The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism, Volume 10

A Letter From the Editors

Early in the spring of this year, the last remaining staff member of the MJLC gifted two twenty year olds an international publication. After a global pandemic, loss of staff, change of leadership and complete revamp of the MJLC, our final 2021 edition is finally here, and we could not be more excited to share it with you.

Despite our drive and the generous help from past management, the path to production was precarious. We began the process by starting many, many, email threads: about finances, passwords, submissions, graphic design, and printing. We organized submissions, put out a call for editors, and gathered what little funding we had left. Like most things, our work became more complicated. Tasks that we tabled ended up taking up the better half of a month, and questions that we presumed to be simple required discussion, collaboration and many outside resources.

Albeit initially frustrating, the increasing complexity of producing this journal can only be described as exciting. We learned to ask the right questions, to temporarily design graphics by hand, and above all else, thank the production team that came before us for providing the example necessary to bring forth a work of this nature. We were working on a task we loved—and the process was a sort of self-pedagogy. More exciting were the submissions we got to read. Critical, complex, works that examined portryal of feminist individualism, sexual undertones, colonial appetities, monstrous dicpictions of humanity, and so much more.

As students studying humanities, we are often asked why we study the disciplines we have chosen or are prompted to justify the pragmatism of said choices. What these questions are actually asking is: “What are you going to do with this degree?” These questions reveal a desire for students to be doing some thing–whether it be a job, internship, or some other future activity. The thought process, while generated in curiosity, is rooted in simplicity. The selected papers reveal that these students are not simply doing a task to produce; rather, they are engaging with their study—cultivating complex ideas and articulating them in a skillful manner.

The practice and skill of literary criticism is a discipline that prompts one to embrace, uncover, and create complexity. It is comparison, interpretation, argumentation, and analysis—working to holistically understand a text rather than provide a simple summary. And literary criticism, engaging ourselves with subjects that fascinate and frustrate us is needed today, more than ever before. In a world where unreg ulated misinformation, soundbites, political alignments, and headlines dominate a collective worldview, having the tools to navigate an increasingly complicated society is a prerequisite for bettering it.

Understanding complexity is the foundation of humanities. And it’s applicable everywhere.

In a digital age, we are more connected than ever, yet we seem to misunderstand one another more and more. As we read and discussed these works, the two of us found ourselves getting carried away on tangents, responding to this amazing collection in the form of conversations we keep circling back to, conversations without a neat conclusion. We found ourselves assuming less and asking more questions from peers and mentors—everything became more collaborative, educational.

In editing the selected essays, we were reminded that that very process of writing encounters complexity, then embraces it; to produce this journal, we must do the same.

The Fall 2021 issue of the Madison Journal of Literary Criticism comes a year late, delayed by a pan demic and marking the beginning of a new direction. It was a complicated process, but we are beyond excited to share these exemplary works of criticism with you.We would like to especially thank the previous editorial team and their mentors for selecting these amazing works and trusting us to see this edition through to production.

With much love and gratitude, Ria Dhingra and Anna Nelson (co-editors in chief)

Staff

Editors in Chief: Anna Nelson Ria Dhingra

Associate Editors: The 2020-2021 MJLC Editorial Team

Layout: Emily Wesoloski

Design Credits

Front Cover created by: Ria Dhingra

Back Cover created by: Nuha Dolby

Table of Contents

Bearing the Unbearable: Pregnancy, Consumption, and Colonial Legacy in Junot Díaz’s

Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Benjamin Zimmerman, Brown University

Floral Diction and Sexual Undertones in Louisa May Alcott’s Work

Olivia Grenier, Ball State University

A Sympathetic Solipsist: Madame Bovary and the Limits of Feminist

Natasha Roy, New York University

Disrupted Stories and the Remembered Past: Generational Trauma in Madeleine Thien’s

Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel

Lucy Schoenrock, Agnes Scott College

An Excess of the Repressed: Medieval Monsters as Expressions of Excess Human Sensation in the Beowulf Manuscript

Trisha D. Gupta, New York University

with It’: The Suppression and Power of Female Rage in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s

Maggie Yuan, Rice University

Food, Money, and Sex as Colonial Appetites and Inversions from The Tempest toThe Sea Voyag

Cliff Musial, Hamilton College

Humane Individual, Heinous Regime: the portrayal of the enemy in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Silence de la Mer / The Silence of the Sea

Ching Yan Clarissa Lee, University College London (UCL)

Bearing the Unbearable: Pregnancy, Consumption, and Colonial Legacy in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Benjamin Zimmerman, Brown University

“A Ship under sail and a big-bellied Woman, / Are the handsomest two things that can be seen common” – Benjamin Franklin1

On the very first page of The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, “one world perishe[s] and another beg[ins].”2 From the get-go, the reader is confronted with the harsh reality that, as the poet Frank Bidart writes: “All life exists at the expense of other life.”3 Nowhere in Brief Wondrous Life4 is this calculus more conspicuous than in the novel’s treatment of pregnancy scenes, where characters who undertake to bring life into the world (such as Beli, Lydia, or Socorro) find themselves harried by the stultifying vestiges of colonialism. Careful examination of these scenes reveals a disconcerting connec tion between bearing children and being consumed—being used, then cast off, reflecting a disturbing continuation of colonialist practices of enslavement. Since pregnancy may be deemed a productive act within a system that commodifies the labor of individuals, it follows that children can be viewed as, in a sense, products. Therefore, looking at Brief Wondrous Life’s treatment of mothers (crudely: producers) and conceived children (products) reveals a significant facet of the novel’s ideological critique of post colonial values—and, relatedly, the processes of colonization that brought about the internalization of those values in those colonized. And, as I hope to ultimately show, decoding pregnancy scenes in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao as an ideological critique of colonial value systems reveals the mani fold ways in which those malignant systems persist into the novel’s postcolonial present.

Viewing Brief Wondrous Life as an ideological critique of the pervasive and lasting effects of

1 Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard: The Almanacks for the Years 1733–1758 (New York: 1964), 29, as quoted in: Susan E Klepp, “Beauty and the Bestial: Images of Women”, Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820, 128-78. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009), 128.

2 Junot Díaz, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (New York: Riverhead Books, 2008), 1. All references are to this edition and will be cited parenthetically.

3 Frank Bidart, “The Third Hour of Night” from Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016 (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017), 418.

4 As I will abbreviate the title from here on.

colonialism is not without precedent. Melissa Gonzalez, in her article “The Only Way Out Is In,” con siders interpretations such as the decoding of fukú as a manifestation of the postcolonial legacy of rape or capitalism.5 While this essay will draw from Gonzalez’s emphasis on the capacity of colonial ide ologies to “configure… characters’ desires and senses of self,”6 I amend Gonzalez’s conception of the operative ideology to the configuring of postcolonial values. This essay is predominantly focused on the capacity of ideology to prompt the commodification and instrumentalization7 of individuals. The issue is that these tendencies (to commodify and instrumentalize) are not really unique to capitalism, and so a critique of capitalism at large would not necessarily translate to a particularly pointed critique of colonialism. Brief Wondrous Life is a novel with an undeniable focus on the Dominican experience. Accordingly, it would be offensive to extrapolate a subtending critique that does not directly speak to (at the very least) the Caribbean experience. Additionally, it does not take special economic expertise to recognize that what made the colonialist praxis of capitalism so exceptionally objectifying was its reliance on enslavement, on practices by which “nature was converted into labor.”8 Therefore, when I look at pregnancy scenes as the potential basis of an ideological critique, what I will be analyzing is the extent to which the consumptive and instrumentalizing practices of colonial capitalism persist into Brief Wondrous Life’s postcolonial present. For this analysis, I will examine two prominent motifs of preg nancy scenes: languages of consumption and reference to predetermined societal roles. Drawing out the presence and significance of these motifs through a close reading of the novel’s pregnancy scenes, I will connect the tendencies I highlight to fixtures of colonialist capitalism as characterized by Walter Johnson’s River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. 9 Close review of all of the pregnancy scenes in Brief Wondrous Life uncovers a linguistic pattern

5 Melissa M Gonzalez, “‘The Only Way Out Is In’: Power, Race, and Sexuality Under Capital ism in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao” (Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 57, no. 3, 2016), 280.

6 Ibid, 282.

7 In the sense of Immanuel Kant’s belief that it is morally wrong to treat other human beings as ‘instruments’ with no value beyond being an expedient to our own ends.a

a Robert Johnson and Adam Cureton, “Kant’s Moral Philosophy,” in Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta (Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2019), https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ kant-moral/

8 Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cam bridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 185.

9 In particular, I will be drawing on Chapter 7: “The Empire of the White Man’s Will.”

of words that evoke consumption (viz., in the sense of eating, but at times in a more general sense). For instance, when Beli meets up with the Gangster after learning of her pregnancy with his baby, he re marks: “You smell good enough to eat, […] kissing the tender glide of her neck” (137). The Gangster’s diction reflects his treatment of Beli as something for his consumption. Interestingly, though, while the Gangster may be the one doing the consuming in his relationship with Beli, the hairs curling out of his own ears are, in turn, described as “starting to look like a particularly profitable crop” (137). The posi tioning of Gangster as the harvest of a crop field, calls to mind Frederick Douglass’s morbid assertion that the enslaved “are food for the cotton-field.”10 Yet a crucial caveat to the Gangster’s consumption of Beli is that, ultimately, neither character is able to escape consumption. Though in this moment the Gangster may be “consuming” Beli, both are indiscriminately consumed in the end, as is made apparent by the Gangster’s fate.

Looking at a similar pregnancy scene involving Abelard and Socorro, we again see both the consumer and the consumed meet with the same fate. As in the previous scene, both characters are de scribed with food language: “he [Abelard] felt for her [Lydia] the old desire, the one that nearly knocked him over the first time they’d met […] when they’d both been so slender and young and jam-packed with possibilities” (236, emphasis added). The words ‘slender’ and ‘jam’ forge an association between the two lovers and food, and here, too, a man who instrumentalizes his now-pregnant mistress as a sex-object11 will ultimately become an object for consumption within the same system that facilitated his own act of consuming. Clearly, the kind of consumption demonstrated by the Gangster and Abelard connects to the consumption characteristic of colonial capitalism. More than that, however, it is import ant to note how self-defeating Abelard’s and the Gangster’s acts of consuming are. Encouraged by the lingering colonial capitalist ethos, their urge to consume can be connected to Johnson’s description of the processes by which “slaveholders converted black hunger into white supremacy.”12 The Gangster

10 Frederick Douglass, “What to the Slave is the Fourth of July?”, as quoted in Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 176.

11 To be sure, both Abelard and the Gangster exhibit somewhat strong feelings for their re spective mistresses, but, nevertheless, both men lack sufficient consideration for the wellbeing of their partner and so may fairly be said to instrumentalize them.

12 Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cam bridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013), 187.

and Abelard inadvertently perpetuate the vicious cycles that entrap the Dominican people as they strug gle to cast off the spectral yoke of colonialism and enslavement.

The ways in which Brief Wondrous Life insinuates its ideological critique through consumption language go beyond the context of conception. Beli, perhaps the character most often described with consumption language, provides for two more particularly noteworthy instances of the linguistic motif, further establishing the connections developed in the previous paragraph. The first is when her birth is described: “To make matters worse, she [baby Beli] was born bakiní—underweight” (252, emphasis added). While an underweight baby might raise parental concerns over the baby’s health, it is clear that the reception of Beli’s weight does not come from a place of concern. Her weight is taken as a bad omen and aggressively undesirable trait. The significance attached to her weight indicates a commodification of baby Beli, recalling the importance of an animal’s weight when that animal is to be slaughtered and eaten. Separately, when the Gangster’s wife first attempts to force Beli to get an abortion, Yunior writes: “Beli might have felt as if the crone had thrown boiling oil on her” (141). While this quote is not to be taken literally, it certainly is in line with the wife’s attitude, and the throwing of boiling oil is a very provocative action to reference. Of course, readers will remember that Beli was burned with oil earlier in her life, but in this context the action offers itself under a new meaning (one in line with the motif of consumption), as the wording almost suggests that the wife would, if given the chance, fry Beli in oil and eat her. And, in fact, the Gangster’s wife’s desire to rid Beli of her baby is not too remote from the thought of frying and eating her.

In addition to its language of consumption, Brief Wondrous Life also invokes the instrumental ization of colonial capitalism through its depictions of the role and lifecycle of producers (here, moth ers). The kind of subliminal messaging achieved by these depictions is most notably evinced in disparities between the situations of Socorro and Beli, whose early descriptions foreshadow the outcomes of their respective encounters with speeding buses. For instance, prior to when Beli is nearly hit by a bus of musicians, she is characterized as having an important product to offer: children. There is mention of her “yet-to-be-born daughter” (77), and after the horrific beating she endures in the cane fields at the hands of the Elvises, the mongoose prompts her to get back up, saying: “You have to rise now or you’ll never have the son or the daughter. / What son? she wailed. What daughter? / The ones who await” (149).

Thus Beli’s fate seems to be predetermined: “In sorrow thou shalt bring forth children.”13 In a terrible corollary, after Beli’s birth, Socorro too steps onto a street into the oncoming traffic of a bus. Unlike Beli, however, Socorro does not survive the incident. The meaning behind this disparity becomes ap parent when one sees how often the phrase “Third and Final Daughter” (242) appears before Socorro’s death. Clearly, there is a sense conveyed that Socorro has fulfilled her role as producer and is now being cast off, no longer fecund. Socorro’s fate sends a strong message about the ethos of the novel’s pres ent. To bear children (who are to become workers or bear their own children) is to be productive, and the message is clear: those who are not productive will quickly become refuse. The value system under which these women ‘produce’ is a clear continuation of colonial capitalism’s “radical simplification of human being: the reduction of […] human being to ‘hand.’”14 Under the system depicted in the novel, women are no longer people: “[W]hat is a woman? ‘Tota mulier in utero: she is a womb.’”15 This reduc tion is even present in Beli’s name—an obvious homophone of “belly.”

Pregnancy scenes in Brief Wondrous Life force a confrontation with the complicity of the colonizers in the problems facing the Dominican Republic in the novel’s present. In each scene of heart-breaking consumption, the reader is reminded of the colonial root of the evil. While this emphasis does not serve the end of exculpating of the Trujillato nor characters associated with it, but it does per form an important framing role. As the philosopher Richard Rorty wrote of the Bosnian Genocide: We here in the safe, rich democracies feel about Serbian torturers and rapists as they feel about their Muslim victims: they are more like animals than like us. But we are not doing anything to help the Muslim women who are being gang-raped or the Muslim men who are being castrated [...] Here in the safe countries we find ourselves saying things like ‘That’s just how things have always been in the Balkans.’16

The most important thing to takeaway from the novel’s use of consumption motifs is an appreciation for how clear the colonial origin of those attitudes is. To read the novel purely as an indictment of the

13 Gen. 3:16 KJV as quoted in The Second Sex and how TSS cites the Bible passage it’s from. Simone de Beauvoir and Constance Borde, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).

14 Ibid, 8.

15 Simone de Beauvoir and Constance Borde, The Second Sex (New York: Vintage Books, 2011), 3.

16 Richard Rorty, “Human Rights, Rationality, Sentimentality” in Truth and Progress, Philosophical Papers 3, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 168.

cruelty of Trujillo and his regime would be to miss the point at a monumental level. At its core, Brief Wondrous Life puts a finger on the source of the problems that immobilize characters within cycles of consumption, and in doing so, the novel turns its eye to the future, offering a glimmer of hope for a way out of the loop.

Though the consumption-based value systems that sets up the bulk of the hardship endured by Brief Wondrous Life’s characters are deeply entrenched, the novel does contain a case of successful escape from those punishing structures—Lola’s abortion: “After a year in Brooklyn she [Lola] was now in Washington Heights, was letting her hair grow, had been pregnant once, a real moment of excite ment, but she aborted it because I [Yunior] was cheating on her with some girl” (269). Lola’s abortion represents a triumph of individual will asserting itself. Lola refuses to accept Yunior’s philandering and takes it as immediate cause for terminating her pregnancy with his child—a decision sharply contrasting Beli’s wishes for her baby with the Gangster. Lola will not be bound to carry a baby she does not wish to. Her productivity remains her choice.17

“A Ship under sail and a big-bellied Woman, / Are the handsomest two things that can be seen common.”18 For the characters that populate Brief Wondrous Life, both of these sights are dark portents, as when the doctor “confirmed La Inca’s worst fear” (136) that Beli is pregnant.19 By contrast, for Frank lin—as for most all colonizers—both a sailing ship (conquest, trade, etc.) and a pregnant woman power fully symbolize prosperity. The cost born by others to achieve that prosperity is not even conceived.

17 And, n.b., she posits this autonomy in Washington Heights no less—a neighborhood named for one of the United States’ key founding fathers.

18 Q.v., footnote 1. (For the reader’s ease: Benjamin Franklin, Poor Richard as quoted in Klepp.) 19 “A ship under sail” of course would invoke the genocidal colonization of Latin America.

Works Cited Robert Johnson, and Adam Cureton. “Kant’s Moral Philosophy.” In Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by Edward N. Zalta. Metaphysics Research Lab, Stanford University, 2019. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-moral/.

Johnson, Walter. River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2013. Bidart, Frank. Half-light: Collected Poems 1965-2016. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2017.

Beauvoir, Simone de, and Constance Borde. The Second Sex. New York: Vintage Books, 2011. Díaz, Junot. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao. New York: Riverhead Books, 2008.

Ciocia, Stefania. “Psychopathologies of the Island: Curses, Love and Trauma in Julia Alvarez’s how the García Girls Lost their Accents and Junot Díaz’s this is how You Lose Her.”

Journal of Modern Literature 41, no. 2 (Winter, 2018): 129-146. doi:http://dx.doi.org.ezp-prod1. hul.harvard.edu/10.2979/jmodelite.41.2.08.

Gonzalez, Melissa M. “‘The Only Way Out Is In’: Power, Race, and Sexuality Under Capitalism in The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 57, no. 3 (2016): 279-293. doi:10.1080/00111619.2015.1046590.

Klepp, Susan E. “Beauty and the Bestial: IMAGES OF WOMEN.” In Revolutionary Conceptions: Women, Fertility, and Family Limitation in America, 1760-1820, 128-78. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009. Accessed July 28, 2020. www.jstor.org/stable/10.5149/9780807838716_klepp.10.

Kunsa, Ashley. “History, Hair, and Reimagining Racial Categories in Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao,” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction, 54, no. 2 (2013): 211-224. doi:10.1080/00111619.2011.574747.

Rorty, Richard. “Human Rights, Rationality, Sentimentality.” In Truth and Progress. Philosophical Papers 3. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Takolander, Maria Kaaren. “Theorizing Irony and Trauma in Magical Realism: Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao and Alexis Wright’s The Swan Book.” ariel: A Review of International English Literature 47, no. 3 (2016): 95-122. doi:10.1353/ari.2016.0026.

Floral Diction and Sexual

Undertones in Louisa May Alcott’s Work

Olivia Grenier, Ball State University

Work by Louisa May Alcott is a coming of age story of a young girl finding her way in the work ing world. After many exhausting jobs, her last one was the most rejuvenating and impactful because not only did she find work, she found love. Upon arriving at the Sterling residence, the book becomes more floral in diction and whimsical in setting to enhance the oncoming change in Christie. Christie enters her new residence in the springtime which was an intentional stylistic move by Alcott due to the associations to new life and fertility that spring suggests. “A Story of Experience” is the subtitle to the larger Work. Alcott is carefully curating a story around a maturing girl and is not shy in including the sexual experiences that the subtitle may denote. However, Alcott is rather modest in doing so. Due to the intentional absence of explicit sexual images throughout Work, Alcott relies on these associations connected to spring and the symbolism of flowers to augment the flourishing romantic relationship be tween Christie and David. Alcott is able to foster a growing relationship, enhance the familiar connects to spring and create a type of sexual awakening all with the absence of explicit sexual imagery between David and Christie. Alcott uses floral diction as a way to foreshadow the growth of David and Christie’s relationship and as a way to hint towards sexual undertones without being overtly sexual.

Christie and David’s first interaction was in a garden, which conveys a basis for sexual attrac tion. David is the Gardener in this story, so whenever flowers are present, they have some connection to his craft which sets up the relation between David and the flowers throughout the novel. Christie is not instantly attracted to David as Alcott even writes in regard to his looks, “What a blow it was to be sure! Christie actually felt vexed with him for disappointing her so” (chapter 10). Although Christie states her initial disappointment, that does not stop her from wanting to look her best in front of a new man, “She would have been more than woman if she had not first slipped upstairs to smooth her hair, put on a fresh collar, and black silk apron with certain effective frills and pockets …” (chapter 10). Christie got dressed up as if meeting in the greenhouse were her and David’s first date. Flowers are indictive of sexuality and sex is not something Alcott explicitly describes in her story. Therefore, the incorporation of heavy floral

diction and being surrounded by flowers when David and Christie are together denotes hints of sexuali ty. Andrea Frownfelter states, “The flower can be used as either a negative or positive symbol, showing either an absence or presence of sexuality” (21). In David and Christie’s case, the flowers are supporting the presence of sexuality. Since Alcott does not explicitly write about sex, the flowers are the substitute. Frownfelter continues to include that, “flowers are sexy to the masculine gaze…” (21). While Christie got all dressed up to impress David, the environment they are in is enough the sway towards sexual under tones –flowers are sexy. Although Alcott does not specifically write about the sexuality between David and Christie, it is prevalent through the abundance of flowers that sexual attraction is present.

In the strawberry bed is where Christie had her first sexual awakening. The chapter titled, “In the Strawberry Bed”, opens with Christie expressing her gratitude and appreciation for spring. She is com menting on how, “never had spring seemed so early and so fair” and is noticing, “never had such a crop of hopeful thoughts and happy feelings sprung up in her heart as now …” (chapter 11). Alcott intentionally placed David and Christie’s relationship to flourish during the spring season because spring is associated with fertility and new life. Alcott’s diction is also intentional by her unusual pairing of the word “crop” to mean something like an “abundance of.” This word play continues when Alcott writes that happy feel ings “sprung up” in Christie’s heart. This opening scene supports that David and Christie’s relationship is narrated through floral diction. Christie’s outlook on spring is starting to change because of how David has positively impacted her life thus far. On a general level, “beds” are thought of alluding to the physical action of sex. Again, Alcott does not describe overtly that David and Christie have had sex but by having Christie in a strawberry bed in David’s garden definitely leaves undertones of sexual behaviors.

Along with the intentional diction, Alcott visually describes a type of sexual awakening for Chris tie. In the strawberry bed Christie is seen with having “her fingers deeply stained with the blood of many berries” (chapter 11). Mr. Powers, who is another resident of the property, approaches Christie to ask if she is “still happy and content here?” to which Christie replies, “I feel as if I had been born again” (chap ter 11). Alcott writes that Christie answered Mr. Power with “perfect satisfaction in her face” (chapter 11). In this quick exchange, Alcott leaves her readers with undeniable sexual undertones. David is not with Christie in the bed –the strawberry bed but knowing that she is in his garden is enough to support his presence. Describing the red stain on Christie’s hands from the strawberry juices as blood alludes to a

loss of virginity and by having Christie reply in a way with “perfect satisfaction” is diction that connects to a sexual experience. With this novel being “A Story of Experience” it would make sense for Alcott to include a sexual scene in the progression of a maturing girl’s life. The way Alcott approaches sexuality in Work is notable due to the fact of her intentional omission of explicit sexual behaviors. Not only does this intention make for a more modest read, but it also grants the realistic privacy that Christie may have desired in this type of situation. Not overtly and obviously stating whether Christie and David had sex or not makes the characters more realistic and the story more gripping. Continuing on with the scene, Frownfelter says, “… female puberty, menstruation, first sexual experience, fertility, pregnancy, moth erhood, and menopause can be described with floral terminology” (21). This claim is supported in this event because the “blood” on Christie’s hands represents her first sexual experience as well as her reply being presenting in a “satisfied” manner. Strawberries alone hold associations to sexuality with the fruit being an aphrodisiac. According to Cosmopolitan, “While the legend says that strawberries originat ed from the heart-shaped tears of Aphrodite after she learned of her lover Adonis’s death, modern-day strawberries are anything but a bummer. Dr. Hoppe says they’re loaded with vitamin C, which is import ant for the production of sex hormones and chemical neurotransmitters in the brain to increase libido” (25). The origin of the strawberry has connections to love, but also their internal makeup is thought to aid in promoting a sexual mood. So, did Christie lose her virginity in David’s strawberry bed? It is never a conclusive assumption due to Alcott’s lack of explicit sexual imagery but given the location of being in a type of bed, comparison to blood, being satisfied, strawberries themselves, and with the knowledge that Christie does bare a child in the final chapters of the novel proves a convincing case for when David and Christie first had sex.

According to Mehdi Aghamohammadi, flowers are used too often as being just a symbol of female sexuality that much literature is missing the other qualities that flowers can represent. In Aghamohammadi’s article, he is not denying that flowers indicate a sexual presence but is disproving the absolute of “flowers have always represented female sexuality throughout history …” (21) which is something Frownfelter believes. Aghamohammadi’s article analyses Persian literature and Iranian culture for their inclusion of floral symbolism but with the absence of sexuality to give a more holistic view of the symbolism connected to flowers. He writes that, “The present article is an apology to flow

ers against misusers, or abusers, of flower symbolism, those who restrict symbolic referents of flowers not only to gender but also to the sexual organs” (Aghamohammadi 35). Aghamohammadi is highlight ing that flowers “have the potential for multiple interpretations” and by claiming they are only symbolic of sexuality is a gross generalization (35). In Alcott’s Work, even with the connection to sexuality aside, the use of floral diction still constitutes a basis for Christie and David’s growing relationship. Aghamo hammadi shares that, “As seen in examples of Persian poetry, no reference had been made to the female sexual anatomy, experience, or of the presence or lack of sexuality … thereby precluding possibilities of interpreting flowers form a fresh perspective” (36). Alcott incorporates this “fresh perspective” lens in Work when she shares the candid moment between Christie and David in the greenhouse looking at the pansies. Christie becomes immersed in admiring the flowers so much so that David interrupts her gazing by saying, “You look as if you saw something besides pansies there.” To which Christie replies, “I do; for, ever since I was a child, I always see a little face when I look at this flower. Sometimes it is a sad one, sometimes it’s merry, often roguish, but always a dear little face …” (chapter 10). Alcott gen erates this romantic and nostalgic scene through the incorporation of flowers but with the absence of the flowers overtly signifying a sexual presence. Aghamohammadi does not dismiss the fact that flowers are inherently romantic, he even states that, “… to Romantics, women were part of flower symbolism” but he is making the claim that flowers can symbolism much more than just sex (31). Aghamohammadi says that “flowers could represent such things as the eyes, hair, or face, rather than the genital organs” (36). In the scene Alcott created, as described above, she uses these other qualities that flowers represent by seeing faces within the pansies. Through Aghamohammadi’s article he is not entirely dismissing the sexual symbolisms that flowers evoke yet he is adding other qualities of representation to the overar ching symbolism of flowers. The new qualities and what Aghamohammadi describes as giving a “fresh perspective” are aspects to the flower symbol that Work supports. Even when putting aside the sexual connotation that flowers could constitute, Alcott has still created an undeniable relationship between David and Christie through floral diction.

Alcott has imbedded floral imagery to denote sexual undertones between David and Christie’s relationship, but she also uses the construction of the double-carnation to insinuate a lack of ridged gen der roles. Gregory Eiselein focuses his article on the bisexual erotic’s that the double-carnations could

contribute to Work but he also writes, “The double flowers also suggest David’s and Christie’s doubly gendered identities” (224). To this end, Alcott is not trying to hide the fact that she disagrees with strict gender roles and respective expectations for men and women. In chapter one, Alcott has Christie ex press feelings of confinement within her female body hindering her from her ambition to find work. In conversation with her Aunt Betsey Christie tries to explain that her wanting to go and find work is “A very sane and sensible” (chapter 1) idea. Christie used the expectations of gender to support her ambi tion saying, “if I’d been a boy, I should have been told to do it long ago” (chapter 1). Work showcases all of the professions Christie was able to acquire throughout her life. Due to her coveted pride, Chris tie becomes closed off to accepting help from others in fear of aligning herself with one of the socially constructed gender norms for women –dependence. Christie and David are in the garden inspecting the flowers when Christie says, “I like the single ones best: double-carnations are so untidy, all bursting out of the calyx as if the petals had quarreled and could not live together” (chapter 11). Alcott personifies the carnations in Christie’s mind to emphasize her fondness of being independent and fear of dependence so much so that she does not even see how double stemmed flowers could work together harmonious ly. David replies saying, “The single ones are seldom perfect, and look poor and incomplete with little scent or beauty” (chapter 11). David’s view of the double flowers contrast Christies by him expressing a harmonious, balanced stance whereas Christie’s view is self-focused and isolating. Christie fails to see David’s construction of the flowers due to her rejection of dependence. Instead of only attributing stereotypically male qualities onto Christie’s character and female qualities onto David, Alcott instead blends the traditional in with modern ideals making her characters dual sided. The conversation around and ultimate rejection of the beauty that the double-carnation could represent goes beyond floral arrangement aesthetics. David is a gardener and is enthralled by flowers. The enthusiasm and the passion that David expresses for his craft is what gives him the female sided traits alongside his male body. Christie aspires to find work which is a male associated goal. Alcott uses this unique flower as a symbol for what society could be. There could be men who like flowers and still hold the passion to go off to war, like David. There could be women who want to find work and still become mothers, like Christie. The double-carnation that Christie once saw as “untidy” is no longer so and is instead seen as unifying. Alcott has fostered a nuanced dynamic between David and Christie by

having each character express both male and female qualities within one body. Before Christie and Da vid married, Christie admits, “he has convinced me that ‘double flowers’ are loveliest and best” (chapter 15). Christie was hindered by her female body taking away the ease of finding work that rather a male body would grant. Christie was isolating herself due to her fear of dependence but has since reveled in the understanding of a partnerships that would strengthen your individuality. Marriage is the unification of two people in itself but when coupled alongside the double-carnation enhances the nuanced dynamic. Alcott has crafted two people who are not confined by societal expectations but instead liberated by the qualities that their respective partners exhibit.

In Louisa May Alcott’s Work, she creates a loving relationship between Christie and David with the absence of explicit sexual imagery but produces the same effect through floral diction. Although the inference of Alcott’s incorporation of floral diction being allusive to sexuality is not conclusive, it is heavily bolstered through her usage of the floral diction during scenes between David and Christie and when paired with other language that could constitute a sexual presence. Nonetheless, Alcott has cre ated a relationship between Christie and David through the basis of floral diction and naturalistic im agery. Not only does flowers unit Christie and David, but the intentional usage of the double-carnation to symbolize gender roles instills a deeper relationship between the characters bodies and their actions. One could imagine that Alcott’s absence of sex and instead her inclusion of floral diction as its substitute could be because Alcott wanted to preserve the innocent nature of her carefully crafted coming of age story. Or maybe Alcott was hesitant to publish a book that included heavy sexual imagery considering the social norms in the 1870s, or maybe she simply preferred the stylistic integrity that the substitution of flowers for sex promoted throughout her writing process among a multitude of other reasons. How ever, I wonder if Alcott omitted overtly sexualized passages in her book due to her own discomfort with talking about sex. Alcott was never married, so maybe if she published Work with no inclusion of flowers and instead written blatantly with the sexual behaviors between David and Christie, she would risk tarnishing her reputation. David and Christie’s love affair was present in the majority of Alcott’s plot line, so if she did not have her symbolism of flowers as a mask for the sexual connections between David and Christie, her book would have a lot of sexual scenes, maybe too many to be tasteful or maybe too much sex to comfortably write about. Whatever her reasoning, Alcott’s intentional usage of floral

diction as a substitute for sexual behaviors nonetheless created a romantic relationship between David and Christie without either character being overly sexualized. Alcott uses flowers as a symbolic aid to the romantics of David and Christie’s “first date,” she uses floral diction to enhance the familiar connec tions that springtime offers, she uses the strawberry bed as a way to convey a type of sexual awakening, and ultimately, she uses flowers to support David and Christie’s growing relationship together and with in their individual selves. Alcott’s incorporation of floral diction makes the relationship between David and Christie undeniably romantic in nature but ultimately more holistic than just sexual.

Works Cited

Aghamohammadi, Mehdi. “An Apology for Flowers.” International Journal of Comparative Literature and Translation Studies, vol.5, no.1 January 2017, http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac. ijclts.v.5n.1p.31

Eiselein, Gregory. “Sentimental Discourse and the Bisexual Erotics of Work” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, vol.41, no.3 1999, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40755290

Hsieh, Carina. “29 Aphrodisiac Foods That Can Help Make You Horny AF.” Cosmopolitan, Cosmopoli tan, 1 Oct. 2019, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/sex-love/advice/g1022/aphrodisiac-foods-0509/

Frownfelter, Andrea. “Flower Symbolism as Female Sexual Metaphor.” Eastern Michigan University DigitalCommons@EMU, 2010.

A Sympathetic Solipsist: Madame Bovary and the Limits of Feminist Individualism

Natasha Roy, New York University

In the introduction to The Second Sex (1949), Simone de Beauvoir writes that the drama of woman lies in the conflict between the individual experience of the self and the collective experience of womanhood. To herself, a woman is inherently central and essential. To society, she is inessential and secondary: defined on the terms of her relationship to men. Emma Bovary, Flaubert’s famed heroine, tragically lives out this jarring conflict in the eponymous Madame Bovary. Emma sincerely believes herself to be extraordinary; she longs for a more exciting and passionate life, but is continually trapped by marriage, motherhood, and means (or lack thereof). Yet, it would be facile to attribute her bleak arc simply to these material realities. Emma cannot craft herself a more meaningful life because her ambi tions are, ultimately, superficial. She builds fantasies based on appearances and adopts such a solipsistic attitude that she refuses to recognize the little agency she does have. In her mind, things happen to her: she cannot reckon with the gravity of her own choices.

Suzanne Leonard describes a veritable “Americanization of Emma Bovary” that has gained sentience over the last several decades (649). She points to “Emma Bovary’s surprisingly widespread appearance in twenty-first-century American women’s media culture, wherein she has transitioned from cautionary figure to postfeminist icon” (648). Emma is a curious choice for such iconization given her shallowness and penchant for escapism; these are highly feminized characteristics usually rebuked by the milieu of feminists Leonard invokes. And yet, Flaubert’s writing glitters such that Emma, despite her myriad flaws, remains profoundly likeable. It feels incredibly easy to attach your persona onto hers, as do so many conflicted film and television heroines in recent decades (Leonard, 647).

Leonard describes “a critical turn” that took place circa the 1980s “whereby stories of female limitations were read as sympathetic to female difficulty rather than as tacit endorsements of the status quo” (655). During this period of second wave feminism,“feminists exonerated Emma of her multiple failings on the grounds that her dilemmas, particularly with respect to marriage and motherhood, could

be recast in gendered terms.” Emma Bovary has benefited from “feminist rescue” offers Leonard, par tially because of a continued intrigue in her ennui and adultery, and partially because second and third wave feminists have “laid blame for her sad fate on the biases of a culture inhospitable to women who stray from prescribed roles” (655). This sort of reading does the crucial work of situating Emma within the gendered traps she must navigate. Nonetheless, it can also overlook other nuances of the character She has agency, she makes choices, and more often than not these choices add to her chains.

It is a testament to the novel’s study of a woman’s interiority that it continues to cause such a frisson among contemporary women who have, for all intents and purposes, complete access to all the freedoms Emma so helplessly desired. By situating Emma Bovary among contemporary feminist blindspots, I attempt to answer Leonard’s question: “If, as postfeminist rhetoric is so fond of pointing out, these constrictions have been rendered largely obsolete in contemporary American contexts, why does Emma Bovary still serve as such a handy metaphor for modern women?” (648). The novel’s applica bility to contemporary discourses lies in its portrayal of a woman trying desperately to cultivate agency under capitalism, both by ascribing significance to material objects and by seeking comfort in escape fantasies and rejecting collectivism.

I. Labels and Love.

While on the one hand a beneficiary of feminist resurrection, Emma Bovary also emerges as an easy target for critiques of narcissism. Christopher Lasch invokes her in his landmark book The Culture of Narcissism, describing her as the “prototypical consumer of mass culture” (171). Yet, Flaubert’s use of tactile references and material language reveals how Emma’s body holds her soul hostage; the materi al supersedes all aspects of her life. Emma’s consumption of mass culture therefore speaks to her underlying desire to express her interiority using only the material tools ather disposal.

For Leonard, Emma’s interest in the material draws yet another line between her and contempo rary women who may not share her other gendered confines.

“As we might remember, Madame Bovary offered a scathing indictment of the attitudes and op erations of female mass culture in the nineteenth century, a critique it made primarily through a portrayal of a woman seduced by the generic notions of love, romance, and sexuality on offer in women’s magazines and pulp novels. Despite long-standing critiques of such coercions, Ameri can postfeminist popular culture (including some of the books, films, and television shows listed

here) offers similar fantasies: romantic intrigue coupled with passionate love, visions accompa nied by consumptive excess, and nonstop diversion. The resulting comparison between Emma Bovary and modern-day heroines is perhaps inevitable: assessed in terms made popular by Sex and the City, Emma’s raison d’être also appears to be her pursuit of “labels and love.” (648)

There is certainly no more perfect embodiment of market consumption—of a woman swallow ing and regurgitating market ideals—than Emma Bovary. She internalizes consumerist ideals so com pletely that she spends all her money and runs her family into debt. She does indeed spend much of the novel pursuing “labels and love,” as Leonard puts it, but her interest in “mass culture” stems from a more sympathetic underlying desire to experience new freedoms and new planes of emotion.

It feels almost redundant to point out that Emma Bovary is highly preoccupied with appearances and aesthetics. She tortures herself over maintaining the image of the perfect and loving matriarch, yet makes no concerted effort to properly parent her daughter, Berthe. Similarly, she clings to the idea of freedom instead of making a meaningful effort towards liberation. Before the Marquise’s ball in Part I, Emma “[prepares] herself with the meticulous care of an actress at her debut” (Flaubert, 42). Flaubert is almost comically explicit about the degree to which our protagonist performs an entirely crafted identity. At this same ball, she looks at “the windows of the chateau for a long time, trying to guess which were the rooms of all those people she had observed the night before. She would have liked to know what their lives were like, to enter into them, to become a part of them” (Flaubert, 46). Constantly frustrated with the material and gender confines of her own life, she yearns instead to slip into other people’s lives. She cannot, however, envision a life that is wholly her own, because she has resigned herself to the idea that she has little to no agency. She has no framework for complete independence, so she cannot imag ine it. Instead, she dreams of being someone else, and, as such, is wholly severed from herself.

At this same ball Charles kisses her on the shoulder and she rebukes him saying “Leave me alone!...You’re rumpling me” (Flaubert, 43). She does not tell him that he is rumpling her hair, attire, or any other part of her physicality. Rather, she feels that he is rumpling her as a person: diminishing and degrading her propensity for greatness. She makes this jump in part because she has so totally used aes thetics as her currency that even the slightest smear of her appearance becomes an attack on her entire personhood. It is an understandable affront on her person, given that capitalism and patriarchy at their

intersection train women to base their worth on their ability to perform aesthetic value.

The way in which Emma equates her gown to her person speaks to the corporeal politics of her world. For women—who lacked mobility, financial independence, and general intellectual respect— exterior markers such as clothing had far more value than personal interiority, which was barely rec ognized as a standin for interiority. By fixating on “labels.” Emma therefore aims in part to temper the divide between her inner and outer self; to use material articles to express her personhood. In the weeks following this ball, Emma asks herself, “Would this misery last forever? Would she never find a way out of it? And yet she was certainly just as good as all those women who lived happy lives! She had seen duchesses...with heavier figures and more vulgar manners...she would think with envy of tumultuous lives, nights at masked balls, outrageous pleasures, and all the wild emotions, unknown to her, that they must inspire” (Flaubert, 57). She truly believes that her ticket into high society shall arrive in the form of manners, body language, and clothing.

She is perennially shallow, to be sure, but her preoccupation with status and glamor alludes also to a desire for emotional release. In the early, stultifying days of her marriage to Charles, Emma tries “to find out just what was meant, in life, by the words bliss, passion, and intoxication, which had seemed so beautiful to her in books” (Flaubert, 30). The words “bliss,” “passion,” and “intoxication” share tonal echoes with Emma’s later yearning for the “tumultuous lives,” “outrageous pleasures,” and “wild emo tions” that she ascribes to high society women. Emma’s fixation on status speaks, quite simply, to her desire for electricity. She has been so profoundly shaped by consumer culture that she falls prey to the flimsy belief that she can find this electricity in material goods. And yet this preoccupation follows the internal logic of a novel that so heavily employs tactile, material language. At the pinnacle of her de pression before she moves to Yonville, Emma laments:

“It was above all at mealtimes that she could not bear it any longer, in that little room on the ground floor, with the stove that smoked, the door that creaked, the walls that seeped, the damp flagstones, all the bitterness of life seemed to be served up on her plate, and, with the steam from the boiled beef, there rose from the depths of her soul other gusts of revulsion.” (Flaubert, 56)

These material markers of Emma’s provincial life cage her: the stove, the walls, the repetitive meals, all become maddening as her life remains static. This passage evokes a claustrophobia so pal pable that we too grow revolted with Emma’s stale experiences. In doing so, it reveals that Emma is

condemned to live on an entirely material plane. Situated among such sensory and tactile language, our protagonist is left to craft meaning through materialism: objects become metonyms for relationships: a house becomes the cloying reification of her depression.

After the Marquise’s ball, Charles spots a cigar case on the ground and Emma brings it home. It quickly emerges as a material reification of her unhappy marriage, and reappears when, as Rodolphe becomes her lover, she offers him a replica of the same cigar case. Stuck in her mundane life, Emma routinely pulls out the cigar case and peers at it:

“She would look at it, open it, and even sniff the fragrance of its lining...Who did it belong to?... The vicomte. Perhaps it was a gift from his mistress...A breath of love had passed among the stitches of the canvas; each stroke of the needle had fastened into it a hope or a memory, and all those interlaced threads of silk were merely an extension of the same silent passion.” (Flaubert, 49)

The cigar case serves as the only tactile reminder Emma has of her magical night at the ball: it thus becomes a profound mimesis of the social strata she cannot penetrate. The cigar case as an objec tive correlative thus reveals Emma’s steadfast belief that objects can interpellate emotion: that hopes and memories become tactile if stitched into a green silk cigar case. A harsh, Laschian reading would de nounce her a magpie, ascribing inane meaning to flashy objects. A more sympathetic reading recognizes that in a culture that so violently denies women their interiority, exterior articles—a gown, a meal, a cigar case—become paramount. Crucially, the gown and cigarette case don’t just signify class—though that’s certainly important here. Emma connects the objects to some kind of elusive emotional release. If Emma’s raison d’etre is labels and love, then we can feasibly say that it is also labels as a means to attain love—or at least passion of some kind, which Emma only knows to recognize as love. Others around Emma question and minimize her spiritual needs, further denying her of her interiority. In Part II, during a conversation with Bournisien, the town priest in Yonville, Emma offers blankly, “I’m in pain,” adding that “it isn’t earthly remedies I need” (Flaubert, 97; 98). She alludes, of course, to an entirely existential affliction, but the clergyman can only comprehend physical or econom ical pain. When Emma asks about the pain felt by women “who have bread, but have no…” he cuts her off, insisting that pain cannot exist “when one is warm, and well fed” (Flaubert, 99). Emma dissolves into a paroxysm of frustration/agony—”My God! My God!”—and we can understand why. This ex

change reminds us that in literature “Heroes are mostly unhappy for existential reasons; heroines suffer for social reasons, because of male power, because of men” (Tolentino, 120). In life as in its mimesis there emerges a violent denial of the woman’s interiority. We discuss women in terms so material, so corporeal, so limiting, that to then denounce a character like Emma for becoming seduced by shallow materialisms feels facile.

Crucially, Emma is not uniquely shallow within the world of her novel. Flaubert presents us with a culture that is superficial at large, thus sympathetically contextualizing Emma’s particular superficial analysis of the world. Emma’s highly aesthetic worldview is endemic to the novel’s French society across multiple stratas. For example, Homais acts as the prototypical effete, educated, and bourgeois foil to the quotidian Charles. He ostensibly represents the French bourgeois intelligentsia, and yet his arc is one of deceit and dishonor. He concerns himself with knowledge only superficially: giving convoluted speeches about science while engaging in malpractice and displaying limited medical knowledge. De spite his guile, he ultimately receives the prestigious Legion of Honor. As such, on paper, he represents the sort of intellectual and high society life that Emma craves, but we can gather that his milieu is equal ly as superficial as the provincial one, if not more perniciously so.

Flaubert is not a didactic writer, but he lays out the realities of these environments such that we can pull from his writing a simple, if bleak, lesson. An obsession with appearance will not only render your life meaningless, but it will also cause anguish for those around you. It is significant that we see this dynamic play out among bourgeois and provincial characters alike. Even though the provincial class is decidedly myopic, we can ultimately surmise that this superficiality is endemic to every class. Ma dame Bovary is therefore less a critique of its central character than it is a critique of an entire culture of appearances.

II. The Feminist Collective.

In her critical study of The Second Sex, Nancy Bauer offers:

“The first thing Beauvoir has to say about herself is that she is a woman. This means that unlike Descartes Beauvoir begins with a fundamental investment in the significance of her body, so that her thinking will not be able to accommodate a Cartesian mind-body split. Furthermore, since her inquiry is rooted in a sense of herself as being an instance of the generic concept “woman” a certain Cartesian threat of solipsism is avoided from the start: to call herself a woman is to start

with the idea that other beings like her exist—that is, other beings who are called, or call them selves, women.” (60)

Emma by requirement of her gender must remain invested in her body, yet in doing so she cannot, as Beauvoir does, situate herself in a collective. She adopts a highly solipsistic worldview that bars her from recognizing the agency she does have and from contextualizing her struggle as a broader one. For example, she yearns for a son through whom she can live vicariously and forget the trappings of womanhood. When Berthe is born, she makes an incisive criticism of her society in this context:

“She wanted a son; he would be strong and dark, she would call him Georges; and this idea of having a male child was a sort of hoped-for compensation for all her past helplessness. A man, at least, is free; he can explore every passion, every land, overcome obstacles, taste the most distant pleasures. But a woman is continually thwarted. Inert and pliant at the same time, she must struggle against both the softness of her flesh and subjection to the law. Her will, like the veil tied to her hat by a string, flutters with every breeze; there is always some desire luring her on, some convention holding her back.” (Flaubert, 77)

Emma makes a bleakly sophisticated assessment of her life’s gendered limitations; here, she is at her sharpest and most perceptive. She understands the material limits of her own life, but her analysis of gender revolves almost entirely around herself. Sexism matters to Emma Bovary only insofar as it prevents her from achieving the satisfaction she craves. She does not, however, care that it will hinder every other woman of her milieu in the same way. Her desire for a son reveals her childlike desire to slip away from her trials instead of working around them. Crucially, she does not view Berthe’s birth as an opportunity to raise an assertive woman who may be able to more skillfully navigate the limitations of womanhood. Emma recognizes gendered injustice through a highly solipsistic lens: she focuses only on the ways in which gender imprisons her. She does not conceptualize her struggle as a collective one, and therefore cannot meaningfully understand the world outside of herself. She does not wish to free Berthe from her gendered prison; she only cares to free herself. In fact, her lack of empathy for her own daughter is striking even beyond any gendered readings. And while Emma’s desire for liberation feels warranted and just, it is ultimately too myopic to ever materialize.

And though Emma arraigns social conventions, her insistence on a woman who “flutters with every breeze…[who] always [has] some desire luring her on” plays into sexist tropes. Emma criticizes

the trap of womanhood because she is unhappy about being trapped, but not necessarily because of any cogent broader social criticism. To borrow Bauer’s language, Emma recognizes in this passage “that other beings like her exist,” but she skips the crucial work of situating herself in a collective. In Emma’s world womanhood is a great personal inconvenience rather than a system of oppression to be widely challenged. To rehabilitate her as a feminist is therefore so overly complimentary as to be innacurate.

Emma’s monomania with her particular suffering—or, her disinterest in the collective—mani fests in language of escape. She repeatedly expresses desire for a change of physical scenery—if only she and Rodolphe could run away to the Alps or a tropical island! In the midst of her affair with Leon, Emma laments that “everything, even she herself, [is] unbearable. She [wishes] she could escape like a bird, and grow young again somewhere far, far away, in the immaculate reaches of space” (Flaubert, 259). Emma’s desire to “escape like a bird” to a distant realm reveals her fundamental inability to ad dress her problems. She wants always to fly away, free, and refuses to reckon with the material realities of her life. Instead of choosing to productive channel her frustrations with gender into transgressively raising Berthe, she fixates on the useless hypothetical of a son.

One of the central tragedies of the novel lies in the discrepancy between Emma’s yearning for an avian (free) life and the omnipresence of bovine (provincial and limited) imagery in her surroundings. Her very name, Bovary, serves as a cruel reminder that for all her dreams of upward mobility, Emma is constantly mired by provinciality, as represented by the bovine. The novel’s full title—Madame Bovary: Provincial Manners—again reminds us again how adamantly women are framed in terms of their mate rial realities, to the point where interiority becomes entirely elusive. The Cartesian mind-body split that Bauer references cannot exist for Emma when she is constantly reminded that she will only ever be what she already is: provincial, a wife, a woman.

We can therefore understand why Emma so wishes to fly away from her life, her family, her body: escape seems to be her only avenue through which to individuate. And yet, the language of flight and fantasy speaks to the vast distance between envisioning a life free of gender confines and subscribing to a theory of change that could realistically materialize this. Perhaps Emma remains so beloved to contemporary feminists, myself included: it is just so much easier to inhabit an escapist ideology than

it is to meaningfully push the gender needle. For contemporary feminists, a forgiving look at Madame Bovary acts as a sort of palliative. The easier we go on her, the less inclined we feel to confront the fact that comfort and liberation are, in the business of gender, mutually exclusive. Emma’s propensity for escapism prevents her from recognizing the active role she has played in tarnishing her own life. When she receives a court order after acquiring massive debt, she immedi ately proccalims “do you know what’s happening to me? It must be a joke!” (Flaubert, 260). A sensible observer would read the situation as Emma facing the consequences of her continued reckless spending, but she reframes the situation; this is yet another tragedy that is happening to her. Emma is therefore trapped not only by her material conditions but also by her inability to recognize her own autonomy, for better or for worse. As much as the world strips her of agency, she unwittingly strips herself of any agency she does have. By shirking responsibility for her actions and retreating always to a fantasy of escape, she spurns her own autonomy. In her 2019 book Trick Mirror, Jia Tolentino argues that for women in fiction, “love and money, or the lack of them, calcify a life” (95). She adds that, “ultimately, these characters are aware of the trajectory they’re stepping into” (103). Emma Bovary’s awareness of her reality waxes and wanes, but even in her sharpest moments she never gives up on her escape fantasy

Feminist individualism presupposes this strange Catch-22. The worldview is predicated on the nation that it is within an individual woman’s power to blithely self actualize in a world designed to hin der her from doing so. And yet, standard feminist rhetoric subordidnates this idealized, powerful woman by absolving her of criticism: smoothening over her choices and chalking them up to gender trouble. To lend “feminist rescue,” as Leonard describes it, to Emma strips her of her agency in a bid to aknowledge her lack of it. Perhaps this is why the character has remained so extant: in her tale of provincial ennui, marriage, immobility, Emma Bovary still somehow speaks to a contemporary feminism that has moved largely past these particular facets of the patriarchy.

Tolentino argues that “women are genuinely trapped at the intersection of capitalism and patriar chy—two systems that, at their extremes, ensure that individual success comes at the expense of collective morality” (91). This is a miserable convergence that leads Emma to her ruin. And yet, though this context renders Emma sympathetic, it cannot close us off to further criticism of the character. Leonard explains that recent feminist discourses surrounding Madame Bovary have established “Emma’s ennui

as a cultural symptom rather than a personal failing further allowed for a recasting of her dilemmas, so that, for example, her marriage’s failure to live up to her romantic expectations, her disdain for (and simultaneous inability to leave) her provincial country town, her humiliation at the hands of thoughtless lovers, and her lack of access to financial resources all cohered into a portrait of the effects of gendered power” (652).

This portrait does a disservice to a character who makes legitimately poor choices for entirely comprehensible reasons. We must give credence to the act of choice—amplify the agency that Emma does have—in order to seriously reckon with her circumstances. Tolentino points to penchant for femi nist rescue among contemporary pop-discourse: “Any woman whose story has been altered and twisted by the force of male power—so any woman—can be framed as a complicated hero, entombed by patri archy and then raised by feminists from the dead” (237). She cites figures from Hillary Clinton to Brit ney Spears as beneficiaries of this itch to resurrect, and Emma emerges as a natural addition to the list.

This sort of feminist rescue assumes an autotelic nature: it implies that so long as we rehabilitate ambivalent women, we no longer need to contemplate the how of feminist liberty. But if feminist analy sis recognizes the contexts that lead to Emmas tragedy, then it must also coalesce around a meaningful theory of change. To do the first part without the second leaves us in an infuriating snake-eats-tail continuum in which we sanitize stories of female failures to the point where we can no longer learn from our own history. It’s a shame, for when we strike the balance between feminist resurrection (a la Leon ard’s analysands) and unsympathetic criticism (a la Christopher Lasch), Flaubert’s novel emerges as an invaluable feminist heuristic.

Works Cited

Bauer, Nancy. “Recounting Woman: Simone de Beauvoir and Feminist Philosophy.” Diss. Harvard University, 1997.

Beauvoir, Simone de, and H. M. 1884-1953 Parshley. The Second Sex. New York: Knopf, 1952. Print. Flaubert, Gustave. Madame Bovary. Translated by Lydia Davis, Penguin Books, 2010.

Lasch, Christopher. The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations. W. W. Norton & Company, 1979.

Leonard, Suzanne. “The Americanization of Emma Bovary: From Feminist Icon to Desperate Housewife.” Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, vol. 38, no. 3, 2013, pp. 647–669., doi:10.1086/668551.

Tolentino, Jia. Trick Mirror: Reflections on Self-Delusion. Random House, 2019.

Disrupted Stories and the Remembered Past: Generational Trauma in Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel

Lucy Schoenrock, Agnes Scott College

Abstract:

Madeleine Thien’s 2016 novel, Do Not Say We Have Nothing, provides an expansive retelling of the story of a family separated by oceans, death, and time within Mao Tse Tung’s Communist China. This dynamic novel holds power in retelling the narrative of family and life through references to the past that transcend into the present. Thien’s novel serves to display the fortitude of culture, tradition, and life within Communist China that moves beyond the boundaries of time and place. This paper analyzes this novel and its impact in using trauma theory to make the case for this novel’s placement in the canon of literature. Further, this paper analyzes trauma theory in the context of generational trauma to evaluate how myth, silence, and generational distance can play a role in elongating trauma’s effects. Thien’s nov el has a strong presence under the critical eye of literary trauma theory through its provocative and often intense language.

Introduction:

Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel written by Madeleine Thien in 2016 weaves together the histories of two families impacted by the violence of the Communist Revolution into the Massacres at Tiananmen Square. Through her character’s eyes, Thien drafts a generational story that surveys these historical events and provides a human connection to what transpired. Her character, Sparrow, describes the chaos of the early 1960s by reflecting that “Year after year, the roads cratered and collapsed, entire towns vanished, crushed into the mud, leaving behind only garbage, dogs, and the putrid, sickly sweet smell of bodies numbering in the hundreds, the thousands, the millions” (Thien 29-30). Through voices like Sparrow’s, Thien is able to provide a written image that illustrates what occurred in China during this period. The history, while embellished with prosaic language, remains true to what occurred. The

novel becomes a catalogue for the pain, beauty, and memory that culminates in a significant piece of trauma fiction.

Trauma theory is an expansive area of research that bridges between disciplines and genres, however; this paper will narrow in on three points of trauma theory in reference to the novel. First, this paper will address the conflation of trauma and myth as it is passed down from generation to generation. Secondly, I will show how silence perpetuates trauma due to the inability to properly address the event, which would allow it to be processed and mourned. Finally, the paper will discuss the concept of the “hinge generation” about the transmission of trauma from generation to generation. In sum, this paper will acknowledge Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel, as a work that shows the effects of gener ational trauma and make the argument that the novel itself represents an impactful piece for analysis within the canon of literature.

Trauma Theory:

In his article, The Myth of the Trauma/The Trauma of Myth: Myths as Mediators of Some LongTerm Effects of War Trauma, Thomas Pick describes how myth is the combination of both legend and history, where fact and fiction become indistinguishable, creating a story that tells history in a digestible form (Pick 202). Pick writes that this myth becomes incorporated into a group’s identity and is uncon sciously passed down to following generations through the manifestation of a collective memory (2023). This expression of memory is a defining piece of a group’s history that spreads into pride in one’s national history (Pick 203). As these memories become instituted in the community’s identity, they are easily inherited and a cycle emerges that is difficult to break. Myth and trauma merge because of how each feed into the existence of the other and the group afflicted can never truly mourn what trauma took from them. The inability to mourn renders time differently for the victim because they are in a constant state of re-living their traumas. While myth represents trauma in its, often spoken, narrative state; trau ma can also be conveyed through instances of silence.

Cathy Caruth argues that trauma can be understood as the re-visiting of a moment where the “confrontation with the necessity and impossibility of grasping the threat to one’s own life” (“Violence and Time” 25). Judith Fewell expands this concept to show how these experiences require structured,

meaningful words that can properly describe the emotions of having to face a threat to one’s life. How ever, the chaotic, traumatized mind cannot always discover these words and are left silent (83-4). Without processing the experience, the victim is unable to develop a language with which to speak about their experiences in a healing fashion (Pederson 334). A victim can forget the experience immediately after it occurs and not remember the trauma till years later. When these memories do arise, the victim is unable to develop a language with which to speak about their experiences because they have not been able to process them naturally (Pederson 334).

Some researchers disagree with Caruth, Richard McNally in his work Remembering Trauma (2003) argues that trauma cannot result in an amnesia effect, instead; the memory is enhanced in one’s mind following the experience of trauma. And, victims of trauma do not necessarily lack the ability to voice their traumas because they do not remember them. Instead, they avoid talking about their experiences as a means of not having to experience their trauma again. Silence in McNally’s argument describes the victim as having the power to process their experiences but avoids re-experiencing them through speech with family, friends, and other individuals. Part of the mourning process can be found in the act of storytelling, orally, or in written form (Fewell 82). Storytellers have the responsibility to reattach the sequence of events to dispel the silence and the myth and bring about a grieving period.

The “hinge generation” is identified as the successive generation following a distinct, traumatic event and their duty is to translate the stories of trauma that have been passed to them from their parents and/or grandparents. This concept, developed by Tarryn Frankish and Jill Bradbury emphasizes the need for this successive generation to create a “living archive” of the stories they inherit (Bradbury 294). The “hinge generation” can never go back and witness traumatic events for themselves, instead; they must develop their understanding of these events from the narratives given to them. Children, as the next gen eration, are left with having to pick up the pieces of their family’s trauma. Their lives are marred by the traumas of their parents and/or grandparents from conception and inherited trauma becomes a burden that the child will carry with them into adulthood.

Marianne Hirsch describes this phenomenon further in her article, The Generation of Postmem ory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust. Her term postmemory describes the relationship

that the next generation has to the “personal collective, and cultural trauma” that came before them (5). These traumas become ensconced in their experiences so deeply that they transfer the ownership of the trauma from that of their predecessors to their own (Hirsch 5). Here, the “hinge generation” is faced with mediating the spaces between what is a memory of something they were an eye-witness to and what is an inherited memory that has been translated into something of their own.

Historical Context: Mao Tse-Tung’s China

In handling intergenerational trauma within the novel, it is important to reference the contextual history of the culture that Thien describes. Thien, herself, is of Chinese descent and was born in Canada, mirroring the background of her character Marie (Jiang Li-ling). Chinese Canadian writers can dou ble as “community activists and archivists,” and will call on a communal identity/history to write their stories (Liu 27). Her work is impactful in that it tells a story that is often lost in silence and mythology by creating her own retelling of the history that is superimposed onto a cast of characters, humanizing the history. Do Not Say We Have Nothing details the history of China from 1950s to 1990s, including the Great Leap Forward, Mao Tse-Tung’s Cultural Revolution, and the Massacre at Tiananmen Square.

Mao Tse-Tung resided as the chairman of the People’s Republic of China from 1949 to 1959 and served as the leader of the Chinese Communist Party till his death (Schram 1). Philip Bridgham provides an analysis of Mao Tse-Tung’s leadership during the 1960s in his article Mao’s “Cultural Revolution”: Origin and Development. He argues that what motivated Mao was a fear of disloyalty within his par ty, leading him to carry out a “‘great proletarian cultural revolution’” that tested his followers’ loyalty based on their adherence to his ideology” (3). This is best understood in the context of 1962 with the ‘social education’ campaign, which re-educated individuals that were suspected of attempting to rein state capitalism in China through acts of dissent. In the rural areas, incidents of a “violent nature with accounts of struggle sessions, public trials, and beatings of erring cadres” were common in support of the re-education initiative (Bridgham 10). 1965 escalated purging to attack literary, scholarly, and polit ical leaders that were accused of presenting the public with falsified information in support of returning to capitalism (Bridgman 16). The violence was extended to target innocent civilians by employing teen agers into Mao’s Red Guard to ransack homes in search of incriminating evidence (Bridgham 27).

Anne M. Brown describes the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989 writing, “The Tiananmen Square killings can be understood as one, particularly savage, swing of the pendulum between official calls for reform and official repression of and violence towards those Chinese pushing the limits and pace of reform…” (93). On the night of the 3rd to 4th of June 1989, the People’s Liberation Army drove tanks to a protest of unarmed citizens around Tiananmen Square. The number of dead (shot or crushed) from this event ranged from 240 to 5,000 individuals. The international outcry over these protests was significant, however; they quickly leveled out due to the prowess of the Chinese government.

Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel:

The novel begins with a family tree, a visual explanation for her intricate structure of characters. The novel incorporates the stories of two families, which are drawn together through the relationship of the men Sparrow (b. 1940) and Jiang Kai (b. 1950). Sparrow’s family is the ultimate focus of the novel, looking to the past to speak of his mother Big Mother Knife (b. 1920), his aunt Swirl (b. 1925), his uncle Wen the Dreamer (b. 1923), and cousin Zhuli (b. 1952). The stories of this family ultimate ly coincide with Marie (Jiang Li-Ling, b. 1979), Jiang Kai’s daughter, who lives in Canada with her mother. Marie is the one that begins archiving Sparrow’s and her family’s story as she interacts with his daughter, Ai-Ming (b. 1971). Ai-Ming comes to live with Marie and her mother after having fled China due to the protests in Tiananmen Square. She brings with her a knowledge of China, the language, and a past that Marie has been unable to touch. The two connect over histories of pain and loss, both of their fathers have died, Marie’s father lost to suicide not long before Ai-Ming comes into her life. Ai-Ming brings to Marie The Book of Records, which comes from her family and acts as a reference to investi gate her family’s history. She translates the story to Marie and begins to give her the pieces to fill in the gaps of her cultural/familial history. With Ai-Ming, Marie has access to the past unlike she has ever had before and she takes advantage of this connection to begin to bring together stories, which were once lost.

Myth, Trauma, and the Novel:

Trauma has a unique relationship with myth by allowing the traumatized to be able to bring new meaning to their experiences, find security, and address the emotions centered around the trauma. By

utilizing historical facts in conversation with fictional characters and instances, the novel’s structure somewhat resembles that of a myth. While these moments of violence cannot be specifically traced to an actual event, it is clear through historical analysis that many events like those witnessed by characters in the novel occurred. Early on in the novel, the reader is introduced to the forms of violence that were borne out of fear of the bourgeoise that Mao inscribed into the population of the 1950s:

Swirl thought she must be hallucinating when the guns were drawn and Da Ge and his wife were executed. Torches were lit and others demanded yet more killing. She saw Wen dragged forward. Her husband begged for mercy….Swirl felt herself losing consciousness. A deep silence seemed to come at her from every side (Thien 69-70)

The narrator is reflecting on this memory, coinciding with Caruth’s explanation that experiences where respect for humanity is lost often demand that they be processed at a later date (“Unclaimed Experience” 186). Here, the narrator is fulfilling this action, while also creating an opportunity for myth to be formed.

Shortly after this event, Wen the Dreamer and his wife Swirl are sentenced, without evidence or trial, to eight years of hard labor due to their counter-revolutionary crimes and leave their daughter Zhuli with her aunt. Zhuli is forced to enter the world, prematurely, without her parents’ protection and her own experiences of trauma begin. This trauma is a direct result of the trauma of her parents’ absence and they go to experience their own traumas while incarcerated. Now, trauma within the family has been piled on top of one another and the parent and the child suffer, creating a collective memory of trauma rooted in the family. Generational trauma is often witnessed in the parent-to-child relationship, and within the novel, this is developed in the mother-daughter dynamic.

In this section, the mother-daughter unit is Zhuli and her mother Swirl, connected by their indi vidual experiences that occurred while separated, “Last month, Zhuli had overheard her mother saying that the bodies of those who died in the desert camps were left to decompose in the sand dunes. Scien tists and teachers, longtime Party members, doctors, soldiers, paper-pushers and engineers, more than enough to build a better China in the underworld” (Thien 138). As Zhuli overhears her mother talking about her experiences, they are unconsciously adopted into Zhuli’s own memory. While Zhuli was not

present for her mother’s time at the camp, she can reflect in tandem with her mother and they are irrepa rably connected by a traumatic retelling of the story.

Marianne Hirsch describes the concept of postmemory in relation to myth by writing that the transmission of trauma between the mother and daughter figures occurs as the daughter can translate her mother’s trauma into the present day. Between the two, they can create a myth that can perpetuate the trauma into the next generation through continuous re-telling (10-11). Swirl’s experiences are inscribed that of her child by transferring her history into the memory of her daughter, Zhuli (Hirsch 31). This connection corresponds with another concept of Marianne Hirsch’s, “allo-identification,” which represents a closer relationship to the trauma of a relative that is not marked by physical scars but is meant to show how trauma can leave wounds without a physical mark (Hirsch 85).

In the mother-daughter relationship, the daughter will attempt to protect and guard the mother through “allo-identification,” where she will relieve her mother’s memories as if they were her own. This subversion of ownership allows for the daughter to feel as though her adoption has taken the mem ory away from her mother (Hirsch 90). Zhuli acts in this role by reliving her mother ’s memory through her act of listening. She is adopting her mother’s first-person narrative as if it was her in the re-education camps, not her mother. She does this to protect her mother, overcoming her role as the child and step ping into one of an adult. These traumas were never meant to be hers but her aim to protect her mother and listen to these stories make them apart of her own catalog of trauma that can only continue to grow.

The traditions of oral story-telling allow for multiple truths to exist, which carry the stories of trauma and the past forward into the present (Cheung 86). The Book of Records in Do Not Say We Have Nothing acts as a novel inside the novel that is passed down through generations until it reaches Marie in Canada. It represents a type of mythology that interrupts the mourning process because fact cannot be separated from fiction within its pages. The book, written by Wen the Dreamer takes on characters that represent connections between him and his wife, Swirl, and the world he lives in. In the novel, the Book of Records presents itself mysteriously, calling on its readers to decipher it to find the truth in-between bits of myth:

The book was still in its hiding place inside the family home. Tucked into the pages were all the

letters Wen the Dreamer had written to Swirl. When those hungry spirits found no silver coins, they would open the walls. Nothing hidden would remain unseen. Swirl described the coded names, how the ideograms used for Da-Wei and May Fourth changed, and seemed to refer to compass points on a map. Big Mother felt a terrible chill. The love letters would be bad enough but what was in that book anyway? What if it turned out to be written by a Nationalist traitor? They would all be screwed to the eighteenth generation (Thien 64)

The elements of translation from language, code, and authorship make The Book of Records a piece of myth that is rooted in trauma. As Swirl can decode her husband’s letters in The Book of Records, she not only can find pieces of him in the past but also pieces of herself in the present. Her actions have the countereffect of bringing the past into the present and allowing enabling it to continue to circulate. Swirl’s actions will culminate in The Book of Records reaching her daughter, Zhuli, ultimately touching Ai-Ming and Marie in Canada.

Trauma theory is often utilized in analyzing novels that look into the violent, historical past in literature of the U.S. South, specifically in the context of slavery. In particular, Toni Morrison’s Beloved can be identified as part of the canon within trauma studies in literature. Lisa Hin richsen writes, “Critics such as J. Brooks Bouson (1999) have focused on how Morrison utilizes literary techniques that mirror at a formal level the effects of trauma, noting the novel’s insistence on circling back to violent events, and its disrupted timeline, structures of belatedness, and withholding of import ant information, as well as its literalization of the haunting past through a ghost” (643). I argue that Do Not Say We Have Nothing accomplishes a very similar structure through the Book of Records and its mythological components. Like Beloved’s ghost, The Book of Records circles back throughout the novel and serves as a form of placeholder within time that allows contemporary characters to root out the truth within the myth of their family’s past. The collective memory that is formed around The Book of Re cords serves to join the family system together around an oscillating myth that has mystery in its origins. It represents a conflation of myth with its fictional characters, while bridging into reality with stories that resemble historical fact.

Silence as a Symbol for Trauma:

In withholding the intimate details of the trauma, the character ’s experiences are translated from the personal to the collective. This element of trauma theory allows for trauma to be transmittable be cause it is not so personal that others are unable to empathize with the experience. Instead, as Michelle Balaev argues in Trends in Literary Trauma, it is a part of the collective psyche of the culture and the family unit, even though details are absent from their understandings of the event, they still can compre hend and grieve what was lost in their lives from before the event (158). Thien adopts this phenomenon into Do Not Say We Have Nothing through the prevalence of silence. Before committing suicide, Zhuli realizes that, “‘Silence had come to her. It did not try to connect all its pieces, to pretend they were part of the same thing. It didn’t need to pretend. Silence saw everything owned everything, eventually took everything’” (Thien 255). Zhuli clings to death as an escape from not only her present but also from a traumatic past that was given to her by her parents and their generation. The chaos of trauma, as Cathy Caruth describes it, has left Zhuli unable to formulate a proper language to speak of her traumas with, and with no parental guidance to find this language, she turns to silence (Pederson 334). Silence was Zhuli’s only option to escape the maddening chaos around her, she saw no other option and turned to what would be most final. At this moment, death has become a symbol of silence. Zhuli can find peace in death and process her trauma in eternal silence.

Zhuli’s silence in death is passed from to those she leaves behind. Sparrow, her cousin, and close friend, realizes what Zhuli has done and falls into the chaos of grief. He does not know fully how to experience life without her in it and is left reeling from the trauma of having to grieve the life he once had. He thinks to himself, “‘But in my life, Sparrow thought, I think there is a quiet coming now. He felt so certain of it that a sharp pain spread across his chest. A deep silence was about to arrive. How could he live with it?’” (Thien 225). The sharp pain he describes, brings together the physical with the emo tional pain, and the oncoming silence signals the introduction of trauma. Caruth describes this interac tion as “trauma for[cing] itself into hiding,” while the brain continues to record the sensory parts of the experience. The combination of hiding and recording creates chaos that the brain is unable to work itself through, lodging trauma into the experience and Sparrow’s future as he recedes into silence (Pederson

335). Since Sparrow is unable to fully vocalize his trauma, it will continue to haunt him as he learns to live without Zhuli (Hinrichsen 637). He hides from these memories and until he can confront them, they will continue to haunt him. Sparrow passes on the legacy of haunting to his daughter Ai-Ming, and ultimately, it will be inherited by Marie’s father as well, as they both knew Zhuli.

Trauma represents a function of language that gives power to the victim to be able to control their grief as they begin to mourn the life that they once had before the incident. However, this ownership can become counterproductive as the victim’s inability or unwillingness to speak of their traumas can prevent the mourning process from occurring. With this, there is no culmination to trauma’s impact, instead; trauma will be passed on through the untold stories and whispered words to their loved ones.

As Marie stands on the precipice of having to acknowledge family’s trauma, she thinks, “Sometimes, I think, you can look at a person and know they are full of words. Maybe the words are withheld due to pain or privacy, or maybe subterfuge. Maybe there are knife-edged words waiting to draw blood. I felt like both a child and a grown-up” (Thien 17-18). As she watches her mother grieve, she feels both inside and outside of time, both a child and an adult. Her mother’s trauma disrupts her linear sense of time and disjointedly affects her timeline of growth. She is forced to take on the role of the daughter, dependent on her mother, and the role of an adult, the protector of her mother. Marie can understand the pain that is incorporated in the spoken word, however; she is both afraid and unafraid of it as she draws herself into the lives of those that came before her.

Marie and her mother represent a second mother-daughter relationship in the novel, the first being Zhuli and Swirl, which has been marred by the pains of trauma and immigration. Marie and her mother are separated by the lack of a shared native language. Marie’s childhood in Canada meant that she did not have the same access to growing up in her family’s native tongue, as her mother did in Chi na. Her inability to read and write in her mother’s language creates another layer of separation, as Marie cannot access the stories of her family. King-Kok Cheung describes this dynamic in his article, Articu late Silences about the novel The Woman Warrior: Memoirs of a Girlhood among Ghosts. The child in the novel is unable to find her own identity because she is caught on a bridge between the two. She is alienated by her inability to communicate with her family, her past, and present (Cheung 83-84). Ma-

rie is faced with the same need to reconcile her identities to find herself within her family story and to continue her own story as it unfolds in the present. She is caught between two cultures, East and West, and must find a way to connect her contemporary Western lifestyle and upbringing with the contextual, familial identity found in the West. Her relationship with Ai-Ming shows her attempt to find the words to describe her family’s past, in using Ai-Ming’s language skills to translate and describe the past, she is given an agency in her own story that would have not been possible without translation. This new-found information ignites in Marie a want to discover and uncover more about her family, continuously bring what was unspoken into the light, and developing her own voice.

Without words, it is difficult to truly tell a story. What Thien accomplishes in her novel, is giving words to the unspoken traumas of China’s past. In displaying silence, Thien can show how the trauma and silence go hand in hand while showing that silence does not equate to a lack of communication. Lien Chao writes that “what silence can connote is infinite,” and the novel shows where this statement can come to life (21). Silence can transmit trauma by being a powerful form of communication. Do Not Say We Have Nothing represents this unlocking of time, by allowing different generations to interact with each other through the passing down of story and artifact.

The Hinge Generation within the Novel:

As Marie begins to unpack the trauma that her mother carries and is introduced to Ai-Ming, she becomes a representation of Bradbury and Frankish’s “hinge generation.” She feels the pain of her family around her and that of her late father. She looks to Ai-Ming and reflects, “I was terrified that if I touched her [Ai-Ming], her pain would swell inside my body and become my own forever. I couldn’t bear it. I turned away from her. I went into my bedroom and closed the door” (Thien 24). Marie can not bear to face the pain that is threatening to overtake her and her mind. She is afraid of taking on the trauma of her family and runs away from Ai-Ming as a means of blocking this trauma from reaching her. This relationship with the past that Marie attempts to avoid illustrates trauma theory as often the con temporary generation is unable to fully empathize with their family or cultural traumas because they are not contextualized within the same generation. So, they block the type of dialogue that is necessary to mourn these events (Krondorfer 99). However, avoiding this is a futile effort, Marie cannot turn her back

on her family. This need for information can be understood as the existence of a “soul wound” that has scarred Marie without her consent. She is destined to find a way to heal this wound unless she chooses to live with its weight for the rest of her life.

Marie attaches herself to Ai-Ming because she cannot deny the past, nor can she avoid it. She is drawn into this world that is both a piece of her and something that she can never truly experience be cause of its presence in the past. She says, “I set myself to remembering everything she had told me, the beautiful, cruel and courageous acts, committed by her father and by mine, which bound our lives to gether” (Thien 90). The bond between her and Ai-Ming shows the extended bond she has to her family’s past in China and the violence they experienced at the hands of Mao’s actions. Trauma is transmittable because it is not a singular moment, all individuals have some understanding of trauma within their lives and can use their own experiences to connect to those of others. Marie inherits the collective psyche of her culture and family unit and can understand the past despite holes in the truth (Balaev 158). Marie’s search for the truth acknowledges her want to mourn and process the trauma of her family members and her attachments to her personal trauma of losing her father.

Marie continues her search until she reaches China and walks the streets that her family did once. Place is a central concept in understanding trauma within a narrative because of how it situates both the reader and the characters within a condensed setting. The physical place becomes a marker of suffering, grief, and self-identification. The traumatized can become haunted by the place and constantly have to re-experience the event and be in a state of mediating the present with the returning past when in this space (Balaev 160). Marie reflects on this connection as she enters the physical spaces where the trauma occurred:

It’s possible that I have lost track of the dates, the time, the chapters and permutations of the sto ry. That afterwards, I reconstructed what I could about Ai-Ming’s family and mine. Years later, certain images persisted in my memory–a vast desert, a poet who courted beautiful Swirl with a story not his own, music that made not a sound–and I returned to them with greater frequency I wanted to find her again, to let her know what I remembered, and to return something of what she had given me (Thien 149-150).

Here, Marie is continuing the processes of trauma, while also ending them. She is forging truth over myth and trying to mediate the two spheres to create a holistic representation of the past. She is also erasing the silences of her parents’ by using her voice to supplement the absence of theirs. Marie learns the names of her family members and in repeating them in the present, she can bring them back to life in an act of mourning. Her voice shines as the most powerful tool she has to combat the ever-present trauma that has inflicted her identity. However, Marie is not entirely successful in this act and the trauma, from the past, continues to exist in the present. She still carries Swirl’s memories, and while they have given her some solace, they still will continue to visit her as she holds Swirl in her memory. Her haunting leads to travel, to continue to uncover these stories.

Marie feels Ai-Ming as she travels to China and acknowledges Ai-Ming’s ever-presence in her actions as an archivist of the family history, “She was a sister to me; from the beginning we were joined, two halves of the world Sparrow and Kai had left behind” (Thien 199). Even though she is physically separated from Ai-Ming as she leaves to travel to the U.S., where they were providing a safe haven for Chinese students having escaped the Tiananmen Massacre, she still feels this intense bond to her be cause of their shared position within the generations of their families. And, part of Marie’s draw to visit China comes from her want to finish Ai-Ming’s story. She comes across those that knew Ai-Ming and Sparrow. Her interaction with a young woman at the local radio station with a copy of Sparrow’s music shows the impacts of the family’s trauma that goes beyond the scope of the family system. She says as they listen to the composition, “‘The first movement is finished. It will never come back again, But, Marie, how can I put it? It might be finished, it might be over, but that doesn’t mean I’ve stopped hear ing it’” (Thien 418). This music is forever a symbol of what her family went through, maintained in the archives of a radio host it will live on, outside of Marie’s control. She can only sit and listen to its effects and the story it holds. For Marie, she can leave behind the music itself but its past will stay with her. This past can never be rewritten or truly revisited, but it remains.

The Coda shows a final weaving together of the stories within these family lines. It shows the holes that still remain within the narrative that Marie is attempting to fill. Marie’s grief is something that she can begin to let go of as she processes these accounts and continues her archival work. She says, “I

continue to live my life, to let my parents go and seek my own freedom” (Thien 461). In this statement, Marie is able to permit herself to let go of some of the trauma she has inherited, stopping its continuous cycle within the family line. It is the voice she provides to these stories that allow her to mourn and to understand her family and their actions. However, the inability to find Ai-Ming holds her back from en tirely grieving, “I will wait for Ai-Ming to find me and I continue to believe that I will find her– tomorrow, perhaps, or in a dozen years” (Thien 463). As one of the final statements within the novel, it is clear that trauma’s effects are all-encompassing to the point that it will take decades to reconcile what Marie has lost. There are unknowns by the end of the novel and questions unanswered, however; like Marie, the reader is left somewhat in the past because there is so much unsaid.

Conclusion:

In a review for The Oxford Culture Review, Tilly Nevin writes, “Although Thien shows how language in a political climate holds enormous power, she also explores the inadequacy of words. It is music rather than fiction which provides her characters with consolation” (1). Like many reviews of Thien’s novel, the significance of its legacy lies in Thien’s ability to intertwine history, politics, and mu sic to tell the stories of the Cultural Revolution. I agree with the argument that music plays a key role in Thien’s narrative, in its ability to elevate the written word to be something lyrical and heard. Senses are enlightened in Thien’s use of music and violence is not forgotten, instead it is tamed through the mu sical retelling. Stephanie Boland in the New Statesman isolates politics and violence in the novel, “All regimes rely on secrets and silence to operate. Do Not Say We Have Nothing reminds us what fiction can do for the truth. It speaks to the humanity that continues even in the harshest, most self-destructive paranoid conditions, and it shows how the savagery of destroying culture comes hand-in-hand with the destruction of human bodies” (3). What Boland writes is what the basis of this paper was founded on, a want to reveal the forms of violence inflicted on the Chinese population by the Chinese Communist Par ty. From this point, I saw a gap in the conversation about Thien’s novel that could be fulfilled through the application of trauma theory to show the influence that Thien’s novel would have, if added to a canon of research on generational trauma.

Joshua Pederson argues that literary critics need to be ready to experience authors writing trauma

in lengthy language because of how “multi-sensory” trauma can be. More words need to be used to de scribe its totality in mind, body, soul, rather than sparse prose that does include the scope of the victims’ experiences (339). Thien accomplishes this in Do Not Say We Have Nothing by exposing the traumas of her characters, simultaneously exposing the traumas of many, and entering into a form of grieving for the community. Thien represents a group of Chinese Canadian writers that are working to provide support to the community through a presence in the arts and literature community. Zhen Liu writes that, literature can allow for the community to dismantle traditional ideas of cultural oppression and racism that has held Asian-Canadians at bay (87). Thien emblazons this voice through Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel in her profound account for the history that has been passed down within China. This is where the significance of Thien’s work lies, in her ability to provide voice to those that have had their voices taken away by censorship or been lost in the passing of time. Her novel provides an account of generational trauma that encapsulates two families and three generations, carrying her reader through out this intense history and violence. Thien enables the reader to become intertwined with this history through the human view it is told through, allowing for hope that these traumas can be mourned.

Works Cited

Balaev, Michelle. “Trends in Literary Trauma Theory.” Mosaic: An Interdisciplinary Critical Journal, vol. 41, no. 2, 2008, pp. 149–166. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44029500. Accessed 15 Oct. 2020.

Boland, Stephanie. Why Do Not Say We Have Nothing Should Win the Man Booker, New Statesman, 17 Oct. 2016, www.newstatesman.com/culture/books/2016/10/why-do-not-say-we-have-nothingshould-win-man-booker.

Bradbury, Jill and Tarryn Frankish. “Telling Stories for the Next Generation: Trauma and Nostalgia.” Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, vol. 18, no. 3, Aug. 2012, pp. 294-306. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1037/a0029070. Bridgham, Philip. “Mao’s ‘Cultural Revolution’: Origin and Development.” The China Quarterly, no. 29, 1967, pp. 1–35. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/651587. Accessed 16 Sept. 2020.

Brown, M Anne. “China-the Tiananmen Square Massacre of 1989.” Human Rights and the Borders of Suffering: The Promotion of Human Rights in International Politics, Manchester Uni versity Press, Manchester, UK, 2002, pp. 93–127. Caruth, Cathy. “Unclaimed Experience: Trauma and the Possibility of History.” Yale French Studies, no. 79, 1991, pp. 181–192. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2930251. Accessed 12 Sept. 2020.

“Violence and Time: Traumatic Survivals.” Assemblage, no. 20, 1993, pp. 24–25. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3181682. Accessed 12 Sept. 2020. Cheung, King-Kok. Articulate Silences: Hisaye Yamamoto, Maxine Hong Kingston, and Joy Kogewa. Cornell University Press, 1993. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&Auth

Fewell, Judith. “Tattered Scripts: Stories about the Transmission of Trauma across Generations.” Emo tion, Space and Society, vol. 19, 2016, pp. 81–86., doi:10.1016/j.emospa.2015.11.002.

Gillson, Stefanie L., and David A. Ross. “From Generation to Generation: Rethinking ‘Soul Wounds’ and Historical Trauma.” Biological Psychiatry, vol. 86, no. 7, Oct. 2019, pp. e19–e20. EBSCO host, doi:10.1016/j.biopsych.2019.07.033.

Hall, S. (2017). Cultural Identity and Diaspora (922413100 724021019 M. Ryan, Ed.). In 922413099 724021019 J. Rivkin (Ed.), Literary Theory: An Anthology (pp. 1191-1201). West Sussex, UK: John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. https://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/agnesscott/detail.ac tion?docID=4792586.

Hinrichsen, Lisa, and Michael Ryan. “Trauma Studies and the Literature of the US South.” Literary Theory: An Anthology, edited by Julie Rivkin, Ohn Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, West Sussex, UK, 2017, pp. 636–649.

Hirsch, Marianne. “The Generation of Postmemory: Writing and Visual Culture after the Holocaust.” On Writing with Photography, edited by Karen Beckman and Liliane Weissberg, Uni versity of Minnesota Press, 2013, pp. 202–230. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?di rect=true&AuthType=ip,shib&db=mzh&AN=2013297139&site=ehost-live&scope=site.

Krondorfer, Björn. “Unsettling Empathy: Intercultural Dialogue in the Aftermath of Historical and Cultural Trauma.” Breaking Intergenerational Cycles of Repetition: A Global Dialogue on Historical Trauma and Memory, edited by Pumla Gobodo-Madikizela, 1st ed., Verlag Barbara Budrich, Opladen; Berlin; Toronto, 2016, pp. 90–112. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctvd f03jc.11. Accessed 15 Oct. 2020.

Pick, Thomas M. “The Myth of the Trauma/The Trauma of the Myth: Myths as Mediators of Some Long-Term Effects of War Trauma: Peace and Conflict: Journal of Peace Psychology, vol. 7, no. 3, Sept. 2001, pp. 201-226. EBSCOhost, doi:10.1207/S15327949PAC0703B_2.

Pederson, Joshua. “Speak, Trauma: Toward a Revised Understanding of Literary Trauma Theory.” Narrative, vol. 22, no. 3, 2014, pp. 333–353., www.jstor.org/stable/24615578. Accessed 15 Oct. 2020.

Schram, Stuart Reynolds. Mao Zedong. 5 Sept. 2020, www.britannica.com/biography/Mao-Zedong. Senior, Jennifer. “Review: In ‘Do Not Say We Have Nothing,’ a Portrait of Souls Snuffed Out.”

The New York Times, 23 Oct. 2016, www.nytimes.com/2016/10/24/books/review-in-do-not-saywe-have-nothing-a-portrait-of-souls-snuffed-out.html. Accessed 12 Sept. 2020.

Starr, John Bryan. “`Good Mao’, `Bad Mao’: Mao Studies and the Re-Evaluation of Mao’s Political Thought.” The Australian Journal of Chinese Affairs, no. 16, 1986, pp. 1–6. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2158772. Accessed 16 Sept. 2020.

Thien, Madeleine. Do Not Say We Have Nothing: A Novel. W. W. Norton & Company, 2017.

An Excess of the Repressed: Medieval Monsters as Expressions of Excess Human Sensation in the Beowulf Manuscript

Trisha D. Gupta, New York University

The description and conceptualization of monstrous bodies in European medieval texts was, and continues to be, a field of intense developing scholarship holding significant—and perhaps unexpect ed—implications for how we define what makes us human. The Beowulf Manuscript is rich with intricate descriptions of medieval monsters, and the tradition of monstrous categorization further manifests itself in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville and the Liber Monstrorum 1 Scholars such as Susan Kim, in her “Man-Eating Monsters and Ants as Big as Dogs,” theorize that these bestiaries and catalogs of monsters, such as those in The Wonders of the East, stem from a deep-rooted need not only to define mon sters but also to define ourselves through articulating differences between what is monstrous and what is human.

Kim states that “It is about what identifies the monsters and other wonders of the East: as such it is also about what identifies the humans in England, from whom these monsters are ostensibly to be distinguished” (39). She explores the purpose of this distinction by asserting that “monster catalogues can reassure their readers” through reminding readers of their numerous differences from monsters and adherence to human normalcy—a recapitulation that we are not what monsters are (40). Here, Kim hints at a language of conceptualizing monstrosity through what it is and comprehending humanity through what it is not. She refines this claim, however, by articulating a complexity: “monsters have meaning outside their described physical manifestations” (43). She suggests that the bodily differences between humans and monsters, though documented physically in catalogs and bestiaries, hold deeper implica tions that are quite literally “outside” of mere physicality and the superficiality of disparate limbs and body parts. Kim recognizes this subcutaneous connection between understanding the self through defin ing the monster and prompts the budding question of how classifying monsters externally allows us to classify ourselves internally.

Peter Dendle, in his “Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds,” begins to offer a

potential answer to this query in his complication of Kim’s conceptualization of difference: he pro poses that hybridization prompts an understanding of monsters and humans. In his exploration of the purpose for the creation, existence, widespread popularity, and arguable necessity of bestiaries, Dendle states that “by hybridising the monstrous and the human, they [bestiaries] continually raised questions about the essence of ‘humanity’ by contrasting it with ‘animality’ or ‘deformity’” (194). Here, similar to Kim, he summarizes the general, widely stated scholarly belief that humanity is questioned, defined, and redefined through contrasting it with monstrosity. However, Dendle’s incorporation of the term “hybridising” suggests a subtler implication that challenges Kim’s seemingly straightforward notion of difference. Difference, for Kim, appears to imply a simple separation or a certain establishing of bound aries between what is distinctly human and what is distinctly monstrous. Dendle, however, seems to be hinting at a mixing of some sort—a physical connection, even—that ironically precedes the differentia tion between humans and monsters.

A consideration of the analyses of Kim and Dendle prompts the recognition that there is some thing more nuanced or multifaceted lurking underneath the already murky relationship between humans and monsters—something more convoluted than just definition through differentiation. Kim’s movement beyond the exterior physicality of the monster and Dendle’s “hybridisation” suggests a warping, trans formation, or physical connection between what is human and monstrous that turns into something more internal to the human condition. However, what precisely is this hybridization of humans and monsters? Before conceptualizing the intersection of the two beings, it is first necessary to consider the external monstrous form itself as an individual entity: what physically makes a monster a monster? Lara Farina, in her “Wondrous Skins and Tactile Affection: The Blemmye’s Touch,” explores this through the sen sation of touch. Initially, she seems to agree with Kim’s notion of definition through difference in her statement that “the startling and sometimes grotesque variety of human and animal bodies contributes to Anglo-Saxon identity formation via the spectacle of difference” (13). The diction of “spectacle,” im plying something visual or a display of sorts, appears to parallel Kim’s notion of detectable differences between monsters and humans, but underlying Farina’s term is a hidden intricacy.

Farina highlights monstrous sensation not necessarily through difference, but rather through accumulation, and states that “its description [monsters in The Wonders of the East] is generally accu-

mulative, with recognizable, even familiar, bodily elements piling up into hybrid forms” (15). Farina modifies Dendle’s proposition of hybridization by viewing it through the lens of accumulation and subsequently offers a more visually striking image of monstrous body parts piling up onto each other, somewhat resembling the human body itself. Unlike Kim, who bases her argument on the idea of exclusive difference, Farina proposes a rather intimate connection between a “recognizable, even familiar” monstrous body and the human form. In fact, it appears here that if difference is present at all, it is a differentiation of what is monstrous and what is human based on monsters presenting extreme versions of humans. Farina’s notion of accumulation evokes an image of Pinocchio’s nose, but in holding with Farina’s theory, if Pinocchio were a medieval monster, instead of his nose lengthening, he would have two, or three, or perhaps four noses piling on each other. This, however, is neither the case with Pinoc chio nor with typical medieval monsters portrayed in The Wonders of the East. There is then an ambiguity in Farina’s argument as monsters appear to be described not necessarily through accumulation in this manner, but rather through enlargement, and in this particular example, the traditional visual of Pinoc chio’s nose is indeed one of lengthening rather than of multiplying.

Consequently, although Farina postulates that medieval monsters are characterized by accumula tion, it seems that they are rather defined by an excess of the senses, feelings, and urges that we negate, moderate, and bind within ourselves. The significance of this approach to monstrous characterization through excess, rather than through Farina’s accumulation, is that although the difference between hu mans and monsters may superficially seem to be a dissimilarity in nature or quantity, it may on a subtler note, in actuality, be a difference based on degree. Specifically focusing on touch and hearing, exploring the underpinnings of excess underlying these senses, and viewing medieval monsters through a lens of excess evokes unique insight into how and why monsters and humans are characterized how they are.

The Wonders of the East offers a collection of descriptions of such monsters and can be described perhaps as a sort of travel guide or collection of zoological classifications that may have been based partially on the Latin Liber Monstrorum. The text offers numerous descriptive accounts of differing monsters, and one such characterization specifically highlighting touch is: “beyond the river Brixontis, east of there, big and tall people are native who have feet and legs twelve feet long, flanks with chests seven feet long. They are of a dark color, and they are called Enemies. Evidently, whatever person they

get hold of, they eat him” (23). This description begins with distinctly qualitative language such as “big and tall,” which is then juxtaposed with the more quantitative language of “twelve feet long” and “seven feet long.” The Oxford English Dictionary defines accumulation as “the process of gradually increasing or getting more and more of something over a period of time” while it defines excess as “more than is necessary, reasonable, or acceptable.” Placing these definitions in conversation with the description of the aforementioned monster in The Wonders of the East, the excerpt presents a sense of elongation that is more precisely termed excess rather than accumulation. This excess is evocative of the nature of the differences between humans and monsters in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville: “portents, then, or unnatural beings, exist in some cases in the form of a size of the whole body that surpasses common hu man nature” (244). The monsters in The Wonders of the East passage seem to exemplify this surpassing that is mentioned in the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville through their enlarged bodies, and demonstrate that it is perhaps when monsters surpass what is humanely normative that they become monsters.

The elongation in The Wonders of the East is specifically related to skin, however—the very skin that humans have. In fact, the monsters are first called “people,” before being labeled “Enemies,” and the syntactical progression of the thought mirrors the rhetorical pathway of characterizing monsters as simply “big and tall people” to then describing them as something entirely different and placing them more definitively in the category of “monster.” This transition from being “people” to being “Enemies” closely follows the transition from discussing qualitative characteristics of the monsters to quantitatively considering the degree of excess that they symbolize. The text maintains a close attentive focus to the skin as the colorization of the skin is evidently emphasized, but the very act of touching or “hold[ing]” is also isolated—introducing the concept of not only the state of presenting excess but also the ability to act excessively. Are monsters defined by excess both in being and acting, then? A comparison of these monstrous characterizations across other medieval texts may begin to elucidate this question.

In the Old English Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle, an account of a similar monster appears: “When it was daylight on the next day, we traveled to another province of India… They were nine feet tall, and the people were naked, and they did not bother with clothing” (67). Here, there is a similar lengthening of the body and a comparable excess of the sense of touch; however, the inclusion of the detail that the “people were naked” offers a deeper understanding of the conceptualization of mon

strous bodies. This seemingly minute and perhaps initially insignificant detail places a crucial emphasis on the rooting of monstrous characterization in excessive skin. The “shaggy women and men” don’t seem to be acting in excess, then; in fact, they appear to be living quite minimally with no clothing. Monstrous excess is then defined more so by an excess in the state of being, or the excess of skin, than by the performance of excessive acts. The lack of clothing may serve to mirror the simultaneously phys ical and metaphysical unbarred, unfettered, and unrestricted sense of touch that monsters possess—a characteristic that society does not afford humans. Humans cover their skin with clothing: a tangible, visual representation of the restriction and moderation of the human sense of touch.

This connection among the excess of skin, human restriction, and societal boundaries appears earlier in the passage through the visualization of hair: “they were shaggy women and men; they were as shaggy and hairy as wild animals” (67). Here, the hair may originally appear to suggest a parallel to modern human clothing, but this, too, subtly speaks to the notion of excess in a rather unexpected way. The hair is essentially an extension of the skin as it grows naturally from the very pores of the skin; unlike clothing, this body hair is biological and functions as just another form of excess of skin. These men and women are considered to be “as shaggy and hairy as wild animals” perhaps because human society has taught and emphasized the covering (or more contemporary removal) of body hair, which is suggestive of a rejection of what is deemed by society to be an “excess.” It appears then that excess of hair—acting as a unique elongation of skin—prompts the shifting in definition from being “women and men” to being compared to “wild animals” and perhaps, by extension, to monsters.

In the Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, there is another account of such a monster: “in India, there are said to be a race…who are twelve feet tall” (245). Additionally, the Liber Monstrorum, a late seventh/early eight century2 Latin catalog or book of monsters, contains characterizations of a monster similar to that described in The Wonders of the East: “Also certain people from near the Nile and the Brixontis rivers are described as having bodies of amazing whiteness, twelve feet tall, with a split face, long nose, and skinny body” (271). In these selections, there are essentially parallel descriptions of the monsters as people, but with excessive human features—specifically, “twelve feet tall” bodies. In the Liber Monstrorum excerpt, however, there is a moment of literary transitioning: in considering the “long nose,” the nose essentially turns into an excess of skin space and an excess of the sense of touch. It is

not necessarily a quantifiable excess in the number of noses, but rather an excess simply in tactile space. Through these discussions and meditations on the conceptualization of the monstrous excess of the sense of touch, it seems that monstrous and human natures aren’t inherently different—their degrees of sensory experiences and sensory restrictions are.

If the elongation of the nose is conceptualized as not necessarily an excess of the sense of smell, but rather as an excess of skin and touch itself, this same notion can be applied to the sense of hearing: not necessarily an excess of the sense of hearing, but rather an excess of skin. This is demonstrated in The Wonders of the East:

Then it is to the east where people are native who are fifteen feet tall in stature and ten wide. They have a large head and ears like a fan. One ear they spread under them at night, and with the other they cover themselves. The ears are very light, and in their body they are white as milk. If they spot or notice any person in that region, they take their ears in their hands and flee like mad, so quickly that it is supposed they fly. (25).

Here, there is the typical bodily extension quantified by “fifteen feet tall” and “ten wide.” However, focusing on the ears that are “like a fan” and so large that the monsters take them “in their hands” while fleeing, it seems that the sense of hearing itself is not in excess, but it is rather the skin itself that is extended. The description of the monsters wrapping themselves with the ears demonstrates a quite literal shrouding of monsters in this excess of skin; the ears almost act like a double layer on top of the monsters’ first layer of skin, establishing not only an excess in skin space but also an excess of layering. In the Etymologies of Isidore, “The Panotians of Scythia…have such huge ears that they cover all the body,” further reinforcing this excess not of quantity, but rather of size of what is already characteristic of human physiology (245).

The Liber Monstrorum offers a description of a similar monster: “people are born in the regions of the East, who as the fables imagine, reach fifteen feet in height and have bodies of marble whiteness, and ears like fans, with which they cover and conceal themselves at night, and when they see a human, they flee through the vastest deserts [or’ most deserted wastes’] with ears outstretched” (281).

Fig. 1. f. 104r: A panotii, a man with ears projecting on stems, holding an object that looks like a bow. Cotton MS Vitellius A XV, f. 104r. The figure above, from The Wonders of the East, portrays such a monster with ears “outstretched.” This outstretching of the ears, like the monsters’ lack of clothing, demonstrates the absence of restric tions in a novel way: the ears are literally unrestricted, mirroring both an outstretching in the length of the skin and an outstretching of the ears in space. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, in “Thesis VII: The Monster Stands at the Threshold of Becoming,” in his “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” explores the ramifica tions of the monster’s lack of restriction: “the monster is too transgressive, too sexual, perversely erotic,

a law breaker, and so the monster and all that it embodies must be exiled or destroyed” (16). Cohen, though not discussing skin in particular, employs a language of excess or a language of “too” much, in describing monsters as “too transgressive” and “too sexual.” The numerous commas syntactically break up the sentence, which reads like a lengthy list that stylistically reiterates the excess of monsters.

Cohen rationalizes that it is precisely due to this excess that monsters are subsequently “exiled or destroyed” in literature. Monsters are often portrayed as adopting a form of self-exile, just as the faneared monsters in The Wonders of the East and the Liber Monstrorum flee upon sight of a human. It is only in comparison to humans that the monsters demonstrate excess, however—for example, consider if they were to be compared to elephants, would their ears still be considered excessive? Consequently, when the monsters are in the vicinity of humans, their state of essentially normal being becomes labeled excessive by comparison to a predetermined human norm. Once this excess becomes apparent—in this case, when humans are near—the monsters flee or self-exile.

If the monsters do not flee in this manner, they may instead, as Cohen notes, be exiled, which is precisely the case in The Wonders of the East, in which Alexander the Great kills the women monsters that he encounters:

There are other women who have the tusks of a boar and hair down to the heel, and an oxtail on their hindquarters. Those women are thirteen feet tall, and their body has the appearance of marble, and they have the feet of a camel and the teeth of an ass. For their filthiness they were slaughtered by the Macedonian Alexander the Great. He killed them when he could not capture them alive, because they are obscene and disgraceful of body (27-29)

The excess is rooted in the “thirteen feet fall” description, but the medley of animal body parts is rem iniscent of Dendle’s notion of hybridization. Here, it appears not to be a hybridization of humans and monsters, but animals and monsters. In essence, however, the excess of skin eventually leads to the death of the monsters. It is almost as if humanity imposes restrictions on monsters through exiling and killing because monsters in and of themselves do not appear to have any such restrictions. Monsters are then described in relation to humans—while humans are described by a language of moderation, monsters are characterized by a language of excess. Monsters become monsters when

they exceed what is considered normative for human existence, so if humans surpass these norms, does this indicate the potential to cross into the realm of monsters? Dendle states that “these [bestiaries] were not purely catalogues of knowledge for its own sake, but that the genre served a notable role in the pro jection of sublimated anxieties” (194). There indeed appears to be intrinsic lurking anxiety then, under lying how humans define what is normal, what surpasses that line, and what is then deemed monstrous. Dendle goes on to articulate that there is a “psychological need for folkloric monsters running from the ancient to the modern world” (196). What is the root of this “psychological need” however? What defines these “sublimated anxieties?” Kim explains that “the monsters catalogued in the ‘Wonders of the East’ thus define their human readers, not only because of the difference from them but also because they are representations of the difference of alienation recognized within human identity” (40). The anxieties appear to take form then, as Kim defines them as stemming from a sort of “alienation” with in “human identity.” Is this alienation perhaps due to the dichotomy of the public self that must live in moderation and the inner self that desires to live in excess similar to monsters?

Dendle states: probably, we will always project primordial fears onto creatures lurking just beyond reach and just out of sight…the construction of ‘monsters’ in art, literature, and mythology seems to provide a mechanism for articulating human qualities (especially libidinal ones) that must be publicly repudiated, perhaps even exorcised, through very act of externalizing and naming them. (196)

Through writing and reading about monstrous excess in “art, literature, and mythology”—an excess that humans are not necessarily afforded the luxury of expressing in society—the self-alienation and discon nect in human identity are somewhat alleviated. Living without boundaries, whether physical or mental, is perhaps a source of “primordial fear” for humanity that is “project[ed]” and later woven into the very identity of the monster. Thus, the monster acts as either a being through which to live unrestrained lives vicariously or a being to shun, exile, or even kill, as a symbol of abiding by society’s regulations. Farina notes that “to ‘read’ the Blemmye is to touch it, and touching here instigates both a sense of our bodies in space and a feel for an enfolding of surfaces that may not be perceived by the eye alone” (24). Through reading about monsters, humans experience their own sense of touch in excess through imag

ining touching the monsters or sensing bodily movements that may not be ordinarily possible. Monsters represent humans if they experienced senses in excess or lived in excess, instead of living in moderation and repression. Cohen states that “the repressed, however, like Freud himself, always seems to return,” and the “linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a tem porary egress from constraint” (16-17). Perhaps it is not necessarily the repressed in this case, but rather the potential to overcome what is repressed that returns to haunt humanity. Despite the repression of the human desire for excess and to challenge societal boundaries, the monster as a symbol of overcoming repression returns time and time again—through literature, film, and perhaps even the occasional chil dren’s fairytale.

Farina notes a similar idea in her notion that “the self constituted by exclusion must keep the excluded constantly in view, effectively incorporating it within” (13). Placing this idea in conversation with Cohen’s theory, the human self is essentially defined by repression of excess, thereby formulat ing an exclusion of all that is termed excessive, including monsters, that are therefore exiled or killed. However, Farina brilliantly observes that if the self is defined by this exclusion of excess and all that is monstrous, then the monster must be kept “constantly in view” for reference—eventually merging or hybridizing with the human. While Dendle theorizes that this hybridization of what is monstrous and human must come prior to differentiation, it seems then, that regardless of human attempts to differen tiate from monsters, this very exclusion results in an eventual return to eternal hybridization—monsters are excess versions of humans. Farina notes that through monsters, “we see ourselves made wondrous” (23). Monsters allow us to better see ourselves after removing the lens of cultural and social norms that society has imposed on humanity—a liberating, and perhaps terrifying thought.

Cohen combines the notions of the excess of the monster and the repression of the human and notes that by capturing, killing, or categorizing monsters, humans repress something within themselves. The notion of defining humanity through difference from monsters then transitions into alleviating hu man anxieties and suppressed tensions through categorizing monsters and reassuring ourselves that we are successfully observing norms by living in moderation. Monsters represent the extreme and excess of the human sensorium—essentially being more authentically human than we are ourselves. Cohen states that “they [monsters] ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our

perception of difference, our tolerance of its expression. They ask us why we have created them” (20). Just as Cohen asserts that monsters call for a reassessment of humanity and how it defines itself, this conceptualization of monsters as excess dramatically alters how we view monsters and ourselves as the question of difference essentially dissipates. Monsters and humans are both on a spectrum of being simply assuming different levels or degrees of sensation due to repression of human desires. Monsters are projections of unrepressed human selves that we can: 1. either fear and revile in an act of rejecting the notion of excess and living within societal norms, or 2. celebrate in a subtle, yet boldly significant act of accepting the potential of living beyond societal regulations through free, unfettered expression.

1. Since the Beowulf Manuscript has no explicit date specified, its age has been estimated through analyzing scribes’ handwriting, which suggests that it may have been written in the late tenth or early eleventh centuries (The British Library). Isidore of Seville is thought to have written his Etymologies well before this, c. 615-630s (Barney et. al). Isidore’s work may have had a significant influence on Anglo-Sax on scholarship in the late seventh/early eighth centuries, and some scholars claim that the similarities between the monstrous descriptions might suggest that it influenced the text of the Beowulf Manuscript in a similar manner.

“Beowulf.” The British Library, The British Library, 9 Dec. 2014, www.bl.uk/collection-items/beowulf. Isidore, and Stephen A. Barney. The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville. Cambridge University Press, 2010.

2. The Liber Monstrorum is estimated to have been written in the late seventh or early eighth centu ries and scholars have noticed the similarities between the characterizations of monsters in the Liber and The Wonders of the East. Some theorists note that the text of the Liber, although not necessarily passing judgment on the monsters included within, does express a certain degree of skepticism or anxiety regard ing these beings. It is, therefore, a possibility that it may have been written at a time of crisis.

McFadden, Brian. “Liber Monstrorum.” Wiley Online Library, American Cancer Society, 3 Aug. 2017, onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/9781118396957.wbemlb132.

Works Cited

“Accumulation.” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, OxfordLearnersDictionaries.com, www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/accumulation. Barney, Stephen A., et al., translators. “Book XI: The Human Being and Portents.” The Etymologies of Isidore of Seville, Cambridge University, pp. 231–246. Cohen, Jeffrey Jerome. “Monster Culture (Seven Theses).” Monster Theory: Reading Culture, University of Minnesota Press, 1996, pp. 3–25.

Dendle, Peter. “Cryptozoology in the Medieval and Modern Worlds.” Folklore, vol. 117, no. 2, Aug. 2006, pp. 190–206., doi:10.1080/00155870600707888.

“Excess” Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary,OxfordLearnersDictionaries.com, www.oxfordlearnersdictionaries.com/us/definition/english/excess_1?q=excess.

Farina, Lara. “Wondrous Skins and Tactile Affection: The Blemmye’s Touch.” Reading Skin in Medieval Literature and Culture, edited by Katie L. Walter and Karl Steel, Palgrave, 2013, pp. 11–18.

Fulk, R. D., translator. The Letter of Alexander the Great to Aristotle. The Beowulf Manuscript, Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 33–83.

Fulk, R. D., translator. The Wonders of the East. The Beowulf Manuscript, Harvard University Press, 2010, pp. 15–31.

Kim, Susan M. “Man-Eating Monsters and Ants as Big as Dogs: The Alienated Language of the Cotton Vitellius A. Xv Wonders of the East.” Animals and the Symbolic in Medieval Art and Literature, edited by L. A. Houwen, Groningen: Forsten, 1997, pp. 38–51. London, British Library, Cotton MS Vitellius A XV d. 1631, fol. 104r. Porsia, Franco. Liber Monstrorum. Dedalo Libri, 1976.

‘Out with It’: The Suppression and Power of Female Rage in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own

Maggie Yuan, Rice University

One of the most compelling moments in Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own is her criti cism of Charlotte Brontë’s rage, during which Woolf argues the expression of anger invalidates literary integrity. Her aversion to anger arose from a modernist literary sentiment that valued impersonal art, as well as cultural values of the Victorian era and conciliatory motives of early feminists, all which sought approval from a male-dominated social landscape. By exploring the literary and historical context of the suppression of female anger during Woolf’s career, I challenge the disapproval of female rage in A Room of One’s Own. Female rage is a valuable source of insight, energy, and freedom. The expression of female rage is act of rebellion that produces impactful artwork and social progress, as feminist writers Jane Marcus and Audre Lorde argue. The restraint of female rage that Woolf espouses not only derives from concessions to patriarchal standards, but also acts as a systemic tool that silences minorities—par ticularly women of color, whose voices have been historically excluded from the feminist literary canon, including A Room of One’s Own. In a novel in which women need “a room of one’s own” to write, there must be room made for female anger.

In A Room One’s Own, Woolf articulates her distaste for the expression of anger and explains that female writers must avoid rage for the sake of preserving their novels’ artistic integrity. While examining passages in Jane Eyre, Woolf argues that the single error of the novel is Charlotte Brontë’s inability to quell her anger. Asserting that “anger was tampering with the integrity of Charlotte Brontë the novelist,” she makes explicit that rage threatens the execution of an artist’s vision for their work (Woolf 72). Woolf laments that Bronte’s rage detracts from the focus on her narrative, leading to a story that is moved by personal feelings. While she acknowledges that Brontë’s rage arose rightfully from the struggles she faced as a woman—she was “made stagnate in a parsonage mending stockings when she wanted to wander free over the world”—Woolf nonetheless concludes that writing suffers when anger takes reign (72). Female writers must restrain their rage, as the consequences of anger tarnishes the experience of reading the novel. Brontë’s anger, to Woolf, produces writing that is laced with “acidity,”

interrupting the narrative with the “influence of fear” and “contract[ing] those books, splendid as they are, with a spasm of pain” (Woolf 72). The expression of anger is a fatal flaw, one so potent that Woolf winces in “pain” when she sees its remnants in Jane Eyre. Woolf makes her stance uncompromisable: anger impairs the artistic integrity of literature, and female writers must avoid expressing their rage in order to uphold the credibility of their work.

Woolf’s resistance to the expression of anger can be contextualized by the impersonal sentiments of modernist literature. Alex Zwerdling argues that Woolf’s principles aligned with the “whole literary climate” of the early 20th century, which “fostered the kind of detached, controlled, impersonal aesthetic theory she adopted” (70). Seeking to erase their identities from their creative work, modernists valued impersonal art that was “detached” from the self. For modernists, it was precisely emotions such as rage that threatened the successful erasure of the self. Woolf’s primary criticism of Brontë is that “she left her story, to which her entire was due, to attend to some personal grievance”—that is, the expression of rage. Brontë infused her novel with the trials of her identity, which Woolf viewed as irreconcilable with detached modernist sentiment. Her assertion that Brontë’s “entire [attention] was due” to the integrity of the novel can be further elaborated as the modernist justification for the erasure of the self, an idea delin eated by T.S. Eliot in his 1919 essay, “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Asserting that “the more perfect the artist, the more completely separate in him will be the man who suffers and the mind which creates,” Eliot makes the case that artists must learn to eradicate any traces of the personal. In modernist authorship, the relinquishment of the self is a necessary sacrifice. Eliot goes as far as to argue that art is forged from the very act of erasing the self, that art is “not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion,” and “not the expression of personality, but an escape from personality” (Eliot). In Eliot’s essay, artistry and impersonality are mutually dependent; artists must successfully separate themselves from their creations. Any personal emotions, such as the rage of Brontë that Woolf criticizes, must be excluded from in order to produce true artwork. The detachment from the self, a value espoused by Eliot and his fellow modernists, led to the aversion to anger that Woolf displays in A Room of One’s Own. Implicated in Woolf’s contemptuous relationship with her anger was the desire for support from a male-dominated environment, as reflected by the backdrop of the feminist movement. During an era in which feminist leaders were concerned about the viability of rage, many female writers used “concilia

tory gestures” in order to appease male lawmakers and scholars (Zwerdling 73). Feminists were inclined to suppress violent emotions in order to attain the support of men in power—an inclination that impact ed Woolf’s own literary values. Indeed, the sense of urgency in A Room of One’s Own—from Woolf’s critique of the “acidity” in Brontë’s writing to her succinct warning to the fictional writer Mary Carimi chael (“If you stop to curse you are lost”)—speaks to the idea that excess anger was antithetical to male approval (92). Woolf’s distaste for anger veered towards repulsion, a knee-jerk response that any rage in her work would tarnish her literary success. In his analysis of her diary entries and letters, Zwerdling explains that Woolf saw her anger as “embarrassing and childish; at best it only provides some interest ing raw material for the artist to refine and contain” (69). Woolf’s hostility to rage led her to only express this emotion in her private writings, a realm in which she could release her turbulent feelings and successfully detach herself. She viewed anger as an uncontrollable emotion that harmed the integrity of a literary work, just as the suffragists saw rage as a detriment to gaining male support. From this light, Woolf’s rebuke of Brontë’s rage is contextualized by both modernist theory and the feminist movement; both are tied irrevocably to gaining the approval of male authority. Zwerdling makes the case that Woolf was entrapped by “the urge to conciliate the male audience she could never entirely ignore” (68). As much as A Room of One’s Own espouses the necessity of female agency and authorship, Woolf’s rebuke of female rage is undeniably connected to historical conciliations to patriarchal structures of power. A contemporary feminist lens can provide more historical context to Woolf’s aversion to rage and offer an incendiary opposing perspective—when expressed openly, anger is a form of rebellion, an agent of social change, and a catalyst for profound artwork. In Art and Anger: Reading like a Woman, Jane Marcus looks to the values of the Victorian era as further reasoning for Woolf’s suppression of anger. In a time period where anger was considered a “masculine emotion,” the female expression of rage was “the great Victorian taboo” (Marcus 45–46). Marcus acknowledges that Woolf’s restraint of rage was necessary in order for her to succeed as a female writer in the Victorian era. At the same time, Marcus credits rage as a force that drove the creative pursuits of Woolf and makes the case that anger is a valuable resource for female artists. Referring to anger as the “great sewer of the imagination,” Mar cus asserts that these recesses of female rage remain in Woolf’s work (138). Indeed, there is anger bur ied between the lines of A Room of One’s Own; the emblazoned defense of female intellect—“Lock up

your libraries if you like; but there is no gate, no lock, no bolt that you can set upon the freedom of my mind”—speaks to the defiance smoldering below the surface of its conciliatory tone (Woolf 75). Marcus contends that such rage should be uncovered. Contradicting the modernist belief that emotion should be detached from writing, Marcus declares, “Anger is not anathema in art…. Rage and savage indigna tion sear the hearts of female poets and female critics” (153). If violent emotions such as anger are the creative forces behind great works of art, as Marcus puts it, rage should be brought to the center stage of female artistry. This anger—arising precisely from the patriarchal standards that they are inclined to comply with—gives female creators a conviction that is unparalleled. Reflecting on the lives of Woolf and her Victorian peers who repressed their anger, Marcus urges the modern-day female writer, “Out with it. No more burying our wrath, turning it against ourselves” (153). Highlighting the right of female writers to openly express anger, Marcus’s contemporary feminist perspective designates rage as an act of defiance, one that dismantles the patriarchal limitations that ensnare all women.

If anger is an act of liberation for all women, then its expression is rendered more critical by the intersectional struggles faced by women of color—an acknowledgment is not addressed by Woolf in A Room of One’s Own. At the end of the novel, Woolf presents a call to action to women that ignores the disproportionate obstacles that women of color must face. Chastising women for not achieving enough and urging them to take full advantage of the resources available to them, she asserts, “The excuse of lack of opportunity, training, encouragement, leisure, and money no longer holds good” (Woolf 111). Yet her assertion only applies to white women; far more societal and institutional barriers prevent women of color from accessing these opportunities that Woolf claims are readily available to all women. When Woolf points to the right of 20th-century women to vote, for instance, it must be taken into account that this right did not apply to women of color in 1929 (the year in which A Room of One’s Own was published). In the United States, while the passage of the 19th Amendment in 1920 gave women the right to vote, women of color were barred from voting due to discriminatory voting practices such as poll taxes and literacy tests; they were only able to vote 45 years later, after the ratification of the Voting Rights Act in 1965 (“Voting”). The concerns of women of color are not taken into account in Woolf’s address ment of “all women.” Her accusation to women of the 20th century, “What is your excuse?” overlooks the fact that it is far more difficult for women of color to acquire “opportunity, training, encouragement,

leisure, and money,” all assets necessary for the achievements Woolf expects (110). The feminist call to action of A Room of One’s Own turns a blind eye to the struggles that women of color are forced to confront.

These intersectional obstacles serve to complicate the expression of rage for women of color, making it far more difficult for them to express their anger in works of art and other social spaces—a struggle that is multiplied for Black women. As Audre Lorde asserts in her 1981 keynote presentation, “The Uses of Anger: Women responding to racism,” Black women must contend with a rage that has been multiplied, stoked by misogyny and racism alike—they also face the greatest expectation to sup press this anger. The limitations placed upon Black women’s expression of rage come not only from men, but also from white women and non-Black women of color. Lorde gives the modern example of tone policing; reflecting on academic conferences where white women have responded negatively to her open expressions of anger, she explains how Black women are forced to curb their rage so as to appease privileged women. She also presents a particularly pertinent instance of how the privilege of non-Black women of color can contribute to anti-Blackness; when conversing with a white colleague about a col lection of work produced by non-Black women of color, she recalls the colleague admitting, “It allows me to deal with racism without dealing with the harshness of Black women” (Lorde). The aggressions that Black women face form what Lorde calls a “symphony of anger at being silenced at being uncho sen, and she elaborates that it is a “symphony rather than cacophony because we have had to learn to orchestrate those furies so that they do not tear us apart.” Lorde’s honest account of the disproportionate struggles she has faced as a Black scholar rejects Woolf’s distilled claim that “all women” in the early 20th century have access to ample resources to guarantee their professional success and social digni ty—evidently, this equality was not the case during the time of Lorde’s speech (published 50 years after A Room of Own’s Own), nor is it the case today. The heightened experience of anger and suppression of that anger that Black women undergo in contemporary society is a testament to the disproportionate struggles that women of color continue to face—a narrative excluded from Woolf’s colorblind call to action.

While highlighting the voices of Black women and other women of color, Lorde reaffirms the necessity of the expression of female rage, as Marcus brought up, in an inclusive, contemporary femi

nist exhortation. She reflects candidly on her relationship with her anger, “I have lived with that anger, ignoring it … Once I did it in silence, afraid of the weight,” before she concludes, “My fear of anger taught me nothing” (Lorde). Lorde’s addressment of the “fear of anger” echoes the detachment espoused by modernist literature and the suffragist movement. Her admission that she was “afraid of the weight” of her rage begets the question of whether or not the writings of Woolf, and the modernist movement as a whole, drew their impersonal style from a primal “fear” of rage, rather than dedication to literary cred ibility. This fear of anger, as Lorde asserts, is not conducive to creating more impactful artwork. Like Marcus, she zeroes in on female anger as a “powerful source of energy serving progress and change.” Her assertion that rage is a form of “energy,” one that can be funneled into social progress, creative works, and female solidarity, poses a refutation to Woolf’s modernist, Victorian designation of anger as unconducive to coherent writing. Charlotte Brontë’s rage over being “made stagnate in a parsonage mending stockings when she wanted to wander free over the world” then need not be removed from the source (Woolf 72); her anger—tied to her “self” that the modernists sought to eradicate—can make for an even more compelling work of literature and serve as an act of feminist rebellion. The expression of rage also gives way to a powerful agent of change in intersectional feminism: the act of listening to one another. Calling upon women to honor the rage expressed by others, Lorde attests that “The angers between women will not kill us if we can articulate them with precision.” The recognition of other wom en’s anger can be a platform for intersectional feminist solidarity, giving space to women of color who have been historically excluded from the works of Woolf and the feminist literary canon. The contemporary feminist perspective honors the stagnate anger of female writers of the past, from Woolf to Brontë, while calling upon present-day women to channel their rage into creative works—for the sake of female liberation, solidarity, and progress.

When expressed openly, female anger is an agent of social change and creative insight. The sup pression of female rage espoused by Virginia Woolf in A Room of One’s Own can be analyzed through the lenses of modernist literature, the suffragist movement, and the Victoria era, whose values restrained female expression of emotion. Woolf’s detachment from anger in her writing reflects sensibilities of modernists and feminists in her era, indicating their aim to conciliate a male-dominated society. Vocaliz ing anger is an act of feminist rebellion that challenges patriarchal standards and grants women freedom,

as contemporary feminists Jane Marcus and Audre Lorde have illustrated. Rage is an arsenal of energy and empowerment; when channeled into creative works, female anger can produce compelling insights that can transform society. The liberation of female rage is pertinent to women of color, particularly Black women, whose voices must be amplified in the feminist literary community. If women are to be free to write novels—the dream that Woolf stoked in A Room of One’s Own—they must be emboldened to release the anger that has been silenced for far too long.

Works Cited

Eliot, T.S. “Tradition and the Individual Talent.” Poetry Foundation, 2009, www.poetryfoundation.org/articles/69400/tradition-and-the-individual-talent.

Lorde, Audre. “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism.” BlackPast, 12 Aug. 2012, Storrs, CT, www.blackpast.org/african-american-history/1981-audre-lorde-uses-anger-women-respond ing-racism/

Marcus, Jane. Art and Anger: Reading Like a Woman. Ohio State University Press, 1988.

“Voting Rights Act.” Legal Information Institute, Cornell Law School, www.law.cornell.edu/wex/vot ing_rights_act

Woolf, Virginia. A Room of One’s Own. Harcourt, Inc., 2005.

Food, Money, and Sex as Colonial Appetites and Inversions from The Tempest toThe Sea Voyage

Cliff Musial, Hamilton College

In Shakespeare’s The Tempest, Prospero’s island offers a fantastical vision of art, colonialism, and political power somewhat removed from reality. Prospero’s island, while endowed with fantastic magic and spirits, offers a hypothetical, allegorical vision of colonialism. Gritty political concerns of betrayal, power, and subjugation drive the plot, but the material and practical desires that underlie those rarely come to the surface. As Gonzalo points out, even the simplest reality of the wetness of the ocean dissipates on the island, when the beached crew’s garments become inexplicably dry and “new-dyed” after being “drenched in the sea” and should have been “stained with salt water” (2.1.59-61). The Tem pest eschews such pragmatisms in favor of lofty, ideological concerns.

However, just over ten years after Shakespeare likely wrote The Tempest, John Fletcher and Philip Massinger borrowed and manipulated elements of Shakespeare’s play to imagine an island quite unlike Prospero’s in their 1622 play The Sea Voyage. As in The Tempest, a ship full of Europeans from nobility to lower class become stranded on a deserted island after a heavy storm. Yet the island of The Sea Voyage has no magical powers that dry clothes, or draw attention away from basic needs and desires. In The Sea Voyage, appetites for money, food, and sex overcome all else. Furthermore, Fletcher and Massinger use these appetites to invert norms of the time, creating a play that engages with their contemporary thinkers, following Thomas Mun and Michel de Montaigne and challenging Robert Bur ton, by sharply contesting the political status quo. The appetite for wealth joins with Mun by showing the worthlessness of precious metals without trade and the consequences of English privateering in the war with Spain. The appetite for food draws on accounts of starvation in Jamestown to, like Montaigne, challenge the European notion of superiority over the “cannibals” of the New World. And finally, the appetite for sex challenges patriarchy and the notion of inherent male superiority popular among Re naissance thinkers such as Robert Burton by reversing the sexual roles of men and women, making them equally beast-like in their desires and the resolutive marriages concluding the play unconvincing to undermine patriarchal hegemony.

The appetite for wealth immediately divides the two plays. In The Tempest, material wealth has little importance. In one instance, it distracts Stefano and Trinculo from their plot with Caliban to kill Prospero. Prospero’s noble finery catches Trinculo’s attention, but Caliban reprimands him. “Let it alone, thou fool. It is but trash” (4.1.222). Caliban looks beyond material wealth toward the political power to be gained by killing Prospero: political power and control dominate characters’ aspirations on the island. Caliban wants to take back control of his island, Prospero wants to reestablish his political power in Milan by marrying Miranda to Ferdinand, Gonzalo wants to establish a primitive utopia, An tonio wants Sebastian to be King of Naples, and Stefano wants to be king of the island. Wealth merely distracts the poor unworthy of reaching for the loftier goal of power.

In The Sea Voyage, however, concern for material wealth drives the play from the first scene when Lamure and Franville must cast their money and possessions overboard to lighten the sinking ship per the captain’s command (1.1.110-144). Tibalt, however, whom Fletcher and Massinger describe as “a merry gentleman” free from these debilitating material desires, establishes himself as a moral center with his carefree, measured response.

I ha’ nothing but my skin

And my clothes, my sword here, and myself; Two crowns in my pocket; two pair of cards

And three false dice. I can swim like a fish, Rascal, nothing to hinder me (1.1.139-143).

For Tibalt, possessions and wealth are hindrances, especially for sea-faring men like him who often need to “swim like a fish,” and the events on the island prove him right. Sebastian and Nicusa’s treasure distracts the Frenchmen from their escape, and dooms them to starve on the island.

However, as Gitanjali Shahani argues, this does not equate to as simple of a moralizing statement against greed as it may seem. Rather than condemning materialism, The Sea Voyage points to a contem porary concern about the intrinsic value of gold. “In particular, the slippage between its [gold’s] intrinsic value as metal and its nominal value as coinage simultaneously confounded and fascinated several early modern writers” (Shahani 9). A common English concern around this time, articulated by Thomas Mun in A Discourse of Trade from England unto the East-Indies, published a year before The Sea Voyage

played, was that England exported and pursued too much bullion, especially through privateering. Mun observed that gold and money only gained value through trade, and feared that England lacked intrinsi cally valuable commodities in its pursuit of bullion (Mun, as cited in Shahani 19). The pile of gold plays right into contemporary concerns over intrinsic and exchange value. Tibalt demonstrates this by show ing Franville, who complains of hunger after joining in the fatal fight over the gold, how invaluable gold becomes without any means of exchange.

Here’s a pestle of portigue, sir;

‘Tis excellent meat with sour sauce. And here’s two chains—suppose ‘em sausages (1.3.239-241).

A portigue—a Portuguese coin—and metal chains offer little in satisfying hunger.

Rita Banerjee notes a similar historical complication in early Spanish colonialism. Rather than cultivating permanent colonies in the New World as other European nations did, the Spanish primarily used privateering and exhaustive gold mining to chase after bullion. This bullion, however, “ended up in the coffers of other European nations whose policies of trade and plantation proved more effective in the long run” (Banerjee 298). From an economic perspective that Mun brought to attention in the 1620s, pursuing intrinsically valuable commodities to trade for currency did far more for the wealth of a na tion than just pursuing the metals that could be made into currency to trade for these commodities. This conflict plays out explicitly in The Sea Voyage. The French pirates chasing after gold end up starving with an incredible amount of wealth that has no value on its own, representing the eventual fate of Spain that Mun feared for England. The Portuguese settlers, who cultivated a colony that yielded intrinsically valuable commodities, end up with more practical wealth, even if it is theoretically less valuable than the gold. Sebastian and Nicusa acquire the ship to escape the island, and Roselia and the pseudo-Amazons acquire the fruitful island where they have plentiful food (although, as Shahani points out, a sexual appetite quickly replaces an appetite for food).

Without trade, the gold has no value. Thus, Shahani rightly observes that The Sea Voyage does not necessarily critique the greed of early modern colonial ventures; it rather endorses a mercantile mod el of colonization (Shahani 17). The value of the play’s gold returns only once it is given back to the Amazons in exchange for food, which has intrinsic value. Fletcher and Massinger decry privateering’s

sole aim of bullion and gold, not materialism generally. But in doing so, they put forward the first of three politically subversive inversions in the play. They align themselves against Spanish privateering, which is certainly not subversive, but also against English privateering. By this time, almost twenty years after the end of the war with Spain, and thus the height of English privateering, Mun had only just published A Discourse of Trade from England Unto the East Indies, and privateering was still consid ered a very legitimate practice without concern for economic consequences. The Sea Voyage maintains an important political and theoretical position by exposing the fundamental worthlessness of gold and currency without exchange, and the consequences of dedicating resources to privateering. Materialism, then, is one of many appetites that compel the characters of The Sea Voyage. However, once Sebastian and Nicusa sail off with the ship and the crew finds itself stranded, the most basic appetite, for food, supersedes that for material wealth. Fewer than 40 lines after Aminta calls the pirates’ attention to the ship (1.3.210), Tibalt brings up the proposition of supper, and Lamure, Franville, and the Surgeon ask in unison, “Where’s the meat?” (1.3.249). Tibalt mocks them (1.3.250), yet despite his characteristic temperance, of course cannot avoid hunger as he avoids other appetites. This desperate craving for meat that haunts the wealthy Frenchmen becomes especially interesting in light of the histor ical availability of meat in England. As Stephen Greenblatt points out about 16th and early 17th century England, “the lower classes then, as throughout most of history, subsisted on one of two foodstuffs, usually low in protein. The upper classes disdained green vegetables and milk and gorged themselves on meat” (Greenblatt 3). This same discrepancy emerges between the upper class (Franville, Lamure, and Surgeon) and the lower class (Tibalt and the shipmaster) on stage. The lack of meat does not concern Tibalt, the shipmaster, or the sailors, yet renders the higher class Lamure, Franville, and Surgeon pitiful and desperate. Considering that theaters at the time were “unusually inclusive” (Syme 95) of all social classes, this discrepancy would likely have incited very different reactions among audience members, and may have even incited conflict. As Syme shows, such conflicts were already common in the some what equalizing space of the theater.

Audience members from all social spheres could gain admission and enjoy the same spectacles. Social hierarchies became dangerously porous in this shared space, as Dekker ’s stage-sitters ex perienced firsthand: the commoners in the yard could hurl abuse and even dirt at the gentle and

noble audience members onstage” (Syme 95).

With Fletcher and Massinger undoubtedly privy to such common practice, they must have intended the comedic patheticness of nobles deprived of their meat to incite a strong reaction with the audience. If there was ever a time to “hurl abuse” or “dirt” at the noble audience members, it would be this scene. Especially as it is Tibalt who once again flaunts superiority by disrupting their plans with a heavy, patronizing hand (3.1.144-156), the playwrights invert the feudal view of cultivated, wealthy nobles allowing inferior, desperate peasants to subsist out of generosity. Away from the comforts and class divisions of Europe, the upper classes become pathetic and helpless.

Yet this lighthearted mockery moves into darker territory when this desire for meat turns into desire for human flesh, and the three nobles attempt to eat Aminta. This scene, too, has comedic lan guage, and certainly would have provoked more laughter and mockery from the audience. However, it also points to the recent tragic suffering of settlers at Jamestown, disconnected from class concerns. Just as The Tempest deals with a magical, hypothetical instance of a colonial encounter and The Sea Voy age translates it to worldly, monetary concerns, Gonzalo of The Tempest sees Montaigne’s essentially imaginary society of cannibals as an optimistic possibility, whereas The Sea Voyage shows cannibalism through the horror of the way it really played out in Jamestown, as a practice of the colonizers themselves.

Alison Brown and Jason Denman contend that Fletcher and Massinger drew from accounts of “The Starving Time” in Jamestown from 1608-1610 to construct this scene. The language that Lamure uses to describe a man eating his wife, as well as the possibility of powdering Aminta, parallel Smith’s in A True Relation and Percy’s A Trewe Relacyon, firsthand accounts of the Starving Time in Jamestown. (Brown and Denman, 120). Although these accounts were not yet published, word of mouth would have likely spread them through England, and the parallels of diction suggest that Fletcher and Massinger had access to written versions before their publication. This speaks to an anxiety resonant in England as its first colonial plantations encountered hardships, or “the anxious nature of the play’s colonial politics” (Brown and Denman 120).

Other parallels also link the events of The Sea Voyage to England’s early colonies. “Clarinda’s abrupt and politically expedient marriage to Aminta’s brother, Raymond, may be an allusion to Poca

hontas’s marriage to Rolfe, a ceremony that temporarily brought peace to the region” (Brown and Den man 122). The attitude of the Frenchmen toward the Amazons may also reflect English settlers’ views of Native Americans. “They must have seemed powerful, even alluring, in their ability to live off the land” (Brown and Denman 122). Especially in early colonial ventures, the relationship between the starving, desperate French pirates and the plentiful food of the Amazons reflects how starving Jamestown settlers would have sought the help of natives.

Yet this cannibalistic scene does something more. Similar to the inversion of class divisions I mention earlier, an even larger inversion is at play, especially in regards to Montaigne. In “Of Canni bals,” Montaigne compares New World “barbarian” practices to those of the Spanish Inquisition, con tending that what Europeans do is more cruel.

I thinke there is more barbarisme in eating men alive, than to feed upon them being dead; to mangle by tortures and torments a body full of lively sense, to roast him in peeces, and to make dogs and swine to gnaw and teare him in mammocks (as we have not only read, but seene very lately, yea and in our owne memorie, not amongst ancient enemies, but our neighbours and fel low-citizens; and which is worse, under pretence of pietie and religion) than to roast and eat him after he is dead. (Montaigne 226)

The Sea Voyage also makes Europeans more savage than any savages they imagined in the New World. Rather than diverge from Shakespeare, Fletcher and Massinger more or less follow him in this regard. In The Tempest, Shakespeare draws from a different passage of “Of Cannibals,” which he lets serve as Gonzalo’s dream of a utopia on Prospero’s island. It is a nation, would I answer Plato, that hath no kinde of traffike, no knowledge of Letters, no intelligence of numbers, no name of magistrate, nor of politike superioritie; no use of service, of riches or of povertie; no contracts, no successions, no partitions, no occupation but idle; no respect of kindred, but common, no apparell but naturall, no manuring of lands, no use of wine, corne, or mettle. The very words that import lying, falshood, treason, dissimulations, covet ousnes, envie, detraction, and pardon, were never heard of amongst them. (Montaigne 222)

By endowing Gonzalo with the noble, idealistic vision nearly verbatim to Montaigne’s “Of Can nibals,” while the most wicked characters of The Tempest mock him for it, Shakespeare imagines the

possibility of a non-European society optimistically (2.1.162-174). Though realistic pessimism drives the colonial possibility of The Sea Voyage, Fletcher and Massinger use the same type of inversion by making the Frenchmen into cannibals and Portuguese women into Amazons. Both plays push against the prevailing colonial view of the superiority of Christendom over New World non-Christians, and chal lenge the differences that seem to divide them.

But Fletcher and Massinger push inversion one step farther with the final appetite present in The Sea Voyage: sex. This appetite ultimately brings about the resolution of the play, which many critics have viewed as misogynistic and heteronormative. As Julie Sutherland observes, Simon Shepherd, Gordon McMullan, Claire Jowett, and Heidi Hutner have all noted in some way how the marriages at the end of the play reinforce patriarchal power and the biological distinction of sexes (Sutherland 92). However, Sutherland convincingly argues that Fletcher and Massinger actually work against heteronor mative, misogynistic Renaissance thought that saw logical men as superior to emotional women.

Renaissance thought and theater often portrayed women as emotional and guided by voracious sexual appetite. “This sexual appetite in women—evidence for sense ruling over reason—was their most degenerative trait” (Sutherland 91). Thinkers such as Robert Burton considered a lusty human “no better than a beast,” and so women’s perceived lust justified their comparison to beasts. However, as I point out earlier, comparably illogical appetites for money and wealth guide the men in The Sea Voyage, re ducing them to beastliness. Sutherland argues that The Sea Voyage “satirically addresses the mystery of humankind’s nature, providing a picture of men and women not as equally noble but equally base” (92). The Amazons are certainly guided by a sexual appetite not unusual in Renaissance theater, but appetites sexual and otherwise also make men into beasts, who are frequently referred to as “dogs” (Sutherland 98). Although the final act reinforces the idea that women “naturally give way to male authority,” the destabilization of order in the rest of the play undermines this: The Sea Voyage reduces “all humans to a more animal level” (Sutherland 92). Yet another inversion takes place here.

[The play] inverts the common notion of women as being inferior to men and rather gives wom en the status of powerful hunters who prey on men. The men, in turn, are described in ignoble terms usually reserved for ‘savages’ and beasts. Further, they are treated as non-human animals whose worth lies solely in their reproductive potential and the sexual pleasure they bring to

women (Sutherland 93).

Sutherland shows us that Fletcher and Massinger turn the tables on the sexual appetites and roles of men and women. Men are the lusty beasts whose sole purpose lies in “reproductive potential,” whereas the women are the dominant hunters, albeit also driven by a lusty appetite. However, this appetite does not debase the women to be merely agents of reproduction, as is common in Renaissance theater. At first glance, the concluding marriages of the play seem to reinforce the heterosexual patriarchy it has thus far challenged. Rosellia, who has exercised strong control over the other women and fierce disdain towards the men, who are their “slaves” to be used “with all the austerity that may be” (4.2.1-2), submissively and readily relinquishes her power once reunited with Sebastian.

She does give up

Herself, her power and joys and all to you, To be discharged of ‘em as too burdensome. Welcome in any shape! (5.4.96-99)

After Sebastian refers to both of them in the third person, Rosellia follows suit, calling herself “she,” which further isolates herself from her decisions. This comes as a stark contrast to earlier, when she reluctantly allows the initial sexual exchange. In that scene, Rosellia decrees that the other women may take husbands for a month, but only “if you like their persons / And they approve of yours—for we’ll force nothing” (2.2.234-235). This puts the women in the position of control, and asserts their desire for sexuality over reproduction. Though she will accept daughters to their colony “if you prove fruitful” (2.2.239), the focus is on the desire for men rather than the desire for children. As Hippoli ta says, “We must and will have men!” (2.2.210), not children, and the union will only happen if the women “like their persons.” As Sutherland observes, “they are not merely heterosexual so that they can give their husbands sons. They are heterosexual women who lack men with whom they can find sexual delight” (Sutherland 105). Yet the inclusion of sexual appetite does not undermine this inversion in the way that Robert Burton would have it because men, too, are lusty beasts driven and derided by appetite. And furthermore, men serve as the limiting factor of reproductive potential, whose company is tolerated only to ensure the survival of the colony.

So when Rosellia lets this all go with little resistance, readers and audiences are left with two options. The first would cede that these inversive possibilities are merely included for entertainment, and that Fletcher and Massinger intend to show that the patriarchal status quo returns triumphantly in the end, casting aside the critical themes they have built through the play, and that Rosellia is indeed happy with the end. Rosellia’s speeches in 4.2 and 5.4 reveal that much of her strong-armed rulership can be traced to bitterness over losing her husband. She seems to desire such cruelty toward the men because she believes they killed Sebastian (4.2.12-20). They are “taught to be cruel” “from the sad remembrance of our losses” (5.4.24-25). In this way, it makes perfect sense that being “discharged” of her power is “welcome in any shape.”

The other option, however, would find that the resolution to the play is willfully unconvincing. With this view, readers and audiences should find Rosellia’s sacrifice of agency troubling because it so blatantly contradicts her earlier vision. Indeed, Rosellia doesn’t just give up “power,” but “joys and all” as well (5.4.97). Her concession of power brings her as much sadness as the power itself brings her. While considering Rosellia’s position can only partially support the idea that the marriages are willfully unconvincing because of this complication, the other three marriages progressively demean any possi bility of a satisfying resolution.

Deep problems that contradict such a resolution underlie the first marriage, between Albert and Aminta: grim psychological forces stain their relationship. At the beginning of the play, Aminta express es her feelings regarding Albert and her situation. When Albert suggests she find comfort from the storm inside, she deems that she has no option of comfort. “Am I not circled round with misery?” (1.1.75). Al bert kidnapped her from her comfort, murdering some of her friends, and left her brother and those who survived to “Fortune’s never-satisfied afflictions,” presumably stranding them at sea (1.1.79-88). Aminta is “bound to curse” and “hate” him (1.1.77-78). However, as soon as they survive the storm and safely land on the shore, Aminta turns her hatred to praise.

...and recant… those harsh opinions, Those cruel unkind thoughts I heaped upon ye. Further than that, I must forget your injuries; So far I am tied and fettered to your service.

Believe me, I will learn to love. (1.3.10-15) Importantly, her love does not come first. Rather, Albert saving her life obliges her to be “tied and fettered” to Albert’s service. She “will learn to love” him and “forget [his] injuries.” It is probably true that she does come to love him later, but it is a love that she forces upon herself as a mechanism of survival, coming to love her injurious captor in a clear example of Stockholm Syndrome. Traditionally defined as an unconscious bond formed between a captor or abuser and victim, Celia Jameson, in a 2010 study, reconsiders the possibility of Stockholm Syndrome as “a conscious coping strategy which can be understood as a form of adaptive behaviour, providing hope for the victim in an otherwise hopeless situ ation” (Jameson 2010). Aminta’s behavior matches this definition almost exactly. Perfectly consciously, she adopts a bond with Albert adaptively as a way of “providing hope” in her “otherwise hopeless situa tion,” separated from her brother and surviving friends and having no one to rely on but Albert, who has just saved her life and clearly will continue to do so: “And it shall be my practice to serve” (1.3.16), he tells her after her decision to learn to love him. She does this to preserve her life and hope. Similarly disturbingly, in the second marriage, Clarinda must settle for Raymond when Albert has clearly been the object of her affections throughout the play. When Aminta first suggests that she has “another brother,” Raymond, more suited to Clarinda’s affections than Albert, Clarinda responds harshly for her not to “abuse” her, and “be careful” of her (4.2.118-123). Clarinda never comes around to re solve this, and certainly does not forgive Aminta after finding out the truth, that Albert is Aminta’s lover rather than her brother. Clarinda’s last substantial line in the play is “Away with ‘em [Raymond and Aminta], and in dark prisons bind ‘em. / One word replied, ye die both. Now, brave mother, / Follow thy noble anger, and I’ll help thee” (4.4.36-38). Throughout the resolution of the final act, Clarinda offers no opinionated lines that would suggest she has turned from these harsh sentiments, and certainly not to the point of being willing to marry Raymond. Sebastian reads Raymond’s “suit of my Clarinda,” and de crees that “she is yours” without any consideration for or response from Clarinda (5.4.100). Readers and stage directors can only imagine a helpless, furious, Clarinda standing wordlessly to the side.

Finally, Tibalt seizes the opportunity to abruptly add his marriage to Crocale to the ceremonies, without any permission from Sebastian, making a crude phallic joke in a final comedic insertion (5.4.105-107). Crocale merely responds, “You are still no changeling!”, returning his jab in a lightheart

ed way. However, against the backdrop of the three preceding marriages, this too becomes dark. Tibalt “embraces” Crocale and claims her with explicit sexual charge, without any consideration of her will. Although Crocale does “admire” Tibalt and the Master of the Ship (4.3.73), she never explicitly implied that she desired sex or marriage with either of them. She clearly enjoys presiding over them, but in this resolution, Tibalt takes advantage of the return of patriarchal power to seize his agency over hers. So with this in mind, the seemingly happy resolution of the play turns sour. In all four marriages, the women must settle for marriage despite profound, dark, underlying complications. The ending of the play is a brutal reminder of the realities of patriarchal hegemony, and Fletcher and Massinger’s final harsh cri tique of the political status quo hidden behind the surface-level joy of comedy

In this way, The Sea Voyage brings to light the more realistic pragmatisms of colonialism, es pecially in appetites for money, food, and sex, all of which mostly lie under the surface in The Tem pest. Fletcher and Massinger use these appetites to invert social and political norms. They offer an exchange-oriented view of colonial economics condemning privateering and bullion-chasing as Thomas Mun does, follow Montaigne’s cultural relativism in which Christians are as cruel as cannibals, sati rize noble’s privileged helplessness and possibly intend to incite class conflict in the theater space, and challenge the patriarchal status quo of male superiority in England and European Renaissance thought. The Sea Voyage brings the darkest, grittiest realities of colonialism and Early Modern English politics to light in a way that Shakespeare only hints at in The Tempest.

Works Cited

Banerjee, Rita. “Gold, Land, and Labor: Ideologies of Colonization and Rewriting The Tempest in 1622.” Studies in Philology, vol. 110, no. 2, 2013, pp. 291–317. Brown, Alison, and Jason Denman. “The Sea Voyage and Accounts of Famine in Colonial Virginia. Notes and Queries, vol. 65, no. 1, pp. 119-122. Fletcher, John and Philip Massinger. The Sea Voyage Greenblatt, Stephen. “General Introduction.” The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York, W.W. Norton and Company, 2016, pp. 1-74. Jameson, Celia. 2010. “The ‘Short Step’ from Love to Hypnosis: A Reconsideration of the Stockholm Syndrome.” Journal for Cultural Research, vol. 14, no. 4, pp. 337-355

Montaigne, Michel Eyquem de. “Of the Caniballes.” The Essays of Montaigne. Translated by John Florio. London, David Nutt in the Strand, 1892, pp. 217-232. Shahani, Gitanjali. “Of ‘Barren Islands’ and ‘Cursèd Gold’: Worth, Value, and Womanhood in The Sea Voyage.” The Journal for Early Modern Cultural Studies, vol. 12, no. 3, pp. 5-27. Shakespeare, William. “The Tempest.” The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York, W.W. Norton and Company, 2016, pp. 1737-1788.

Sutherland, Julie. “‘What Beast is This Lies Wallowing in His Gore?’ The Indignity of Man and the Animal Nature of Love in The Sea Voyage.” The Modern Language Review, vol. 107, no. 1, pp. 88-107.

Syme, Holger Schott. “The Theater of Shakespeare’s Time.” The Norton Shakespeare. Ed. Stephen Greenblatt. New York, W.W. Norton and Company, 2016, pp. 93-118.

Humane Individual, Heinous Regime: the portrayal of the enemy in Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Silence de la Mer / The Silence of the Sea

Ching Yan Clarissa Lee, University College London (UCL)

In early post-WWII films produced in the French cinematic scene, the enemy is often portrayed in a clear-cut, unambiguous manner: the audience is made aware of the distinction between the ‘good’ resistance fighters of French origin, and the ‘bad’, sadistic German soldiers. These films serve to rein force the Résistancialisme, a term coined by historian Henry Rousso in 1990: the French myth of resistance emerging after liberation, which creates the illusion of unanimous resistance during Nazi occupa tion, and exaggerates the scale and significance of armed methods of resistance in occupied France. In order to create an overwhelmingly ‘us versus them’ narrative, these films often demonise the German enemy to an inhumane extent, and contribute to the erasure of local collaboration with the foreign en emy by neglecting to portray any sign of French collaboration or the Vichy government’s enablement of the Occupation. In Le Silence de la Mer (1949) directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, the once-univocal enemy figure is humanised, resulting in the depiction of a more multi-dimensional enemy, as opposed to earlier resistance films. However, though it does not portray scenes of armed resistance, and thus does not contribute to the resistance myth directly, Melville’s film does not undermine the resistance myth either, as it focuses upon a different kind of resistance: the refusal of those who cannot join the frontlines to collaborate with the enemy. The film, for all its tight adherence to the original novel, also inserts additional scenes which deliberately undermine the officer’s goodness. Through surveying the represen tation of Werner von Ebrennacc in Le Silence, I will argue that, though Melville’s representation of the individual enemy is sympathetic, the ‘humanised’ nature of the individual enemy ultimately amplifies the barbaric nature of the ‘inhumane’ enemy regime he chooses to serve. Furthermore, though the film’s portrayal of the enemy is progressive for that moment in time, Melville still participates in the erasure of French collaboration during the Occupation, as the enemy portrayed is still solely shown to be the Germans. Ultimately, this problematises larger questions of who decides what aspects of war are to be erased and what aspects memorialised.

Firstly, Le Silence’s characterisation of the ‘good’ German soldier contrasts the stereotype of the barbarous Nazis, introducing a more rounded representation of the enemy. Von Ebrennacc, the German officer in Le Silence, is portrayed as a well-mannered individual with a sensitivity for music and a genuine passion for French culture. Taking the Uncle’s first impression of von Ebrennacc for example, the older man remarks to his niece: “Thank God, he seems quite decent” (Le Silence 00:11:19 – 00:11:21), seeming to have taken von Ebrennacc’s introduction fairly well, as contrasted with his scathing comments regarding two other German officers he had encountered earlier: “they spoke to me in what they thought was French…I didn’t understand a word” (Le Silence 00:04:05 – 00:04:10). Von Ebrennacc is respectful to the two home-owners, always knocking before entering the drawing room, and is further shown to be a cultured, well-read man throughout the film by his monologues, which showcase his knowledge of French literature: “Balzac, Baudelaire, Corneille, Descartes, Fenelon, Gautier, Hugo…

What a line-up! And I’ve only got to ‘H’” (Le Silence 00:23:21 – 00:23:27), and reveal his love for music: “I’m a musician […] I compose music” (Le Silence 00:19:09 – 00:19:15). By accrediting von Ebrennacc with a love for the Arts and a respect for French literature and culture, Le Silence softens the officer’s image by portraying his sensitivity and framing him in a civilised light. This depiction count ers the trope of the ignorant, brutal Nazi soldier, introducing a different form of the German enemy being represented on film. By refusing to dehumanise von Ebrennacc as an individual – dehumanisa tion being a tactic used commonly within war propaganda to achieve what Ofer Zur calls the “most important element in the enemizing process” (132) – Le Silence effectively separates the ‘good’ humane characteristics of the personalised enemy from the inherent ruthlessness of the Nazi regime. The per sonalised representation of von Ebrennacc thus stands out amongst the demonised German enemies of other well-known resistance films: “[i]n showing a humane, cultured German in Silence, Melville […] was also countering representations of “bad” (cruel, sadistic) Germans in such films as La Bataille du rail, Le Père tranquille and Jéricho” (Vincendeau 15). Thus, the representation of the individual Ger man enemy in Le Silence is comparatively sympathetic, portraying the officer as a more rounded figure, rather than a simple target for hatred.

However, though Le Silence does not subscribe to the trope of the demonised enemy, the hu manisation of von Ebrennacc contributes in other ways to underline the monstrosity of the Nazis and

their ideologies. As the humane soldier casually reveals his deep-seated belief in inhumane ideals, the juxtaposition of the ‘good’ and the ‘bad’ reveal the fundamental viciousness of Nazism and the Occu pation. One example would be the normalised manner in which the soldier insinuates France to be a weak, feminine country, helpless in front of the tough masculinity of Germany. During the soldier’s first monologue in front of the fireplace, he comments that “the French winter is mild […] we have fir trees, the forests are tightly packed…the snow sits heavy on them. The trees here are delicate, the snow covers them like lace. Germany is like a powerful thickset bull” (Le Silence 00:16:50 – 00:17:17). The “delicacy” of the French trees stand in obvious contrast to the German trees able to hold “heavy” snow, and this claim of masculine German strength is furthered by the analogising of Germany as a “powerful thickset bull”. An even more disturbing representation of this is von Ebrennacc’s fascination with the Beauty and the Beast fairytale (Le Silence 00:28:13 – 00:29:31), which serves as an explicit metaphor to France and Germany’s relationship as well as the tensions between von Ebrennacc and the Niece, who symbolise Germany and France respectively. In another monologue, von Ebrennacc pictures the tale in evocative language: “Poor Beauty. She is at the mercy of the Beast, his powerless prisoner. […] But gradually […] she becomes less aware of its heavy paw, her prison chains. […] Its constancy touches her and she gives it her hand” (Le Silence 00:28:30 – 00:29:31). The image of the Beauty as the Beast’s “poor” “prisoner”, coupled with other instances of heavily power-infused language such as “powerless” and Beauty being at the Beast’s “mercy”, serve as uncomfortable reminders of how France was similarly at the mercy of Germany. The Beauty’s acceptance of the Beast, then, becomes a thinly-veiled coaxing for France to “give [Germany] her hand”, and to get used to the “constancy” of the Beast – and her prison chains – and to give in to Germany’s dominance. This unnerving sense of domination is further amplified by the way von Ebrennacc paces around the Niece’s armchair and openly surveys her expressions, as she looks down at her knitting steadfastly, attempting to ignore the officer. As Tim Palmer observes, “low-angle set-ups highlight von Ebrennac’s endless pacing and phys ical agitation; as he pontificates about Franco-German destiny, he appears to bear down remorselessly on his unresponsive, seated hosts” (12). The power dynamics being revealed in the officer’s speech is thus manifested physically, as the symbol of Germany (von Ebrennacc) looms over the symbols of France (the Uncle and the Niece) in their own household – a symbol for the occupied France – and as

his expressiveness contrasts their lack of response.

At one point, von Ebrennacc even glances the niece’s way pointedly when he refers to the Beauty (Le Silence 00:29:04 – 00:29:06); the camera cuts to a close-up of the Niece when the notion of “cultural marriage” is mentioned (Le Silence 00:29:52), further instilling the parallelism of the fairytale to the Franco-German situation, as the soldier unambiguously stands in as a symbol of Germany and the niece a symbol of France. The greatest shock of the contrast between the humane soldier and the inhumane ideals of the Nazis come as this “cultural union” is disturbingly glorified: “Their union leads to their sublime happiness. Their children who combine their parents’ talents are the most beautiful on earth” (Le Silence 00:29:51 – 00:30:03). Here, von Ebrennacc enthuses over his ideal outcome of the war: a Franco-German union, and a “marriage” of cultures. His eagerness reflects a genuine belief in this marriage, and a complete neglect of the disturbing nature of the idea of a ‘master race’ – in this case the Aryans – being extended through union. As Palmer observes, “he ironically speaks of war as the means to peace and harmony” (13). Ironically, it is exactly von Ebrennacc’s obliviousness which works to deeply problematise the idea of the union. Since von Ebrennacc is portrayed as the ‘good’ German, the ‘bad’ and brutal Nazi ideals are magnified when they are put forth by this ‘good’ vessel: even though the humane German soldier is passionate about French culture, he still harbours and deeply believes in the disturbing idea of uniting Germany and French through a “cultural marriage” en forced by war, and sincerely believes that the war will result in the best situation for Europe to be in. As a result, the atrocity of the Nazis’ methods of occupation and control comes across even more strongly via contrast, highlighting the horror of a forceful cultural union brought upon by war and physical dom ination. This correlates to the “good German/bad Nazi” dichotomy which Ginette Vincendeau suggests “structures the representation of the officer” (16). By showcasing von Ebrennacc in a humane light, the fundamental problematic nature of the idea of the occupation of an ‘open city’ is foregrounded and amplified, as the ‘inhumane’ ideals that the indoctrinated soldier, though ‘humane’, still holds, creates a sharp contrast between the clashing of these elements, and highlights the unchangeable atrocious basis of Nazi ideals.

Furthermore, since the film invites a certain level of sympathy with the German soldier, the audience shares von Ebrennacc’s journey as his naïve perception that the war would bring a cordial

Franco-German union is shattered. The shock and disillusionment, when presented from the point of view of the humanised enemy, works to demonise the German occupation and the rule of the Nazis even further. Melville crafts this impact primarily through the contrast between the first and second clips of von Ebrennacc’s trip to Paris: the first clip reads much like a lighthearted tour of Paris, as shots of von Ebrennacc admiring monuments such as the Arc de Triomphe (Le Silence 00:49:59 – 00:50:58) is shown, while an uplifting, joyous music track plays in the background. The second clip is much more ominous: Von Ebrennacc is informed of the truth of Treblinka, and an array of shots depicting German soldiers in all areas of Paris, roaming on foot and in military trucks (Le Silence 01:04:17 – 01:04:37), are shown. Interestingly, German soldiers were only present in the second clip; as Melville himself explains this directorial decision, “The first time Vernon goes to Paris you see no Germans because he doesn’t notice them […] his compatriots don’t bother him” (44). It is only after he realises the true consequences of the Occupation that “he says there were Germans in the streets and that you see those Germans” (Melville 44), whom von Ebrennacc begins to notice for the first time as the reality of the Occupation sinks in. The ominous tone in the second sequence of his Paris leave stems from this realisation, which is shown to have been caused by not only the knowledge of Treblinka, but also on a more personal level, his being mocked by his fellow officers for being too “soft”, and the other officers’ admittance that the cultural union is but a deception – the Third Reich will destroy France’s “spirit as well as her power” (Le Silence 01:07:31 – 01:09:45). Because Le Silence “portrays the German officer extremely sympathetically – indeed, he becomes the focus of identification of the spectator” (Crisp 179), by focalising the shock of discovering the true violence of crimes by the Nazis through the ‘humane’ enemy’s eyes, with whom the audience has come to sympathise, the inhumane nature of the Third Reich and its deception is all the more highlighted. The fact that the ‘good’ German soldier is also a victim of the false advertisement of a ‘friendly occupation’ and a loving Franco-German union –which presents that, unlike areas such as Holland and Belgium, France and especially its capital Paris will be preserved – reflects how the propaganda being projected has duped the ‘good German’ as well as it is supposed to dupe the French, furthering the animosity of this manipulation. This disillusionment is in line with the changes in the film introduced by Melville to counter potential criticism, changes undermining the ‘goodness’ of the officer, in an attempt to explicate the

inherent ‘badness’ of the authoritarian regime that the ‘good’ officer is serving, and to emphasise that the ‘goodness’ of von Ebrennacc does not erase the inherent problematics of the Occupation. This is because the “flattering” portrayal of the enemy has warranted criticism for Vercors’ novel, which Le Silence was based upon (Vincendeau 15). After all, “a primary task of the propagandist is to identify the enemy publicly thus creating a target for anger and blame” (Fox 136). Films and novels produced during and post-war, being heavily influential tools of propaganda, usually positioned their directors and authors as propagandists, and the textual Le Silence’s unconventional representation of the enemy raised a few eyebrows. As a result, some “small but significant” changes were made to the film adapta tion, amongst which was the ending scene of the film, where the uncle takes a risk in slipping the sol dier a loaded quote: “It is a fine thing when a soldier disobeys criminal orders”. Though von Ebrennacc hesitates, he ultimately leaves to fight on the frontlines, continuing his duties to the Nazi regime (Le Silence 00:19:44 – 00:21:10). This is when the uncle’s voiceover in the opening of the film begins to make sense to the viewers: “He submitted to life like all the others, like the whole wretched nation […] the rebellion that even this man did not have the courage to continue against his master ’s orders” (Le Silence 00:02:31 – 00:02:54). The accusation that “even” von Ebrennacc, the most sympathetic enemy, did not have the bravery or resolve to defy orders from the Nazi regime, highlights the powerlessness of a singular source of ‘goodness’ of an individual working under an imminently heinous authority. The ‘goodness’ of the officer is hence set up from the beginning to be disillusioned and corrupted by the ‘badness’ of the Nazis. This works to crystallise that the goodness of the individual officer does not erase the fanatical nature of the Occupation, nor does it justify the brutal actions of the Third Reich.

Last but not least, the enemy represented in Le Silence is still distinct, in the sense that the enemy is solely shown to be the Germans, as the film still participates in the culture of erasure of any French collaboration with the Nazis. In fact, the representation of the sympathetic enemy highlights the Uncle and Niece’s refusal of collaboration, simultaneously eliminating ideas of a French collaborator-enemy, and displaying a different sort of resistance: the passive resistance of silence. Part of this resistance includes not becoming the enemy themselves via collaboration. As opposed to the active resistance seen in films such as La Bataille du rail, where the resistance myth is glorified through the pathos of sacrifice, the Uncle and Niece in Le Silence reacts to the unavoidable invasion of the German officer

into their home by obstinately ignoring von Ebrennacc. The majority of the film portrays the officer reciting monologues of his thoughts to the silent pair, who focus on puffing their pipe or finishing their needlework. When the officer proves himself to be humane and even amiable, the two struggle to keep to their resolve, but manage to maintain their silent treatment up until his leave. The depiction of their struggle: the Uncle professes “It pains me to offend any man, even if he were my enemy” (Le Silence 00:14:03 – 00:14:08), and the Niece displays pain at their consistent dismissal of the officer as time passes by – only heightens their final choice and their persistence, as they ultimately do not engage with von Ebrennacc in full conversation and thus by extension, do not become the enemy by collabo rating with the German enemy. This not only subliminally erases the idea of a possible French enemy from the audience’s minds, but also serves as a reminder that no matter the level of ‘goodness’ of the officer, he answers to the orders of a ‘bad’ authority, which has to be resisted against. This type of non-physical resistance the two demonstrate can be read as an implication that the ‘old’ and the ‘weak’ of the French people – in this case represented by the Uncle (old) and the Niece (female) – are still resisting to their best ability, in their own ways, even though they cannot join the resistance fighters on the frontline. This feeds the resistance myth in a different way, not by showcasing a fictionalised unity on the battlefields, but by insinuation that the French on the home front are equally contributors to the forces of Resistance through their refusal to collaborate – even when ‘tempted’ to a certain extent by a humane, mild enemy such as the one portrayed in von Ebrennacc. Thus, their neglect of the officer’s presence not only reinforces the idea of dignified French resistance, but also serves to erase the idea of French-German collaboration and the possibility of a French enemy.

Ultimately, Melville’s civilised German officer introduces a more humanised version of the enemy to the French cinema of resistance. However, von Ebrennacc’s individual goodness is primarily utilised to highlight the malevolence of the larger enemy of the Nazi regime; moreover, the refusal of the Uncle and Niece to collaborate with even the ‘cordial’ enemy exalts ideas of passive resistance, reinforcing the film’s negation of the French collaborator-enemy. Thus, the problems of erasure in cinematic rep resentation remain in Le Silence despite its comparatively unorthodox representation of the individual enemy.

Works Cited

Crisp, Colin. “Le Silence De La Mer (22 April 1949).” French Cinema—A Critical Filmography:Vol ume 2, 1940–1958, Indiana University Press, 2015, pp. 178–181. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/j. ctt16gz6fh.59. Accessed 8 Feb. 2020.

Fox, Jo. Film Propaganda in Britain and Nazi Germany: World War II Cinema. Berg, 2007.

Le Silence De La Mer. Directed by Jean-Pierre Melville, performances by Howard Vernon, Nicole Stéphane, and Jean-Marie Robain, Eureka!, 2007.

Melville, Jean-Pierre. “An Interview with Jean-Pierre Melville on Le Silence de la Mer.” Interview by Rui Nogueira. Interview printed for Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Silence de la Mer, Eureka!, 2007, pp. 36–53.

Palmer, Tim. “An Amateur of Quality: Postwar French Cinema and Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Silence

De La Mer.” Journal of Film and Video, vol. 59, no. 4, 2007, pp. 3–19. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/ stable/20688573. Accessed 8 Feb. 2020.

Rousso, Henry. Le Syndrome De Vichy : De 1944 à Nos Jours. Éditions Du Seuil, 1990.

Vincendeau, Ginette. “Le Silence de la Mer.” Chapter printed in extracted form for Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Silence de la Mer, Eureka!, 2007, pp. 6–34.

Zur, Ofer. “The Psychohistory of Warfare: The Co-Evolution of Culture, Psyche and Enemy.” Journal of Peace Research, vol. 24, no. 2, 1987, pp. 125–134. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/423452. Ac cessed 23 Feb. 2020.

Moving Forward

In Summer of 2022, both co-editor in chief Anna Nelson and I were gifted the Madison Journal of Literary Criticism as a vehicle to exercise praxis of our abolitionist research, a project we have devoted ourselves to since the start of our freshman year. Our study focuses on examining interconnectedness between systems of harm and various forms of activism. From 2020 to 2022, we spent time mapping out the vast reach of the carceral state in hopes that understanding can promote action, provide activist outlets, and provoke care. Before adopting the MJLC, we decided to define the complex and polarized subject of abolition as: “Asking ‘why?’ And, dreaming of more.” Today, as we begin to transition the function of the MJLC to explicitly match this definition, we want to acknowledge that the historical form of the MJLC and discipline of literary criticism has always had the potential/already implicitly functions as abolitionist.

Starting this Fall, the MJLC now functions primarily as a study group engaging in social and literary critique that also produces a magazine. Our study group brings together students, activist stakeholders, and a larger Madison community in discussions regarding local politics, abolitionist texts, artwork, and practicing forms of critique—a curricula based on our initial research. Our group applies the academ ic skill of critical analysis to subjects often left out of academia such as film, fashion, music, public addresses, grocery habits, dental care, and more. We encourage members to think critically in every setting, especially questioning institutions and practices that are taken for granted or deemed unimport ant. Simultaneously, as our group practices critique, we shall continue to do what the MJLC has always done: “showcase excellent examples of literary criticism from students across the nation.” Our editorial board shall work to curate a collection of criticism that is now not limited to an academic format. Rath er, we invite critics to send submissions in any medium that allows them to critique any subject. Art, fiction, poetry, prose, journalism, photography, essays, and (of course) academic papers are just some of the forms of criticism the MJLC shall now publish.

We are honored to be expanding the MJLC to bring together activists and artists. We believe that today, more than ever, narrative literacy and artistic imagination are skills required by everybody to not only encourage an abolitionist world, but to simply navigate the harms of the world as it exists presently

Literary criticism is criticism of narratives we have been fed. It is providing alternatives and sugges tions. It is a methodology, a tool, that allows young scholars to engage with what frustrates them. Cou pled with art, a medium that has always been a space for creatives—for dreamers—I truly believe that the MJLC embodies “asking why? And dreaming of more.”

Today, as co-editor in chief of this journal, I invite everybody to join us. To ask questions. To dream big. To care for one another.

We would like to thank the previous editorial team of the MJLC, Professor Ingrid Diran, our university, and all of you. With this support, with this shared care, we hope to continue cultivating our own educational and artistic aspirations while continuing to bring the Madison Journal of Literary Criticism to you.

Keep asking questions. See you all very soon.

With Love, Ria Dhingra (co-editor in chief)