The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism, Volume 7

The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism Spring 2017 1

The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism aims to provide a forum for undergraduate students to publish their scholarly work and engage in the contemporary literary debates ongoing in the larger academic community. A primarily student-published journal, MJLC consists of 8-15 articles chosen for their originality, eloquence, internal coherence, and quality of engagement with academic scholarship. Published annually every April, the Journal exhibits only the best work in undergraduate criticism, placing the work of UW-Madison students alongside that of other top schools, and providing a literal space for their work and thoughts to commingle. The journal is not confined to a single literary perspective or system of analysis; rather, it strives to reflect the richness and diversity of critical thought that thrives at the undergraduate.

Editor’s Note This seventh volume of the Madison Journal of Literary Criticism continues to forge boldly ahead in the way of excellence, building off previous publications and years of impressive undergraduate work and research. The MJLC continues to represent authors from around the world presented in this volume, and this year we received over 300 submissions from international and domestic undergraduates. In an era of “fake news” and attacks on the free press, precision, accountability, and constructive communication are more important than ever. I’m proud to say that the essays in this volume not only surpass those standards, but they strive to break boundaries and expectations through their powerful rhetoric and brilliant poise. The MJLC continues to be a platform that provides undergraduates to be heard and seen by not only their peers, but faculty as well, propelling their voices into the world. We would like to sincerely thank the Evjue Foundation for allocated funds for the MJLC to be published in print for next year during it’s 8th year of publication. Monique Allewart’s guidance and Karen Redfield’s stupendous help and encouragement also deserve a gracious thank you for their time and dedication to undergraduate work. Finally, we would like to thank all the undergraduates, without whom this journal would not be published for their work and dedication; our talented and tireless board of editors, both old and new; and finally to the host of authors who year after year submit their work to be read and enjoyed. We sincerely hope the commitment of those listed above make this year’s volume a delight to read.

Best Regards,

Eliza Weisberg and Kristina Shirk Editors-in-Cheif, MJLC

The Staff Editors-in-Chief Eliza Weisberg is a junior at UW Madison double majoring in English literature and Afro-American studies with a certificate in Media and Culture Studies. While she has currently lived in in Minnesota for nine years, Eliza was born in Birmingham, Alabama and then later moved to Corpus Christi, Texas for eight years. Eliza’s interests include reading and writing, and listening to music. Her favorite authors are Joseph Conrad, Milton, James Joyce, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.

Kristina Shirk is a graduating senior at UW Madison studying English Linguistics and Digital Studies. Originally from Lakeville, MN, she grew up amid the vivid art, music, and literature scene of Minneapolis. Some of her favorite authors include John Steinbeck, Dorothy Parker, Oscar Wilde, and Margret Atwood. When she’s not working or reading, Tina enjoys baking, writing, watching movies, and snuggling with her dog (preferably, all at the same time).

Associate Editors Grace Hayes is a Sophomore at UW-Madison studying English Literature and Conservation Biology. This combination of disciplines was inspired by Aldo Leopold, a revolutionary conservationist and creative writer. When she is not reading she is probably checking on her bees, gardening, or playing cribbage. Her favorite authors are Thomas Pynchon, Toni Morrison, Isabel Allende, and John Steinbeck.

Brianna Rock is a senior studying English and Philosophy with a certificate in Classical Studies at UW Madison.

She is from Oakton, Virginia, where she first discovered her love for reading from the Scholastic novel series The Babysitters Club. Today she enjoys a wide range of literature and poetry, including the works of Fyodor Dostoevsky, Haruki Murakami, David Foster Wallace, Maya Angelou and Charles Bukowski. Brianna also enjoys writing, spending time outside, going to concerts, and eating waffles.

Kristen Romes is a recent graduate from UW Madison, where she studied history and English literature. She plans to move to Eastern Europe in the fall to teach English before attending graduate school. In her spare time she likes to write, play rugby, and sneak into lectures on campus. Her favorites authors are Oscar Wilde, James Joyce, and T.H. White.

Brittany Seefeld is a senior at UW-Madison studying English and Social Work. She grew up in the tiny rural town of Loyal, Wisconsin on a dairy farm but moved to the city after high school. Brittany is dedicated to social justice and reducing inequalities and believes that literature and art can take an active role in these processes. She spends most of her time reading basically anything she can get her hands on, taking walks, and volunteering. Her favorite authors are Neil Gaiman and Toni Morrison.

Hannah Widmaier is a sophomore at UW-Madison majoring in English Literature and Philosophy. She also studies Biblical Hebrew, and is interested in the relations between literature, philosophy, and religion. Currently in her second semester as a campus Writing Fellow, Hannah enjoys helping plan and lead services at the UW-Madison Hillel.

She grew up in Elmhurst, Illinois, and likes music, running, and spending time outdoors.

Cover Artist Shelby Noraas Shelby Noraas is currently a sophomore at the University of Wisconsin-Stout, working on fulfilling her BFA in Studio Art. She is concentrating in Ceramics and Sculpture, as well as minoring in Art History. She has been pursing art as a career since 2014, and is looking forward to the upcoming semester to further her skills and crafts. She is originally from the Twin Cities area in Minnesota, and plans on returning there after graduation.

Contents Sovereignty Subjected: Incarnations of Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare’s Midsummer 9

Intersectional Oppression in August Wilson’s Fences: Social, Psychological, and Economic Means of Revolt 21

‘I don’t know why, but it bothered the hell out of me’: Parental Trauma and Narrative Identity in the American Coming of Age Novel.

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Graphing Liberation: Intersectionality in The House of Mirth and The Color Purple 36

Beyond East and West: Representation, Interrogation, and Adaptation in Pamuk’s My Name Is Red 43 A Place to Call Home: The Role of the Urban Imaginary in Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives, and The Long Day Closes 57

Chinese-Jamaica: An Imperfect Nation Narrative 65

Artist: Ashley Jablonski

Sovereignty Subjected: Incarnations of Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare’s Midsummer Thomas Eric Simonson The University of North Carolina at Charlotte

“Methinks I see these things with parted eye, When every thing seems double” (4.1.186-87).

If Richard II suggested, among other things, Elizabeth’s problematic accession to the throne was the latest installment in a volatile line of succession, then A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be thought of as an examination of the problems engendered by an unmarried woman occupying the throne. Her status as an unmarried woman constantly problematized her political stature, and apprehensions of her unfixed succession and independence necessitated the construction of Elizabeth’s persona as the Virgin Queen. Long in place at the time of Midsummer’s composition and performance, this role helped to certify Elizabeth’s monarchical sovereignty, even as it was implemented to rationalize her continued exemption from the institution of marriage. These were highly topical concerns in Tudor society, in which women were intended for installation in marriages that “implie[d] a domestic hierarchy, [since] marital harmony is predicated upon the wife’s obedience to her husband” (Montrose 61). A woman who presided over her own fate was an anomaly; for a woman to occupy the throne was even more disarming. As such, England’s artistic discourse frequently addressed the implications of their singular queen. Such commentary almost always centered on the contradictions between Elizabeth’s sovereign body politic and her gendered natural body, since “a powerful, unmarried woman ruling opened up both the possibility of expanding gender definitions and recognition of the limits of those definitions” (Levin 125-26). Indeed, as Louis Montrose describes it, Elizabeth’s beguiling ubiquity “was a condition of [Midsummer’s] imaginative possibility” (Montrose 62). Scholarship has frequently fixated upon the fairy queen, Titania, who shares a title with Elizabeth and myriad associations. Yet there are more comprehensive approaches to unearthing Elizabeth in what Montrose refers to as the play’s “imaginative possibility” (62) of the queen.

Accordingly, I argue that not just in the case of Titania, but also in those of Hippolyta, Hermia, and Helena, Shakespeare fully engages in the “imaginative possibility” of Elizabeth by presenting four women embodying, 9

in various respects, her template of a sovereign female dueling with patriarchy’s chief means of controlling her sex: the institution of marriage. Unlike Elizabeth, these women all marry, because their agency is divested by usurping male figures of authority: Oberon, the fairy king, and Theseus, the Duke, stage interventions through the law and fairy magic that restore patriarchy’s gendered hierarchy. This recalibration of feminine subservience is the necessary condition for the play’s marriages to occur, as well as the necessary condition for the existing marriage (between Titania and Oberon) to endure. To demonstrate this, I will closely analyze these four women, discussing first the pair of Titania and Hippolyta, then that of Hermia and Helena, in order to emphasize their connections to the sovereign queen who eluded containment.

Titania & Hippolyta: Married Queens are Conquered Queens

Titania is traditionally regarded as the central symbol of Elizabeth in Midsummer, both for readily apparent

reasons tied to her name and queenly status, and for the character’s analogous associations with the natural world.

Indeed, Elizabeth appears to be descended from Titania, just as she is from other rare and supernaturally-anointed women of great power: “Queen Elizabeth, as the emblem of sovereignty, is the political equivalent of Titania, emblem of Nature’s sway over living things” (Allen 116). Elizabethan tropes of the moon1 in particular are reproduced via Titania in the play, yet more relevant to my discussion are the details of Titania’s marriage. The only women of the four under discussion who is married at the onset of the action, Titania is paired with Oberon, the fairy king. In the play, their union has been compromised by Titania’s self-governance in defying Oberon’s will: she adopts a child, the son of her deceased mortal friend, with a vow to rear him in her memory. Oberon wishes for the child himself, and the opposition to his queen results in dysfunction manifested in the natural world. Titania vividly describes the disharmony that results from their quarrel: Thorough this distemperature we see The seasons alter; […] the spring, the summer, Thilding autumn, angry winter change Their wonted liveries, and the mazed world By their increase now knows not which is which.

And this same progeny of evils comes From our debate, from our dissension.

We are their parents and original (2.1.106-07, 111-117).

1

2.1.103-105; 2.1.141

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Such a scene colorfully suggests that the disorder between male and female sovereigns is not contained to their interpersonal relationship, but spreads throughout their realm. In Titania and Oberon’s case, monarchical “powers within and over nature,” the elements are correspondingly distempered (Davies 121-122). In the scene painted by Titania, “jealous” Oberon2 is aligned with the winds, which “in revenge have sucked up” the “contagious fogs” that have provoked the moon, aligned with Titania, to be “pale in her anger” as she “washes all the air” with infectious sickness and discomfort. These associations powerfully reinforce the idea that Titania and Oberon’s gender differences are at the root of their quarrel. Oberon is “jealous”—like the covetous God of the Old Testament, always referenced as a male—of the obedience a fallen, “proud” sinner devotes to another in idolatry. The original source of pride is, of course, Satan, who inserts himself in the position of God to commit idolatry of the most intimate nature. But this association invariably leads to sexist equations with Eve, whom Satan tempted first in the garden, and who has been charged for time immemorial for bringing about Adam’s fall in the garden of Eden. The proximity of Eve to the presumption of Satan thus renders Oberon’s aspersions of Titania as “proud” a uniquely gendered invective. Titania and Oberon are therefore locked in a duel of supremacy in which Titania would be sovereign over herself, and Oberon over them both. Balance in the natural world depends on the resolution of their debate.

That resolution is made possible only through Oberon’s intervention to subdue his queen, for his “preoccu-

pation is to gain possession, not only of the boy but of the woman’s desire and obedience” (Montrose 71). Compromise is not an option for Oberon; confronted with Titania’s obstinacy3, he resorts to a forcible restoration of order. That order manifests itself through subjugation, humiliation, and objectification—aspects all of Oberon’s utilization of marital union in the play. In Titania’s case, he vows to “torment [her] for this injury” (2.1.147). To effect this torment, he will apply a juice from flowers tainted by Cupid’s bow and, waiting for Titania to be asleep, douse her eyes. The effect of the juice is such that, the first thing Titania will behold on waking, “be it on lion, bear, or wolf, or bull, / On meddling monkey, or on busy ape—/ She shall pursue it with the soul of love” (2.1.180-182).

This startling imprecation bears clear associations with rape, in that Titania’s bodily weakness is exploited (as she is sleeping) to curtail her agency and transfer her as a sexual commodity to whichever nearby beast she beholds. Additionally, Oberon delights in this act as a means to “torment” Titania, for, a moment later, he admits, “Ere I take this charm from off her sight / (As I can take it with another herb) / I’ll make her render up her page to me” (2.1.183185). There is no necessity for Titania to endure any of this torment in order for Oberon to obtain the page from Titania. The purpose of the entire exercise is not only to “make her” render the page to him, but to do so in a way as variegated in its abuse and manipulation of the female body as possible. Oberon subjugates Titania emotionally by 2 3

2.1.24; 2.1.81 “Not for thy fairy kingdom!” (2.1.144)

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disassociating her from her senses, physically by offering her to the nearest animal she might fixate upon, and again in a combination of these approaches by making her “render up” to him what he has no claim to. In restoring order as the male to Titania’s female, Oberon demonstrates the same subjugation that is exerted upon the other women in the play in through their marriages.

For in the case of Hippolyta, the betrothed of Theseus, Duke of Athens, an impending marriage approaches as a consequence of an intervention similar to Oberon’s. As with Titania, Hippolyta sustains an immediate comparison to Elizabeth in her stature as a Queen of the Amazons. As was the case with the associations of femininity and Elizabeth in Titania’s name, so too does Hippolyta sustain such comparisons. As the queen of the Amazons, Hippolyta represents a mythical race of women possessing unusual masculine behaviors and sexual proclivities.

According to general conceptions of the myth, the Amazons are a matriarchal society with sovereign female leaders who ostensibly embody a position that inverts the Tudor paradigm of subservient womanhood. Abnormal women are those who possess sexual desire and agency unbecoming of their sex, as well as those who possess “male” qualities or fill “male” roles of leadership, namely the Amazons. Yet Hippolyta is extracted from this society and brought to Athens after her kingdom is conquered by the invading Theseus4. Theseus resorted to military conquest in order to obtain her, and the threat of physical violence to woo her: “I wooed thee with my sword, / And won thy love doing thee injuries” (1.1.16-17). According to the myth, Hippolyta enters into a marital engagement with Theseus in order to spare the lives of others. Though she enters the match willingly, her coercion, much like the manner of Theseus’ “wooing,” again suggests rape, as Titania herself says to Oberon: Hippolyta, “the bouncing Amazon, / Your buskined mistress and your warrior love, / To Theseus must be wedded” (2.1.70-72). As such, there is no textual suggestion of Hippolyta as the Amazonian masculine woman, and every appearance of a woman who has been conquered, as Theseus implies when he declares, “I will wed thee in another key, / With pomp, with triumph, and with reveling” (my emphasis; 1.1.18-19). Her very conformity within the narrative suggests that her impending marriage will solidif her subjugation. Hippolyta and Titania thus conclude as queens whose unions with males have neutralized their power. They stand in apparent contrast to Elizabeth, whose enduring sovereignty was unobstructed by such unions.

As an unmarried woman, the chief means of patriarchal control could not encompass Elizabeth. The “domestic hierarchy” of Tudor marriage was not able to affect Elizabeth’s authority. However, were she to have married, Elizabeth’s authority would not have eliminated the historical propensity for a transference of monarchical stature from a queen to the man she made a king through marriage: “the reigns of women are commonly obscured by 4

Recalling Oberon’s invasion of Titania’s sport in 2.1.87: “With thy brawls thou hast disturbed our sport.”

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marriage; their praises and actions passing to the credit of their husbands; whereas those that continue unmarried have their glory entire and proper to themselves” (Bacon as qtd. in Montrose 78). On the other hand, scholars such as Susan Doran have argued that Elizabeth did not avoid marriage to maintain her authority, unusually associated with her female person as it was: “it is a mistake to assume that Elizabeth believed that she could deal with the issue of her gender only by remaining celibate, and had to remain unmarried because she did not wish to share her rule with a husband” (Doran 5). Doran cites the example of Elizabeth’s predecessor, Queen Mary I and her contracted marriage to Philip of Spain, as evidence that there was a possible cohabitation in the same woman of monarchical sovereignty and wifely subservience. Accordingly, Doran argues that Elizabeth can and did entertain offers of marriage without the institution posing a dominating threat.

However, this approach may rely upon a diminishment of the ideological forces at work in Tudor England, as men relied on marriage as an enclosure for women. The very nature of the marriage agreement in the religious and gendered tradition of patriarchy makes the contradiction of Doran’s example unable to be resolved. A publically sovereign but privately subservient queen was no queen at all, since the premise inherently suggests that the public authority is a performance belying a proscription of authority in a necessarily present male who ultimately prevails.

Whomever Elizabeth might have married is irrelevant. The security her self-representation as the sovereign Virgin Queen sought to create would have manifested instead in the creation of a monarchical unit, in which the queen was accompanied reassuringly by a male “king” to her “queen,” and, ostensibly, by a male heir. This is in keeping with the “structure of theft and deceit” that patriarchy utilizes to undermine women (Davies 125). The autonomy of a woman is forcibly transferred to a male that is her superior complement, and this model deceitfully presents itself as natural. Had Elizabeth married, whatever quantum of her authority and sovereignty remained would be measurably smaller than that which she possessed as an individual, exceptional female monarch. The construction of the Virgin Queen persona would not have been needed because Elizabeth would have derived her legitimacy through her association with maleness, in the form of a husband ideally, a meil her. But all of these observations rest on analogies to Elizabeth presented by women who are, in Midsummer, coerced into unions of gendered hierarchy. I will now turn to the two women who seek entrance into such a union in the play.

Helena & Hermia: Sequestered Sisters become Blushing Brides

Helena and Hermia differ from Titania and Hippolyta in that they both desire their place in the respective

marriages Midsummer concludes with. However, they reference Elizabeth in the same way the two conquered queens do, by disrupting the sovereignty of men before marriage can be utilized to correct the imbalance. Helena and Hermia each defy the wishes of men in their choice of suitors. In Hermia’s case, that figure is her father, Egeus, 13

who opposes her match with Lysander in favor of Demetrius. In Helena’s, it is Demetrius himself, who recants his courtship of Helena in order to pursue Hermia. Both women, like Titania and Hippolyta, exercise unusual amounts of agency over their bodies by resisting the control of men and begin the play with self-defining aspirations for marriage. However, the imbalance their increased agency creates is overcome, again by Oberon, and additionally

by Theseus. At the close of the play, both women are permitted to marry the man of their choice, but only at the discretion of Oberon and Theseus, sovereign males who sanction the matches because they restore patriarchal order to the women by assigning them husbands.

Like Hippolyta and Titania before Theseus and Oberon’s respective rapes, Hermia’s disruption of the male order lies in her own agency that controls the usage of her body. She resists the efforts of her father, Egeus, to align her in marriage to Demetrius. Egeus laments this as a perversion of the natural order: “her obedience, which is due to me” has been turned to “stubborn harshness” (1.1.36-38). Her obdurate refusal to obey him provokes Egeus to take a sinister, drastic approach in order to restore her obedience: Be it so she will not here […] Consent to marry with Demetrius, I beg the ancient privilege of Athens; As she is mine, I may dispose of her; Which shall be either to this gentlemen Or to her death” (1.1.39-44).

In attempting to intimidate her into submission, Egeus’ threat to end his daughter’s life works in tandem with his will to arrange her marriage, since Hermia may be disposed of as he sees fit: bodily—through death—or sexually, through the consummation of her marriage to Demetrius. As Carol Levin explains, in patriarchal systems, “the female body is a supreme form of property and a locus for the contestation of authority” (68). However, Hermia intends to maintain her autonomy, even if it means dying “ere I will yield my virgin patent up / Unto his lordship, whose unwished yoke / My soul consents not to give sovereignty” (1.1.80-82). The language of her response to her father’s threat mirrors his own as it systematically contradicts it, and confirms their debate as one over Hermia’s sovereignty: She will not “yield” or “consent” her “virgin patent.” Additionally, Hermia refuses to acquiesce to Lysander’s sexual advances, which he offers after they elope to flee her father. “Nay, good Lysander, for my sake, / Lie further off” she says (2.2.49-50), instructing him “Such separation as may well be said / Becomes a virtuous bachelor and a maid, / So far be distant” (2.2.62-66). Hermia clearly chooses to wed Lysander in eloping with him, yet this does not equate to a forfeiture of her standards or her claim to her body, despite the romantic attractiveness of his 14

offer. Despite these victories, however, Hermia’s subjugation is only deferred until that moment when a male who supersedes the authority of Egeus sanctions her marriage.

For in examining Hermia’s position at the conclusion of the play, her flouting of her father’s expectation is only made permissible by the Duke. When Theseus’ hunting party unearths she and Lysander sleeping coupled in the field, Egeus’ begs Theseus for retribution: “They would hae stol’n away, they would, Demetrius, / Thereby to have defeated you and me, / You of your wife, and me of my consent” (4.1.154-56). At this juncture, Egeus’ cites his consent as the one that should stand in for his daughter’s, and begs the punitive strike of the law upon Lysander for effecting a near “defeat” of Egeus’ disposal of his daughter. The Duke, however, decides that the “fair lovers […] are fortunately met” (4.1.174), and that he will “overbear [Egeus’] will” (4.1.176). Such a conclusion might seem like a triumph for Hermia, but the Duke’s decision was an entirely arbitrary one that was directly contradictory to his initial pronouncement that Hermia: Look you arm yourself To fit your fancies to your father’s will; Or else the law of Athens yields you up (Which by no means we may extenuate) To death, or to a vow of single life (1.1.117-121).

Whatever means or motives precisely allow the Duke to perform the exact opposite of this utterance is unclear, but such implications are secondary to the larger point: Hermia’s agency is still undermined by a sovereign male who transfers sexual ownership of her to another male (Lysander). Her agency is not confirmed so much as her stubbornness is rewarded by happenstance in the form of Theseus. That Hermia prefers Lysander as a partner does nothing to mitigate the realities of this affirmation of patriarchal sexual politics demonstrated in Midsummer.

A similar arc is traceable in the outcome of Helena, the last of the play’s women that I will examine. Helena is Demetrius’ former love, despondent that he has transferred his prospects to Hermia. It is important to note that Helena’s despondency in Midsummer is not simply evidence of a besotted woman infatuated with Demetrius, but the pained endurance of a woman who has been cast aside after a mutually fervid romance: ‘Ere Demetrius look’d on Hermia’s eyne, He hail’d down oaths that he was only mine; And when this hail some heat from Hermia felt, So he dissolved, and showers of oaths did melt (1.1.242-245).

This comment exposes Demetrius’ flippancy more than Helena’s obsessive pursuit of him, an aspect of her character 15

that is normally the fixation of critical opinion. However, instead of pointing to the violence of Helena’s affections, my interest is in the pointing to her autonomy of her pursuit of Demetrius following the dissolution of her romance.

As she laments, “the story shall be changed: / Apollo flies, and Daphne holds the chase; / The dove pursues the griffin” (2.1.230-32). What is pursued—a woman, ostensibly appropriately by a man—is now the pursuer of that man, even as he now pursues another (Hermia). In chasing Demetrius, both figuratively and literally, Helena embodies the reversal of gender roles that result from women possessing an inordinate amount of power, as was the case with Hippolyta’s former position as Queen, Titania’s refusal to comply with Oberon’s wishes, and Hermia’s resistance to her father.

However, as in each of those cases, Oberon and Theseus intervene to restore order. This is perhaps the most

nuanced example of subjugation in the play, for it is not Helena that is altered to correct this imbalance, but Demetrius. Observing Demetrius’ cold indifference to Helena, Oberon concurs with her that women “cannot fight for love, as men may do; / We should be woo’d and were not made to woo” (2.1.241-42). He instructs Puck to anoint Demetrius’ eyes with the same juice that he administered to Titania’s, in order that the Demetrius’ will no longer, as Helena puts it, “set a scandal on [the female] sex” (2.1.240). Oberon recognizes that Helena’s inappropriate pursuit of Demetrius can be amended by elevating Demetrius, promoting him, as it were, to his former status as her lover: “ere he do leave this grove, / Thou shalt fly him and he shall seek thy love” (my emphasis; 2.1.246). This is a key factor of Oberon’s interference: even though he alters Demetrius, the result accomplishes Helena’s realignment as the subordinate party in the romance, as Oberon makes clear when assigning the task to Puck: “Anoint his eyes; / But do it when the next thing he espies / May be the lady […] / Effect it with some care, that he may prove / More fond to her than she upon her love” (my emphasis; 2.1.265-66). Oberon mandates that the task must be accomplished such that Demetrius’ affection for Helena be stronger than her own for him, in order that he might be the pursuer again, and she the woo’d lady: his “response is neither to extinguish desire nor to make it mutual, but to restore the normal pattern of pursuit” (Montrose 82). Restoring the order preempts Helena’s disruption of the hierarchy because Demetrius then naturally occupies the role of wooer.

Thus, Oberon’s interference should not be misinterpreted as a beneficent act. While he may pity Helena’s frustrations, he does not restore Demetrius to his former state because he wants to ease her pain. Instead, he is motivated by the deeper sexual politics of their relationship to realign and prevent Helena from occupying the role reserved for her male counterpart. Consider his willingness to unite Helena with Demetrius specifically in the first place. Demetrius is not an honorable man, nor a constant one. His affections for Helena, “melted” when confronted with “some heat.” Similarly, in awaking from a miraculous transformation to find himself devoted again to 16

Helena, he seems unperturbed by the eradication of his feelings for Hermia, concluding almost absentmindedly that they too “melted as the snow” (4.1.163). Furthermore, in being pursued by Helena, Demetrius explicitly references the abuse he could easily subject her to You do impeach your modesty too much, To leave the city and commit yourself Into the hands of one that loves you not; To trust the opportunity of night And the ill counsel of a desert place With the rich worth of your virginity (2.1.214-219).

Of course, we know that this position is not alien to Demetrius, considering his willingness to conspire with Egeus in forcing Hermia to wed him. Yet he surpasses Lysander’s offer of consensual marital liaisons in the forest by suggesting Helena is foolish to “trust the opportunity of night” in his company, a situation far too conducive to the plucking of “the rich worth of [her] virginity.” Thus, when Theseus overrules Egeus’ efforts to unite Demetrius with Hermia, it complicates readings of the play that would refer to Helena’s conclusion as something other than her becoming re-affiliated with a questionable man. Hermia and Helena are permitted to keep their preferences, but Oberon and Theseus override their agency in that it is not the women who bring about their marriages, but male figures of authority who arbitrarily make a decision that does not contradict their tastes.

What are the play’s inferences, then, of women possessing power and established preferences in their prospective uniting with a man? If we apply their template to Elizabeth, another parallel is unearthed, this time in the queen’s courtship of Robert Dudley. As Carol Levin describes of their situation, “As her favorite, Elizabeth’s relationship with Dudley was very different from those with her foreign suitors. She knew him well, she apparently had intense feelings for him for many years, and his prospects for marrying the queen came not from the suitability of his birth but from Elizabeth’s personal affection for him” (Levin 45). Even in this case, however, marriage was not a sustainable option for a sovereign queen. One episode that serves to demonstrate the problems of such a match (beyond the Privy Council’s disapproval) occurred when Dudley assumed the authority of a king and punished one of Elizabeth’s subjects, prompting her to retort “If you think to rule here, I will take a course to see you forth-coming: I will have here but one Mistress, and no Master” (Levin 47). Despite occupying the throne, Elizabeth foreswore the “Master” that her marriage would have created of any potential husband. Indeed, such was her position regarding the women who served her, as Carol Doran explains: “in general terms, she wanted her privy chamber to be apolitical and consequently required her ladies to be free from loyalties to a husband and his kin. By marrying, her ladies 17

were risking their political neutrality” (4). This is the inevitable result of marriage, in which a woman, whether she seeks the status or is forced into it, is understood by society to have entered into an alternate state that has transferred her authority from one man (her father, normally) to another.

It will not to do to argue that, as Queen, Elizabeth was impervious to the influence of men. Considering the role of her Privy Council in facilitating and negating her varied marital prospects, Doran argues that “had Elizabeth’s council ever united behind any one of her suitors, she would have found great difficulty in rejecting his proposal; likewise, without strong conciliar backing Elizabeth would not or could not marry a particular candidate” (9). As a sovereign, Elizabeth prudently recognized the wisdom of her advisers and the need to operate in cognizance of their collective opinion. As such, Doran’s point may seem to contradict mine, yet she clarifies that, if the council had arrived at a consensus, the sovereign queen would have “found great difficulty” in rejecting a proposal; similarly, she “would not or could not” marry a candidate in a paucity of that same consensus. Elizabeth, clearly, while sovereign, was not immune to the influential power of men, even in a situation in which she bore no legal responsibility to them. How much a marriage might have exacerbated this situation if her given husband were even remotely wise?

Would the queen not have been even more prone to share her authority with a counselor additionally possessed with the role of her husband, to whom in private she would owe spiritual obedience? It is clear that Elizabeth was not subject to men (in the form of the Council) in the same way or to the same extent that private female citizens were to their husbands—but her position as a “vital exception” to gendered power normativity cannot be interpreted as one unaffected by the fact that “all [other] forms of public and domestic authority in Elizabethan England were vested in men: in fathers, husbands, masters, teachers, magistrates, lords” (Montrose 64). If Elizabeth’s Council was this effective in guiding and shaping her decisions, making her authority something sovereign but three-dimensional in her leadership’s stylistic lack of despotism, then it is not unreasonable to conclude that marriage would have compromised her authority, if not in practice, then at the very least in her authority’s representation, which, as we know, was as integral to Elizabeth’s sovereignty as the sovereignty itself.

Therefore, A Midsummer Night’s Dream can be thought of as a “play of reflected identities”, each of which refract representations of Elizabeth and project them onto the theatrical stage as characters exhibiting a modicum of the queen’s autonomy (Davies 124). In much of the artistic discourse of the time, representations of England’s Fairy Queen were panegyrics, but Shakespeare’s interrogative approach revels in the ambiguity created by such a queen.

Some have argued that his “whole endeavor in his play was to restore her to the control of the patriarchy” through the subjugation of Titania (Berry 146). However, a more balanced cognizance of the full imaginative potential of Shakespeare’s play recognizes not only the cultural entropy toward female subjugation prevalent at the time, but 18

the nascent sovereignty of women unfettered by institutions like marriage. For “even though Elizabeth herself was no feminist—in the sense that she did not concern herself with the situation of other women,” her flourishing in a position of independence and her control of self-representation “worked for representations of female autonomy and power that both underwrote and jeopardized the apparently natural fabric of signification” (Frye 21). A Midsummer Night’s Dream surely depicts the tendencies of society at the time to reject such women or denature their authority by juxtaposing them with sovereign males, but the implications of the play are progressive in that it allows, even insists, that all four women demonstrate the agency of which they are robbed, but which their daughters might fully possess.

Works Cited Berry, Philippa. “Of Chastity and Power: Elizabethan Literature and the Unmarried Queen.”

New York: Routledge, 1994. Print.

Clement, Jennifer. “The ‘Imperial Vot’ress’: Divinity, Femininity, and Elizabeth I in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’” Explorations in Renaissance Culture. 34.2 (2008): 163-184. Print.

Davies, Stevie. “The Feminine Reclaimed: The Idea of Woman in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Milton.” University Press of Kentucky, 1986, www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt130jbpr.

Doran, Elizabeth. “Why Did Elizabeth Not Marry?” Elizabeth I and Her Age: Authoritative Texts, Commentary and Criticism. Ed. Donald V Stump and Susan M. Felch. New York: Norton, 2009.

681-693. Print.

Frye, Susan. “Elizabeth I: The Competition for Representation.” New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Print.

Hunt, Maurice. “A Speculative Political Allegory in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream.’”

Comparative Drama, vol. 34, no. 4, 2000, pp. 423–453. www.jstor.org/stable/41154056.

Levin, Carole. The Heart and Stomach of a King: Elizabeth I and the Politics of Sex and Power.

Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1994. Print.

Montrose, Louis A. “Shaping Fantasies: Figurations of Gender and Power in Elizabethan Culture.” Representations Spring. No. 2 (1983): 61-94. JSTOR. Web. 22 Aug. 2016.

Shakespeare, William. A Midsummer Night’s Dream. Russ McDonald, and Lena Cowen Orlin, Eds. The Bedford Shakespeare: Based on the new Cambridge Shakespeare Edition. Boston: Bedford/St Martin’s, 2015. Print.

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Artist: Melanie Xiong

20

Intersectional Oppression in August Wilson’s Fences: Social, Psychological, and Economic Means of Revolt Joe Davidson Hamline University St. Paul, MN

“And yet, being a problem is a strange experience, peculiar even for one who has never been anything else” - From The Souls of Black Folk, W.E.B. Du Bois (2).

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Fences, a play by August Wilson that was written in 1983, which serves as the sixth installment of the au-

thor’s ten-play “Pittsburgh cycle,” is set in the year 1957 and tells the story of the Maxson family and those who are closest to them. Like much of Wilson’s work, Fences is a deep exploration of what it means to be an African-American individual living in a society where one is assigned the status of a “problem” and forced to navigate the world as such. By exploring the philosophies and frameworks of social critics Iris Marion Young and W.E.B. Du Bois, I will clarify the status of the play’s patriarch, Troy Maxson: he is an oppressed individual who has fallen victim to the illusion of race that the dominant society reinforces through its policies and norms. . Troy’s oppression manifests itself socially, in the binary opposition between the Negro baseball leagues and the “American” or “Big” leagues; psychologically, in Troy’s clear double-consciousness; and economically, by means of his isolation in the labor market. Troy meets this oppression with acts of revolt. However, due to his ignorance of the discriminatory systems surrounding him, his acts of revolt are misplaced -- thus ultimately solidifying his role as a tragic hero.

In the eyes of Iris Marion Young, a social and political theorist who built upon many of Marx’s original claims regarding labor and alienation, Troy Maxson, a former baseball player turned garbage-worker, has fallen victim to oppression, and can serve as a representation of African-American alienation from society throughout the history of the United States. For Young, oppression is tied to the reduction of one’s humanness and manifests itself in at least one of five ways: exploitation, marginalization, powerlessness, cultural imperialism, and violence (Young 40).

All fives faces of oppression are relevant to the social context of the play, specifically the dichotomy that is created between the Negro Leagues and the American Leagues.

Troy, a self-proclaimed star of the Negro Leagues, is confident that he would have been a star if he had been 21

given a shot in the American Leagues. Prior to Jackie Robinson breaking the color barrier in 1947, baseball had two distinct leagues. There was a league created for players of color, separate from the “Big Leagues,” which now characterizes baseball as America’s sport. The “Negro Leagues,” synonymous with poor pay, poor travel conditions, and poor public perception, are nevertheless historically known for their exceptional talent. They serve as a representation for how people of color, specifically African-Americans, were treated, and to some extent still are, by the larger, intersectional American value system. In highlighting the imperialistic trends of the white society and their dictation of baseball, Wilson offers an ironic critique of this system. Baseball, historically speaking, is often perceived as America’s sport which is composed of values that are said to represent exactly what it means to be American. It is, in its simplest form, “an expression of hope, democratic values, and the drive for individual success” (Koprince 349).

Baseball, in Wilson’s Fences, serves as a representation and staunch critique of the notions of an American Dream.

This dream is more of a nightmare to Troy, as he is systemically bound by the fence that has been erected, representing the color line and racial divide within society.

Years after Troy’s career has ended and he has once again fallen victim to the racist nature of America’s institutions, Troy receives his opportunity to revolt against the oppressive nature of professional sports. This instance centers on the relationship Troy shares with his son, Cory, a high school student with a promising athletic career.

Not wanting Cory to fall victim to the same pain/victimization that Troy is still battling with, Troy refuses to let Cory make an attempt at college football, despite the fact that he is being actively recruited. Instead, Troy vouches for Cory’s entrance into the stable (yet exploitative) labor market. Perhaps without even realizing it, Troy is pushing Cory into the same fits of alienation and oppression that he himself is experiencing, and is doing so quite ironically.

In the last exchange between the two, there is a clear divide. After arguing over Cory’s future, Troy comes out victorious, although tragically, for he fails to see that he is functioning within the same systems that have contributed to his continued oppression.

“CORY: Tell mama I’ll be back for my things.

TROY: They’ll be on the other side of that fence” (Wilson 89).

This exchange exemplifies the metaphorical weight the fence has in the story. Troy’s binary perception of the world -- his inability to see in terms other than black and white -- further alienates him. They alienate him not only from society, but from his family, and actually push him to take on the role of an oppressor without realizing it.

Troy is left to pick up the pieces of his identity as it is defined by the world around him. This takes a toll on the individual, for Troy is living his life as a constant fight wherein a fence must always be navigated, serving as an obstacle and a distinct binary to the white world.

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When examined at a deeper level, the psychological implications of Troy’s reality become clear: there is a clear existence of a double-consciousness alive within his character. By taking baseball, a historically American, and historically white sport, and using it as the backdrop for the story of an African-American man who has fallen victim to oppression by the dominant society, Wilson reasserts the messages of W.E.B Du Bois. Troy is living with a double-consciousness.W.E.B. Dubois defines the double-consciousness as, “this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. One ever feels his two-ness,—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder” (Du Bois 45 ). Troy is an African-American man living in a white dominated world. There is no American Dream for him. This is most clearly indicated by how Troy’s baseball aspirations were cut short due to his race, which it is represented by the fence Troy is building throughout the play. Young would describe Troy as a marginalized individual. Marginalization, in her terms, “[...] is perhaps the most dangerous form of oppression. A whole category of people is expelled from useful participation in social life and thus potentially subjected to severe material deprivation and even extermination” (Young 53). This fence represents the binary perceptions Troy has of himself due to his marginalization in American society.

This idea of the double-consciousness is further echoed by Du Bois’ proposed claims of the intentional “veil” that has been created by the white society and the realities that manifest themselves because of it. This veil is characterized both by the notions of literal skin color (with strong contrasts between whiteness and blackness) and of white and black Americans’ inability to realize that they are functioning within a binary perception assigned to them by the dominant group (England, Warner). Troy is a victim of double-consciousness and the veil, and to truly undermine his status as an oppressed member of society, he must understand the notions of the color line and oppose them through active, intentional revolt.

Instead, Troy revolts through romantic avenues, and accidently impregnates Alberta, the woman with whom he was having an affair. Together, Alberta and Troy’s wife, Rose, represent Troy’s double-consciousness. They each represent a piece of Troy’s identity. Rose, Troy’s wife of eighteen years, represents the side of the fence Troy has been stuck on, the side associated with blackness. Alberta represents what Troy yearns for, and that is freedom from the chains of oppression that have been locked by the reality of race manifesting itself in society. Alberta grows to symbolize the opposite side of the fence -- a metaphorical whiteness. As aforementioned, Troy is so blinded by his alienation that he fails to see this as a form of revolt. In his own mind, his actions are completely justified; he is simply taking a chance that he has never taken before, revolting in an avenue that will have no further implications, yet will 23

still give him the false feeling of power:

ROSE: You should have stayed in my bed, Troy.

TROY: Then when I saw that gal.. . she firmed up my backbone. And I got to thinking that if I tried ... I just might be able to steal second. Do you understand after eighteen years I wanted to steal second.

ROSE: You should have held me tight. You should have grabbed me and held on.

TROY: I stood on first base for eighteen years and I thought . . . well, goddamn it . . . go on for it!

ROSE: We’re not talking about baseball! We’re talking about you going off to lay in bed with another woman . . . and then bring it home to me. That’s what we’re talking about. We ain’t talking about no baseball” (Wilson 6970).

The alienation within Troy’s romantic relationships also manifests itself in the labor market, thus bringing to

life the economic disparities and implications of the oppression he faces . The first clear example of this is the conversation that opens the play between Troy and Bono wherein Troy details his frustrations with their boss, Mr. Rand.

“I went to Mr. Rand and asked him, ‘Why?’ Why you got the white mens driving and the colored lifting? [...] All I want them to do is change the job description. Give everybody a chance to drive the truck” (Wilson 2-3). This is an example of the literal alienation Marx discusses as related to labor (Young 49). Troy’s labor, which is completely conducive to his identity as an African-American male, alienates him not only from society, but from his family and from himself. He has become a cog in the machine, stripped of his humanity, political capital, and consciousness.

It becomes clear that Troy has fallen victim to Marxist ideals of survival, focusing on material goods and the need to simply get by, paying no mind to his own emotional well-being. These notions are best exemplified by an exchange between Troy and Cory in Act One, Scene Three of the play. With intensity and rawness in his voice, Troy questions why Cory is able to live the life he lives, and when not satisfied with Cory’s answer, seeks to frame it in a way he feels appropriate: “Like you? I go out here every morning… bust my butt… putting up with them crackers every day… cause I like you? You about the biggest fool I ever saw. It’s my job. It’s my responsibility!” (Wilson 38). In the end, Troy’s mindset cost him one of the only things that he actually expressed a care for: his family. His alienation within the labor force has extended to all aspects of his life, revealing to the reader the false legitimacy of the American Dream. Hard work does not yield a happy life for Troy. Despite his flaws, there is no denying that he has lived and worked, as Cory and Raynell realize at the end of the story, like a dog. Although Cory may have never realized his American Dream of making it to the Big Leagues, he did leave a legacy behind for his family. This is a symbolic double-bind for the character. Troy’s greatest strength, his perseverance and willingness to revolt when the 24

opportunity presents itself, is also his greatest flaw. Due to his misunderstanding of the systems of oppression around him, he misplaces his energies and ultimately fails to bring about much social change.

However, despite these struggles, Troy always “goes down swingin’” (Letzler). This is an ode, by Wilson, to African-Americans, who, despite the social, psychological, and economic implications of the oppression that is inflicted upon them by the dominant white society, have been able persevere. Troy is living in a racist world. This racism is manifested not only through policy, but through the norms that are woven into the fabric of society. At the end of the play Troy dies, and he goes down swinging. This death symbolizes Troy’s legacy as a tragic hero. Unable to fully comprehend the binaries that transcend all aspects of his life, Troy revolts where he sees fit. The flaw, though, is he revolts towards areas of his life where he holds power, instead of those wherein he is oppressed.

Troy leaves the play with an aura of perseverance , in total blues tradition, recalling Ralph Ellison’s claim that the blues is “...an impulse to keep the painful details and episodes of a brutal experience alive in one’s aching consciousness, to finger its jagged grain, and to transcend it, not by the consolation of philosophy but by squeezing from it a near-tragic, near-comic lyricism. As a form, the blues is an autobiographical chronicle of personal catastrophe expressed lyrically” (Ellison 103) .

This is exactly what Troy is able to do, and it is communicated by the song that Cory and Raynell sing at the end of the play. “[Old] Blue laid down and died like a man/ Now he’s treeing possums in the Promised Land/ I’m gonna tell you this to let you know / Blue’s gone where the good dogs go” (Wilson 99). Troy Maxson, whether a flawed character or a hero, has fallen victim to the social conditions around him, and represents the struggles of the greater African-American community during the time in which this play is set. Staying true to the African-American blues tradition, Troy turns his pain into beauty and legacy: he leaves behind two children who, despite their own experiences with oppression, are able to find strength in one another, and seem to express a hope in navigating the institutional and systemic racism that surrounds them.

Fences truly serves as an ode to the African-American community living in a white-dominated world. In Young’s terms, Troy Maxson perfectly represents the oppressed individual. It is clear that Troy suffers from all of Young’s “Five Faces of Oppression,” in part because he is African-American. According to Marx, the only way to fight oppression is revolt. Troy’s greatest flaw is that he expends his energies in all of the wrong places due to his inability to understand the roots of his oppression. Troy serves to represent the greater African-American experience; he is so alienated within society that he cannot achieve the American Dream. This is represented socially, through the dichotomy created between the Negro and the American baseball leagues, psychologically through Du Bois’s concept of the double-consciousness, and economically through Troy’s alienation in the labor market. It is important 25

to note that these issues are intersectional -- they are not mutually exclusive. The realities of each riff on one another, resulting in a hierarchy of oppression that functions through the framework of race and manifests itself through policy and societal norms reinforced through the binary between black and white. However, despite the struggles he faces, Troy stays true to his blues roots, serving as an eventual reckoning for those around him. In the end he is the catalyst of a moment of beauty and hope for his family solidifying his identity as a tragic hero. Rose, Cory, and Raynell are united at last, a family once again, held together by Troy’s legacy: “...I’m gonna do her just like your daddy did you… I’m gonna give her the best of what’s in me” (Wilson 98). Wilson’s play is a message of personal strength and cultural uplift to the African-American community, symbolically represented by the character of Troy. Despite the oppressive nature of the dominant American society, which has found its power through the very real illusion of race, the fence can be navigated.

Works Cited Du Bois, W.E.B. The Souls of Black Folk. 1903. New York: Penguin, 1969.

Ellison, Ralph, and Robert G. O’Meally. Living with Music: Ralph Ellison’s Jazz Writings. New York: Modern Library, 2003. Google Scholar. Web. 28 Feb. 2017.

England, Lynn, and Keith W. Warner. “W. E. B. Du Bois: Reform, Will, and the Veil.” Social Forces. Oxford University Press, 28 Feb. 2013. Web. 28 Feb. 2017.

Koprince, Susan. “Baseball as History and Myth in August Wilson’s “Fences”” African American Review 40.2 (2006): 349-58. JSTOR. Web. 28 Nov. 2016. www.jstor.org/stable/40033723.

Letzler, David. “Walking Around the Fences: Troy Maxson and the Ideology of “Going Down Swinging.” African American Review 47.2-3 (2014): 301-12. Academic Search Premier [EBSCO]. Web. 28 Nov. 2016. doi: 10.1353/afa.2014.0049.

Young, Iris Marion. Justice and the Politics of Difference. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 1990.

Wilson, August. Fences. London, Penguin Books, 1988.

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Artist: Shannon Gardner

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‘I don’t know why, but it bothered the hell out of me’: Parental Trauma and Narrative Identity in the American Coming of Age Novel.

Samatha Calver University of Edinburgh

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (Twain, 1884), The Catcher in the Rye (Salinger, 1951) and Lolita

(Nabokov, 1955) are three quintessential American novels that reflect analogous literary techniques in their representation of trauma. Told from a retrospective standpoint by a subjective first person narrator, the novels are concerned with a “movement from the uncertainty of youth into the power of maturity” (Bolaki, 12); they map out their central characters’ departures from childhood using three very different and highly stylised forms of prose. Both Huckleberry Finn and Holden Caulfield speak as adolescents who experience abuse at the hands of their fathers, and their narrative voices indicate their inability to acknowledge this trauma. Huck normalizes the physical and emotional cruelty of Pap Finn in an attempt to suppress the emotional effect it has on him; however, despite his ignorance of the emotional realities of his abuse, his traumatic relationship with his father spurs his “going out into the world and experiencing both defeats and triumphs,” allowing him a “better understanding of self ” (Hardin, 15). Similarly, the emotional aftermath of Holden’s parental trauma, namely the neglect and emotional abuse suffered at the hands of his father, remains unarticulated throughout his narrative. He presents us with a paradoxical representation of his abuse: while implicitly suggesting the realities of the father-son relationship, his narrative style denies the emotional reactions that we would expect trauma to incite in him. This representation complicates our understanding of the journey he undergoes in order to establish a better understanding of himself; it suggests that it is not the events within his narrative, but the act of narration itself, that provokes change. Conversely, Humbert Humbert plays the part of the abusive parent. Nabokov’s oeuvre mirrors elements of the narrative style of the preceding novels; Humbert’s subjective discourse actively suppresses the emotional responses of his Daughter Dolores. Through this account, he attempts to justify the trauma he inflicts upon her, while simultaneously denying her an identity that exists outside of his sexualized creation.

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is characterized by the distinct narrative style of the novel’s protagonist, Huck. Albert Stone suggests that “the vernacular language […] in Huckleberry Finn strikes the ear with the freshness of a real boy talking out loud” (3), and it is this colloquial tone that gives us an insight into the interiority of Huck’s character, reflecting his “personality and modes of perception” (63). Janet McKay outlines the stylistic choices Twain 28

makes in order to develop the narrative voice of his eponymous character. She summarizes the author’s carefully placed errors: “nonstandard verb forms,” “the use of the conjunction ‘and’ to link any number of subordinate and coordinate ideas,” and “a vocabulary that depends on strategic repetition” (63-68), that typify the narrative. Furthermore, Huck uses direct reporting speech to relay the exact dialogue of the characters that surround him: the Duke’s and King’s butchered Hamlet soliloquy, Jim’s distinctive Missouri dialect, and Mrs. Watson’s severe disciplinary dialogue. Twain’s use of these particular literary techniques in developing Huck’s voice is important to bear in mind when considering Huck’s narration of the central traumatic episode of the novel: his kidnapping and subsequent escape from his father, Pap Finn.

Huck first mentions Pap, the town drunk, through direct speech5 in chapter three, telling us “I didn’t want to see him no more. He used to always whale me when he was sober and could get his hands on me” (177). Pap’s abusive nature becomes immediately apparent to us, and this portrayal is reinforced upon his return to St. Petersburg, where he “catched me [Huck] a couple times and thrashed me, but I went to school just the same, and dodged him or out-run him most of the time” (185). This instance implies a normalization of the trauma inflicted: “just the same” suggests that being thrashed makes no difference to Huck, as he presents his trauma as an unremarkable part of his everyday life in an attempt to suppress it. Moreover, Huck’s account of being kidnapped by Pap is marked by a distinctly casual tone: “He [Pap] said he would show who was Huck Finn’s boss. So he watched out for me one day in the spring, and catched me, and took me up the river about three mile, in a skiff, and crossed over to the Illinois shore where it was a woody and there warn’t no houses but an old log hut in a place where the timber was so thick you couldn’t find it if you didn’t know where I was.” (185) Huck describes his displacement from his home in single sentence, betraying no feelings towards the violent situation – only providing us with exterior description. We would not be wrong in understanding this nonchalant account as an implicit concealment of the emotional strain that Huck has objectively undergone.

The section of the narrative that Huck spends trapped by his father does not exhibit any sort of departure

from the narrative style outlined by McKay: “he see me and went after me” (190), as opposed to “he saw me,” is a nonstandard verb form, the use of present form in the place of the simple tense. Additionally, “Pretty soon he was all tired out, and dropped down with his back against the door, and said he would rest a minute and then kill me”(190) is an example of the use of the conjunction “and” to link coordinate ideas. He also employs a colloquial phrase that 1 Pap is mentioned through directly reported speech in chapter two: Huck chronicles Ben Rogers saying “Yes, he’s got a father, but you can’t never find him, these days. He used to lay drunk with the Hogs in the tanyard, but he hain’t been seen in these parts for a year or more” (174). Huck thus establishes his father as an absent drunkard.

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he repeats throughout the rest of the narrative, “by and by” (182, 187), which is demonstrative of his consistent and repetitive vocabulary. Huck is also able to reproduce verbatim Pap’s diatribe on the “govment!” (187) for a substantial length – over forty five lines of directly reported speech – in the same fashion that he reports the Duke’s soliloquy. The consistency of this passage and the rest of the novel in terms of Huck’s narrative voice further exhibits an unconscious desire to normalize his trauma.

Despite Huck’s attempt to suppress his traumatic experience, his relationship with Pap serves as a catalyst for his voyage up the Mississippi, pushing him to “fix up some way to leave there” (186). Moreover, it influences his relationship with Jim – a figure in whom Huck effectively finds his “true father” (Trilling, 8) in place of his absent and abusive Pap - and ultimately drives him to “come to a more heart-felt conception of what’s right” (Freedman, 103) regarding the political landscape of slavery that surrounds him. He undergoes a moral “coming of age that is contextualised by the historical circumstances that […] deeply inform it” (Millard, 10), made possible by the traumatic episode with Pap. Huck’s normalization of abuse within his retrospective narrative establishes his inability to confront its emotional consequences even at the end of his physical journey. But his trauma is nevertheless important within the temporal structure of his narrative as it facilitates a change: a social and moral departure from childhood.

Holden Caulfield’s narrative is more evidently occupied with his traumatic experiences than Huckleberry Finn’s: Holden grapples with the death of his brother, his struggles with his sexuality, and his anxieties about growing up. However, the trauma inflicted by his parents – specifically his father - is perhaps the most interesting to examine alongside Twain’s novel. Holden’s narrative provides us with a number of implicit suggestions of trauma -- not necessarily physical, but rather caused by neglect and emotional abuse. He tells us that his father is “quite touchy” (1) about sharing anything “personal” (1), implying a lack of emotional communication. Before Phoebe discovers Holden’s expulsion from Pencey, she informs him that “Daddy can’t come” (147) to her performance in the school play, since “he’s in California” (147). Holden’s failure to react implies that their father’s absence from domestic life is not an unusual circumstance. Upon realising why Holden has returned home early, Phoebe’s reaction is telling: “All she kept saying was ‘Daddy’s gonna kill you’’’ (147). Phoebe’s repeated suggestion of violence in the phrase “Daddy’s gonna kill you” reveal the abusive temperament of Holden’s and Phoebe’s father.

Despite these indications of trauma, the narrative style also reveals an active suppression of emotions related to Holden’s ’s parental trauma. Like his literary precursor Huck, Holden’s first person narrative is stylistically unique: Salinger makes use of the colloquial language of the mid-twentieth century teenager, presenting an “extremely trite and typical teenage speech, overlaid with strong personal idiosyncrasies” (Costello, 173) in order to express Holden’s subjective world view. Throughout his narration, self-deflection is Holden’s most obvious rhetorical technique: he 30

directs the flow of discourse, denies information, and attributes emotional reactions to disparate causes so as to avoid betraying his feelings about his traumatic experiences.

Perhaps the most revealing instance of this form of self-deflection is his account of the afternoon he spent playing checkers with Jane Gallagher. Her stepfather asks if there are cigarettes in the house, and she reacts emotionally to this confrontation: a “tear plopped down on the checkerboard […] she rubbed it into the board with her finger” (70).

In the line that immediately follows, Holden remarks “I don’t know why, but it bothered the hell out of me” (70); he acknowledges that Jane’s obvious emotional distress elicited an emotional reaction on his part, but denies any understanding of why. The reader – who is aware of the parental trauma that Holden has undergone through his implicit indications – is invited to interpret this emotional connection as a consequence of their shared traumatic experience, despite Holden’s unwillingness to admit it. When she begins to cry in earnest, Holden tells us “and next thing I knew, I was kissing her all over – anywhere – her eyes, her nose, her forehead, her eyebrows and all. Her ears – her whole face except for her mouth and all” (71). His desire to comfort her through physical intimacy -- with the sexual element removed, as she “wouldn’t let [Holden] go near her mouth” (71) suggests an emotional understanding between the two of them. However, Holden immediately redirects the flow of conversation: “anyway, it was the closest we ever got to necking” (71). He denies the emotional realities of the situation by labelling it as a story about “necking” instead of acknowledging the poignant emotional connection that we perceive. Moreover, Holden reflecting upon this particular episode in the midst of the “madman stuff that happened around last Christmas” (1) implies that his mind is engaged with his parental trauma; recalling Jane provides Holden with a source of comfort, even if he is disinclined to admit it to himself or to his reader.

There is ample critical debate as to whether or not Holden’s narrative exhibits a change in attitude towards his trauma that would indicate movement into maturity. Miller and Strauch both argue that Holden’s change occurs over the course of the three days spanned by the book’s plot; other critics locate it within his period of institutionalisation, and still others suggest that the present process of narration is “the major transformative agent” (Cowan, 45). The third argument seems the most convincing: Michael Cowan offers two significant reasons to support the argument that change occurs through Holden’s narration. Highlighting the importance of the temporal structure of the novel, Cowan asserts that there is not enough emotional distance between Holden’s pre-Christmas wanderings and his present narration to demonstrate any change (47). Holden narrates his own story, and features within that story as another “character” of sorts. The reader might therefore assume that Holden the narrated character is a different person from Holden the narrator. However, Holden’s use of present perfect early on in the narrative (“people never notice anything” (8)) indicates that his attitude at the outset of his narration is similar to his attitude as a character in New York.

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Additionally, Cowan underlines the characterization of Holden’s nominal audience, the specific “you” being addressed. He asserts that, since Holden the character is most comfortable when talking to one person, we can suppose that Holden the narrator is talking directly to a singular “you.” His use of young adult vernacular suggests that the “you” is someone of a similar age, to whom he has attributed the virtues of intelligence and respectful listening (41-42). Together, Holden’s emotional suppression of his parental trauma and his apparent addressal to a young adult, singular “you,” suggest that the act of narrating his memories serves as a cathartic act for Holden: “His present talking to you is the verbal equivalent of his holding hands with Jane Gallagher” (51). Even though he is unwilling to consciously admit his trauma in the retelling of his experiences, the act of narrating serves as a release of the emotional consequences of the parental abuse he has suffered. The narrative act thus provides narrator Holden the possibility of overcoming his trauma in the future, even after his narrative has ended.

Nabokov’s novel is as concerned with narrative style as both Huckleberry Finn and Catcher in the Rye, yet he presents us with a narrator who occupies the position of abusive parent rather than abused child. The primary aim of Humbert Humbert’s6 pointedly stylised prose is arguably to justify the trauma he inflicts on the innocent Dolores Hale. Indeed, his language has been labelled by critics as “the rhetoric of reader entrapment” (Toker, 199). In a similar manner to Holden’s, Humbert addresses a very specific nominal audience, a “learned reader” (57) intentionally created through the language with which he addresses them. His discourse consistently conveys a tone of European sophistication that is reinforced by the numerous declarations in French that pepper the narrative. This demonstrates Humbert’s desire to portray himself as sophisticated, and it is accompanied by an implied appreciation by his reader; Humbert thus invites us to identify with him. Moreover, the text is permeated with literary allusions: Humbert evokes Joyce, Poe and T.S Eliot so as to flatter our intellectual capabilities. Humbert’s appeal to this “ideal reader of Lolita […] a literary scholar, trained and widely read” (Proffer 5) invites their sympathies. In effect, the seductive power of Humbert’s rhetoric upon the reader parallels his seduction of Dolores.

Alongside his attempt to demonstrate his essential humanity, an examination of Humbert’s representation of Dolores over the course of the narrative reveals his suppression of the trauma she undergoes. Primarily, Humbert sexualizes her in order to deny her any sense of autonomy: a physical being, she is defined by her “freckled face, or the purplish post on her naked neck where fairy-tale vampires had feasted, or the unconscious movement of her tongue exploring a touch of rosy rash around her swollen lips” (139). His narrative style also imitates Holden’s in that he deflects the discourse, denying us specific information and directing the flow of narration away from Dolores’s emotions. In the central seduction sequence, when Humbert tells us “I shall not bore my learned reader with a detailed 2 It is important to make the distinction between narrator and author, Nabokov, in his ‘On a book entitled Lolita’ purported ‘it is childish to study a work of fiction in order to gain information about […] the author’ (316).

32

account” (140), he erases details that are arguably paramount to a scene of molestation, thereby distancing himself from culpability for the sexual trauma he is causing. Eventually, he acknowledges Dolores’s emotional reaction to the incident: “An expression of pain flitted across Lo’s face” (140). But he soon shifts the narrative focus away from her distress (“loquacious Lo was silent” (140)), contemplating instead his own anxieties about the situation. Humbert’s love for Dolores is in reality a self-absorbed fixation that compels him to deny her any sort of characterization that doesn’t comply with his ideal of her. She is deprived of her identity as “Dolores” and mutated into Lolita by Humbert’s discourse as the narrative progresses.

Toker argues that Humbert “cannot suppress [Dolores’s] intuition for normality” (222), which eventually compels her to abandon her captor in pursuit of her own life. She writes to Humbert from her poverty-stricken situation, telling him, “I’m married. I’m going to have a baby” (266). Here, she indicates her attempt to create an identity through living a normal life: marriage and children. However, she is ultimately denied this identity by Nabokov himself: “Mrs Richard F Schiller died in childbed, giving birth to a stillborn girl, on Christmas day 1952” (4). Her death “re-establishes her image in its proper dimensions […] a very real very abused child” (Toker 223); it is emblematic of the trauma that leads to Humbert’s suppression of her character. In killing her before she even turns eighteen, Nabokov denies an identity to the Dolores that exists beyond Humbert’s narration. Thus, she exists only as Humbert’s creation.

The final page of his narrative states that she will “live in the minds of later generations” (309); she lives on not as Dolores, but as “Lolita, [his] sin, [his] soul” (1).

Ultimately, the distinctive discourse of each individual narrator is of paramount importance to their respective parental trauma and its dramatization. Huck and Holden suppress the emotional repercussions of their abuse, the former because he is unable to accept them and the latter because he is unwilling. Nevertheless, Huck’s trauma allows him the opportunity to experience the world, facilitating his coming of age; Holden has evidently not recovered psychologically from his relationship with his father, yet the very act of narration suggests recovery and subsequent change as a possibility. By contrast, Humbert assumes the antithetical position of abusive parent. His narrative style demonstrates an appropriation of the narrative techniques established by Twain and Salinger, and his suppression of Dolores’s identity denies her the opportunity to mature. The traditional

Works Cited Bolaki, Stella. ‘Unsettling genre.’ Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic Women’s Fiction.

Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2011. 9-20.

Costello, Donald P. ‘The Language of The Catcher in the Rye’. American Speech. 34.3 (Oct. 1959). 172-181.

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Cowan, Michael. ‘Holden’s Museum Pieces: Narrator and Nominal Audience in Catcher in the Rye.’ New Essays on Catcher in the Rye. Ed. Jack Salzman. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 1992. 35-55.

Freedman, Carol. The Morality of Huck Finn.’ Philosophy and Literature 21.1 (1997). 102-13.

Hardin, James N. ‘Bildungsroman Term and Theory.’ Reflection and Action: Essays on the Bildungsroman. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 1991. 1-45.

McKay, Janet. ‘An Art So High: style in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.’ New Essays on Huckleberry Finn. Ed. Louis J Budd. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. 61-82.

Millard, Kenneth. ‘Introduction: Contemporary Coming of Age – Subject to Change.’ Coming of Age in Contemporary American Fiction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2007. 1-14.

Miller, E.H. ‘In Memoriam: Allie Caulfield in The Catcher in the Rye’ Contemporary Literary Criticism. Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. 15.1 (1982). 129-140.

Nabokov, Vladimir. Lolita. London: Penguin Classics, 2000.

Proffer, Carl R. ‘Literary allusion.’ Keys to Lolita. London: Indiana University Press, 1968. 3-56.

Salinger, J.D. The Catcher in the Rye. London: Penguin Books, 1994.

Stone, Albert. ‘Mark Twain and New England.’ The Innocent Eye: Childhood in Mark Twain’s Imagination. New York: Archeon books, 1970. 3-33.

Strauch, Carl F. ‘Kings in the Back Row: Meaning Through Structure – A Reading of Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye.’ Wisconsin Studies in Contemporary Fiction 2. (Winter 1961). 5-30.

Trilling, Lionel. ‘Huckleberry Finn.’ Blooms Major Literary Characters: Huck Finn. Ed. Harold Bloom. Pennsylvania: Chelsea House Publishers, 2004. 5-16.

Toker, Leona. ‘‘Reader! Bruder!’: Broodings on the Rhetoric of Lolita.’ Nabokov: the Mystery of Literary Structures.

London: Ithaca and London Press, 1989. 198-228.

Twain, Mark. The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. London: Wordsworth Classics, 2001.

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Artist: Ashley Jablonski

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Graphing Liberation: Intersectionality in The House of Mirth and The Color Purple Lindsay LaMoore Hamline University

Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth and Alice Walker’s The Color Purple have often been viewed by critics as signposts for the waves of the feminist movement in modern history. Indeed, the ideological contexts of both texts lend themselves to the tenets of feminist and black feminist criticism, which coincide with the first and second waves of feminism. Both texts depict marginalized women striving for liberation in achieving their notion of it: “the republic of the spirit” for Lily in The House of Mirth and “the love of God” for Celie in The Color Purple. Yet, there is dissonance existing between not only the systems of oppression in each, but also in how Lily and Celie operate within their ideological contexts. The ultimate attainment of agency in Celie’s case, and failure to do so in Lily’s, and their different modes for navigating such marks The Color Purple as a possible response to the questions that The House of Mirth poses. Given this, a close reading of, firstly, the ways in which both characters navigate, secondly, the discrepancies of their methodology, and thirdly, the limitations their contexts grants them in this process is essential in determining how and why there is dissonance between Lily and Celie’s outcomes and what that means for the critical conversation both texts are engaged in.

At their foundation, Celie and Lily experience a disparity in their terms of operation as a consequence of the initial relationship between content and form of The Color Purple and The House of Mirth—particularly in the point of view of the narrative. First person perspective in Walker’s text intrinsically places Celie on her own terms of operation as she is automatically the teller of her own story, despite being marginalized within it. In its own way, the form of perspective already enables Celie, giving her an agency that Lily cannot possibly share considering Wharton writes her in third person point of view. It is important to note how the point of view affects the content of the narrative, especially the perception of other characters and the lens through which they are filtered. For example, The Color Purple is narrated by Celie, who filters all other characters through her perspective; what the reader knows and feels for a character is the product of Celie’s knowledge and feelings for them. Thus, readers’ perspectives are limited by Celie in addition to her having more agency. In contrast, The House of Mirth is narrated by an omniscient narrator, and readers are given insight into what all other characters are thinking and feeling, but only to the extent 36

of what the characters know of themselves. Consequently, readers know other characters in ways that Lily cannot, but their knowledge is limited by the lens of each character. For example, Lily’s interactions with Selden are two-sided as Wharton narrates from both characters’ perspectives, revealing what Selden believes his motivations are. In this way, Lily’s inability to have agency is determined by the narrative form and by the content whereas Celie’s agency is predetermined to surpass Lily’s, although the content oppresses it in the same way.

It is apparent that Lily and Celie exist in systems of oppression and so it is imperative to understand that systems of oppression function on a psychical level, which becomes the site of their sustainability. Freud illustrates what is meant by social loss in “Mourning and Melancholia,” describing such losses as being “transformed into an ego-loss” (Freud 586) where the subject’s libido is not displaced onto another object but rather withdrawn into the ego. Lacan extends this to include that “the ego ultimately is something ‘extimate’...insofar as it crystallizes ‘the desire of the Other’” (Johnston) in which the loss withdrawn into the ego is projected onto the subject’s object of desire.

Thus, the ultimate power that sustains systems of oppression resides within their ability to manifest melancholy. As Freud explains “the ego can kill itself only if...it is able to direct against itself the hostility which relates to an object and which represents the ego’s original reaction to objects in the external world” (Freud 588). Alternatively speaking, melancholia can only be healed by recognizing that the oppressed identity is also the identity from which the subject can be liberated.

Both Lily and Celie experience systems of oppression that impose melancholic loss onto them, although these losses differentiate according to the identity of each character, which in turn affects how they operate within their ideological contexts. In “Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth,” Wai-Chee Dimock points out that the fiscal nature of Wharton’s word choice—“cost,” “payment,” “investment”—is evidence of the implicit system of exchange which manifests Lily’s melancholia. Rather than money, or the wealth of man, the demands of capital for women are their reputation, which is exchanged by way of marriage, and in turn, they gain the wealth of their husband. Due to Lily’s indecisiveness to marry, and thus failure to accept the rate of exchange, higher class characters such as Trenor and Bertha fix the rate of exchange for her. She is forced to abide by the rate of exchange furthering the oppression of her agency as she cannot operate on her own terms of exchange. Dimock articulates that “the manipulatable rate of exchange makes it a treacherous model for ‘fair play,’” (Dimock 377). As a result of her inability to fix the exchange rate, Lily experiences a melancholic loss that she projects onto Selden, as she believes him to be the symbolic representation of having achieved liberation from this system. In The Color Purple, a different system of oppression dominates; one of patriarchal, heteronormative racialization instilled by the convergence of gender, sexual, and racial difference that is ruled by characters such as Celie’s father and Mr.___. Judith Butler’s 37

article “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution” centers around the notion that all identity is constituted from a repetition of acts or performances; in particular, gender comes into being through the “stylization of the body” (Butler 900). In this way, Butler recognizes that gender, being a production, can thus be reconstituted. As Celie is faced with oppression on multiple modes of difference, she begins to recognize the performativity of gender identity and its relationship to her sexual difference: Shug say, Girl you look like a good time, you do. That when I notice how Shug talk and act sometimes like a man.

Men say stuff like that to women, Girl, you look like a good time...Not bout how some woman they hugging on look like a good time (Walker 72).

This passage illustrates how Celie comes to understand Shug’s gender to be performative, and, borrowing Butler’s conclusion, its ability to be reconstituted, which provides Celie a basis for understanding her same-sex desire for Shug. In turn, Celie begins to operate on her own terms in her ideological context, navigating the waters of oppressed racial, sexual, and gender difference.

Faced with the demands of capital and patriarchal, heteronormative racialization, Lily and Celie turn to

Selden and Shug for guidance towards liberation, unknowingly placing themselves at the forefront of their melancholic condition. Lily confesses to Selden, “‘I should never have found my way there if you hadn’t told me,’” explaining that she felt she “‘never had any choice’” (Wharton 70) in achieving liberation because no one had instructed her on the republic of the spirit, i.e. liberation. She declares, “‘I have known, I have known!’” (Wharton 70) the signposts to the republic of the spirit upon seeing Selden, and in saying so, she admits that he is ultimately her object of desire. Lily is less concerned with arriving there upon her own terms as she is with having Selden lead her to liberation, in which case she can never achieve it. In relying on her object of desire as also her means by which she might achieve liberation, Lily is inadvertently reinforcing her melancholia rather than disbanding it. Comparatively, Celie relies on Shug for guidance toward being loved by God, i.e. liberation, but does not directly view Shug as her means of achieving it due to the nature of how she defines it. Shug’s idea of liberation takes on a more spiritual tone, one that is intrinsically fluid and flexible and most significantly, one that is non-binary: “‘but once us feel loved by God, us do the best us can to please him with what us like’” (Walker 193). Shug designates liberation as individual liberation, free of the oppression they face, where Selden defines it in the context of the system of exchange: “‘freedom from money, freedom from poverty’” (Wharton 70). Thus, Celie is free to achieve liberation on her own terms rather than on the terms of the patriarchal, heteronormative racialization of the system that traps her, despite being guided

by Shug, her object of desire.

As there is a an inherent disconnect between the consequence of consulting their object of desire—namely, 38

where Celie is liberated and Lily succumbs to its absence—this discrepancy can be hypothesized as being a result of how their intersectionality operates in their ideological contexts. In her book, Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick discusses the notion of intersectionality as it relates to not only identity, but also oppression, and the dependent relationship of the two. She warns against dismissing the relationship between non-definitionally related identities in the name of their inseparability, as she says “gender is definitionally built into determinations of sexuality, in a way that neither of them is definitionally intertwined with, for instance, determinations of class or race” (Sedgwick 31). Instead, Sedgwick suggests that these analytical axes are the modes for which we might understand how the positionality of one identity might lend to the oppression of another. By these means, intersectionality poses as a possible solution to melancholia as Freud defines it; melancholia can only be healed by recognizing that the oppressed identity is also the identity from which the subject can be liberated. Through this understanding of identity, we can begin to understand what it is about the interstitial nature of identity that allows for some to have agency and for others to not, such as the case with Celie and Lily, respectively.

The intersectional identity of Celie allows her to embrace her relationships with women where Lily’s melan-

cholic object of desire fosters competition with other women, ultimately serving to heal melancholia in Celie’s case and fostering it in the instance of Lily. For example, Sophia and Shug are walking breeches of the patriarchal social contract by which Celie has been victimized. Shug, in particular, acts as a mentor to Celie, giving advice that directly goes against the oppression they face such as “‘you have to git man off your eyeball before you can see anything a’tall’” (Walker 197). Celie learns vicariously through the other women in her life; an important pattern that is conspicuously absent in The House of Mirth. In contrast, Lily is oscillating between “fate” and “luck” (Restuccia 411), as Frances L. Restuccia presents, which stand in for Lily’s indecisiveness in choosing the path that Gerdy walks, a humanist feminism, and the way Bertha lives, a poststructuralist feminism. “[Lily’s] demise,” Restuccia elaborates, “is instead the result of her being born into a patriarchal world...of frozen female identities” (Restuccia 415) in which agency belongs to those women who remain fixed rather than oscillate as Lily has demonstrated. These frozen identities represent two sides of the Marxist coin: remain single without wealth or marry into it. This demand of capital requires Lily to compete with other women for marriage, which is also a product of her heterosexuality. She admits to Gerty that “‘I have always had bad people about me’” (Wharton 165) and claims that Gerty could not understand her, as she belongs to a frozen identity. In this way, Lily’s melancholic object of desire, of freedom from money and poverty as presented by Selden, is reinforced because she cannot maintain supportive relationships with women on either side. Celie, as a poor, black, non-heteronormative female, operates at the intersection of several modes of difference. Barbara Smith describes black women writers as producing literature “as a direct result of the specific 39

political, social, and economic experience they have been obliged to share” (Smith 1415), indirectly emphasizing the significance of identity, and more specifically, intersectionality, being constructed from various axes of experience converging rather than primarily one separately from another. Celie’s intersectionality as well as her non-heteronormativity allows her grounds for maintaining supportive female relationships that ultimately serve as the foundation for her liberation.

As it has been determined for them by their objects of desire, both Celie and Lily must embody the idea

of “amphibiousness,” or versatility in order to achieve liberation, yet their intersectionality does not equally equip them for this embodiment, consequently resulting in one having agency where the other does not. As previously mentioned, Selden defines the republic of the spirit, and thus Lily’s achievement of liberation, as existing in a state of limbo wherein that difference of extremes “is in yourself [Lily]” (Wharton 286). In the sense of existing between two modes of operation—wealth or poverty—Selden encourages Lily to “remain amphibious,” as it is “all right as long as one’s lungs can work in another air” (Wharton 83). In saying so, the idea of liberation as existing between the margins of oppression is presented and can be seen as a parallel theme in The Color Purple. Shug tells Celie that God “just manifest itself even if you not looking, or don’t know what you looking for...yeah, It. God ain’t a he or a she, but a It” (Walker 195), essentially encouraging the non-binary idea of amphibiousness in the belief that God is gender non-conforming. However, God’s non-gender conformity can only truly be understood at the intersection of social and sexual difference, both of which are positionalities that Celie embodies. In contrast, Lily cannot embody amphibiousness because her intersectionality does not exist on the terms of liberation that Selden has prescribed for her. Yet, criticisms such as bell hooks’s question the validity of Celie’s liberation: “Celie never fully develops capacities for sustained self-assertion” (hooks 289) due to her dependency on others for liberation. However, hooks appears to overlook narrative form when making this assertion. Lily’s achievement of liberation is defined through the perspective of Selden’s idea of the republic of the spirit, whereas Celie’s achievement of liberation is defined through her own perspective of Shug’s idea of the love of God. As a result, Celie’s liberation is, indeed, sustainable due to its definition on the grounds of her own agency.

Through the analysis of The House of Mirth and The Color Purple and how their ideological contexts allow Lily and Celie to navigate their systems of oppression, the discrepancies in their methodology of doing so, and the limitations they face in this process due to their ideological contexts, it can be determined that intersectionality of identity is the basis for marginalized people to function on the terms of amphibiousness, which is the mode for which liberation can be achieved in various systems of oppression. In this way, Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s theory of viewing non-definitionally related identities as not only intersectional, but also as a means for establishing a founda40

tion for liberation at the intersection of gender, sexual, and racial difference proves significant. As a result of amphibiousness being the product of intersectionality, the oppressed identities that allowed melancholic loss by way of patriarchal heteronormative racialization and demands of capital within Celie and Lily can also serve as the site from which they might navigate out of these systems of oppression. In this way, intersectionality proves to be a possible cure for melancholia.

Works Cited Butler, Judith. “Performative Acts and Gender Constitution.” Theatre Journal 40.4 (1988): 900–911. Print.

Dimock, Wai-Chee. “Debasing Exchange: Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth.” Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Shari Benstock. Boston: Bedford Books, 1994. 375–390.

Print.

Freud, Sigmund. “Mourning and Melancholia.” The Freud Reader. Ed. Peter Gay. New York and London: Norton & Company, 1989. 584–589. Print. hooks, bell. “Reading and Resistance: The Color Purple.” Alice Walker: Critical Perspectives Past and Present. Ed. Henry Louis Gates, Jr., and K. A. Appiah. New York: Amistad Press, Inc., 1993.

284–295. Print.

Johnston, Adrian. “Jacques Lacan.” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Ed. Edward N. Zalta, 2 April 2013. Web. 17 May 2015.

Restuccia, Frances L. “The Name of the Lily: Edith Wharton’s Feminism(s).” Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Shari Benstock. Boston: Bedford Books, 1994. 404–418.

Print.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. The Epistemology of the Closet. Berkeley and Los Angeles, California: University of California Press, 1990. Web. 14 May 2015.

Smith, Barbara. “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism.” The Radical Teacher. No. 7 (1978): 1411–1421. Print.

Walker, Alice. The Color Purple. Orlando: Harcourt Books, 1982. Print.

Wharton, Edith. The House of Mirth: Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism. Ed. Shari Benstock. Boston: Bedford Books, 1994. Print.

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Artist: Mackenzie Madison

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Beyond East and West:

Representation, Interrogation, and Adaptation in Pamuk’s My Name Is Red Thomas Eric Simonson The University of North Carolina at Charlotte As far as the east is from the west, so far has He removed our transgressions from us.

To Allah belongs the east and the west.

So wherever you turn, there is the face of Allah.

Holy Bible, Psalms 103:12 (NIV)

The Qur’an, The Cow 2.115

Two of the world’s sacred religious texts concur that the distance between East and West is unimaginably broad, reconciled by supernatural power alone. But geographical divides have not formed the divide between the East and the West as we know it; rather, these regions have long been split by metaphysical disparities, such as those of cultural and religious identification. In opposition to the traditional reinforcement of these differences, Orhan Pamuk’s 1998 novel My Name Is Red, is a text of nuanced, yet explicit crossings and linkages between these regions. Set in the Ottoman Empire’s capital of Istanbul in the twilight of the sixteenth century, the novel unfolds in a leveling of the walls between the people, cultures, and religions of the East and West. This is accomplished through Pamuk’s use of alternating narrators: twelve speakers narrate the novel, chronicling interlaced narratives. Their variegated voices dismantle conceptions of an East-West binary by deconstructing the stereotypes it projects, interrogating the destructive ideologies of dominance upon which it relies, and modeling the forms of coexistence available to societies navigating a space of cultural collision. To demonstrate this, I will provide prefatory material relating the novel’s historical context and discuss several theoretical implications of its narrative technique before turning to an analysis of one of its characters.

Contextualizing My Name Is Red As the terms have been understood since the Enlightenment, ‘West’ refers to Europe as a more or less singular entity with attendant supremacy; ‘East’, on the other hand, like the term ‘Orient’, refers to the putatively inferior Asiatic continent. While the East-West binary originated in a pre-national context, the societies of the East and of the West have historically opposed each other, and can be thought of as “imagined communities,” to borrow the expression crafted by Benedict Anderson to define the nation. In his own words, a nation is “an imagined political community—and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign” (6). Anderson herein describes a very par43

ticular process in forming a community. Invariably, they collectively comprise individuals whose unity is imagined “because the members of even the smallest [one] will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion” (my emphasis; 6). This “image” of communion is the pith of the community, signifying and uniting more than the actual characteristics of identity featured by the group. Thus, it will not do to characterize the unity Anderson describes as literal, nor as complete, for as he clarifies, the imagined community is “limited because even the largest of them, encompassing perhaps a billion living beings, has finite, if elastic, boundaries, beyond which lie other nations” (my emphasis; 7). The importance of this explanation lies in the implications of the word “limited,” which Anderson explains is the reason one community is always set off from “other nations.” Whereas larger and more complex than nations, societal groupings such as those that set East and West against each other mirror the formative processes of the nation in that both rely on the process of Othering. An imagined community ostensibly creates an in-group, but in the process invariably creates any number of juxtaposing out-groups.

The groups formed by processes of Othering are not objective differentiations: they are ideologically charged projections of difference that are then cited (by those who project them) as evidence of the rationale for such divisions. Thus, Anderson explains that an imagined community like that on each side of the East-West binary is imagined as not only limited, but “sovereign.” The word connotes the presence of inferior “out-groups” over which a superior “in-group” reigns. Anderson postulates that this might have been an inevitable result of Europe’s embrace of modernity, as nationhood “was born in an age in which Enlightenment and revolution were destroying the legitimacy of the divinely-ordained, hierarchical dynastic realm” (7). Instead of church-sanctioned binaries of the believing and unbelieving, or economic divides of the aristocracy and the proletariat, revolutions7 were utilized by communities to set themselves apart from their internal and external opponents. Similarly, the Enlightenment engendered State-sanctioned Othering as it implemented newly constructed ideological systems of hierarchical differences.8 One community was constructed to end where another, inferior group began.

This cultural demarcation is precisely what created the East-West binary, as the differences between the regions were qualified by the Enlightened West’s burgeoning self-representation. As Edward Said elaborates in Orientalism, “the Orient is one of [Europe’s] deepest and most recurring images of the Other. In addition, the Orient has helped to define Europe (or the West) as its contrasting image, idea, personality, experience” (1-2). He concludes that “European culture gained in strength and identity by setting itself off against the Orient” (3). The East-West relationship is thus one deeply entrenched in representation, originating in the scholarship, religion, philosophy, and 1 2

Such as the American Revolution of 1765 and the French Revolution of 1789.

Such as those of race, and, to a lesser extent, of gender.

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science of Enlightenment-era Europe. Like Said, other scholars9 have pointed to this as evidence of the West’s cultural need—and political ability—to define and qualify others with a “vindicated power as a victor over everything not itself ” (14). As theorists and thinkers of the time defined what it meant to be European, they inevitably defined what it meant to be not-European: “the dialectic of self-fortification and self-confirmation by which culture achieves its hegemony over [others] is based on a constantly practiced differentiation of itself from what it believes to be not itself ” (12). Just as there is no nation without other nations against which it can be demarcated and defined, there was no West without the East against which it could be set.

The West’s misconceptions of the East were centralized, arguably, in Istanbul. Said draws attention to this city throughout his text, summarizing that the East—“and particularly Istanbul—does not simply connote a place outside Europe,” but rather symbolizes and encapsulates the West’s conception of “the terrible Turk, as well as Islam, the scourge of Christendom, [and] the great Oriental apostasy incarnate” (6). The West’s imperialist projections of identity on the East muddled a religious apprehension of Islam with disgust for societies it viewed as indigenous and in dire need of intervention. For this reason, it is particularly intriguing for My Name Is Red to be set in Istanbul, since the text unravels these distinctions of what the city was, and what it was misinterpreted to signify. The ostensible embodiment of the East in Istanbul, as Said points out, has been historically inaccurate, and the misconception belies the city’s significance as a commercial and cultural meeting ground of East and West. Suraiya Faroqhi, for example, acknowledges the relaxed borders of the Ottoman Empire that not only allowed for European merchants and envoys to enter Istanbul, but also those seeking recreational access to the East: “along the major routes of the Empire, […] there were European gentlemen in search of pleasure, instruction, and topics on which to write books” (161). Her observation underscores that European travelers entering the Empire were largely unimpeded by the cultural differences they encountered, just as they were by the absence of impermeable borders that we might associate with juxtaposed “imagined communities.” Rather than encouraging conflict, in fact, the diversity of the city mandated a modicum of tolerance, as suggested when Faroqhi relates that “avoidance of non-Muslims was recommended

by Muslim religious specialists, while Christian priests and Jewish rabbis made analogous recommendations to their respective congregations. Yet in the marketplace of the Ottoman capital, representatives of the three Abrahamic religions came together” (17). This is an important aspect of Istanbul’s dual function historically, and is central to Pamuk’s use of the city in My Name Is Red. Across Pamuk’s oeuvre, Istanbul is a key thematic and topical presence. His memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, recounts much of Istanbul’s history and present state, always through the lens of its relationship as a 3 In her treatise Playing in the Dark, Toni Morrison traces the roots of America’s fraught racial history to the need of colonists to define blackness as something qualifiedly inferior to whiteness.

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rival to—and host of exchanges with—the West. Pamuk makes it clear that Istanbul’s dual nature is not delimited by the cultural conflicts of these regions alone, but by a larger opposition between a glorious past and a disillusioned present. The Ottoman Empire collapsed in the carnage of World War I, and in the wake of the destruction the Republic of Turkey was formed in 1923. Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, the first president of the new Republic, abolished the monarchy and effected a series of westernization processes that were designed to separate Turkey from associations with its past as it developed into a modern, secular nation. As Pamuk explains, “in the secular fury of Atatürk’s new Republic, to move away from religion was to be modern and western” (179-80). Istanbul became a city increasingly fashioned after the West, but one that remained socially unwilling to undergo a complete transformation. Pamuk emphasizes the resulting paralysis of the city, caught as [it] is between traditional and western culture, inhabited as it is by an ultra-rich minority and an impoverished majority, overrun as it is by wave after wave of immigrants, divided as it has always been along the lines of its many ethnic groups. Istanbul is a place where, for the past 150 years, no one has been able to feel completely at home. (115) Istanbul thus emerged as a hybrid: it was neither a symbolic reflection of the West nor an unspoiled pillar of Eastern identity. This aspect of the city is highly relevant to My Name Is Red’s thematic rejoinder that where East and West meet, neither maintains the ostensible purity, suggested by their positions within a binary.

Much like Istanbul itself, the narrators of My Name Is Red are characters whose experiences depict a merging of East and West, which empowers the novel to destabilize the opposition between them. Writing from this literal juxtaposition of East and West within Istanbul, Pamuk’s works are critically lauded pieces of World Literature, texts of and for the world that meaningfully depict humans from disparate social spheres functionally coexisting. As David Damrosch points out, works like Pamuk’s are emblematic of the genre’s hallmarks because they possess “an exceptional ability to transcend the boundaries of the culture that produces them” (2). This is hardly an incidental accomplishment of Pamuk’s text, for the “back-and-forth movement between the familiar and the unfamiliar” (3) that Damrosch describes also takes place in the lives of the novel’s cast of Istanbulite characters. The linguistic translation that enables us to read foreign texts facilitates this exchange.

However, Damrosch cautions against reading these texts with the intention of culturally translating their contents, since doing so would “risk reducing [them] to a pallid version of some literary form we already know, as though Homer had really wanted to write novels but couldn’t quite handle character development, or as though Japanese haiku are would-be sonnets that run out of steam after seventeen syllables” (1). These tactics are the result of paired fallacies—those of “exoticism and assimilation” (13). Regarding exoticism, translated literature can be 46

usurped to justify stereotypical misconceptions of the unfamiliar, a pattern of entropy that seeks overzealously for tropes at the expense of actual understanding. Regarding assimilation, translated literature poses a unique challenge for readers to avoid the temptation of assuming that what they are reading belongs to the same literary tradition as everything they immediately connect it to. Even when reading in full cognizance of an author and work’s worldly context, it is inadvisable to assume that we can fluently interpret the familiar from the foreign: any approach is going to be intertextual. Every reader is going to be accompanied by a tremendous amount of cultural and political positions that color the reading whether he detects these influences or not (Secular Criticism 14-15). In ignoring them, in fact, the reader may make the assumptions to which Damrosch refers, misrepresenting the foreign as the familiar, either by denying what colors the reading, or by limiting it to a quest for parallels. As in the case of Istanbul, however, Pamuk’s cast of characters does not reward such exoticizing or assimilative approaches. Each of them hosts an internalization of the East-West conflict, as evidenced by their respective narration of the text. It is to this pivotal aspect of the novel’s form that I will now turn.

Theoretical Approaches to Narration in My Name Is Red Narrative voice in My Name Is Red alternates to a different character with the passing of every chapter, enabling the novel to avoid a unitary voice through a continual challenge to the representation events that each narrator offers. Problematizing representation in this postmodern fashion grants the text a distinct political charge. As Linda Hutcheon explains, postmodern works of this nature are “resolutely contradictory [and] unavoidably political” (my emphases; 1). Both of these properties apply to My Name Is Red via its narrators, as they each provide a different perspective of Istanbul, the West, and each other. That multiplicity is in keeping with Hutcheon’s requirement of “resolute contradiction” within a postmodern text: “difference and ex-centricity replace homogeneity and centrality as the foci of postmodern social analysis” (5). Difference, ambiguity, and multiplicity in the novel’s narration prevent it from becoming a text of explicit correction that favors East or West. The twelve voices may collectively tell a story that bridges the many narratives of the novel, but their multifarious narration emphasizes the lack of a single, privileged perspective. Contrast and difference are made ubiquitous because of this narrative tactic, which is in keeping with “postmodernism’s distinctive […] wholesale ‘nudging’ commitment to doubleness” (1). This “doubleness,” Hutcheon says, gives the postmodern its “self-conscious, self-contradictory, and self-undermining” qualities (1), even as “the tension between apparent opposites finally defines […] the worldly texts of postmodernism” (2). Importantly, then, works such as Pamuk’s novel enter the realm of critique through their paucity of a single, “true” voice. Instead of affirming homogeneity or rewarding dominance, the postmodern text acknowledges multiplicity through its fixation on the “tension between apparent opposites.”

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My Name Is Red also fulfills Hutcheon’s requirement of postmodern texts being “unavoidably political.”

Again, the multiple narrators render the text so. Each of them posits a representation of reality that both challenges the surrounding narratives, yet contributes to the whole. There is no single voice or narrator that can be trusted, as “postmodern art cannot but be political, at least in the sense that its representations,” its voices, “images, and stories are anything but neutral” (3). Such a statement does not suggest a transformation by the postmodern of everything apolitical into something political. Rather, in the postmodern’s focus on representation—which we use to define ourselves and to understand others—Hutcheon rightly ascribes a political charge to the texts. The surface societal differences that the postmodern invariably gazes upon and reflects upon can be thought of as examples of culture, and “what we call ‘culture’ becomes [under the postmodern gaze] the effect of representations, not their source” (6-7). Hutcheon’s model of postmodern representation thus recognizes that self-identification is formed relative to others. All differentiations relied upon by individuals to self-identify—such as those of gender, race, ethnicity, class, etc.—support this claim: self-identifying as a male assumes the existence of females; self-identifying as white assumes the existence of those of other races. Each of these manifestations of representation creates difference, rather than finding, observing, or proving that difference exists in the first place. At the most elemental level, representation is a set of responses to the “not-me.” My Name Is Red engages in this discourse by speaking from perspectives that challenge and contradict each other. The Istanbulites narrating the story reverse the normal hierarchy of the East-West binary by depicting varying alternatives to what the West dismissed as an inferior not-West.

Part of why the text is able to do this is the absence of a narrator understood—or, more appropriately, misunderstood—to stand in for Pamuk. Nor are the collective voices of the narrators so harmonious that their collective voices can reasonably be interpreted to summarize the author’s singular voice. For, in My Name Is Red, the author all but disappears from the text. Pamuk is a specter, suggestively adumbrated by the text but never made tangible: one of the narrators is named Orhan, a small boy whose relationship with his mother bears striking similarities to Pamuk’s descriptions of his childhood in his memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City. The inclusion of a version of himself accomplishes the opposite task it normally might, because it is given no special signification, no distinction of tone, and no other special privilege over the book’s other narrators. It is insistently joined in chorus with a host of other voices, which collectively tell the novel’s story. Obfuscating himself is important for Pamuk to have done because of the political leverage of his text. For the text to not be an unabashedly subjective subscription to ideological concepts, its author must disappear.

In “What Is An Author?” Michel Foucault points to the associations readers make with an author’s name as the factor that necessitates this disappearance. Left unobstructed, the reader’s associations are arrested by the reader 48

to infer and accentuate whichever interpretation, approach, or conclusion they believe the text elicits. As Foucault explains, “one cannot turn a proper name into a pure and simple reference. It has other than indicative functions: more than an indication, a gesture, a finger pointed at someone, it is the equivalent of a description” (105). Foucault emphasizes that readers subject the author’s name to uses beyond mere signification. Access to the author’s name creates a fallacious certification of any ostensible connections to the work. Pamuk forestalls this process by assigning his own name to one of the narrators, then consistently demonstrating that neither it nor any other narrator is privileged, uncorrected, unflawed, or dominant. Inferences of Pamuk’s voice are preempted by the presence of diverse, multiple narrative voices that instead chronicle the novel’s events. Yet the novel’s chorus of narrators does not trend toward unison either; it is not a general critique of the West any more than it is an epistle from a single speaker (such as Pamuk) for the East. There is no “pure” voice that is dominant amongst its twelve narrators. In The Dialogic Imagination, Mikhail Bakhtin emphasizes how, in employing multiple speakers using “now one language, now another, in order to avoid giving himself up wholly to either of them,” the author “himself might remain as it were neutral” (314). The effect of this tactic enables the author to remain neutral even as his text is vivified by impartiality, which identifies postmodern texts along the political lines Hutcheon referred to. Thus, despite its origin as a Turkish text set within the epistemological territory of the East and its attendant framework, My Name Is Red does not provide a unitary conception of the East, much less a panegyric to the culture of the region. Rather, in depicting life in Istanbul from multiple perspectives at once, Pamuk’s text interrogates competing hegemonies of East and West within the city. The book privileges neither half of the East-West binary. Instead, Pamuk’s authorial impartiality enables the text to interrogate both sides as they seek dominance over and destructively affix differences to each other.

Nor will it do to extract a single voice from the speakers of the novel. Each of these narrators, in addition to not being entangled with the author, is notably distinct from each other. This lends strength to the book’s reliance upon duplicity, on continually challenging representations of East and West. This can be traced to the respective individualization of language in each narrator’s voice. As Bakhtin describes, each speaking narrator brings unique “ideological conceptualizations” to their use of words10, which identify the speaker as an individual through the customization of their language. In the context of the East-West binary, then, the ideological positioning of any of Pamuk’s speakers clarifies not only the meaning of their utterances relative to multiple possible meanings, but the identification of the speaker relative to other users of language. Bakhtin refers to this as “heteroglossia,” a phenomenon he argues is unique to the novel, since “the special resonance of novelistic discourse [is its] images of speak4

In addition to the words’ dialogic quality within a given language.

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ingpersons” (332). In entering the novel “in person,” heteroglossia takes the form of narrators and characters whose voices are accompanied by the competing voices of others in the text. A novel, especially one like My Name Is Red that capitalizes on multiple speakers, is then by its very nature invested in postmodern conceptions of political contradiction and personal representation: “Every novel, taken as the totality of all the languages and consciousnesses of language embodied in it, is a hybrid” (366). Attempts to streamline the novel’s contents and style are fallacies that fixate upon one character’s language or style to the detriment of the full view: “the style of a novel is to be found in the combination of its voices and their styles; the language of a novel is the system of its ‘languages’” (my emphasis; Bakhtin 262). Beyond the normal duplicity of verbal art’s author and speaker, the novel thus features an intra-textual multiplicity of voices, styles, and languages.

Harnessing the political significance of narrative representation, My Name Is Red gives voice to nearly every character within its “system of languages.” Aside from the many theoretical implications of their use, which have just been discussed, My Name Is Red’s kaleidoscopic assortment of voices enables the book to tell many stories at once. In fact, it might be argued that the text is many books in one: a treatise on art, involving the work of master miniaturists11 that ornament or “illuminate” religious and royal manuscripts; an examination of religion, in which the miniaturists represent various positions within Islam; a textbook of history, incorporating the traditional Islamic love story of Husrev & Shirin and the careers of the master artists of the Islamic manuscript tradition; and a comparatively modern love story, complicated by a violent pair of murders. Art and religion, contemporary life and historical narratives, love and murder, East and West—all are aspects of My Name Is Red’s cross-hatching of narratives and narration. Each of these spheres of tension between apparent opposites provides an opportunity for the text to dismantle the East-West binary. To demonstrate this, it is to a close reading of one of the novel’s narrators that I will now turn.

Interrogating Dominance: Olive

One of a group of four miniaturists12 commissioned by Enishte to illustrate a manuscript for the Sultan,

Olive is another character who embodies the breaking down of binary concepts of East and West. As in the case with Shekure, Olive’s position is at once similar and at odds with a historical narrative. In his case, as one of a school of contemporary artists, his position is constantly compared to those of the master artists of Herat.13 Of these, the most prominent example was Bihzad, who led the Heart master miniaturists during what is recognized as the apex of the Islamic artistic tradition, both in the refinement of their artistry and in the laudable lifestyles that accompanied their 5 6 7

Illustrators, or, in Islamic terms, illuminators.

Illustrators; also “illuminators,” in Islamic terms.

City in present day Afghanistan; in the 16th century, site of Bihzad’s illumination workshop

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artwork. Like Shekure and Black’s allusions to the story of Husrev and Shirin, the life of Bihzad is frequently referenced by Olive and the other miniaturists as the ideal paradigm in forming their artistic and religious self-concepts.

Bihzad’s representation forms the Eastern, historical complement to Olive’s contemporary experiences, which, on the surface, represent the West. Upon closer examination, however, Olive’s real position is revealed to be one of hybridity. He resists the defining forces of hegemony from both East and West, setting himself at odds with the singularity of Bihzad.

The distinction between Olive and Bihzad is one of distinctively interlaced artistic and spiritual components.

In the Eastern, Islamic conception of art (emphasized through allusions to Bihzad), art that exists for its own sake is blasphemy,14 as it is a fabrication of the act of creation. The novel encapsulates this doctrine by speaking, at intervals, from the perspective of inanimate paintings. In one example, a painted tree reflects on the potential for blasphemy in art that exists for its own sake: As a tree, I need not be part of a book. As the picture of a tree, however, I’m disturbed that I’m not a page within some manuscript. Since I’m not representing something in a book, what comes to mind is that my picture will be nailed to a wall and the likes of pagans and infidels will prostrate themselves before me in worship. May [others] not hear that I secretly take pride in this thought—but then I’m overcome with the utmost fear and embarrassment. (47) As this passage demonstrates, the miniaturists believe that Allah alone may engage in this activity of creating. The religious conviction of their approach rests on the assumption that creative artistry would mimic the satanic precedent of trying to assume Allah’s role or power. To mimic or reproduce Allah’s sight is to worship Him; to mimic His perspective by assuming His position, however, is another thing entirely. Artists must not usurp the right of engaging in creation; they are permitted only to reproduce, worshipfully, what they believe to be Allah’s vision of something as He created it. Instead of painting a tree from their imagination, they strove to depict a tree in its purest form, as it must have appeared in the mind of the Creator before He spoke it into existence.

In addition to questions of artistic intention, there are notable features of the miniaturists’ art that render it explicitly religious. Firstly, the pictures within the manuscripts refer to a text that necessarily accompanies them, so that the illustrations do not seek to represent what is not present, but instead serve as a component of what is already present. This is an acknowledgment of the performative utterance of Creation, in which words proceed from the mouth of Allah, as what is signified by the words is simultaneously created. There is no such thing in Islamic art as a 8 As denoted by the hadith (or epistles) composed by Muhammad’s followers, which supplement the Qur’an. Unlike the Biblical epistles of Jesus’ disciples, the hadiths are not included in the Qur’an, because their origin is not tied to Muhammad, but to those followers who chronicled his life and actions. They are nonetheless widely accepted as authoritative by both Sunni and Shia Muslims.

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spiritually acceptable autonomous picture; it must refer to something textual, as Enishte admits: “The images are the story’s blossoming in color. But painting without its accompanying story is an impossibility” (26).15 Thus, the intention of illumination dictates that its practice must follow rules of form, which restrict what is being illustrated to appear as it would from the perspective of Allah, not the tainted perspective of humans. The nuance of their approach is in seeking to illuminate what the Creator sees, not what is seen by that which He has created. The miniaturists recognize the techniques of Bihzad and the other masters of Herat as the achievement of this goal, to the extent that for generations, succeeding artists endlessly replicated the Herat masters’ techniques.

In observing these maxims, illumination avoids the autonomy of the West’s figurative art, which is built upon realistic representation. The distinction is powerful: representation of Allah’s vision is privileged in a hierarchy over humanity’s vision. In My Name Is Red, art in this Western manifestation is depicted as the portraiture of master Italian artists in Venice, which symbolize each aspect of the spiritually deficient position of the West. Painting involves the same tools and materials as illuminating, but to vastly different results, because of the lack of restrictions on its subject matter and its autonomy. Illumination abides by the religious tenets of Islam and is a distinctively religious activity both because of who accomplishes it, and the reasons for doing so. It ideally points to Allah by mirroring His perspective as the only perspective, and is worshipful, appropriate, and spiritually nourishing. But painting is regarded as inappropriately “creative” in that its composition and content point to—and therefore exalt—man. The supposed opposition between illumination and painting, the union of art and religion on the one hand, and their disparity on the other, thus represent the ideological divides that inform the East-West divide.

Yet Olive’s experience of navigating these parallel worlds emphasizes the merging of Eastern and Western worldviews. Like the other miniaturists in the workshop, Olive is heavily preoccupied with the question of whether his work is creative and if it possesses an individual style: “Does a miniaturist, ought a miniaturist, have his own personal style? A use of color, a voice all his own? […] Questions of style increasingly arose in my head” (17-18).

Olive flirts with the idea as something he knows to be spiritually inappropriate but which he desires nonetheless.

Surrendering to the temptation to develop a style of his own, to create, ultimately leads Olive to what his culture would designate as spiritual self-destruction. He paints a self-portrait, a blasphemous act of idolatry that is directly referential of the fall of Satan: “I feel like the Devil not because I’ve murdered two men, but because my portrait has been made in this fashion” (399). Not only did Olive elect to paint a subject in the realistic style of the Western portraitists, but he also chose a human subject: himself. Olive, intrigued by his own ability and unwilling to censure his potential by conforming to a religious dictation, paints a portrait as if to prove that he can accomplish such a thing: 9 When Enishte later clarifies that painting without a text is indeed possible, he refers exclusively to the art of the West by recounting the works of Venetian portraitists.

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“I’m not afraid of possessing character and individuality, nor do I fear others bowing down and worshipping me; on the contrary, this is what I desire” (398). The act, and his response to it, positions his own person not as it appears to Allah, but as he himself sees it, through what his society deemed irreligious individualism. Olive, it would seem, has made a cataclysmic decision that removes him from religious associations of the East and aligns him with secularity.

Secularism is more complex than the absence of a given religion, though; in the cultural context of the novel, it is identification with the West. As Talal Asad describes in Formations of the Secular, “the opponents of secularism in the Middle East and elsewhere have rejected it as specific to the West” (2). Accordingly, when they discover his self-portrait, Olive’s fellow miniaturists are of the conviction that this engagement with artistic activity originating in the irreligious16 West renders Olive irreligious as well. They equate the separation experienced by Satan after his rebellion with Olive’s own actions. Thus, it is tempting to read Olive as paradigmatic of a transformation of the East into the West. Just as Shekure mirrors Istanbul’s hybridity, Olive too is emblematic of that aspect of the city’s history, as though he is prescient of the Westernization processes the former Empire would undergo hundreds of years later.

Olive’s arc (as perceived by his society) follows a trajectory from associations with the East to proximity with the West. Asad describes this process as Istanbul experienced it when faced with the encroaching West: In an interdependent modern world, ‘traditional cultures’ do not spontaneously grow or develop into ‘modern cultures.’ People are pushed, seduced, coerced, or persuaded into trying to change themselves into something else, something that allows them to be redeemed. […] Such [politically] directed changes […] are not possible without the exercise of political power that often presents itself as a force for redeeming ‘humanity’ from ‘traditional cultures.’ (154) The temptation that “pushes, seduces, coerces, or persuades” Olive offers the promise of redemption. Redemption, frequently used to signify the spiritual deliverance of humankind, becomes here the process of secularization. Yet the spiritual and secular concepts of redemption are related, for to be redeemed from the traditional into the modern (into the West, essentially) is an inverted parallel of the religious arc a sinner undergoes once redeemed by faith. In Olive’s case, despite the erosion of his prior self, being “redeemed” by the secular West is an enticing proposition. He becomes willing not only to paint the self-portrait, but also to murder Enishte to defend the act. The angst and guilt arising from his crimes are overcome and relegated because he regards his transformation as bittersweet at worst, redemptive at least: “I confessed my crimes and resolved to abandon the only city I’d ever known. […] I told myself to dream of the splendid life I would live […] off the splendid works my talent would create” (403). Olive thus can imagine a future not of damnation but of luminous possibility. He might not yet be fully assured of that future, 10

i.e., not Muslim

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but in opting for it anyway, the text suggests he has been irretrievably redeemed from the enclosures of his cultural traditions.

While Olive can be thought of as the villain of the novel for several reasons, there are several issues that problematize the idea of his representing the West and its corruption. He cannot be interpreted as a properly pure or abnormally defective Muslim. For instance, when he has the chance to kill Black, who has helped expose him as Enishte’s murderer, he spares him, “for the sake of Shekure’s children and her happiness” (402). To Black he charges, “Be good to her and don’t act crudely and ignorantly toward her. Promise me!” (402). Black accepts, and Olive concludes: “I hereby grant you Shekure” (402). While it is a deeply patriarchal presumption to grant any human being to another, at this moment Olive confirms his deep love for Shekure and renounces his pursuit of her. Flawed though he is, Olive nonetheless experiences this moment of selflessness, which is inextricably linked to faith in that it operates from the position of something being more important, of greater worth, than oneself. Olive can therefore not be entirely an apostate. Furthermore, his apostasy is a subjectively defined status. Renouncing the confines of his faith in one culture in favor for the precepts of another would, within that new culture, prove an act of redemption. Olive abandons his culture, but does not extinguish his faith or deny the supremacy of Allah. He murders, but spares life. He paints himself, but does not forfeit illumination. Thus, Olive is not purely on the side of East or West, neither singularly religious nor irreligious, despite subjective assertions from within the binary that he is. His identification is not a fixed status on one side of an indivisible wall, but the mutable, fluid navigation of a spectrum. The seemingly unconscionable merging of East and West that his interiority hosts resists the dominance each of these regions competes for over his cultural and religious identification.

Conclusion My Name Is Red is a worldly text of meaningful crossings between East and West. Olive provides an example of this by demonstrating a rejection of destructive cultural stereotypes, an interrogation of ideologies of dominance, and a navigation into coexistence that is forged in the strength of diversity. In this way, Pamuk’s text offers readers the invitation to examine their own worldview with a critical eye, rejecting conceptions of the Self and the Other that rely upon irreconcilable disparities. If East and West, distanced such that both the Christian Bible and the Islamic Qur’an address their separation, yet meet in the identities of Istanbul itself, as well as in Olive, then what are the implications for our own encounters in the space between cultural and ideological divides? In the words of Talal Asad, “What politics are promoted by the notion that the world is not divided […] into West and non-West?

What practical options are opened up or closed by the notion that the world has no significant binary features, that it is, on the contrary, divided into overlapping, fragmented cultures, hybrid selves?” (author’s emphasis; Asad 15).

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Are we to assume that what we are taught to perceive and what we are encouraged to interpret is necessarily true?

Or, might we not appreciate texts such as My Name Is Red for their depictions of another way forward? Might we not be brave enough to be skeptical of divisions, not mergers? Might we not, rejecting usurpation and dominance, pursue instead the promise of coexistence?

Works Cited Abdel-Haleem, M. A. S., trans. The Qur’an: A New Translation. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. Print.

Appiah, Anthony. Cosmopolitanism: Ethics in a World of Strangers. New York: W.W. Norton, 2006. Print.

Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Revised ed. London: Verso, 1982. Rebel Studies Library. Web. 05 Dec. 2016.

Asad, Talal. Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity. Stanford, CA: Stanford UP, 2003. Print.

Damrosch, David. How to Read World Literature. Chichester, U.K.: Wiley-Blackwell, 2009.

Print.

Faroqhi, Suraiya. The Ottoman Empire and the World around It. London: I.B.Tauris, 2004. Print.

Foucault, Michel. “What Is an Author?” Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology. New York: New, 1998. Print.

Hutcheon, Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2002. Print.

Morrison, Toni. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U Press, 1992. Print.

Pamuk, Orhan. Istanbul: Memories and the City. Trans. Maureen Freely. New York: Vintage International, 2006. Print.

My Name Is Red. Trans. Erdağ M. Göknar. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001. Print.

The White Castle. Trans. Victoria Rowe Holbrook. New York: Vintage, 1998. Print.

Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon, 1978. Print.

The World, the Text, and the Critic. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1983. Print.

The Bible. New International Version, Zondervan, Grand Rapids, 2001.

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Artist: Nurdul Adreena Burhanuddin

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A Place to Call Home: The Role of the Urban Imaginary in Terence Davies’ Distant Voices, Still Lives, and The Long Day Closes Jacob Carter University of Texas- Austin

In their article “Urban Imaginaries and Youth Geographies of Emotion,” Jo-Anne Dillabough and Jacqueline Kennelly explore how adolescents “on the urban fringe of economic disadvantage” project internalized fantasies onto the cityscape “to gain a sense of place or…avoid the experience of shame” (139). In the face of daily encounters with criminal activity, the children create an “urban imaginary” to overcome the ambivalence they feel toward their inner city neighborhoods. The imaginary provides a “fantasy narrative that exists beyond…any associated forms of revulsion, abjection or disgust” and allows the children to develop their respective identities within the context of their urban surroundings (Dillabough and Kennelly 148).

British director Terence Davies examines the role that the imaginary plays in helping adolescents shape their identity and overcome trauma in his companion films Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988) and The Long Day Closes (1992). Both films recreate Davies’ memories of his childhood in post-WWII Liverpool and chart his tumultuous relationship with the city from birth to early adolescence. Though often centered on children, Davies’ films demonstrate greater concern for the adult reflecting back on his childhood; they contrive “to convey the ‘structure of feeling’ that attaches to Davies’ memory” of the city (Kuhn 4). Despite diverging from Dillabough and Kennelly’s scholarship in this respect, Davies’ filmography still reveals an ambivalence toward Liverpool that serves as the primary catalyst for the urban imaginary. As Davies came of age within the city, he gradually developed emotional attachments to different locations, direct interaction with its surroundings to develop the fantasies that allow it to negotiate its identity within the city.

Throughout Distant Voices, framing and camera movement work concurrently to fragment and reshape the

space of the film, thereby expressing the discrepancy between the infans and its urban surrperceiving urban spaces as sites either of love or of torment. While finding solace at home and in the local movie theater, he felt ostracized within his school and the Catholic Church, largely due to the self-loathing incited by the discovery of his homosexuality.1 Through the agency of the cinema Davies attempts to overcome the painful memories of childhood and construct a Liverpool that helps him “make sense of his [identity]…in light of deeply contradictory experiences” within 57

disparate urban spaces (Dillabough and Kennelly 148).

Though not directly involved in the formulation of the imaginary, Distant Voices reveals the centrality of the city in influencing adolescent identity. Recreating the period when Davies was just on the cusp of being born, the film depicts what Vicky LeBeau calls the infans, or the early years of a child’s life, before it has become indoctrinated “into the adult world of language, meaning and desire” (64). To actualize this state of pre-identity, Davies uses the camera to offer an unmediated gaze into memories of his family and Liverpool. The film depicts many of the formative spaces of his childhood, including the home and the Catholic Church, but only as disjointed impressions. Standing in for the infans, the camera exhibits an inability to contextualize its surroundings; it perceives the city as a fragmented collection of auditory and visual sensations. Distant Voices depicts Liverpool in the absence of a “structure of feeling,” or a set of perceptions toward a particular place that arises through lived experience (Dillabough and Kennelly 138). By detaching itself from Liverpool and filtering the city through the innocent gaze of the infans, the film elucidates the mechanisms that shape adolescent identity and, by extension, the urban imaginary. Distant Voices also demonstrates that a child relies upon oundings. In an early scene, the camera stands in the hallway of the family’s home. In this confining environment only a staircase is visible, while the rest of the home resides in the off-screen space. The camera slowly dollies forward and pans 180 degrees to the right, coming to rest on the front doorway of the home. The mise-en-scene undergoes a complete transformation post-pan, with neither the staircase nor the other end of the hallway remaining visible. The film provides such a limited vantage point when this scene opens that a simple turn of the camera constructs an entirely new space. Davies offers the viewer only small glimpses of his childhood – a hallway, a staircase, a picture of Jesus hanging on the front door – rather than providing a holistic view. The inability to cohere the home into a recognizable whole reflects the limitations of seeing the world through the gaze of someone who possesses no identity. The infans perceives its urban surroundings without grasping their context. It lacks self-awareness and therefore fails to understand how it relates to the various spaces it inhabits.

With little connection between the child and the city, even the temporality of the film becomes incoherent.

In one sequence, Davies implements a series of dissolves to transport the film through a range of times and locations in the span of two minutes. The camera first captures the eldest sister of the family crying in her brother’s arms at a train station. It then tracks to the left, a dissolve transitioning to an earlier time when the siblings were children, lighting candles with their mother in church. Another dissolve sends the camera floating down the street where the family lives during the Christmas season. The dissolve works particularly well for evoking the infans, due to the afterimage present in the transition from one image to the next. For a brief moment one scene overlays another, blending together different spaces and temporalities. The absence of linearity – a manmade conception of time – 58

reflects the infans’s lack of adult understanding. It inhabits a world devoid of rational thought and meaning and thus simply floats across space and time, unable to establish its position within the city. Representing a nascent state of childhood, the camera can neither grasp nor gain control over its surroundings. It occupies its own space and time, unable to make direct contact with Liverpool and project meaning onto the city spaces.

With The Long Day Closes, Davies breaks down the barrier separating the child and the city and begins to examine how his interaction with different urban spaces influenced his identity and understanding of home.

Rather than have the camera function as his gaze, he frames the film around a ten-year-old character named Bud, who clearly represents Davies as a child. Bud traverses the fictive cityscape, coming into contact with four formative spaces of Davies’ adolescence: the home, Catholic Church, school, and local cinema. In paring Liverpool down to these self-contained locations, Davies represents the city in a manner akin to what Teresa Castro describes as topophilia, or “the love of place” (146). While love does not speak to the isolation Davies experienced within his church and school due to his burgeoning sexuality, every location within the film functions as a site of affective attachment.

In his reimagining of Liverpool, Davies situates spaces of love (home and cinema) in close proximity to spaces of suffering (school and church), emphasizing both their disparity and his ambivalence toward the city. Using the camera and mise-en-scene, Davies gives primacy to spaces steeped in feelings of affection and rearranges the city into an environment that is accepting of Bud’s/Davies’ personal identity. In overwriting the pain of childhood, he creates an urban imaginary that reflects the “amorous geography” associated with topophilia (Castro 146).

Understanding the mechanics of the imagined topography depicted in The Long Day Closes first demands a close analysis of the personal suffering Davies experienced during his adolescence. The trauma of reality necessitates the formation of the urban imaginary, and therefore the Liverpool Davies creates in the film is inextricable from the events of his life. In an interview with Cinema Scope, the director said that the instant he realized he was gay, his “childhood was over in a second.” Raised in a staunchly Catholic household, Davies felt isolated from both his faith and his family, and certain spaces served only to torment him further. Classmates bullied Davies for his perceived effeminacy, and he felt ostracized from the Catholic Church, despite praying “until his knees bled” (Davies). Though not a strict autobiography, The Long Day Closes still remains indebted to the events in Davies’own adolescence. The film specifically recreates the period of his childhood from ages seven to eleven – after his abusive father died and before he fully comprehended his homosexuality – which Davies describes as time when he was “ecstatically happy and everything seemed magical” (Davies). Though the film aims to recapture this momentary bliss, Davies still burdens Bud with personal suffering. As the character navigates the city, he inevitably encounters spaces that inspire him to retreat into the comfort of an urban imaginary.

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The film depicts the church and school as sites of oppression, as they were in Davies’ own life. In the first scene set at Bud’s secondary school, Bud approaches three of his classmates in the schoolyard. The camera first captures Bud in medium close-up before cutting to the three boys, who taunt him for being soft. The film returns to a close-up of Bud, standing humiliated and alone on the other end of the schoolyard. Through framing, Davies quickly isolates Bud from his classmates. Though the child cannot fully comprehend his difference from the other boys, he still views himself as someone who deviates from the norm and cannot find acceptance among his peers. Bud’s faith evokes similar feelings of isolation, a struggle that Davies elucidates by restaging the schoolyard scene within the context of the Catholic Church. Bud sits in a pew, surrounded by the same three classmates. The boys tease Bud with the same insults, with one tormenter once again asking, “who’s a fruit, then?” By self-consciously providing the bullies with identical dialogue and positioning them within the space of the church, Davies positions the boys as representative of a more generalized form of oppression. Rather than being characters in their own right, they stand in for the authoritarianism that pervades every facet of the school and church. Due to the extent of his ostracism, Bud withdraws into spaces that provide him with love, joy, and acceptance. Davies supports him in this effort, using his camera to confine Bud to the spaces of the home and theater and shield him from further torment.

Though internal suffering encroaches on the space of the film at times, most of The Long Day Closes takes place within the boundaries of Davies’ urban imaginary. From the first shot, Davies grounds the viewer in the urban space that provides him (and Bud) with the most happiness: the home. Opening on a shot of a dilapidated street in modern-day Liverpool, the film dissolves to a medium shot of Bud sitting on his staircase in the 1950s, asking his mother if he can go to the cinema. Most of the early scenes in The Long Day Closes are confined to the home, giving the viewer the impression that Davies associates Liverpool only with the affection he feels toward his family.

Bud’s mother, in particular, evokes the feelings of warmth and kindness attached to the household, and Davies often depicts her singing sweetly to herself as she completes chores around the home. While Davies later incorporates scenes of Bud’s torment at school and church, he initially elides over these moments of pain to focus on his love for Liverpool, a love that almost entirely derives from the space of the home. He eliminates the pain of childhood by simply denying it access to his reimagined version of the city. By omitting the school and church spaces, he manages to recapture the intense happiness associated with a specific time in his adolescence.

Davies also attaches content to memories of the local cinema- another space that participates in the construction of his urban imaginary. In interviews, Davies declares his deep love for movies, saying that just hearing his favorite musicals “recreates [his] childhood in his head” (Kennedy 18). This passion informs his reimagined Liverpool most clearly in the numerous imitations of film projection that arise in the mise-en-scene of non-theater 60

environments. In one of the school scenes, Bud daydreams of a ship passing in a stormy night, with the camera adopting his viewpoint to reveal the ship’s enormous sails. The classroom mimics the space of the cinema throughout the sequence, most notably in the moments after the daydream when the light from the window behind Bud evokes the ethereal glow of the film projector. This final image incites a dissolve to a scene of Bud, his mother, and his sister at the cinema, and the sight of Bud backlit by a projector recurs. In addition to linking disparate spaces – thereby constructing Davies’ imaginary – imitations of projection further illustrate how Davies shields his young protagonist from oppressive spaces. Bud gains ownership over his school environment through an imagined world that Davies projects onto the child’s reality. Davies allows Bud’s passion for the cinema to extend beyond the bounds of the theater and reshape other urban environments. For a brief instant, he undercuts the pain associated with Bud’s school, replacing it with the passion associated with the cinema.

In the purest distillation of Davies’ imaginary, imitations of projection intrude upon Bud’s home, conflating the home and theater into a single space of warmth and safety. In a scene set during the Christmas season, Bud sits quietly on the staircase of his home. As he turns his head toward the camera, an off-screen light illuminates his face, evoking the image of a spectator sitting in a darkened theater. The non-diegetic score swells as the image dissolves to a set of wooden doors, which draw back like curtains to reveal Bud’s family gathered around the dining room table.

Snow inexplicably falls in this indoor space, and the bright colors of the family’s clothes stand in contrast to the film’s otherwise drab production design. Given these unrealistic details, it is clear that the image operates on the plane of fantasy, representing an imagined space that Davies literally projects onto Bud’s surroundings. Davies filters Bud’s home through the apparatus of cinema, and in the process creates a heightened version of a space already entrenched in affection. While Davies initially presents Bud as a passive viewer, keeping him detached from the imaginary space through framing, he grants Bud access to the fantasy toward the end of the sequence. After ignoring him for several moments, the family turns to Bud and offers a warm greeting (“Happy Christmas, Bud!”). Their words welcome the child into this safe environment far removed from the pain of reality.

But the imaginary cannot deny suffering at all times. Just as the theater bleeds into other spaces, the pain attached to the school and church occasionally enters Bud’s home, effectively undermining the purpose of Davies’ imaginary. In an early scene, Bud watches construction workers lay the foundation for a building across the street.

He eventually catches the eye of a shirtless bricklayer, who gives Bud a friendly wink. Bud then retreats to the dark interior of his bedroom, overwhelmed by his confusing desires aroused by the gesture. During this sequence, Bud’s window frames the outside world as though it is an image on a screen, but rather than projecting fantasy onto his urban environment, the camera brings Bud into confrontation with reality. To be sure, the shot of the bricklayer, much 61

like the shot of the family at Christmas, represents an image of desire, but it is a desire that inspires intense feelings of guilt and self-loathing in the child. While Davies projects fantasy to reshape Liverpool, he does not preclude the torment of childhood from infringing upon his imaginary. The bricklayer sequence implies the limitations of the urban imaginary, which can only deny the pain of the child’s reality for a brief moment.

Though it appears to give supremacy to oppressive forces, the bricklayer sequence actually suggests that Davies recognizes the centrality of pain within his urban imaginary. Personal suffering partially shaped his identity and understanding of home, and therefore he cannot fully reconcile his relationship with Liverpool without acknowledging it as a space of love and torment. He communicates this awareness most evocatively in a single overhead shot that traverses the four spaces of Bud’s world. Set to the Debbie Reynolds’ song “Tammy,” the sequence begins with the camera capturing Bud from above as he swings from an iron bar outside his home. The camera tracks left, moving down the sidewalk of Bud’s street. A series of dissolves transitions the shot from the home to the cinema to church to school. Eventually the camera loops back to Bud’s neighborhood street, though this time it tracks the walkway from an inverted angle. By bookending the sequence with upturned images of the same location, Davies conveys a unified and circular locality. The dissolves bridge discrete spaces, and the high position of the camera provides a comprehensive map of an imagined urban environment. The “Tammy” sequence depicts the entirety of the child’s world, composed of equal parts pain and love. It offers a radically different conception of the urban imaginary from the early sequences of the film in that it allows the school and church to intermingle with the theater and home. In a single shot, Davies embraces the ambivalence he feels toward Liverpool, suggesting that childhood suffering informed his identity and thus cannot be denied access to his urban imaginary.

Distant Voices and The Long Day Closes portray the journey demanded of every child, starting from its first awareness of the world and ending with the painful negotiation of its place within its surroundings. Davies admits that the trauma of childhood effectively “ruined [his] life” and undermined his love for Liverpool (Davies). His films suggest, though, that ambivalent feelings toward home must persist if Davies is to gain control over his identity. Torment and isolation allowed the director to reshape Liverpool with his camera and find a place within a reimagined cityscape. Rather than reject adolescent suffering, Davies allows it into his urban imaginary, upholding it as a factor in the formation of his identity.

Works Cited Castro, Teresa. “Mapping the City Through Film: From ‘Topophilia’ to Urban Mapscapes.” The City and the Moving Image: Urban Projections, edited by Richard Koeck and Les Roberts, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010, pp.

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144-55.

Davies, Terence. “My Liverpool: Terence Davies’ Of Time and City.” Interview by Jason Anderson. Cinema Scope.

Accessed 28 November 2016.

Dillabough, Jo-Anne and Jacqueline Kennelly. “Urban Imaginaries and Youth Geographies of Emotion: Ambivalence, Anxiety and Class Fantasies of Home.” Lost Youth in the Global City, Routledge, 2010, pp. 135-51.

Distant Voices, Still Lives. Directed by Terence Davies. British Film Institute, 1988.

Kennedy, Harlan. “Familiar Haunts.” Film Comment, vol. 24, no. 5, 1988, pp. 13-18.

Kuhn, Annette. “Distant Voices, Still Lives (1988).” BFI Screenonline, 2003.

LeBeau, Vicky. Childhood and Cinema. Reaktion Books, 2008.

The Long Day Closes. Directed by Terence Davies. British Film Institute, 1992.

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Artist: Hannah Bourgault

64

Chinese-Jamaica:

An Imperfect Nation Narrative Sophie Chung Amherst College

In a transnational purview of the Chinese diaspora, the Chinese immigrant figure is not only identified by

physical movement across nations but also by inevitable contact and confrontation with new multiethnic societies, each with their own layered histories of colonialism and nation-making. Questions of how such encounters with other peoples change internal conceptions of the Chinese immigrant self become increasingly important as the immigrant becomes an inextricable part of the continued history and production of that nation. This concept of ‘nation out of people’, especially in the postcolonial context of the British West Indies, relies heavily on Frantz Fanon’s argument in “On National Culture” that culture is central to the production of nation. Culture here is defined by its ability to function dually as a vessel for ideologies and myths that ground ‘collective identities of nation’ and a “form of expression that necessitates and creates bonds between members of a community” (Fanon 245, Lee-Loy “Searching” 26). Thus, as the Chinese immigrant continues to interact with others in a society, this figure eventually becomes complicit in the making of nation.

Looking specifically at the colonial context of the West Indies, this is evidenced by the inclusion, however

marginalized and stereotyped, of the Chinese figure in the national narratives, especially as Fanon suggests, “through the themes that appear in their literature” (Lee-Loy 26). The stakes of literary representation then are quite high, requiring closer analysis of the ways that the Chinese immigrant figure is (mis)used in the dominant national narrative. With such an understanding of the complicity of literature in nation production, I plan to read works by Chinese-Caribbean writers Victor Chang and Meiling Jin in which the Chinese-Caribbean figure remains circumscribed by the shop space against Kerry Young’s novel, Pao in which such a monolithic representation is nuanced by a more complex spatial presentation of the liminal Chinese position in an imperfectly creole Jamaican nation narrative.

This comparative literary analysis first requires some historical context of a Chinese-Jamaica before inde-

pendence. With the first influx of imported Chinese labourers in 1854, Jamaica’s landscape was undeniably altered, especially in the context of the country’s unstable economic environment after slave emancipation in 1834 (Bryan 15). Because post-emancipation Jamaica began to rely heavily on indentured labour as the alternative to slave labour, Britain endorsed the mobilization of the Chinese as indentured labourers to work on the sugar plantations. However, the Chinese who came to work on these rural plantations increasingly left them in the face of low survival rates 65

and repeated contract violations that eventually led to many violent Chinese labour protests (15). By the 1880s, the Chinese had secured a foothold in the mall but burgeoning enclave of retail in many Caribbean towns, a position further solidified with the second wave of Chinese migration into Jamaica, this time one that primarily consisted of Chinese businessmen (Bryan 16, Bohr 49). The economic conditions for the grocery retail trade were particularly ripe at this time in the middle of the 19th century because of the sizable shift of former slaves into the class of wage-earners, accounting for the increase in consumers (Bryan 16). Given a new demand for middlemen between the farmer suppliers and the shifting consumer group, the timing was impeccable, allowing for the Chinese to capitalize on opportunities in the shopkeeping industry. Furthermore, “their success as businessmen was attributed to superior service, long working hours, and credit facilities and accessibility” (17).

Insomuch that the Chinese occupied a certain “ethnically differentiated Jamaican middle

class,” their place in the Jamaican community became increasingly paradoxical (18). While the Chinese shop was integrally central to the local community’s needs and the nation’s economic sector, it was still an othered space, one that contained the Chinese shopkeeper as the ‘other’ because of elevated economic status and obvious ethnic difference. Often, the Chinese shopbecame the prime target for violent riots, as the local community united periodically against this easily distinguishable, colonizer-introduced landmark of ‘otherness’. Lisa Lowe credits these violent eruptions in particular as one intended result of British colonialism, positing that “the British introduced the Chinese into the community of white colonials and black slaves as a contiguous ‘other’ whose liminality permitted them to be, at one moment, incorporated as part of colonial labor and, at another, elided or excluded by its humanist universals” (Lowe 197). Lowe proceeds further to argue that “the fixing of a hierarchy of racial classifications gradually emerged to manage and modernize labor, reproduction, and society among the colonized and to rationalize the conditions of creolized mixing” (197). To the extent that the British colonizers could not possibly account for all uncontrollable variables of intimacies and creolization, Lowe’s argument that the Chinese shopkeeper figure was instated instrumentally to render a new racial mode of labour management between the former black slaves and white colonial consumers provides a lens through which the literature that promulgates the Chinese figure as such, earlier recognized as complicit in nation-making, can be better analyzed.

Indeed, such implications of imperial Britain purposefully utilizing the Chinese only bolster the prevalence

of the stereotyped Chinese shopkeeper in Jamaican literary imagination. As long as Jamaica was still under colonial rule, it could only follow naturally that such narratives of the Chinese shop, as conditionally inside or outside space, would be dominant. The Chinese shop as depicted in Caribbean literature is what Anne-Marie Lee-Loy also identifies as “a place [in West Indian fiction] where ideas of the community defined as ‘nation’ is performed...the shop 66

space is represented as both alien and home ground” (Lee-Loy “The Chinese Shop” 1). Lee-Loy first situates the Chinese shop as alien land, essentially out of step with the experiences that touch the rest of the national community most obviously because of the buffer of higher economic standing. Accordingly, the shop becomes a site of exploitation against which the ‘real people’ of the nation struggle, as illustrated by the burning and looting of Chinese stores in Victor Chang’s short stories. At the same time, Lee-Loy also points to the Chinese shop’s space as the most ideal for constant interaction among the local creole community as such overlapping diasporic intimacies inform a certain nation identity. Here, the shop as a space of continued contact and and eventual creolization becomes one of the uncontrollable variables not accounted for in the implementation of the Chinese figure as a racial stabilizer to colonial order.

It’s a paradox that the dominant Caribbean literature doesn’t explicitly address as much as it shows, with

special emphasis on the inherent alien qualities of the Chinese figure. Specifically looking at a select short stories written by Chinese-Caribbean authors, the Chinese shop space, however much nuanced for its liminality, is still very much a physically circumscribed space that the Chinese body is bound to. Moreover, the Chinese body is reduced to stereotypes, an ‘othered’ representation inextricable from the shop. The stories almost seem to recycle the same shopkeeper with variations on the same name: a Mr. Chin with the heart of gold, naive credit system, incomprehensible background and poor English. In “Mr. Chin’s Property,” Victor Chang introduces a Mr. Chin, a Chinese man who appears one day in the local town to take over a previously Chinese-run but recently abandoned shop. With his halting English and pleasant demeanor, Mr. Chin is the quintessential Chinese shopkeeper, one whose services makes lives more comfortable for the local community but resolutely remains on the fringes of it with his strange “Chinee sauce” and “foreign arm and leg exercises”. His acquiescing character is confirmed as he starts “giving credit to several customers, and keeping the shop open till 10 o’clock at night...would serve anyone who called to him.

More than that, he would cut slices off a whole bread and sell in smaller quantities” (Chang 3). In the aftermath of An incident with the constable and Mr. Chin’s shop assistant, Belle, the misunderstandings subsequently spread in the local community about Mr. Chin murdering Constable Samuels lead people to loot and burn the shop down. Still, Mr. Chin remains the quiet Chinese shopkeeper, choosing not to defend himself and ultimately silently moving away, leaving the area as it existed before he entered it.

Mr. Chin as the archetypal Chinese shopkeeper figure is seen again in Chang’s other short story, “The Light

in the Shop”, this time as the narrator’s brother, Ah Go who migrates to Jamaica from China as an adult to join his family who had already moved there some time ago. Ah Go quickly finds his place67

“Now he has a shop of his own, following in the footsteps of generations of Chinese who came to Jamaica and went into the grocery trade. Twenty years have passed since I first met him but my brother’s hold on English is still very tenuous. His vocabulary has expanded and he knows every item in stock, and quantities, but he remains curiously insulated from the life that enters his shop” (105) The narrator notes that even with this disengagement with the local community, his brother’s bookkeeping system is one that the narrator “never ceases to marvel at [because of ] the trust involved” (107). Like Mr. Chin from the first short story, Ah Go has a heart of gold, trusting his customers to pay for their groceries eventually and “willing to sell small quantities that satisfy a meagre budget which a supermarket simply would not provide” (107). The narrator as a second-generation Jamaican-born Chinese curiously observes Ah Go as such, grappling with the seeming paradox of Ah Go’s ‘inside yet outside’ position within the community. The narrator’s own disdain for the shop that has been a constant in his life betrays a certain nuance; the Chinese shop here is set up as a traditional space for the Chinese-Caribbean figure that the narrator, being born in Jamaica, succeeds in escaping via education. On the other hand, Ah Go, akin to their parents, remains in the Chinese shop space, unable to physically move beyond this circumscribed space. It’s only later revealed through the narrator’s discovery of “an unfinished letter in beautiful and incomprehensible calligraphy...a fat biography of Dwight Eisenhower translated into Chinese, and a book on Mao written by his doctor” (108) that he realizes Ah Go also escapes via education, albeit only feasibly done in the interiority of his Chinese mind.

Ah Go’s ability to transcend the shop space in the interiority of his mind is curious in contrast to yet anoth-

er short story, this one by Meiling Jin titled “Victoria” and set in Berbice, Guyana. Here, the main protagonist is a Chinese-Caribbean girl, Victoria, who works for some time with her sister and brother-in-law (another Mr. Chin) in a shop called Cho Chin. Victoria was raised behind the shop counter, in a family provided for by her father, Wong, and his shops. The shopkeeper role is actively sustained in the family: Victoria’s brothers, Stanley and Edward open an ice cream shop while her other brother, David owns a bakery on Hatfield Street in Georgetown. While Victoria isn’t averse to the shop setting, she desires a physical change in landscape. Eventually, Victoria ends up moving to Trinidad alone, leaving behind the Guyanese shops. However, unlike Ah Go, while Victoria ends up physically escaping, she doesn’t seem to truly escape the Chinese shop space. Instead, as she embarks for Trinidad, she effectively carries the space of the Chinese shop and her shopkeeper skill set with her to a different land. This unchanging position speaks, on one level, to the socio-economic opportunities prescribed to the ethnic Chinese and on another level, reveals the internalization of the Chinese shop space, evoking Victoria’s inevitable assumption of the shopkeep68

er role, forever remaining one who “didn’t understand depression but understood credit” (Jin 10).

As the literature shows, Lee-Loy’s theory pinpointing the Chinese shop space in literature as one that direct-

ly informs and is also informed by the broader production of nation recognizes a distinct, problematic pattern of one-dimensional representation of the Chinese in the literature, that is, if the Chinese figure crops up at all. As much as the Chinese shop is a crucial space of communal convergence, the dominant literary discourse around this space delegates it to the ringes, easily dispensable when the situation calls for such. By calling attention to this, LeeLoy’s work is invaluable, especially in the clear presentation of the ‘either-or’ quandary for the Chinese shop as manipulated in nation discourse by colonial power. It makes sense then that the salience of this theory renders a rich analysis of many short stories specifically set in the Chinese shop space. However, where I look to extend Lee-Loy’s dichotomous portrayal of the Chinese-Caribbean space as conditionally outside or inside is specifically through an analysis of Kerry Young’s Pao, a Chinese-Caribbean novel that transverses the physically circumscribed Chinese shop space, letting the Chinese body move fluidly across boundaries in literal physical but also relational ways. Analyzing literature that condones the Chinese body stepping out from behind the shop counter calls attention to the limited extent of British colonial influence, accounting for the complexities of creolization as real uncontrollable variables and rendering new positions of liminality in all the ways that the Chinese figure both is and isn’t spatially creolized in Jamaica’s process of nation formation.

Given that the main point of contrast between the short stories and Pao is the spatial configuration of the

Chinese figure within the Jamaican nation narrative, I analyze Pao specifically through the lens of space to show the innovation of breaking past the shop counter but also to nuance where the ideal of a creole nation still crumbles. Although the Chinese body moves across physical boundaries, the deeply-rooted racial and class tensions problematize Pao’s naive conception of a truly creole nation, tensions that Lee-Loy and Lowe attribute to the inextricable influence of colonialism. Still, to first closely analyze the role of space, the novel is radical even if just for its placement of the ethnic Chinese community in the heart of Kingston, the capital of Jamaica, instead of the more prevalent seen settings of remote rural towns. In Kingston, the Chinese presence is strong and vibrant enough to take over a sector of the city in what becomes known as Kingston’s Chinatown. This is where the main protagonist, Pao lives upon immigrating to Jamaica from China as a young boy with his mother and brother. Although Pao also becomes a ‘shop-owner’ of sorts, the novel’s intentional geopolitical placement of Pao in Kingston’s Chinatown complicates the figure of the Chinese shopkeeper, breaking the tereotypes seen in other stories with depictions of the Chinese merchant embroiled in the urban underworld, criminal activity, and international transactions in terms of both mobilities and business exchanges. Already the Chinese figure here is implicated in areas far beyond the shop space 69

and furthermore, becomes far more entangled with other ethnic communities because of he mobility of the Chinese body in actively instigating such activities.

These mobilities are crucial not only because they diverge from the dominant discourse around the passive-

ly and conditionally accepted Chinese person but doubly for the unforeseeable opportunities of creolization. It’s a wholly different set-up from the static Chinese shop space and shopkeeper submissively and tentatively creolized because of the nature of the shop space as communal ground. In returning agency back to the Chinese body situated in a vibrant and influential Chinatown, Kerry Young specifically references the street names, corners, and neighborhoods that Pao freely roams with particular precision and intensity. The street names embedded within Pao’s narration become the norm, “We walk up Matthews Lane till we get to Barry Street and as we turn the corner all I see is the buggies [...] when we get to the post office we turn into King Street and into a shop call Issa’s that sell everything” (Young 20). Such topographic precision is traced even more closely as Pao navigates other areas of Kingston outside of Chinatown: “When I turn outta the hospital I drive up Old Hope Road, down Tom Redcam Avenue pass Up Park Camp and head out along Windward Road where the sea breeze whip through the car going ‘cross the Palisadoes to Port Royal” (99). This lively physical movement within and outside Chinatown, as recorded, continuously reaches beyond the shop counter which in turn, unsettles the passivity of the Chinese shopkeeper position.

But even beyond merely a physical mapping project, Young’s meticulous mapping reveals further insight

into the consequences of such physical mobilities. None of Pao’s movements within and outside of Chinatown have consequences solely for him individually but ather, are implemented to create and sustain relationships with others.

These relationships, borne out of Pao physically traversing racial borders, naturally reflect such flagrant disregard of certain unspoken racial and class boundaries. Gloria, a black woman, first comes to meet Pao at his shop on the edge of Chinatown, quite a way off from where she lives in East Kingston (1). This initial encounter sparks an intimate relationship, leading Pao to repeatedly travel from Matthews Lane to East Kingston to sustain his romance with Gloria (4). Hampton, Pao’s black friend, takes Pao to East Kingston later on to meet Finley, another black boy who ends up completing their trifecta of friends (26). To capitalize on U.S. Navy resources, Pao and Finley travel towards the U.S. base near the Blue Lagoon lounge to meet Bill, their white, illegal supplier of U.S. goods to sell (37). After visiting Fay’s grand estate on Lady Musgrave Road, Pao decides to pursue her hand in marriage which then initiates Fay’s continued travels between Matthews Lane in Chinatown and her more secluded mansion on Lady Musgrave Road further north (63). Pao forces a ‘mutual-benefits’ relationship on Dr. Morrison, a white doctor, whom Pao stops from committing suicide on King Street, a bit further northwest out of Chinatown (92). Although the initiation of such relations spring from Pao’s mobility, they are also only sustained by continued mobility. This is especial70

ly true for Pao’s relationship with Father Michael, a black priest, that initially starts on a calculated move from Pao’s side but ends up morphing into an actual friendship that warrants extensive travel between the neighborhoods of downtown Kingston where Chinatown is and much further north where Bishop’s Lodge is. Through such analysis, It becomes clearer that Young’s astute spatial awareness is intentional first on the formal level of topographic perception and less obviously, to evidence relationships bred from spatial mobilities as a form of creolization.

This creolization, as an indispensable aspect of the Caribbean and New World, is most commonly depict-

ed as a mixture of sorts, different from assimilation because a mixture implies that parts can still be distinguishable within the mix. Nevertheless, creolization and moreover, the idea of a creole nation, must rest on some melded or unified front. According to Fanon’s theory about culture being central to the production of nation, the ideal creole nation then relies on the creation of one culture out of the ‘mixture’ of peoples living together on one land. This is an ideal of creolization that Pao refuses to let go for the majority of the novel although it’s an ideal that quickly becomes compromised in the face of the many complexities of mid-twentieth century Jamaica. As Dennis M. Hogan argues, the protagonist, Pao advances naive notions of creolization as multicultural romance separately from the overall politics of the novel itself resisting such felicitous fantasies, which again attests to the complexities of creolization (Hogan 1). Accordingly, the physical mobilization of the Chinese figure beyond the conventional shop doesn’t unilaterally recover a reality of Chinese diaspora overlooked in the British colonial agenda but additionally captures a whole new array of complexities of the Chinese body participating in creolization, accentuating liminal states akin to what Lee-Loy recognizes for the physically static Chinese shopkeeper.

Once again, expressions of physical space and relationships tied by spatial movement reveal much, this time

in the gradual complication of Pao’s creole optimism and in a broader scope, creole nation itself. Early in the novel, Pao’s optimistic voice, unwavering in painful naivety, attacks a white man who throws racial slurs at Pao and his friends, “I am not a Chink and these boys are not Niggers. We are Jamaicans. We are brothers” (Young 33). Here, Pao sees himself justified in saying this, in evoking the unity granted by Jamaican nationhood to scold an ignorant ‘white man’. This is even more so because of the clear display of ethnic contact and creolization his personal friend group attests to: Pao as a Chinese boy relying on his best friends, Hampton and Finley who are black. What Pao doesn’t realize but the novel itself ironically paints is this multiethnic friend group marking the white man as an outsider and physically fist-fighting him into submission, all while claiming that the Jamaican nation holds all who live there under its name. This incident becomes the precedent to repeated expressions of physical space, more specifically maps of divisions, inequalities, acts of violence, and dynamics of mobility-fixity, that capture the inherent messy underbelly of creolization. In this manner, Young’s novel complements and effectively extends the argument of 71

Caribbean scholar, Nigel Bolland, who claims that racial and class tensions have always been constitutive to the idea of creolized societies (Bolland 26).

Although these race and class-based tensions and spatial divides become far more pronounced as the novel

moves in time toward an independent, post-colonial Jamaica, Pao still engages with these tensions quite early on, promulgating them unconsciously with his actions while his voice repeatedly touts a united creole nation. When Pao and his friends spot Louis DeFreitas, a “skinny white boy” (in reality, mixed white and black) hanging out by the post office on the corner of Barry Street, Hampton definitively concludes, “that bwoy well out of his jurisdiction” (Young 30). Pao’s contradictions can, in part, be seen as correlated with his individual liminal position as a protector figure of Chinatown after Zhang who has to accordingly mediate the overarching relations between Chinatown and other ethnically differentiated neighborhoods like the impoverished, predominantly black West Kingston. While his mobility allows him to experience the positive relationships and consequences that inform his idealistic creole vision, it simultaneously brings heightened awareness to the fact that these racial/class boundaries still do exist in one form or another. This then directly informs Pao’s way of dealing with certain crises, not as a passive recipient of conditional inclusion but as a Chinese figure with the agency to pick and choose when to be creolized. Pao exhibits this in the rejection of Samuels, a member of DeFreitas’ gang, and his “long political speech ‘bout how bad everything getting in West Kingston” predicting that poverty-inflicted anger and violence there will eventually spill over into other districts in the city (133). To this, Pao states, “West Kingston is West Kingston, and this is Chinatown” (133).

With this statement, Pao draws a strict geographic line, deeming the Chinese community’s experience as incompatible and even out of reach with that of black West Kingston. While such a self-instated exclusion from the ideal of a creole nation is innovative in the sense that it was an actively calculated choice, Pao’s talk of ‘one Jamaican nation out of many’ gets cast in a hypocritical light when juxtaposed with his decisions to alternately exclude others and the Chinese community as a whole when he deems it necessary. In this manner, Pao as a character comes to reflect the sheer internal complexities of creolization.

As the novel progresses further into the troubled years after Jamaica gains independence in 1962, Pao’s

optimistic creole ideal starts to crumble in the face of many years of contradictions and the reality of the challenging times in front of his face. As a postcolonial nation, Jamaica faces a slump of economic instability, financial constraints, prevalent gun violence and most insidiously, a narrowing definition of the nation as belonging to its majority Afro-Jamaican constituents. Contrary to the initial rose-colored picture of a newly independent Jamaica, the extant racial and class tensions culminate in the years to follow, most dramatically portrayed by the death of Pao’s 72

brother-in-law, Kenneth, who gets shot in West Kingston and is left to “lay there in the street and bleed to death” (165). The significance of Kenneth, as a racially mixed Chinese man, shot and killed in the majority black neighborhood of West Kingston is great in its blatant gesture to the interethnic tensions of an imperfect creolized society. As highlighted earlier, it is exactly these tensions, albeit on a smaller scale than shootings, that play into Pao’s decisions, whether or not he does so consciously. Now in the chaos of post colonialism, Pao can only confront the reality of these fissures: “The other thing that strike me ‘bout the way Jamaica changing is how everybody start talking ‘bout Africa. Is like we ‘Out of Many’, but the ‘One People’ seem to be just the Africans. Is Africa this and Africa that. Marcus Garvey and Haile Selassie. And ever since the world discover Bob Marley, everything turn to Rasta and reggae. It like they think the only true Jamaican is an African” (243).

The shift in the discourse of nation membership as portrayed here in the novel reflects directly on the actual historical context of postcolonial Jamaica, in a time when there was mass Chinese emigration out of Jamaica and into other countries like the United States, Britain, and even back to China. This is again specifically and accurately recorded in the novel as Pao comments, “You can hardly see a Chinese man on the street these days. And now, when I step outta the yard at Matthews Lane, all I see is a mass of black faces looking at me and wondering what the hell I am still doing here” (243). It’s a huge shift in perspective for Pao but also a call to the broader literary audience to visualize the creole nation for the uncontrollability of its constituents and their relations.

Ultimately, one question still stands at the end of this extensive analysis: what are the stakes involved? Start-

ing first with Fanon’s theory for the centrality of culture to nation and a brief historical introduction to the now postcolonial Jamaica, I argued that literature, as an expression of culture, provides crucial insight to the production of a nation, especially a colonized nation. If, as Lisa Lowe argues, the Chinese figure was introduced to the Caribbean as part of a broader colonial manipulation to stave off black revolution and maintain production, the dominant literary discourse only naturally reflects this influence. For the Chinese in Caribbean literature, this meant being physically circumscribed by the shop area, conditionally and passively accepted or rejected at whim. Lee-Loy explores this liminality further, specifically attributing this to lasting consequences of colonialism. Here, I extended Lee-Loy’s framework in a literary analysis of a recent Chinese-Caribbean novel, Pao in which the Chinese body is restored with physical and relational mobility as well as the agency to choose to participate in nation-formation.

Looking specifically through spatial expressions, I called attention to the ways in which Jamaica is imperfectly creole, further complicating the Chinese position in nation narrative.

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In many ways, the process of analysis itself was laborious precisely because there is no easy way to approach

literature that is informed and continues to inform reality, a reality still very much mediated by racial typing and tensions seen not only in the Caribbean but also transnationally. Insomuch that a nation is never absolute but instead, formed by contact and relationships among peoples, it is imperative to continuously nuance the participation of diaspora, as a transnational phenomenon, in the formation of nation. My specific intentions to provide a more nuanced comprehension of the Chinese diaspora in Jamaica only echo others whose works challenge conventional understandings of migration and nation-formation, in a high-stakes effort to restore the transnational figure, in all its complexities, to nation histories.

Works Cited Bohr, Aaron Chang. “Identity in Transition: Chinese Community Associations in Jamaica.” Caribbean Quarterly Vol. 50. 2: 2004. Print.

Bolland, O. Nigel. “Creolisation and Creole Societies: A Cultural Nationalist View of Caribbean Social History”.

Caribbean Quarterly 44.1/2 (1998): 1–32. Web. Bryan, Patrick. “The Settlement of the Chinese in Jamaica: 1854-1970.” Caribbean Quarterly Vol. 50. 2: 2004. 1525. Print.

Chang, Victor. Light in the Shop. Small Axe Collective, No.2: 1997.: 103-108 Print.

Chang, Victor. “Mr. Chin’s Property,” s/x Salon March 2014. Web. Fanon, Frantz. “On National Culture.” In The Wretched of the Earth, translated by Constance Farrington, preface

by Jean-Paul Sartre, 206-248. New York: Grove Press, 1963.

Hogan, Dennis. “And that is not how Jamaica is”: Cultural Creolization, Optimism, and National Identity in Kerry Young’s Pao”. Anthurium 12.1/7. Web. Jin, Meiling. “Victoria” in Song of the Boatwoman. Leeds, England: Peepal Tree, 1996.

Lee-Loy, Anne-Marie. Searching for Mr. Chin: Constructions of Nation and the Chinese in West

Indian Literature. Temple University Press, 2010. Web.

Lee-Loy, Anne-Marie. “The Chinese Shop as Nation Theatre in West Indian Fiction.”

Anthurium: A Caribbean Studies Journal 5, no. 1 (2007). Web.

Lowe, Lisa. “Intimacies on Four Continents.” In Haunted by Empire: geographies of intimacy in

North American history, edited by Ann Stoler, 191-212. Durham: Duke University Press,

2006.

Young, Kerry. Pao: A Novel. New York: Bloomsbury, 2011. Print.

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Artist: Mackenzie Madison

Featured Artists Hannah Bourgault was born in Oak Harbor, Washington and moved to Appleton, Wisconsin as a child. At the University of Wisconsin-Fox Valley she graduated with an associate’s degree with an emphasis in anthropology. She transferred to the University of Wisconsin-Madison to complete her bachelor’s degree in art. She is now graduating from UW with a degree in serigraphy and photography. Hannah Bourgault has been a part of numerous shows in Madison, and in the Fox Valley. Her work primarily focuses on her interactions and interpretations of her surrounding environments. Through using a variety of textures and colors she hopes to embody the mood and mise en scène imagined.

Nurdul Adreena Burhanuddin. If there is anything she’s good at, that is to self-deprecate. “You’re being too hard on yourself,” is what everyone would tell her. Always feeling left behind. Always trying to catch up with everyone else.

But making art; painting, drawing, taking photographs, are the things that could save her from the chaos. Slowing down, living in the moment, appreciating every details, capturing the beauty of every element – healing. Adreena, a junior, majoring in Actuarial Science and Risk Management and Insurance in the Wisconsin School of Business, thus dedicated most of her time on her minor instead- Studio Art. Shannon Gardner My name is Shannon Elizabeth Gardner. I like to draw dead things. I strive to evoke a haunted aura and reminder that death and decay reflects the evident future of life. I enjoy dark and grotesque stories as well as illustrating dead and morbid topics that others may avoid. My goal is to reach the extreme and address the macabre and taboo. My work invokes emotional memories that create connections that make one come at peace about of the destruction life. It reflects a wabi-sabi like aura, and the viewer can witness beauty that lies hidden within imperfections.

Ashley Jablonski is an artist whose main medium is painting. Currently, her work encompasses sadness and her belief that sadness is one of the purest and rawest emotions. As a person, the two main emotions that she feels are happiness and sadness. As an artist, she is drawn to gestural work and conceptual art. Along with gesture, most of her work uses high contrast. In 2016, she exhibited three times in Steven’s Point. She’s currently enrolled at the University of Steven’s Point, and is majoring in both Sociology and Fine Arts (2D emphasis), with minors in Psychology and Art History.

Mackenzie Madison is from St. Paul, Minnesota studying at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. She is a sophomore pursuing a Bachelor of Fine Arts in studio art and a Bachelor of Arts in art history. Her work is greatly influenced by her love of color and form. She believes in art as a creative force meant to express deeper emotion. She intends on attending graduate school and hopes to become a professor to share her love for art with future generations.

Melanie Xiong. My name is Melanie Xiong. I am a recent graduate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a Bachelor of Fine Arts. My areas of focus are in art metals and 3D animation, but I prefer having a pencil in my hand. My work is inspired by music, storytelling, and my own life experiences. As an artist, I want to share my stories and ideas with the world through art, whether it be in the fine arts or in pop culture.

Featured Authors Samantha Calver, author of “Parental Trauma and Narrative Identity in the American Coming of Age Novel,” is fourth year English Literature Honours student and The University of Edinburgh, currently in the home stretch of her undergraduate degree. Her academic interests include the American Novel, contemporary feminist literature and criticism and postcolonial studies, and she plans on using her free time as a graduate student to explore these genres in more depth.

Jacob Carter, author of “A Place to Call Home: The Role of the Urban Imaginary in Terence Davies’” is a recent graduate of the University of Texas at Austin, where he majored in Radio-Television-Film. His interests include queer theory, genre theory, and transnational cinema. He is currently enrolled as a graduate student at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, where he plans to complete his MA in Film Studies.

Sophie Chung, author of “Chinese-Jamaica: An Imperfect Nation Narrative” I am a recent graduate of Amherst College, where I majored in English with a concentration in film theory. I also just turned in an undergraduate honors thesis called ‘Broadcast Yourself ’: Cultural Politics of Asian American YouTube, a passion project born at the intersection of critical literary analysis and contemporary media inquiry. More than the core literary canon, I find myself drawn to the literature and media of historically and contemporarily marginalized minority groups. This upcoming year, I will be in South Korea on a Fulbright Fellowship, teaching English to high school students.

Joe Davidson, author of “Intersectional Oppression” in August Wilson’s Fences: Social, Psychological, and Economic Means of Revolt,” is from Burnsville, Minnesota. He is entering his third year at Hamline University where he is studying English and Social Justice. His academic interests include critical race and queer theories, cultural and gender studies, reader-response criticism, and critical pedagogy.

Lindsay LaMoore, author of “Graphing Liberation,” is a recent graduate of Hamline University, where she majored in English with a concentration in professional writing and rhetoric and with minors in creative writing and religion.

Recognizing literature as both a reflection and critique of society, her main interests are postmodernist theory and narrative form. She will continue her work in the literary field at New York University’s Summer Publishing Institute.

Thomas Eric Simonson, author of “Beyond East and West: Representation, Interrogation, and Adaptation in Pamuk’s My Name Is Red” and “Sovereignty Subjected: Incarnations of Queen Elizabeth I in Shakespeare’s Midsummer,”is a recent graduate from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and will begin graduate study at Wake Forest University in 2017. His research interests include contemporary multicultural and world literatures, postmodernism, Shakespeare, poetry, and the history and application of literary theory. He appreciates working with language in both academic and creative disciplines.