powerful and celebrated poet–– allowing her to outshine that “vampire” (72) who feasted on her blood for “seven years” (76), even in death.

Works Cited Bassnett, Susan. Sylvia Plath. Totowa, NJ: Barnes & Noble, 1987.

Print.

Bundtzen, Lynda K. “Poetic Arson and Sylvia Plath’s ‘Burning The Letters’.” The Unraveling Archive: Essays on Sylvia Plath.

Ed. Anita Helle. Michigan: The University of Michigan Press, 2007. 236-253. Print.

Curley, Maureen. “Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’.” Explicator 59.4 (2001): 213-214. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

Dahlke, Laura Johnson. “Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’.” Explicator 60.4 (2002): 234-236. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

De Jong, Mary G. “Sylvia Plath and Sheila Ballantyne’s Imaginary Crimes.” Studies in American Fiction 16.1 (1988): 27-38.

MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

Gordon-Bramer, Julia. “‘Fever 103°’: The Fall Of Man; The Rise Of Woman; The Folly Of Youth.” Plath Profiles: An International Journal Of Studies On Sylvia Plath 4.(2011):

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The Devil in Plath’s Men 88-105. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

Hughes, Frieda. “Foreword.” Preface. Ariel: The Restored Edition.

New York: HarperCollins, 2004. xi-xxi. Print.

Hughes, Ted. Birthday Letters. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 1998. Print.

Hunter, Dianne. “Poetics of Melancholy and Psychic Possession in Ted Hughes’s Birthday Letters and Other Haunted Texts.”

Partial Answers 1.1 (2003): 129. Publisher Provided Full Text Searching File. Web. 30 Apr. 2014.

Kroll, Judith. Chapters in Mythology: The Poetry of Sylvia Plath.

Stroud: Sutton, 2007. Print.

Nance, Guinevara A., and Judith P. Jones. “Doing Away With Daddy: Exorcism and Sympathetic Magic In Plath’s Poetry.”Concerning Poetry 11.1 (1978): 75-81. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

Narbeshuber, Lisa. “The Poetics of Torture: The Spectacle of Sylvia Plath’s Poetry.” Canadian Review of American Studies/Revue Canadienne D’etudes Américaines 34.2 (2004): 185-203. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

Plath, Sylvia. Ariel: The Restored Edition. New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Print.

Ramazani, Jahan. “‘Daddy, I Have Had To Kill You’: Plath, Rage, and the Modern Elegy.” PMLA 108.5 (1993): 1142-1156.

MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

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Jessica M. Serfilippi Roberts, Neil. Ted Hughes: A Literary Life. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007. Print.

Rollyson, Carl E. American Isis: The Life and Art of Sylvia Plath.

New York: St. Martin’s, 2013. Print.

Ungar, Barbara. “draft” Message to Jessie Serfilippi. 25 April 2014.

E-mail.

Van Dyne, Susan. “Fueling the Fire: The Manuscripts of Sylvia Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus.’” Sylvia Plath. Ed. Harold Bloom.

New York: Chelsea House, 1989. 133-147. Print.

Wilson, Andrew. Mad Girl’s Love Song: Sylvia Plath and Life before Ted. New York: Scribner, 2013. Print.

Works Consulted Bentley, Paul. “‘Hitler’s Familiar Spirits’: Negative Dialectics in Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ and Ted Hughes’s ‘Hawk Roosting’.”Critical Survey 12.3 (2000): 27-38. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

Clark, Heather. “Tracking the Thought-Fox: Sylvia Plath’s Revision of Ted Hughes.” Journal of Modern Literature 28.2 (2005): 100-112. MLA International Bibliography.

Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

Collins, Theresa. “Plath’s ‘Lady Lazarus’.” Explicator 56.3 (1998): 156-158. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 25 Apr. 2014.

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The Devil in Plath’s Men Cooper, Rand Richards. “Daddy’s Girl? ‘Sylvia’.” Commonweal 130.20 (2003): 17-18. MLA International Bibliography.

Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

Dickie Uroff, Margaret. Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes. Urbana: University of Illinois, 1979. Print.

Eder, Doris L. “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Lady Lazarus.”

Contemporary Literature 21.2 (1980): 301-307. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

Enniss, Stephen. “Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes, and the Myth of Textual Betrayal.” Papers of the Bibliographical Society Of America 101.1 (2007): 63-71. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

Gill, Jo., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Sylvia Plath. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge UP, 2006. Print.

Hoffman, Nancy Jo. “Reading Women’s Poetry: The Meaning and Our Lives.” College English 34.1 (1972): 48-62. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

Koren, Yehuda, and Eilat Negev. Lover of Unreason: Assia Wevill, Sylvia Plath’s Rival and Ted Hughes’s Doomed Love. New York: Carroll & Graf, 2007. Print.

Malcolm, Janet. The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath & Ted Hughes.

New York: A.A. Knopf, 1994. Print.

Plath, Sylvia. The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962.

Ed. Karen V. Kukil. New York: Anchor, 2000. Print.

Ragaišienė, Irena. “Names and Revisionist Re-Naming in the Poetry of Sylvia Plath.” Acta Humanitarica Universitatis

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Jessica M. Serfilippi Saulensis 8.(2009): 227-235. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

Sheldon, Glenn. “From Sylvia Plath’s ‘Daddy’ to Myself and Back Again.” Plath Profiles: An International Journal Oo Studies on Sylvia Plath 1.(2008): 263-268. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

Shewaga, Bradley. “Sylvia Plath: The Woman Who Gave Up Her Voice.” Plath Profiles: An International Journal of Studies on Sylvia Plath 4.(2011): 106-114. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

Van Dyne, Susan R. Revising Life: Sylvia Plath’s Ariel Poems.

Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 1993. Print.

Vendler, Helen. Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill. Princeton, NJ: Princeton UP, 2010. Print.

Zivley, Sherry Lutz. “The Source of the Vampire and ‘Frisco Seal’ in Plath’s ‘Daddy’.” ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes, And Reviews 4.4 (1991): 194. MLA International Bibliography. Web. 14 Mar. 2014.

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The Power of a Stereotype

Introduction to “The Power of a Stereotype: American Depictions of Black Women in Film and Media” Many disciplines are quite reliant on other disciplines for theories and models that explicate phenomena, and communication is one of those disciplines. Many of its foci emerged from social science disciplines. For example, sociological frameworks offer insights into a variety of “isms” still present in society today. One of these “isms” is racism which, despite some arguments for its demise since the Civil Rights era of the 1960s, is still quite prominent today.

“Isms” of all sorts typically begin with stereotypes, can evolve into prejudices, and then culminate into forms of discrimination. What this paper demonstrates is the presence of Black, female stereotypes present in film, starting with D.W. Griffith’s Birth of a Nation in 1915 and continuing today, that influence race-related interactions.

While some media critics claim that diversity in films has increased, the latest Media Diversity Report from the USC-Annenberg School of Television and Journalism notes “many have claimed 2013 to be a renaissance year for Black actors in film, with the critical acclaim and popularity of 12 Years a Slave, The Butler, 42, and Best Man Holiday. Our findings demonstrate, however, that no meaningful change has been observed in the frequency of any racial/ethnic group on screen in popular films between 2007 and 2013”(Smith et al. 3). And, if the numbers increase, that doesn’t always mean that the representations of those groups have become more positive.

Therefore, continued research into representations of people from diverse backgrounds is needed to identify the absence or misrepresentation of these diverse groups that keep some forms of stereotyping (and sometimes “isms”) quite prominently displayed in our media, from TV shows and film, books and magazines, and music and web sites to local, national, and international news.

Examining media outlets and messages at a variety of levels is a focus for media literacy scholars, and was the genesis for this paper. Media literacy is not only about knowing how to use media, it is also about analyzing patterns in and across media, creating The College of Saint Rose

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Brittany Ann Terry your own media products, and examining your, and others’, worldview. If we can identify and articulate concerns we have about media messages, then we can engage in meaningful discussions with others, and this paper challenges readers to engage in discussion.

To do so, this paper briefly acknowledges the role of the history of African-American (Black) representations in film, but then also asks us to consider current media representations as a continued dialogue about the positioning and representation of Black women in film. The author also hints at the role of Black male directors and writers play in creating and sustaining this negative representation. An overarching question in the paper is “Why is it important to discuss these representations? We know those characters aren’t real people!”

Sharon Jones, in “From Margin to Centre? Images of African-American Women in Film,” directly addresses this question when she explains how “motion pictures transmit memorable images with the power to alter or reinforce popular conceptions of black women” which also parallels claims made by a variety of social science and humanities scholars (35). Sonja M. Brown Givens and Jennifer L. Monahan have also found that these images influence how African American women perceive themselves.

Therefore, knowing how diverse groups are represented in the media and how those representations influence audience members are both important to media researchers and media users, and are an important part of media literacy. This paper focuses on representations of black women in film which continue to emphasize three stereotypes: Mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire. The first emerged after slavery in the south and focuses on how black women are domestic, self-sacrificing, overweight women with strong nurturing skills, which leads to “Mammy-ism” (Abdullah, qtd. in West 289). The Jezebel is the hyper-sexualized black female who sexually conquers men thereby controlling them and leading them on a path of destruction. The Sapphire is the boisterous black female who demands attention through her sheer presence and booming voice; she is not self-sacrificing. With these images from the past and the use of current examples, this paper offers a 72

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The Power of a Stereotype reminder of how important it is to monitor media representations of diverse groups, such as these, much like the NAACP has been doing since 1915, since these representations send repeated negative messages about Black women and often carry over into everyday interactions. While some progress has occurred, stereotypes can and do influence viewers’ perceptions of themselves and others, and may cultivate both long and short-term (mis)understandings of groups of people and cultural norms. We see this in Essence’s recent survey where they asked 1,200 women “about the images of black women in media and found that respondents felt the images were ‘overwhelmingly negative,’ falling typically into categories including: ‘Gold Diggers, Modern Jezebels, Baby Mamas, Uneducated Sisters, Ratchet Women, Angry Black Women, Mean Black Girls, Unhealthy Black Women, and Black Barbies’” (Byng par. 3). Here, Black women report their observations of media representations that support the few stereotypes this paper brings forth.

In summary, the recent debate about the absence of Black actors and directors up for 2015 Academy Awards is an example of the concerns echoed in the Media Diversity Report mentioned above, the NAACP’s continued concern about how Hollywood has and continues to treat and represent Black members of Hollywood, and many media scholars’ continued dialogue about media representations. If media viewers are experiencing repeated negative representations of diverse groups or are witnessing the absence of diversity in general, and if media scholars are noting the influence of such images on people’s perceptions of those groups in everyday life, then this paper sends a strong reminder that there is still much needed change in the film industry from creation to production, and onto distribution.

Karen McGrath Professor and Co-Chair of Communications

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Brittany Ann Terry Works Cited “About the NAACP Hollywood Bureau.” Media Diversity.

NAACP. 9 Mar. 2015. Web. Byng, Rhonesha. “The Images of Black Women in Media Still ‘Only Scratch the Surface,’ Essence Study Says.”

Huffington Post. 15 Oct. 2013. Web. Givens, Sonja M. Brown, and Jennifer L. Monahan. “Priming Mammies, Jezebels, and Other Controlling Images: An Examination of Mediated Stereotypes on Perceptions of an African American Woman.” Media Psychology, 7, 2005: 87-106. Academic Database.

Jones, Sharon L. “From Margin to Centre? Images of AfricanAmerican Women in Film.” Social Alternatives 17.4: 3539. Academic Database.

Smith, Stacy L., Marc Choueiti, & Katherine Pieper.

“Race/Ethnicity in 600 Popular Films: Examining On Screen Portrayals and Behind the Camera Diversity.”

Media, Diversity, & Social Change Initiative, Annenberg School for Communication & Journalism University of Southern California, 2014. Web. West, Carolyn. “Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, and Their Homegirls: Developing an ‘Oppositional Gaze’ Toward the Images of Black Women.” In Joan C. Chrisler, Carla Golden, & Patricia D. Rozee (Eds.), Lectures on the Psychology of Women (4th ed.). New York: McGraw Hill, 286-299.

Print.

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The Power of a Stereotype

The Power of a Stereotype: American Depictions of Black Women in Film and Media Brittany Ann Terry Communications, ’15 The media’s message is one that we unknowingly allow to create and reinforce the image in which we see others, be it social class, race, ethnicity, sex, or even age. Through these particular messages, society learns how to treat and act around these individuals given their ascribed demographics. African American women in film productions have specific reiterated negative and positive appearances. Over time, these depictions have been altered in order for them to fit appropriately into popular culture. Rooting back to slavery, three underlying images are prevalent within today’s media image for ebony women: the mammy, the jezebel and the sapphire.

Historically, black women have been seen to carry a double burden, fitting into two minority groups: people of color and women. This double burden is still in effect today, and through various media forms given definition. In Yanick St. Jean and Joe R. Feagin’s book Double Burden: Black Women and Everyday Racism, the socially constructed image of black women is explained: “Given this relative neglect in social science scholarship, it is not surprising that contemporary black women are often misrepresented, mischaracterized, and misrecognized in public and private discourse” (5). The author explains that because of lack in scientific social study, the constructed image of the black woman is not accurate, and therefore misunderstood. St. Jean and Feagin go on to describe the characterization of these women: “The negative depiction of black women as domineering matriarchs or exotic sexual objects was created, and still is perpetuated, by white (usually white male) social scientists, and even by a few black male social scientists trained by them…images of hyper-sexuality and overbearingness often merge to symbolize the black woman” (6-7).

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Brittany Ann Terry This reading further clarifies the historical context of how the image of the black women has been created in present day media, starting in sixteenth century Spain and brought over to the Americas by seafarers and colonists (Feagin, 8).

Once the production of motion pictures began, the enforcement of stereotypes and ideologies of racism arose on the “big screen” (Chao, 69). In the very beginning, African Americans were played by white people through black face. The Birth of a Nation by D.W. Griffith in 1915 showed the most disreputable of Black American stereotypes, displaying them as extremely inferior to whites (Chao, 69). Entering the 1930s and 1940s, images that originated during slavery for black women began to emerge within Hollywood films; this was the commencement of the mammy, jezebel and sapphire through film productions. In the textbook, “Racism, Sexism and the Media” by Clint Wilson, Felix Gutierrez and Lena Chao, the expansion of these characters is described: The new stereotype played to White perceptions of Black personalities who, in the vernacular of the era, ‘knew their place’ in American society. Blacks now appeared in movies for the purpose of entertaining White audiences within the context of social limitations… When in movie character, Blacks were subservient to Whites as maids, mammies, domestics, and sidekicks. (73-74) THE JEZEBEL With her desirable body type, alluring facial features and light skin, maybe of mixed racial descent, the Jezebel is the most hypersexual, seductive and manipulative black woman. This stereotype is the most evolved of the three, and influences the sexual socialization and perceptions of black women in the present day (Brown, 525).

Brown states, “While this stereotype has been projected onto all women perceived to be sexually permissive, regardless of cultural background, when race is accounted for, it is most often associated with African American women” (526). The Jezebel is known for using sexuality in order to receive material goods and the attention of men. This ideal originated during the slave era as an 76

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The Power of a Stereotype “explanation for slave owners’ sexual attraction to and sexual abuse of African American women” (526). Through numerous movies this stereotype is played upon in various altered forms. In Griffith’s Birth of a Nation (1915) the main character, Lydia Brown, is the mulatta mistress of the white Senator Stoneman (Pilgram, 2012).

She is portrayed as using her physical attractiveness to deceive the formerly “good white man” and is blatantly sexual (Pilgrim, 2012).

This was one of the first depictions of the Jezebel in cinema.

Throughout the 1970s, a trend began to occur where many roles black women played in Hollywood were of the Jezebel essence, getting what they needed through the use of sexuality and attractiveness. An example of this would be the popular Pam Grier in the film “Foxy Brown” circa 1974 (Carpenter, 270). A popular contemporary example would be the 2011 film, “Video Girl,” where actress Meagan Good plays a woman who is practically owned by her white boyfriend and used as a sex object in music videos.

THE MAMMY The stereotypical presentation of a darker skinned, overweight woman who is usually a caregiver may be referred to as a “mammy”. This characterization originated in order to oppose the popular Jezebel, who was physically attractive and sexually driven.

Although this particular stereotype is not sexualized, it is just as objectified. She is a loyal slave who takes good care of her master’s household and children. This persona implied that black women were only suitable for domestic work and undesired by white men.

The mammy, in a sense, was adored by American society; although she was double burdened and looked down upon, the characteristics of a mammy were warm and motherly. Micki McElya’s book Clinging to Mammy: The Faithful Slave in the Twentieth-Century America discusses how the persona of this stereotype is glorified and shown in positive light from the perspective of whites. Each chapter is a stand-alone essay. One section of the book, “The Violence of Affection,” speaks on how The College of Saint Rose

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Brittany Ann Terry the black community responded to a specific case where the government wanted to embrace the ideal of the mammy and place a monument of one in a public setting. McElya states, “They considered the mammy to be not merely an icon of white supremacy but a tool for its reproduction, arguing that faithful slave narratives were particularly insidious mechanisms of exclusion, coercion, and terror” (173). This perspective was dominant among blacks, who disagreed with the majority that this stereotype was a positive one for not only black women, but the black community as a whole. Women specifically held yet another burden. The chapter entitled “Confronting the Mammy Problem” explained how this depiction of black women had an impact on their stance in society: The faithful slave narrative presented particular dilemmas for black women as workers, activists, mothers, and citizens in the twentieth century- a ‘mammy problem’.

They struggled with dominant white supremacist conceptions of black women’s servitude, maternity, and sexuality as well as black activists understandings of African American civic identity and racial progression as fundamentally masculine. (220) Working-class black women were underpaid, patronized and often cheated by those they worked for, when all they really wanted was fair treatment and fair wages. A traditional example of this stereotype within film is Hattie McDaniel’s role in the 1939 production of Gone with the Wind. McDaniel received backlash from the black community who questioned why she would willingly play the role which enforces a negative stereotype to her “own kind.” Her response to this was that she would rather “play a maid then actually be one, and make $200 a week instead of only $2” (Valentino). This quote has such depth; McDaniel’s wasn’t “selling out” her race or disregarding popular stereotypes of black women. She chose to play the role to make money and do something she loved to do, which was to act. She also went on to become the first African American to win an Academy Award for 78

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The Power of a Stereotype her role in that very film. An example of the traditional depiction in modern day film would be The Help, which was introduced in 2011. This movie clearly displayed black women as maids for suburban, southern, white families in order to tell a story which is present in our nation’s history. Over time, the image of the ‘mammy’ has evolved to be more suitable to modern standards.

This portrayal still holds the same physical attributes as the original mammy: overweight, darker skin complexion and not the most attractive. The attitudes and occupation of this stereotype are the most changed.

MEN TAKE ON THE MAMMY Although still negative, this depiction has extended into wider territories, with the new ideology of the “Male Mammy”. In recent films, popular male actors are playing the roles of “large and in charge” women who are “desexualized, maternal, and nonthreatening to White people but who may be aggressive toward men” (Chen, 116). A study conducted by Li Chen offers answers as to how damaging these images may be to black women in society. They do this by directing interviews with women of color who see these “repeated media images in characterizations that violate the dominant female beauty ideal in America in multiple ways, including by being portrayed by men” (117). Not only do these roles enforce stereotypes, they also play on the self-image of real life black women who may happen to be physically similar to these mock characters. The study found that both Black and White women were dissatisfied with their bodies, but whites were more dissatisfied. Due to representation through media images, we are informed on what is considered “beautiful” in America. By the “modern mammy” being portrayed as a comedic, loud mouth, outspoken woman, the intent is to have pressure taken off of black women to want to be supermodel thin. However, “black audiences still come to know the dominant group’s expectations and worldviews through mainstream media” (Chen, 119). But why are these characters men? Chen found that one factor is black women The College of Saint Rose

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Brittany Ann Terry are hesitant to reinforce such a bold stereotype, and another is that a man in a dress would probably “get a quick laugh” (126). In one interview, the opinion of an interviewee was given: “The fact that some of the most high-profile depictions of Black women in the media are actually men emphasized the vulgarity of how Black women are portrayed by desexualing the images of Black women even more than if women played these roles” (Chen, 126). This recent trend of black men playing the roles of overweight women of color is expressed in many different movies including Tyler Perry’s most popular character, “Medea.” Medea, which originated from the expression “My Dear” (usually nicknamed to the grandmother of a black family), is a contemporary example of the mammy; her characteristics are blunt, offensive and risky, but hold true to the family oriented traditional mammy.

THE SAPPHIRE Bitchy, obnoxious and malicious are all adjectives used in describing the common stereotype of the sapphire. Like the jezebel and the mammy, the sapphire also originated during the American slave era. During this time, the ideology of “true womanhood” required upper-middle class white women to adhere to a certain standard of femininity that was passive, frail and domestic (West, 295). In opposition to this image, black women did not apply in this ideology. They were viewed as strong, masculinized laborers or as “aggressive women who drove their children and partners away with their overbearing natures” (West, 295). From the 1800s through the mid-1900s, it was not uncommon for black women to be portrayed as “Sassy Mammies” (Pilgrim, 2012). The sassiness was intended to imply that “slavery and segregation were not overly oppressive” (Pilgrim, 2012). From this the modern sapphire was derived, whose attitude was changed to aggressive and overassertive. She usually has brown to dark complexion and speaks with poor grammar. The first depiction of this was in the radio show Amos ‘n’ Andy, first airing in 1928 (Pilgrim, 2012). This show had a character named “Sapphire Stevens” who was very 80

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The Power of a Stereotype stereotypical (Carpenter, 265). This show moved from the radio into television on CBS in 1951 (Pilgrim, 2012). In 1953, after years of complaints, this show was finally taken off of the broadcast schedule (West, 296). Recent depictions are prevalent in Hollywood productions. Tyler Perry’s character “Medea”, mentioned within the mammy stereotype, may also be considered a sapphire because of her attitude with “both hands on her hips” and “telling off the person who has just offended her” (West, 296).

This is an interesting case where one character fits the roles of two stereotypes given to black women. Another depiction of the sapphire may be found within the film, “Daddy’s Little Girls”, also written and directed by Tyler Perry. Gabrielle Union plays a very successful and demanding woman who is also very physically attractive. In multiple scenes of the movie, she is shown bossing her driver, a black male, around in a very degrading manner. This is the known “Angry Black Woman” popularized in today’s media.

Pilgrim describes characteristics of this woman in his article “Sapphire Caricature,” by stating, “The sapphire’s desire to dominate and her hyper-sensitivity to injustices make her a perpetual complainer, but she does not criticize to improve things; rather, she criticizes because she is unendingly bitter and wishes that unhappiness on others” (1). None of the above passage is positive language; all of it is describing an undesirable annoyance, someone that no one would willingly be around. Obviously, this portrayal of black women is one that further damages their societal standing and is clearly destructive. This misrepresentation is punishment to black women for violating societal norms of being submissive, non-threatening and hidden.

The mammy, jezebel and sapphire all say a lot about the ideal beauty standard in American society. Through assessing all three of these representations, it is clear that the most “attractive” is the jezebel, who usually has a lighter skin complexion, straight hair and a “desirable” body type. What does this mean? Subliminally it holds to the idea of white beauty. The lighter your skin tone, the better and the less kinky your hair is, the more appealing, idealistically to white men. Reflecting on the mammy stereotype, The College of Saint Rose

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Brittany Ann Terry with her large body and dark-complexion, she is usually asexual and motherly. The mammy, out of the three demonstrations, is the least physically attractive. Tracing back to the slave era, “slaveholders used these physical features to create a hierarchy of beauty and social status within the enslaved community” (West 291). Lighter slaves would more likely to be deemed house workers, while those of darker complexions were field laborers.

These beauty standards, even today, cause heavy intra-racial prejudice and affect the self-worth and esteem of black women.

Carolyn West provides statistical evidence in supporting this argument: The consequences of colorism become more pronounced in adulthood. On average, darker-skinned African American women have lower salaries, less education, and are more likely than their lighter-skinned counterparts to marry less educated men. (292) Obviously these statistics have other contributions such as education, geographic location, opportunity and social class of the individual. However, it is thought provoking that something as insignificant (or significant) as skin color holds such impact on American society. Very slowly is there a growing acceptance of what is considered beautiful; “African American women begin the process of renaming their beautiful characteristics, not as eye color and hair color, but as pride, intelligence, perseverance and solidarity with one another” (Hunter 122).

TYLER PERRY’S INFLUENCE What do all three of these stereotypes have in common? They are degrading, objectifying, and an unfair representation of what an African American female should look and/or act like in everyday society. From these media images, people who do not identify within this group are left to make and reinforce judgments on a double burdened group. I find it interesting that recent examples of these stereotypes are found within the films of Tyler Perry, a black director and writer who is very predominant and influential 82

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The Power of a Stereotype throughout Hollywood for his numerous productions. Does this say something about the unity or lack thereof within black culture?

Does Perry make these stereotypes noticeable within his films and plays in order to make a political stance, or to reinforce the three ideologies of black women? This goes along with Li Chen and her study on the “male mammy” which suggests that black men are large enforcers of certain stereotypes that are present within popular culture pointed toward women of color.

The media has a very large impact on how society constructs the treatment of individuals. Three prevalent images that have represented African American women since slavery are the mammy, jezebel and sapphire. These three depictions have evolved overtime in order to be considered suitable within pop culture.

However, they are objectifying, inaccurate and could be interpreted as offensive. In history, films have played a huge role in imposing typecasts of people belonging to all types of demographics. The portrayal of black women in movies has most commonly fallen within these categories, which has created an unrealistic ideology of the authentic black woman.

Works Cited Brown, Danice L., Rhonda L. White-Johnson, and Felicia D. Griffin-Fennell. “Breaking the Chains: Examining the Endorsement of Modern Jezebel Images and Racial-Ethnic Esteem among African American Women.” Culture, Health & Sexuality 15.5 (2013): 525-539. PsycINFO. Web. 22 Oct. 2013.

Carpenter, Tracy R. “Construction of the Crack Mother Icon.”

Western Journal of Black Studies 36.4 (2012): 264-275.

Academic Search Premier. Web. 29 Oct. 2013.

Chao, Lena M., Felix Gutierrez, Clint C. Wilson. Racism, Sexism and the Media: Multicultural Issues into the New Communications Age. Washington D.C.: Sage Publications Inc., 2013. Print.

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Chen, Li, et al. “Male Mammies: A Social-Comparison Perspective on How Exaggeratedly Overweight Media Portrayals of Madea, Rasputia, and Big Momma Affect How Black Women Feel about Themselves.” Mass Communication & Society 15.1 (2012): 115-135. SocINDEX with Full Text.

Web. 27 Oct. 2013.

David Pilgrim. “Jezebel Stereotype”. Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. Ferris State University. Web. 25 October 2013.

-----. “Sapphire Caricature”. Jim Crow Museum of Racist Memorabilia. Ferris State University. Web. 26 October 2013.

Hunter, M.L. Race, Gender, and the Politics of Skin Tone. New York: Routledge. 2005. Print. 29 October 2013.

McElya, Micki. Clinging To Mammy: The Faithful Slave In Twentieth-Century America. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007. 2007. College of Saint Rose Library Catalog. Web. 27 Oct. 2013.

Sewell, Christopher. “Mammies and Matriarchs: Tracing Images of the Black Female in Popular Culture 1950s to Present.”

Journal of African American Studies 17.3 (2013): 308-326.

Academic Search Premier. Web. 27 Oct. 2013.

St. Jean, Yanick, and Joe R. Feagin. Double Burden: Black Women and Everyday Racism. New York: Routledge, 1998. Print.

Valentino, Kami. “Black Women and Media: Historical vs.

Contemporary Roles. Yahoo Voices. Yahoo.com. Web. 25 October 2013.

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The Power of a Stereotype West, Carolyn M. “Mammy, Jezebel, Sapphire, and Their Homegirls: Developing an ‘Oppositional Gaze’ Toward the Images of Black Women”. Lectures on the Psychology of Women. Ed. Joan Chrisler, Carla Golden, & Patricia D. Rozee. New York: McGraw Hill, 2008. 286-299. Print.

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Call for Papers:

Journal of Undergraduate Research Volume VII

The Journal of Undergraduate Research publishes high-quality research produced by undergraduate students at The College of Saint Rose in all fields, and is published each spring. Current students and recent graduates are invited to submit their work for consideration. Submissions are accepted on a rolling basis, though there is a deadline each fall for the following spring’s publication.

All submissions are evaluated by faculty reviewers, and accepted papers must be revised before publication.

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Email your submission as a Microsoft Word document to journal@strose.edu.

Include a cover page with your name, department, and class year. If the paper was originally written for a course, please identify the course, professor, and semester it was taken.

Do not place your name anywhere else in the document.

All sources must be thoroughly documented in strict accordance with the conventions (APA, MLA, Chicago, etc.) of the relevant discipline.

Papers must be carefully proofread before submission.

Papers containing significant spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors will not be circulated for review.

If the conventions of your academic discipline require one, include an abstract.

Tables and figures may be included in the text or attached at the end.

Journal of Undergraduate Research