The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism, Volume 8

C L MJ al of n r u o J n Madiso Criticism y Literar

Spring 2019 Volume 8

EDITORIAL STAFF

Editor-in-Chief Grace Hayes is a senior 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, and Robin Wall Kimmerer.

Associate Editor Emma Crowley is a junior studying Creative Writing and Communications Arts. She spends most of her time writing or thinking about writing, but also enjoys watching other people play video games on the internet. Her favorite authors are VE Schwab, Leigh Bardugo, and Michael Crichton.

Layout Designer Elliott Puckette is a senior at UW-Madison studying Theatre and Drama and English Linguistics.

When she is not reading, writing, or in a show, she is driving back and forth to Milwaukee to see her girlfriend. Favorite authors include William Shakespeare and Tennessee Williams.

Essays 7

Collatine The Publisher

by Daniella Martino

18

Redefining “African” at New York City’s African Burial Ground

by Maggie McMillin

25

Silhouettes and Sexuality: Looking at Representations of Lesbian Relationships in Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet and Fun Home

by Kayla Beckman

41

The Musicality of The Winter’s Tale

by Thomas Erik Nielsen

49

John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath

by Spencer Polk

63

Is it a Crime to be a Woman?: An Exploration of “Criminal” Women in Broadside Ballads

by Noa Levhar

71

Diagnosis, and Witness The Tension Between the Soldier and the State in the Work of Siegfried Sasson and Virginia Woolf’s

by Sinclair Willman March

Artwork You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone

by Joscelyn Sager

Cover

Murica the Beautiful

by Joscelyn Sager

6

Priorities

by Joscelyn Sager

17

Thrings are Beautiful if you let them

by Hattie Grimm

24

Namira

by Ashley Jablonski

48

who are You to tell ME

by Hattie Grimm

62

Table of Contents

Murica the Beautiful

By Joscelyn Sager

6

Collatine The Publisher Daniella Martino

William Shakespeare’s poem, The Rape of Lucrece, is infused with language relating to authorship and publication, a direct result of the historical moment in which it was written. Shakespeare himself published the poem in 1594, one of only two works that he intentionally placed on the literary market. This came at a time when writers were beginning to transition from traditional manuscript circulation to print for widespread publication. Manuscript exchange existed among the higher classes and many writers advocated for its continuation since discussion with peers often helped to catch misinterpretations and elucidate revisions. With the new method of publishing exchange came great anxiety about the meaning of authorship when “printed works – physically cut off from the author’s writing hand and available to anyone who could pay for them – seemed to evade such direct control” (Greenstadt 49-50). Further anxieties stemmed from the fact that publication entailed movement into the public sphere out of the intimate elite circle of old. A “stigma of print” developed as writers of all social classes, even those desiring publication, scorned publishing as “common and vulgar” and this rhetoric became highly fashionable during the time of Lucrece’s publication (Wall x). Yet, despite its critics, the English market was rapidly growing, with the number of books in the market increasing from 2,428 in the period of 1583-1592 to 4,077 between 1613-1622, an expansion of more than 60 percent (Erne and Badcoe 40-41).

Shakespeare was not immune to these societal forces and scholars have debated his motivation behind the publication of these specific poems. Some portray him “as a reluctant author, forced in publishing his poetry because his major source of income was compromised” when the theaters shut down due to the plague (Scott 2). However, this explanation seems strange when examining the data surrounding the reprinting rate for printed poems and plays between 1583 and 1622. The rate was “27.1 per cent as opposed to 49.3 per cent,” respectively, indicating that “only a little more than one poem (or collection of poems) in four was reprinted within a quarter century of original publication” (Erne and Badcoe 43). If Shakespeare was only publishing for financial reasons, it seems strange that he would have chosen to publish his narrative poems rather than his many plays, which the market implied would have been more successful. This counterargument is not meant to undermine the considerable success he achieved through his published poems, with Lucrece re­printed seven times, exceeding the popularity “of 98.6 per cent of the other poetry books published at the time” (Erne and Badcoe 49). Rather, it is an indication of the challenge historical statistics present to this rather common perspective.

Alternatively, scholars see The Rape of Lucrece “as an expression of Shakespeare’s ambitions as a rising poet and playwright.” They

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Daniella Martino assert that these poems were written “in a bid for patronage and status” as exemplified by the prefaces dedicated to the Earl of Southampton (Hehmeyer 139). In the words of Richard Lanham, these two poems were “masterpieces in the old sense of the word – pieces made by an artist to prove he is a master” (qtd. in Hehmeyer 139). However, in this es-say, I will present an additional explanation for Shakespeare’s publication of his narrative poems beyond just the financial and aspirational theories. I argue that Shakespeare’s broader motivation for publishing The Rape of Lucrece was to prove the necessity of publication despite its potential threat to authorial intention. I claim that through Shakespeare’s portrayal of both Tarquin and Lucrece as authorial figures with opposite motives, he frames the poem between two acts of publication and thereby asserts his own commentary within this contested tradition.

The poem begins in medias res, a significant alteration from the original versions of Ovid and Livy, highlighting how publication can incite the action of the poem. In the earlier myths, Tarquin visits the home of Collatine and observes Lucrece himself. It is her physical beauty that arouses his lust and ultimately leads to her own rape. In Shakespeare’s version, it is Collatine’s description of his wife that inflames Tarquin, an act of publication causing unintended consequences. The narrator criticizes Collatine for his words: Or why is Collatine the publisher Of that rich jewel he should keep unknown From thievish ears, because it is his own?

(Shakespeare lines 29-35).

Enjambment works in this passage to question the role of Collatine as a publisher, independent of what he is publishing. Invoking the critical rhetoric surrounding publishing at this time, the first line taken alone sets up a rhetorical question about a high-class figure acting in a profession of vulgarity. The narrator is assuming a position that immediately places the question of publication at the forefront of the story, taking what appears to be a highly skeptical, almost accusatory stance at the start.

When Lucrece is referenced, she is a possession owned by her publisher, a material good not even called by name when published. Jeffrey Hehmeyer reads this act as one that sets up the rivalry between Collatine and his audience, Tarquin, while Lucrece “does not exist independently even as an object of desire. Sight unseen, Tarquin can only imagine what Collatine describes, and only wants when Collatine’s words arouse desire” (144). This theme of Lucrece as a dependent object or possession reappears in other parts of the text. Perhaps the most striking example is in the aftermath of her rape when Lucrece is imagining her defamation, claiming that future generations will hear “how Tarquin wronged me, I Collatine” (Shakespeare line 819). Her rape is not just her own, but also a violation of her publisher and possessor, Collatine, the name that modifies her personal pronoun. Through this first introduction to publishing, the language sets up a negative portrayal of

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Collatine The Publisher publication, highlighting the unintended consequences affecting both the object and the publisher when making private objects public.

In the lines leading up to the rape Shakespeare institutes Tarquin as an authorial figure, but one that desires secrecy instead of publication. In his analysis of Lucrece, Jeffrey Hehmeyer uses the contrast between heraldic and commonplace rhetoric to explore how Shakespeare derives authority. Heraldry is applied to Tarquin and his speeches in the first half of the poem. Hehmeyer specifically talks about the use of impresa as applied to Tarquin: Formally, impresa displayed elaborate personal allegories that were meant to be interpreted only by individuals with intimate knowledge of the bearer’s affairs. This intentional obscurity imparted an air of social exclusivity and hidden inwardness to the devices. Impresa were unusual in that they privileged individual desire and ambition. They were meant to be read as private symbols of these men, their power, and their aspirations. In other words, these heraldic expressions’ value and authority resided in their possessor or creator. Tarquin, therefore, is both perpetrator and judge of his actions. (145) It is striking how the language Hehmeyer uses to describe impresa with terms such as “intimate knowledge,” “social exclusivity,” and “private” relates to the process of manuscript circulation. The exchange of manuscripts occurred in “textual communities,” circulating in places such as “households, usually aristocratic or gentrified, where manuscripts were written for a limited circle of family or friends,” universities, the Inns of Court, and the Royal Court (Beal). These were more private, exclusive settings for audience engagement. In this way, Hehmeyer’s analysis produces an image of Tarquin as a figure characterized by values and rhetoric of the manuscript tradition, favoring private exchange over public. Shakespeare presents this idea in Tarquin’s exchange with Lucrece when he threatens to frame her as an adulteress, making her “the author of their obloquy,” but tells her, “if thou yield, I rest thy secret friend: / the fault unknown is a thought unacted” (Shakespeare lines 526-527). In framing Lucrece as the author of a crime she did not commit, it is implicit that Tarquin would be the actual author of the scheme, giving him authority over her through his ability to write the story portrayed to the rest of the world.

However, after manipulating her with the threat of publication, he draws back and gives her the alternative of privacy. In complying and yielding to his will, their story can remain in secret, a manuscript exchanged only between them.

He even goes so far as to claim that if their deed remains secret, it never happened at all. He uses the threat of publication to force Lucrece into the secret exchange. While publishing is not presented in a positive light in this moment, the alternative, a private interaction like a manuscript exchange, is the moment when the rape occurs, giving Lucrece the option of public disgrace or private violation.

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Daniella Martino

Tarquin’s authorship is most explicit in the moment of the rape. In the lines leading up to the rape, Tarquin stands above the sleeping Lucrece and observes her body through a blazon and then “his eye commends the leading to his hand” (Shakespeare 436). Hand has multiple connotations, three definitions of which are most important to the understanding of the rape as an act of authority. The first is the obvious connection between the hand and “the action of the hand in writing” (“hand” 16a). His observations, organized within the rhetorical device of the blazon, moved his own hand to the act of writing. The second connotation is of “something regarded as comparable in function to the human hand as an agent of a specified authority, principle, or abstract entity” (“hand” 1b). In this way, his hand can be understood as moving to assert authority or dominance over Lucrece. And third, Amy Greenstadt presents the argument that the movement of the hand mimics the movement of the male genitals (47).

In this way, his blazon moves him physically to enact the rape. These three separate definitions of “hand” all serve to endow Tarquin with power in the moment of the rape: “For with the nightly linen that she wears / he pens her piteous clamours in her head” (Shakespeare lines 680-681). The word “pens” is linked to each definition of hand. The hand writing with the pen is the author of her rape.

The hand asserting authority serves “to enclose, shut in, confine, or trap” (“pen” 1a) as his hand is literally trapping her screams. And finally, pen also has phallic imagery so it also mirrors the act of rape. In this way, the progression from his eye observing the blazon to the movement of his hand to “pen” her screams creates a tri­ partite expression of the physical rape, the literal hand, and the metaphorical act of writing her violation. Charlotte Scott comments on this moment as “an electrifying re­presentation of authorial authority. As Tarquin writes her, so he will also rape her” (14).

Shakespeare takes specific words of authorial power and images of printing used by Tarquin, and repurposes them in Lucrece’s speeches, linguistically endowing her with Tarquin’s authority and thereby transitioning her from the object of the text to its very author. In the immediate aftermath of the rape, she dwells on her fate and predicts: The illiterate that know not how To cipher what is writ in learned books Will quote my loathsome trespass in my looks (Shakespeare lines 810-812).

These lines reflect back on some of the main themes presented earlier in Tarquin’s speeches. The first instance is in the specific connection established by the word “cipher,” used prior to Lucrece’s speech by Tarquin in the following speech: “Some loathsome dash the herald will contrive / To cipher me how fondly I did dote” (Shakespeare lines 206-207). The Oxford English Dictionary cites both Lucrece and Tarquin’s use of “cipher” in conjunction with two different definitions. Tarquin is

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Collatine The Publisher using its meaning, “to express, show forth, make manifest by any outward signs, portray, delineate” (“cipher” 3). His use centers on ideas of portrayal inherent in the act of writing. However, he sees himself as the subject of the herald’s authorship rather than the author. A herald is “one who proclaims or announces the message of another” (“herald” 2a), identifying yet another figure in the poem associated with the act of publication. If he chooses to rape Lucrece, he comprehends that others will construct their own stories of his deeds. In his language here, it is implied that he presumes his scandal will not remain private for long and that it will soon be published. However, in the language surrounding the “herald,” Tarquin seems to blame the publisher figure, a man who merely conveys others’ messages, for the writing of his legacy. “Dash” inspires thoughts of pen strokes and the Oxford English Dictionary again uses this sentence for the definition of “contrive” as “to devise, invent, design (a material structure, literary composition)” (“contrive” 3). Tarquin imagines the herald as both the publisher and the author of his legacy, expressing awareness of the forces that might expose his private indiscretion to the public.

Lucrece uses “cipher” in the sense of deciphering or decoding, focusing on the breaking down of written words for comprehension, rather than the building of the description through writing as in Tarquin’s passage. While Tarquin looks at the singular figure of the herald, Lucrece extends her concern to encompass the broader public. In this way, she distinguishes herself from Tarquin by her concern for a wider audience rather than just the elite circle of the Royal Court— where both Tarquin and the herald would have dwelled. The identification of a very public audience foreshadows the publication she chooses to carry out at the end of the story. It also relates to another major comparison between Lucrece’s passage and former Tarquin statements. Prevalent in both is the common Elizabethan metaphor of “people as books” (Thompson 60). Her looks are equated to books through readability. This is the original issue in the interaction between Lucrece and Tarquin: But she that never coped with stranger eyes Could pick no meaning from their parling looks, Nor read the subtle shining secrecies, Writ in the glassy margins of such books (Shakespeare lines 99-102).

Because of her own illiteracy, Lucrece is unaware of Tarquin’s intentions seeing as she cannot read the looks of his book. Especially important to this metaphor is the essential nature of the eyes: “If faces are books, eyes are margins…But of course, the resemblance is a conceptual one, based on the notion that what eyes and margins have in common is a capacity to carry commentary” (Thompson 63). Her unfamiliarity with the eyes leads to the glassy quality ascribed to the margins; glass is transparent as are the margins. This adjective is ironic as it should aid in visibility since glass is able to be look through. However it can also obscure the very presence of this commentary in the margins since one can see through glass, effectively missing the margins made

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Daniella Martino of the transparent material. The metaphor comes full circle when Lucrece transitions from the position of illiterate reader to become a book herself, read by the illiterate.

It is the fear of what readers might see in her book that motivates her ultimate transition from object to author. In order to assume this role, the second half of the poem grapples with Lucrece’s transition out of the private into the public realm, mirroring the shift in the publishing world from manuscript to print. Hehmeyer discusses her position as a private figure, pointing out that “throughout the poem, Lucrece demonstrates a paralyzing awareness of the stigma that marks a woman’s public speech and public action. She is loquacious only when alone” (Hehmeyer 156).

However, it is the internal private dialogue that comprises much of the poem itself.

The private is made public by publication and, through this window into the private, readers can trace Lucrece’s rise to authority and eventual entrance into the public sphere. The moment when she assumes the role of author is most explicitly described in her apostrophe to her hand, calling out, “’Poor hand, why quiver’st thou at this decree? / Honour thyself to rid me of this shame” (Shakespeare lines 1030-1031). As already mentioned, the hand can double as the means for her writing, the body part from which she derives her authority. Yet, she is a reluctant author and the quivering motion of the hand can play into Hehmeyer’s analysis of her acute perception of what it means for a woman to assume this position and expose herself. She fights for the authority to rid herself of the shame, killing herself as a martyr to her story, sacrificing herself so that her rape might not be read as a trespass, but a violation concluded with honor.

She builds up to the moment of publication through a series of introspectively authored moments, living in the private until the moment of full disclosure. Examples include her series of apostrophes to Night, Opportunity, Time, the verbal composition of her will, and the “ecphrasis” dealing with the siege of Troy (Burrow 315). Most essential to the development of Lucrece as an author is the will that she privately composes. Also a key word for establishing Tarquin as an author, Shakespeare employs yet another definition of will for Lucrece through the physically written document. The key moment of her testament is when she addresses her violator: My stained blood to Tarquin I’ll bequeath, Which by him tainted shall for him be spent, And as his due writ in my testament

(Shakespeare lines 1181-1183).

She begins by connecting her speech back to his original words, choosing “bequeath.”

In his persuasion that she should yield to him, he tells her not to bequeath the stigma of shame to her family. Now she brings the reader back to the deed of rape by reversing Tarquin’s persuasive rhetoric, bestowing the power of bequeathing to herself. It is her violated body that she is giving away, owning her being as a personal possession. In this moment, she has the authority over her body that she lacked in

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Collatine The Publisher the rape; she controls what becomes of it. In dedicating it to Tarquin, she is able to write his blame into the story. It is no longer her trespass, but his as the blood she gives him is tainted directly by him. This section of her will establishes her authorial intention that, by means of the spilling of her blood, Tarquin should bear the punishment and suffer the consequences of his actions, brought to the public’s attention by her last act of suicide.

The peak of Lucrece’s authority comes at the end of the poem. Hehmeyer points to a very simple point about the conclusion of Lucrece: “No epic hero compels her to complete the text. She controls herself” (153). Up until the moment that she writes the letter to her husband summoning him home, she could continue her private reflections forever. There is no one inciting her action, but herself. Yet she chooses publication, despite the difficulty she has in taking steps to reveal her story. The moment of her suicide is the moment when the necessity of publication becomes crucial for her purpose as an author. Her personal reflections are beautifully constructed works of rhetoric, but her ultimate intention is to bequeath Tarquin with her spilled blood. This part of her story requires a public readership only achievable through publishing the tale. David Bergeron talks about the importance of readers, citing ideas of Alberto Manguel: “Writing, in order to be salient and effective, requires readers. This interconnectedness leads to a paradox, as Manguel suggests: ‘in creating the role of the reader, the writer also decrees the writer’s death, since in order for a text to be finished the writer must withdraw, cease to exist’” (1).

By this logic, in her position as the author, Lucrece must die so that her story can reach readers. The intention of her writing is to publish the deed of Tarquin and so she must sacrifice herself, as the author, to publication.

The final lines of the poem return to the action of publishing, framing the poem in the language of print. The men to whom she bestows the story carry her out “to show her bleeding body thorough Rome, / And so to publish Tarquin’s foul offence” (Shakespeare lines 1851-1852). Through her spilled blood, she exposes Tarquin just as she intends in her will. In this, she is successful in spreading her tale to the public. However, her success is undermined because Tarquin is only banished rather than killed as she intended. In this way, Shakespeare continues to play on the anxiety about the relinquishment of authorial power. Her end goal is not entirely achieved. However, the conclusion serves the same purpose as the authorial language throughout. Tarquin is set up as an authorial figure defined by the privacy of manuscript circulation, writing the story of the rape in privacy. Lucrece takes his language and develops herself as an author capable and willing to make the sacrifice of authorial control, or existence in this case, to publish his secret. While the poem does not achieve Lucrece’s whole intention, it does the essential deed of revealing what was meant to be private. Furthermore, the poem as a whole is successful in proving Shakespeare’s argument about publication. It emerges as means of exposure and is in fact proved a necessity by the return to the original theme at the conclusion of the poem. The ending reminds readers of the first act of publication by Collatine.

By beginning the poem with the act of the “publisher” as the impetus for the plot,

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Daniella Martino Shakespeare is making a statement about the necessity for publication in the poem.

Had Collatine never published his “jewel,” Lucrece, there would be no poem at all.

In other words, publication is the very action that gives life to the poem. Without “Collatine the publisher,” there would be no Lucrece. And without Shakespeare publishing his poem about publishing, his masterpiece would remain hidden in privacy.

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Collatine The Publisher Works Cited Beal, Peter. “textual community.” A Dictionary of English Manuscript Terminology 1450–2000. Oxford UP, 2008, pp. 414-415. ProQuest ebrary. http://site. ebrary.com.turing.library.northwestern.edu/lib/northwestern/reader. action?docID=10215742. Accessed 10 March 2017.

Bergeron, David M. Textual Patronage in English Drama, 1570-1640. Ashgate, 2006.

Burrow, Colin, editor. The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, 2002.

Oxford UP, 2008. “cipher, v.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2016. Web. 10 March 2017. “contrive, v.1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2016. Web. 10 March 2017.

Erne, Lukas, and Tamsin Badcoe. “Shakespeare and the Popularity of Poetry Books in Print, 1583-1622.” The Review of English Studies, New Series, vol. 65, no.

268, 2013, pp. 33-57. https://academic-oup-com.turing.library.northwestern. edu/res/article/65/268/33/1558274/Shakespeare-and-the-Popularity-ofPoetry-Books-in. Accessed 4 March 2017.

Greenstadt, Amy. “’Read it in me’”: The Author’s Will in Lucrece.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 57, no. 1, 2006, pp. 45-70. “hand, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2016. Web. 10 March 2017.

Hehmeyer, Jeffrey Paxton. “Heralding the Commonplace: Authorship, Voice, and the Common-place in Shakespeare’s Rape of Lucrece.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 64, no. 2, 2013, pp. 139-164. https://muse-jhu-edu.turing.library. northwestern.edu/article/514663. Accessed 6 March 2017. “herald, n.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2016. Web. 10 March 2017. “pen, v.1.” OED Online. Oxford University Press, December 2016. Web. 10 March 2017.

Scott, Charlotte. “’To Show…and so to Publish’: Reading, Writing, and Performing in the Narra-tive Poems.” The Oxford Handbook of Shakespeare’s Poetry, edited by Jonathan Post, Oxford UP, 2013-07-01. Oxford Handbooks

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Daniella Martino Online. 2013-10-01. http://www.oxfordhandbooks.com.turing.library. northwestern.edu/view/10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199607747.001.0001/oxfordhb9780199607747-e-037. Accessed 6 March 2017.

Shakespeare, William. “The Rape of Lucrece.” The Oxford Shakespeare: The Complete Sonnets and Poems, edited by Colin Burrow, 2002. Oxford UP, 2008, pp. 237338.

Thompson, Ann and John O. Thompson. “Meaning, ‘Seeing,’ Printing.” Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, edited by Douglas A. Brooks, Ashgate, 2005, pp.

59-86.

Wall, Wendy. The Imprint of Gender: Authorship and Publication in the English Renaissance.

Cornell UP, 1993.

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Priorities

By Joscelyn Sager

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Redefining “African” at New York City’s African Burial Ground Maggie McMillin In Open City, Teju Cole’s use of the city of New York as a setting demonstrates a flexible definition of what is “African,” and therefore of what constitutes an “African novel.” Through the relationship of narrator Julius to New York’s ephemeral and shifting cultural landscape, Cole shows how “Africanness” must be considered beyond the confines of geographic location, linguistic community, national origin, or any other traditional defining factors. By portraying New York as a center of cultural hybridity with diverse cultural roots, Cole draws parallels between Julius’s existence in the city and the rise of the modern conception of African identity and African literature. In doing so, he also uses specific locations within the city to draw attention to the history of African identity and the forces that have shaped it into what it is today. Julius’ encounter with the memorial to the African Burial Ground in New York is especially significant. A close reading of this scene reveals Cole’s ideas of flexible cultural landscapes and the changing nature of how one defines the “Africanness” of a person or a literary work.

New York’s African Burial Ground National Monument serves as a particularly relevant setting because of the history that it represents. The Ground was a burial site for both free and enslaved Africans, with burials beginning in the 17th century and continuing until 1794. The site was rediscovered in 1991 during a construction project and has since been returned to public consciousness by being formally recognized as a national park (United States National Park Service). It had an “active, visible presence during many significant nation-building events. The site’s use spanned the longest period of British enslavement in New York, Manhattan’s development as a center of national commerce… [and] the return of this burial site to public awareness has stimulated a new awareness of how closely tied was the more familiar nation-building history with the difficult side of that same history” (Pearce 4). On one hand, that is, the site showcases the role of the African on American soil and the significance of Africans to the history of America. On the other hand, the African Burial Ground represents the ways that African identity has been historically desecrated and commodified and the way that the importance of African contributions to global history have been consistently minimized.

The National Park Service describes the African Burial Ground as being “lost to history due to landfill and development” (United States National Park Service). In more explicit terms, this means that “immediately after its closure, houses began to be built on the land,” and that these were soon followed by landfills, large construction projects, and “federal, state, and municipal government buildings” (Pearce 4).

Construction was so extensive that the current memorial site represents only 4% of the original Burial Ground. Cole describes the “sense of

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Redefining “African” at New York City’s African Burial Ground invasion happening on several levels, historically, psychologically” as a central theme of his novel (Conversation: Teju Cole’s Open City). Here, there is a literal invasion of the city into the territory of the African Burial Ground, with buildings taking over what many considered to be holy land. There is also a psychological invasion taking place: as the site is buried under buildings and its significance is forgotten, the importance of African narratives to Western history is likewise buried. Thus, the African Burial Ground is at once the bedrock upon which many historical events that furthered the anti-African, pro-slavery agendas of white Americans took place and a symbol of the continued prevalence of such agendas.

The dichotomy that the site represents, and its contribution to the modern African identity, is expressed in Julius’ interaction with the burial ground. When Julius initially encounters the site, he muses on the “echo across centuries of slavery in New York” that it represents (Cole 221). He also reflects on the way African identity and the concept of Africanness, especially in America, are based in Western beliefs about identity. Julius states that “the Negro Burial Ground was no mass grave: each body had been buried singly, according to whichever rite it was that, outside the city walls, the blacks had been at liberty to practice” (Cole 222). Despite these individualized burials, however, the final outcome is a large grave site labeled only as “African.” The African identity as it exists in this burial ground is a creation of the Western imagination: a foreign, monocultural entity that is not given the dignity of an acknowledged culture, home country, or name, even in death. When applied not only to cultural identity but to literary identity as well, this reflects the way that “the use of the term African literature… presupposes an attention to the complex determinations that have endowed the term African with real meaning” (Irele 7). That is to say, the term “African” took on real meaning in the eyes of the West through the processes of colonialism and slavery. It is only because of such forces that an overarching “African” identity is accepted as an unquestionable truth, whether in the context of “African literature” or “African Burial Ground.” When Julius reiterates that each individual had their own “rite” and their own cultural tradition, he makes clear that they do not come from one monocultural “Africa,” and that this understanding of Africa exists only in the minds of the non-African.

Furthermore, the mention of the “city walls” that restricted Africans in the US at the time calls to mind the separation and discrimination that stemmed from this understanding of Africanness. To be allowed to exist within mainstream white society in the 1700s, Africans living in America had little choice but to respect the established boundaries of white society. The Burial Ground was “on the outskirts of the city at the time… and so outside civilization as it was then defined,” and this is the only reason that “blacks were allowed to bury their dead [there]” (Cole 220). Because they were not considered a part of white civilization, Africans needed to be visibly separated from it, even in death. Outside of the city and the confines of this “civilization,” however, they were free to practice their own culture (a fact which is once again demonstrated by Julius’ mention of the different burial rites of individuals). This relegation to the margins of society mimics the relationship of

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Maggie McMillin African writers to the English literary canon. In pleasing European or American editors, many African writers are asked to present a story or point of view that is seen as the most appealing to Western audiences. Literature in general “[cannot] enter the canon if it [does not] conform to the mainstream ideology” of “cultural acceptability.”

In many cases, striving for “acceptability” leads African writers to “write more to please their Western audiences and publishers rather than their own African people” (Ojaide 3). But outside of those expectations, beyond the bounds of what Western civilization expects from an African narrative, they are free to portray their culture and tell their story in a way that is not monitored and curated by Western taste.

African writers “bring their race and humanity to the centre of discourse, unlike the margin Africa occupies in Western discourse” (Ojaide 12). Similarly, Africans brought their culture to the forefront during burial rites even as they were relegated to the margins of white civilization in America. Within Cole’s narrative, this parallel serves to establish the African Burial Ground as the representation of an outdated view of African cultural and literary identity.

The fact that it is a part of tourist culture within New York furthers this idea.

Africans here are “excluded as living figures” in quite a literal sense (Irele 14). The African presence is limited to the bones of the Burial Ground, with Julius unable to see the monument up close because it is “closed for public access, for renovation… in preparation for the summer tourism season” (Cole 220). He cannot see the actual dedications on the monument; rather, as it is far away and off-limits, he must see it only as a part of the city without fully appreciating its historical context. Adding insult to injury, these limitations are imposed by the need to make the site a popular and profitable attraction; it is not enough for it to just exist as a memorial to those buried. In an attempt to ensure continued relevance through tourism, the meaning of the site is obscured.

Because of this, Julius feels that it is “difficult… from the point of view of the twenty-first century, to fully believe that these people… were truly people, complex in all their dimensions as we are” (Cole 222). Again, the reality of the individuals in the African Burial Ground and their presence as “living figures” is obstructed, and this leads to their dehumanization. Among the lifeless Africans, Julius himself is the obvious exception. Not only is he literally the living figure among the dead, but he also identifies himself as someone “complex” and refers to himself as a part of the collective “we” of modern day New Yorkers. So, among the presence of the silenced and forgotten Africans of the African Burial Ground, Julius stands out. In this way, he symbolizes the fluid and contemporary nature of African identity and African literature as it exists today. And as an African living in America and coming into contact with the African diaspora, he further embodies many of the ways that Africanness is defined differently in the 21st century than it was in centuries past.

In New York City, Julius “is not a visitor but a resident. He is a local New Yorker who already knows this city very well, and has access to the diverse personal, collective, and other narratives making up the city” (Steckenbiller 146). This fact is an aspect of his African identity, not something that works against it. In his

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Redefining “African” at New York City’s African Burial Ground synthesis of the many different cultural aspects of New York and his subsequent acceptance into New York as a resident of the city, Julius’ experience mirrors that of African literature as a genre, which in its form synthesizes many different languages, landscapes, and nationalities. The modern African literary canon “is related to the African experience, which has strong cultural and historical underpinnings” but which does not necessarily have to take place in Africa and can instead include the diaspora (Ojaide 3). Julius, as an African man in a Western city with a significant historical relationship with Africa, reflects exactly these historical and cultural underpinnings. Similarly, his symbiotic relationship with New York and existence within its cultural landscape make him indicative of a larger African diasporic identity. He himself is a symbol of African identity as it has come to be understood today. His actions in this scene therefore reveal the ways that Western conceptions of Africa create an African diaspora, which must be considered an aspect of African identity. The burial ground “calls attention to the real and imagined geographies of remembering and forgetting, and of the erasure of certain histories in favor of others” (Steckenbiller 154). Julius’ presence at the burial ground in turn reveals how, from a foundation of violent colonialism, an African identity that is formed out of hybridity and adaptation lives on.

When Julius first encounters the African burial site, he comments that a tiny plot “had been set aside… to indicate the spot,” but that “the site had been large” and that “most of the burial ground was now under office buildings, shops, streets, diners, pharmacies, all the endless hum of quotidian commerce and government” (Cole 220).

The overtaking of the burial site by the surrounding culture of New York city, which makes it less visible but still present “under buildings” and under, more abstractly, the “hum” of quotidian life, can be read as a metaphor for the experience of those existing within the African diaspora. While it is not something that is prioritized in public memory (as indicated by the small size of the plot), it is nevertheless present under the entire city, and the space that it occupies within New York city and New York culture is made clear. It may be forgotten by many, but its presence is a tangible reality. Additionally, when Julius notes that “the excavated bodies bore traces of suffering: blunt trauma, grievous bodily harm,” he reveals a larger theme: the inescapability of pain in the African diaspora (Cole 221). “Cole speaks about violence, trauma, war in a new way, indirectly, describing not the external events but rather the consequences of suffering upon one’s psyche, individual and collective memory” (Conversation: Teju Cole’s Open City). This is indicative of the larger contemporary African experience, and Julius himself is not exempt from this “suffering.” He decides to enter the burial ground even though it is closed, narrating, “I stepped across the cordon, and into the grassy plot. Bending down, I lifted a stone from the grass and, as I did so, a pain shot through the back of my left hand” (Cole 222). Here, Julius physically enters and interacts with the site, and in doing so experiences physical pain. His left hand, which was hurt when he was assaulted and

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Maggie McMillin robbed by two young African-American boys, is emphasized in this experience.

For Julius to experience pain as a culmination of his entrance into the African burial site and his interaction with African-American boys in New York symbolizes the ways in which modern conceptions of “African” identity are complicated by history and place. Cole does not create a simple idea of a unified “African identity.”

Instead, in this instance, he uses the historical implications of the burial site and the complicated makeup of the African diaspora (which presumably includes, in different ways, both Julius and the boys who attacked him) to show the pain that is carried through over generations and the different shapes that African identity can take on. In essence, African literature “aims at countering the Western image of Africa in cultural and socio-political perspectives” (Ojaide 11). By portraying the pain inherent in confronting historical oppression and navigating an identity within a diasporic community, Cole uses this moment as an opportunity to highlight the differences among Africans regardless of any geographic similarities. In this way, he once again works against the historical Western idea of a singular “African” identity and emphasizes the nuances of what constitutes “Africanness.”

When he considers The Last King of Scotland, a British movie about Idi Amin, Julius notes that “Africa was always waiting, a substrate for the white man’s will, a backdrop for his activities” (Cole 29). With the inclusion of the African Burial Ground, Cole complicates the opinion that Julius brings forward here. Africa is not just the backdrop of the white man’s activities. It is also the bedrock of his society, and an inextricable part of the history of what is considered “mainstream” America. In this way, a city like New York becomes a place of African heritage, and it is therefore a setting that fits into the canon of “African Literature.” By choosing to portray the African Burial Ground as he does in this passage, Cole draws a connection between the history of colonization by Western forces and the history of African literature. In doing so, he also reveals the many layers of Africanness and complicates the question of what makes someone African and what makes a text African. In a sense, “Africa has emerged as an operative concept, which can be applied to an entire area of existence and historical experience” (Irele 6). As Julius’ story demonstrates, aspects of Africanness stretch all the way across the globe and come to encompass many different generations, nationalities, and experiences. In this way, African identity and African literature are at once broad enough to include Julius, the boys who attacked him, and the many individuals interred in the Africa Burial Ground, and varied enough to defy the idea of a singular “African” experience.

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Redefining “African” at New York City’s African Burial Ground Works Cited Cole, Teju. Open City: a Novel. New York: Random House Trade Paperbacks, 2012.

“Conversation: Teju Cole’s Open City.” Interview by Jeffrey Brown. PBS Newshour.

Newshour Productions, 18 Mar. 2011. Web. 15 Nov. 2016.

Irele, Abiola. The African Imagination: Literature In Africa & the Black Diaspora. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001.

Ojaide, Tanure. “Examining Canonization in Modern African Literature.” Asiatic 3.1 (2009): n. pag. Web. Pearce, Susan Carol. “Africans on this Soil: The Counter-Amnesia of the New York African Burial Ground.” Order No. 9717884 New School for Social Research, 1997. Ann Arbor: ProQuest. Web. 16 Nov. 2016.

Steckenbiller, Christiane. “Putting Place Back into Displacement: Reevaluating Diaspora in the Contemporary Literature of Migration.” Order No. DA3564402 U of South Carolina, 2013. ProQuest. Web. 13 Nov. 2016.

United States. National Park Service. “African Burial Ground National Monument (U.S. National Park Service).” National Parks Service. U.S. Department of the Interior, n.d. Web. 13 Dec. 2016.

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Things are Beautiful if you let them

By Hattie Grimm

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Silloheuttes and Sexuality Looking at Representations of Lesbian Relationships in Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet and Fun Home Kayla Beckman

In her article “Making the Invisible Visible: Lesbian Romance Comics for Women,” Andrea Wood highlights that comics are particularly useful in crafting “different visions of lesbian romance through a medium that intersects and overlaps the written and the visual” (Wood 295). Through the use of static images illustrated across a spectrum of artistic styles, paralleled by or juxtaposed with dialogue and narrative text, comics and graphic novels offer an array of opportunities for the kinds of relationships and characterizations that a text can visualize and explore. While neither Ta-Nehisi Coates’ and Brian Stelfreeze’s Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, Vol. 1 nor Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home explicitly narrativize a lesbian romance or follow a romantic arc such as those examined in Wood’s piece, both texts take advantage of their medium to include portrayals of lesbian relationships, illustrated and inked in two stylistically contrasting manners. While non-heterosexual sexualities are a traditionally underrepresented demographic in contemporary media, the mere fact of lesbian representation in a text is not an inherently beneficial thing. For example, lesbian representation might be harmful if it subscribes to and perpetuates homophobic stereotypes, or if it features a plot that diminishes and denigrates its lesbian characters without the text offering a criticism of that inflicted harm. That Fun Home—featuring scenes of lesbian intimacy rendered in explicit detail—and Black Panther—employing matte black silhouettes for similar narrative instances—should opt for two apparently mutually exclusive artistic depictions would seem to suggest that these texts are working in opposi-tion to one another, with Fun Home—both authored by a lesbian woman and exploring themes of visible and suppressed nonheterosexual sexuality—implicitly indicting Black Panther for effectively censoring its lesbian couple from certain scenes through the use of silhouettes.

However, such an initial and cursory analysis fails to consider how the distinctions between comparatively detailed depictions and silhouetted outlines might affect the experience of the audience when it comes to empathizing and identifying with the characters. If Fun Home’s explicit visualization of intimacy between two women can be taken as a means of normalizing the sexual nature of non-heterosexual relationships, what might that imply about Black Panther’s use of silhouettes? By removing subtleties of facial expression—and, consequently, nuances of vocal tone and mood—do Black Panther’s silhouettes deny a non-heterosexual couple the opportunity to visually and unequivocally express romantic and intimate love for one another?

Or, by sketching both characters in silhouette during a moment of lesbian intimacy, does the lack of detail and emphasis on simplicity allow the reader to engage and empathize more fully with the characters? If so, is Fun Home’s comparatively greater

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Kayla Beckman level of detail— often paired with an autobiographical voice-over narrative—working to limit the number and nature of readers who might be able to engage and identify with the text?

Taking these two representations at textual face-value fails to consider historical and contextual trends revolving around genre and race that are likely informing the artistic decisions of either author. Whereas Fun Home lives in the genre of autobiography—with Bechdel exploring the effect of suppressed and concealed sexuality as it relates to herself and her family—Black Panther falls on the superhero end of the spectrum, a genre with a lengthy history of visually exploiting its female characters. As such, is Black Panther’s use of silhouette subscribing to a his-torical trend to exclude explicit lesbian romance from the text (the kind of trend Bechdel seeks to acknowledge and counter through the vivid and frank details in her comingout narrative)? Or, is Black Panther’s use of silhouette Coates’ and Stelfreeze’s solution to providing non-heterosexual representation in a pop culture text while at the same time sidestepping the tendency in comics to exploit female sexuality for the sake of their predominantly male fanbase? Finally, it’s worth noting that Fun Home—for all its focus on visible and realized non-heterosexuality—primarily concerns itself with the experiences of a white family, as well as restricting itself to representations of a lesbian relationship between two white women. As such, it fails to contend with such factors as the historical precedent of black women sexualized for the sake of a white male gaze, which Black Panther necessarily negotiates in its efforts to depict a black lesbian couple.

Littered throughout Ta-Nehisi Coates’ and Brian Stelfreeze’s Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet, Vol. 1 are panels in which one or more characters have been effectively blocked out from the image, with facial expressions and shading of muscle tone stripped away in favor of flat black shadows. Employed for a variety of characters across the first four issues of the comic, alternating between the title’s protagonist to crowds of nameless individuals, localized to a single figure in a scene or extending to a wider cast of characters, the uses of these shadowed silhouettes serve a variety of purposes in the narrative, depending on the scene in question. Yet, while the majority of these instances occur for the span of a single panel—occasionally, albeit rarely, extending to a multi-panel sequence—two private conversations between the comic’s canon lesbian couple, Ayo and Aneka, are rendered in their entirety with both characters illustrated in this matte black style, save for the moment’s final panel (Figures 1a, 1b, 2). In either instance, the conversational scene is preceded by an act of vigilante justice seeking to combat violence against women — in the first case, Ayo rescuing Aneka from a prison sentence she receives for extrajudicially killing a rapist, and in the second, Ayo and Aneka freeing enslaved and abused women from a bandit com-pound. From there, the text transitions directly into a personal and intimate moment between Ayo and Aneka, in which both are drawn in simple silhouette for the entirety of the conversation. They are only shifted back into full-color illustration for the scene’s closing panel, in which the two have made some kind of politically rebellious decision — in the first, donning the Midnight Angel prototypes, and in

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Silloheuttes and Sexuality

Figure 1a, Black Panther, Issue #1, Š 2016 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Kayla Beckman

Figure 1b, Black Panther, Issue #1, © 2016 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Silloheuttes and Sexuality

Figure 2, Black Panther, Issue #2, Š 2016 Marvel Characters, Inc.

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Kayla Beckman the second, Aneka’s plan to attack Wakandan warlords. That Coates and Stelfreeze should employ this distinct artistic choice in depicting two scenes of intimacy between the text’s only example of non-heterosexual characters, and that these two sequences should parallel one another so closely, suggests that the visual elements of this piece of the narrative are neither coincidental nor accidental. Yet the question remains as to whether Black Panther’s visualization of non-heterosexual representation is functioning to empower its characters, or to disenfranchise them. This question is particularly significant considering the scenes of detailed and explicit intimacy between a lesbian couple in Bechdel’s Fun Home.

While Fun Home primarily revolves around Bechdel’s relationship with her father and a reframing of her own childhood through the awareness of her father’s repressed sexuality, the story simultaneously follows Bechdel’s own comingout narrative, including a vivid visual exploration of her first sexual experience with another woman, Joan. Though the bulk of the discussion of her father’s sexuality comes from secondhand sources—derived from conversations with her mother or stemming from Bechdel’s speculation—her own sexuality receives stark and unequivocal representation on the page, beginning with the bold text of her “I am a lesbian” letter to her parents, and culminating in trips to LGBT groups on campus and the start of her relationship with Joan. Both Black Panther and Fun Home explore representations of lesbian relationships within the context of a larger overarching narrative—specifically highlighting the romantic and sexual nature of those relationships when the two characters share the privacy of the panel between themselves. However, whereas Black Panther colors Ayo’s and Aneka’s figures in one uniform shade of black, Fun Home draws attention to the physical nature of Joan’s and Alison’s relationship, shying away from none of the explicit details of the moment (Figures 3a, 3b, 4).

While Coates’ and Stelfreeze’s characters live and operate in the fictional country of Wakanda, existing in a universe a far cry from the autobiographical nature of Bechdel’s text, Black Panther’s and Fun Home’s respective instances of sexual and romantic intimacy between lesbian couples feature enough similarities that those scenes can be placed in conversation with one another. Whereas Black Panther brackets the conversations between Ayo and Aneka with acts of public political revolution— underlaid by the ever-present tension of Wakanda’s fracturing political structure—Fun Home places Alison’s scenes of intimacy in the midst of a personal, political, and sexual revolution—underlaid by the upheaval and fracturing of her family. While both couples—Ayo and Aneka, and Alison and Joan—move openly through their respective narratives as allied units, it is uniquely in these moments of privacy that the full romantic and sexual nature of their relationship is explored and visualized. Further, both texts subvert heteronormativity through the use of silhouettes in the panels preceding these moments of intimacy, playing with expectations surrounding gender stereotypes and the gender binary.

For instance, Fun Home includes a panel depicting two silhouetted figures discussing feminism and lesbianism. A perspective informed by heteronormative

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Silloheuttes and Sexuality

Figure 3a – Bechdel, Fun Home, pg. 80

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Kayla Beckman

Figure 3b – Bechdel, Fun Home, pg. 81 expectations of gender and sexuality might initially lead one to read the character on the right (drawn with a shorter, traditionally masculine haircut) as being male — a visual interpretation of the characters’ gender that is then subverted by the panel’s larger context. Given the paralleled narrative structures and underlying thematic elements between Black Panther’s and Fun Home’s lesbian couples, it is helpful to analyze the visual representations of both texts in the context of questions surrounding audience participation, considerations of genre, and considerations of race. By doing so, we better determine whether one text’s artistic decisions are implicitly indicting the other, or whether these two texts are instead responding to separate concerns and functioning in tandem with one another.

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Figure 4 – Bechdel, Fun Home, pg. 214

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Kayla Beckman

When considering the role and effect of audience participation, author Scott McCloud writes in his book Understanding Comics that the surest indicator of audience engagement is “the degree to which the audience identifies with the story’s characters” (McCloud 42). Such a test becomes more pronounced and more difficult for authors working with characters belonging to traditionally underrepresented demographics.

Given the general makeup of the majority of media, audiences are well-accustomed with being asked to identify with white, heterosexual characters, as opposed to representations of other races and sexualities. Further, it follows that the more an audience is able to identify with a character, the more they are able to empathize and normalize, even when playing witness to experiences separate and unique from their own. As such, when considering Black Panther and Fun Home and their separate artistic takes on the same subject matter, the question becomes whether one text provides an easier point of entry for audience self-identification and engagement, and subsequently plays a greater role in naturalizing the intimacy of a non-heterosexual relationship.

In his analysis of audience engagement with a text, McCloud argues that cartoon illustrations are particularly suited to enabling a high level of participation and self-identification from the reader. “When you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face, you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon, you see yourself” (McCloud 36). McCloud theorizes that cartoons’ and comics’ capacities to simplify an object from a realistic representation down to its more fundamental components allow the reader to perceive that image or idea as an extension of themselves. While Black Panther’s artistic style adopts a realistic slant as opposed to Fun Home’s more cartoonish stylizations, Black Panther’s silhouettes align more closely with McCloud’s theory, providing just enough detail in physical gesture and form to convey the substance of the situation while simultaneously offering the audience enough of a blank slate to ease the process of self-identification. To provide a concrete example justifying his theory, McCloud contrasts two cartoon images of himself—with one being the highly simplified and stylized avatar he adopts throughout the text, and the other appearing substantially more realistic in comparison—and challenges the reader to consider which version they would be more receptive to. In response to his posed question as to whether the reader would listen to information from the more realistic depiction, McCloud writes, “I doubt it! You would have been far too aware of the messenger to fully receive the message!” (McCloud 37).

In reducing Ayo’s and Aneka’s characters down to shadowed forms—leaving just enough distinction in the form of hair coloration and tattoos to distinguish the two— Coates and Stelfreeze draw the scene’s focus to the dialogue —the message of the scene—highlighted in stark white speech bubbles hovering above Ayo and Aneka’s silhouettes, whose figures often seem to blur into the shadows of the surrounding hillside. Coates and Stelfreeze keep the audience’s eye drawn to the text and its contents, leaving Ayo’s and Aneka’s apparent intimacy an unquestioned feature of the landscape. Conversely, Bechdel’s explicit visualization of her sexual relationship with Joan—while indeed treating lesbian intimacy with a frank and unequivocal

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Silloheuttes and Sexuality lens—limits the audience’s opportunity for involvement and self-identification. Given the sentences of voice-over narration running the tops of the panels like banners, spilling into bold-edged text boxes overlaying the scenes themselves, it is impossible to forget that this is first and foremost Alison’s story and Alison’s experience. While other lesbians might be able to relate to Bechdel’s experience (much in the same way she writes of exploring bibliographies of lesbian-focused texts during her own sexual awakening), the effect of the visuals works to keep the audience at the exterior of the page, rather than inviting them inwards to experience the moment in the method of Black Panther.

However, while Black Panther’s artistic choices seem to outpace those of Fun Home in enabling audience engagement, Fun Home’s employment of explicit details more directly confronts a history of lesbian invisibility in popular media representation, and it works actively to normalize explicit intimacy between lesbian couples through a non-heteronormative lens. Speaking on the subject of lesbian representation in the media in general, Wood writes, “Lesbian existence, however, remains overwhelmingly invisible…As a popular graphic art medium, comics are particularly well suited to exploring this ontological erasure because they can, quite literally, make the invisible visible” (Wood 295) — a process that seems arguably reversed through Black Panther’s use of silhouettes. For while the text depicts Ayo and Aneka in such a way as to invite a higher degree of audience self-identification and participation, they are also rendered without facial expressions that would ordinarily be used to convey mood, gesture or expression. In a sense, the two have been visually redacted from the scene, seemingly taking what has been made visible and returning it to the realm of the invisible. Further, that such censoring should occur specifically in the scenes in which the couple is at their most tender and intimate—in the first conversation shown between them, both clothed only in blankets, trading terms of endearment saved for these moments of privacy—would seem to suggest that the text’s point of contention is with such examples of non-heterosexual sexuality made vivid and unequivocal. That the first conversation takes place after they’ve had sex is left unambiguous, and while the use of silhouettes could be employed in pursuit of preserving modesty, that argument falls short of justifying why their faces have been similarly censored from the scene. In his breakdown of the anatomy in comics in his text Comics and Sequential Art author Will Eisner writes, “The head (or face) is often used by artists to convey the entire message of bodily movement…The face also, of course, provides meaning to the spoken word” (Eisner 111). In the context of Eisner’s analysis of the import of human faces and Wood’s assessment of comics as a useful vehicle for restoring visibility to a historically underrepresented demographic, Coates’ and Stelfreeze’s decision to block out Ayo’s and Aneka’s facial expressions seems primarily to deny those characters the visual representation of the expressions of romantic love they have for one another. Fun Home, on the other hand, depicts Joan’s and Alison’s sexual encounters explicitly, highlighting the intimacy between the two female characters in each panel. Further, Bechdel blends these instances of explicit sexuality with voice-over narrations that color the scenes in an almost

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Kayla Beckman academic light— showing snapshots of hardcovers next to Alison’s and Joan’s tangled legs, playing with the conventions of pillow-talk as they reread childhood classics while in bed together—so that these moments become light-hearted and easy. These visual and narrative techniques actively subvert conceptions of lesbian sex as it is typically understood through a heteronormative lens or as a heteronormative fantasy.

Of course, neither text exist in a vacuum. Given that Black Panther belongs to the genre of superhero fiction—which has a history of visually exploiting its female characters and denying them sexual agency—the comic necessarily balances offering its lesbian couple prominent visual representation alongside stripping these characters of their agency or reducing them to a sexualized fantasy, catered to the male gaze. When exploring the role and effect of female sexualization throughout the history of comics in his article “Evolving Sub-Texts in the Visual Exploitation of the Fe-male Form” Christopher Hayton identifies two particularly pervasive tropes, “Good Girl Art” and “Bad Girl Art,” both of which revolve around the exploitation of women’s sexuality and sexual agency for the sake of playing into the fantasies of the audience (Hayton §5, 6).

While GGA [Good Girl Art] was part of a media-wide propaganda strategy used to encourage the young fighting man in World War II, Bad Girls were developed in response to a comic book industry slump, and appear to have been designed to appeal especially to the dominant comic book readership group in the 1990s—late adolescent and young adult heterosexual males. (Hayton §39) While characters subjected to the “Bad Girl Art” trope are often depicted as assertive and self-motivated, in command of and comfortable with their own sexuality, they ultimately serve heter-onormative ideals that reduce women’s sexual identity to something oriented around male fantasies. We can see this trope not just in the “Bad Girls’” plot-based interactions with male characters, but also in the visual portrayals that treat these characters as eye-candy. Wood argues that, due to contemporary media’s tendency to appropriate lesbian intimacy that caters to heterosexual male fantasies, “Lesbian romance comics—especially those that depict explicit sexuality— are often aware of particular burdens of somatic and sexual representation…They are very self-reflexive about straight culture’s appropriation of lesbian sex to titillate male viewers” (296). Given this cultural context, Coates and Stelfreeze run an unavoidable risk when it comes to representing the intimate and romantic nature of Ayo’s and Aneka’s relationship. As such, Coates’ and Stelfreeze’s selective use of silhouettes for those sequences depicting Ayo’s and Aneka’s intimacy can be seen as a deliberate effort to offer a non-heterosexual couple prominence and visibility in a popular Marvel title, while at the same time denying the audience any opportunity to twist the characters and their relationship into a source of sexual gratification.

Just as there’s an underlying consciousness of superhero comic tropes and pitfalls present throughout Black Panther’s representations of Ayo and Aneka, so too

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Silloheuttes and Sexuality does Fun Home operate with the ever-present awareness of the historic invisibility of lesbian characters and narratives in media, backlit by Bechdel’s own experiences with suppression of non-heterosexuality in regard to her father. In looking at representations of lesbian characters by lesbian comic authors—including Bechdel— author Adrienne Shaw writes: Zimmerman (1984) asserts, “[W]hat lesbian feminists identify as the particular unique oppression of lesbians—rightly or wrongly—is speechlessness, invisibility, and inauthenticity” (672). Unsurprisingly then, visibility is a central concern in the texts discussed herein.

Bechdel, for instance, is mindful of using her work to make lesbians more visible. (Shaw 90) While the above quote refers specifically to Bechdel’s comic series Dykes to Watch Out For, it follows that Bechdel—as a lesbian, contending personally with a history of lesbian erasure in media—should highlight her own sexuality as an explicit and significant element of the narrative, in terms of both the visuals and the prose.

Further, that the narrative deliberately follows a non-linear structure suggests that the juxtaposition of specific scenes and sequences are not of coincidence but rather of an intentional artistic choice, with those moments meant to be read as working in tandem. We may therefore conclude that Bechdel’s decision to place her first explicit sexual experience with another woman immediately following the phone conversation with her mother during which she learns of her father’s infidelity and sexual proclivities is deliberate; it signifies her reevaluation of her own history and family dynamic. Bechdel’s father’s suppression of his non-heterosexual sexuality rippled outward and, according to her narration, led to her par-ent’s divorce and her father’s eventual suicide. While the entire text contends with Bechdel making sense of this new understanding of her father’s identity, that she—as author and architect of the narrative—should pair her mother’s revelation with a two-page spread that explicitly visualizes her own newly-explored sexuality suggests a conscious effort to reject this sort of suppression. In light of the cultural and autobiographical challenges that their authors face, I argue that the apparent opposition between Fun Home’s and Black Panther’s depictions of lesbian intimacy is not a product of contradicting perspectives regarding lesbian representation. Rather, it stems from their separate thematic foci and an awareness of the potential pitfalls specific to their non-overlapping genres.

That said, genre tropes and expectations are not the only factors influencing the separate portrayals in Black Panther and Fun Home. Black Panther necessarily contends with an added set of considerations due to its focus on a relationship between two women of color, as opposed to two white women. Given that all the texts which Wood considers in her article on lesbian romantic arcs revolve around white characters, she’s careful to note that “they often fail to consider intersectional identities and the different modes of objectification of lesbian women of color within both heterosexist culture and white lesbian communities” (Wood 296). The premise of Fun Home is

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Kayla Beckman autobiographical—by definition restricting itself to a consideration of Bechdel’s real-life experiences—and the fact that Bechdel narrows her depiction of a lesbian relationship to the experience of two white women therefore seems less a product of an intentionally limited perspective than of her own personal circumstances.

Regardless of Bechdel’s motivations, her focus on white women allows her to depict lesbian sexuality as she chooses. Black Panther, on the other hand, must negotiate a history of the racism and sexualization to which black women have been subjected.

In her article “Female Dancers, Male Explorers, and the Sexualization of Blackness,” author Katrina Thompson illustrates how early seventeenth-century travel narratives from white male authors depicted West African dance as something inherently sexual.

This categorized black womanhood as hyper-sexualized and associat-ed with sexually deviancy, inviting white male readership to objectify black women as purely sexual beings: Through travel narratives, white male writers turned black women into sexually deviant and degenerate objects over which they held power.

The travel narratives also exhibit a form of obsessive voyeurism…For European travel writers, the bodies of African women were fetishized commodities, malleable objects shaped to justify and support their interest (Thompson 5).

Thompson specifically considers the history and effect of such sexualization as a by-product of European interpretations of African cultural traditions during the advent of the Atlantic Slave Trade. But the racial stereotypes and racist perceptions perpetuated during this time period influenced relations between white men and black women throughout the succeeding centuries, and they continue to inform the present-day racist and sexist treatment of black women. While Ta-Nehisi Coates and Brian Stelfreeze are not white men, and while comic book audiences do not have a solely white male readership, these authors must still contend with the precedents established by prior white male authors, who assumed the entitlement of white male readers to sexual gratification from black womanhood. Had Coates and Stelfreeze chosen to illustrate the intimacy of Ayo’s and Aneka’s relationship in the explicit manner of Bechdel, they would have run the risk of playing into these established precedents of black female sexuality stripped of agency and context, reduced to a racist white male fantasy — a risk compounded given that lesbian sexuality is also frequently co-opted in order to cater to male heterosexual fantasies. Depicting the characters in silhouette during their moments of sexual and romantic intimacy offers a solution; it allows Coates and Stelfreeze to showcase the affectionate and loving nature of the relationship while simultaneously sidestepping the potential for Ayo’s and Aneka’s representations to succumb to stereotypes of black women as hypersexualized and sexually deviant.

By analyzing the interplay between Black Panther’s and Fun Home’s artistic decisions depicting the intimacy of lesbian relationships, we should consider both

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Silloheuttes and Sexuality the surface-level implications of apparent visibility and apparent invisibility. Such an analysis necessarily ignores the inherent complexities and pitfalls present in questions of audience, genre, and race. During her discussion of a different romantic graphic novel, Wood highlights the strengths of the text as “skillfully demonstrating in its continual play on revelation and concealment the ways in which visibility and invisibility can be paradoxically enabling and disenfranchising in different contexts” (Wood 311), and something similar seems to be at play with the use of silhouettes in Black Panther. For if Coates and Stelfreeze are using these matte-black silhouettes as a way to specifically censor visualizations of lesbian romance and intimacy, that usage would certainly line up with Wood’s analysis of a context in which visibility and invisibility are at play to disenfranchise, rather than to empower. Yet, given the underlying historical trends threatening to relegate a depiction of explicit black lesbian intimacy into the realm of the strictly sexual, these silhouettes instead seem to be functioning as a conscious rejection of those historical conventions that would justify audience ownership over Ayo’s and Aneka’s relationship for sexual satisfaction.

Coates and Stelfreeze make careful use of this selective visibility and invisibility to showcase a lesbian relationship that is apparent and undeniable, while at the same time making invisible those elements of that scene that might tilt audience engagement from participatory to voyeuristic. Therefore, we should understand Black Panther’s and Fun Home’s starkly different depictions of lesbian intimacy as two noncontradictory approaches to the same issue. They provide two distinct yet empowering depictions of non-heterosexual sexuality in pop culture.

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Kayla Beckman Works Cited Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. New York: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2006. Print.

Coates, Ta-Nehisi, writer. Black Panther: A Nation Under Our Feet. Art by Brian Stelfreeze. New York: Marvel Comics, 2016. Print.

Eisner, Will. Comics & Sequential Art. Tamarac, Florida: Poorhouse Press, 1985. Print.

Hayton, Christopher J. “Evolving Sub-Texts in the Visual Exploitation of the Female Form: Good Girl and Bad Girl Comic Art Pre- and Post-Second Wave Feminism.” 7.4 (2014): Dept. of English, University of Florida. 17 September 2017. Web. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: HarperCollins, 1993.Print.

Shabanava, Krystsina. In-class discussion. 14 September 2017.

Shaw, Adrienne. “Women on Women: Lesbian Identity, Lesbian Community, and Lesbian Comics.” Journal of Lesbian Studies, 13:1, pg. 88-97, 2009. Print.

Thompson, Katrina. “Female Dancers, Male Explorers, and the Sexualization of Blackness, 1600-1900.” Black Women, Gender + Families, Vol. 6, No. 2, pg. 1-28, 2012. Print.

Wood, Andrea. “Making the Invisible Visible: Lesbian Romance Comics for Women.” Feminist Studies, Vol. 41, No. 2, pg. 293-334, 2015. Print.

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The Musicality of The Winter’s Tale Thomas Erik Nielsen As the ballad-seller Autolycus wanders the countryside, he fills the second half of William Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale with music, not only peddling broadsides1 to the inhabitants of rural Bohemia but also singing to himself – and the audience. The Winter’s Tale’s musical moments have been all- too-frequently reduced by critics who assert, as Peter Seng does in Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare, that Autolycus’ songs merely “illustrate his happy-go-lucky attitude toward life and responsibility,” accompanying the changing of seasons from winter to spring (Seng 237). And yet, as Lee Sheridan Cox mentions in “The Role of Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale,” Autolycus’ songs do more than emphasize the contrast between Leontes’ suffocating court and the open air of Bohemia. The songs “unsettle” their listeners’ senses, challenging their sensory perceptions of the world and consequently affecting “an abrogation of physical reality and self” (Cox 299). The enchanting effect of Autolycus’ music on the shepherds mirrors the trajectories of both Autolycus and Leontes as the play progresses. While the men begin by characterizing their respective realities in terms of their sensory faculties, it is only after the invisible forces2 of the play’s universe unsettle their senses and render their views of reality inaccurate that they develop faith in the unseen and find redemption. Music, despite appearing little in The Winter’s Tale, is thus a representation of the play’s universe as a whole – one where sense must be suspended in favor of faith in what cannot be perceived.

Autolycus’ music overrides the shepherds’ sensory perceptions of the world around them, causing them to faithfully accept the fictitious ballads he peddles as true. Before Autolycus presents his wares, Mopsa tells the Clown, “I love a ballad in print a-life, for then we are sure they are true,” implying that she assumes that if lyrics are printed they must be factual (IV.iv. 261-2). And yet, the ballads that Autolycus presents are far from true, addressing topics as unbelievable as “how a usurer’s wife was brought to bed of twenty moneybags at a burden, and how she longed to eat adders’ heads” and “a fish that appeared upon the coast…forty thousand fathom above water, and sung this ballad” (IV.iv.263-5, 276-8). Mopsa is understandably skeptical; she incredulously asks Autolycus, “Is it [the ballad of the usurer’s wife] true, think you?” and Autolycus responds “Very true, and but a month old” (IV.iv.2679). The Clown remains unconvinced, telling Autolycus to “set [the aforementioned Broadside ballads were newspaper-sized sheets of paper featuring printed (and often bawdy) lyrics, consumed as “popular music” by the middle and lower classes of Renaissance England. They were consequently quite cheap, often containing directions to sing the lyrics to an already extant tune in order to save costs. More information: https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/page/heyday-of-the-broadside-ballad 1

Defined here as unseen and inexplicable phenomena that exert effects on the characters of the play, such as the oracle of Apollo, the goddess of Fortune, the animation of Hermione’s statue, and of course, music.

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Thomas Erik Nielsen ballads] aside” without committing to buying them (IV.iv.287). Tellingly, it is only after Autolycus, Dorcas, and Mopsa sing another of his selections, “Get You Hence,” that the Clown decides to “buy [the ballads] for you both” (IV.iv.319). Once the ballads are performed, the music enchants the Clown to the extent that he takes Autolycus’ guarantee of their truth at face value; the Clown tells Autolycus, “let’s have the first choice,” requesting the ballad about the usurer’s wife that he initially found so unbelievable (IV.iv.320). Autolycus later confirms the intoxicating effect of the music on his customers, remarking that the Clown …grew so in love with the wenches’ song, that he would not stir his pettitoes till he had both tune and words; which so drew the rest of the herd to me that all their other senses stuck in ears: you might have pinched a placket, it was senseless. (IV.iv.609-15) The ballads suspend the Clown’s sensory perceptions, as Autolycus reveals when he states that the Clown had “no hearing, no feeling, but my sir’s song, and admiring the nothing of it” (IV.iv.616-7). The shepherds believe these far-fetched tales to be true, then, because the power of the ballads to evoke intrigue is greater than the senses that would reveal them as fictitious.

Autolycus ridicules the Clown’s enchantment with the “nothing” of “my sir’s song” because he assumes that his own senses are settled, accurate observations of reality, unsusceptible to the effects of music. While humorously pretending to be a peasant who was just robbed by Autolycus, Autolycus tells the shepherds, “Having flown over many knavish professions, he [Autolycus] / settled [my emphasis] only in rogue” (IV.iii.103). Autolycus then uses his sensory abilities to explain his propensity for pickpocketing, explaining that “I understand the business, I hear it: to have an open ear, a quick eye, and a nimble hand, is necessary for a cut-purse; a good nose is requisite also, to smell out work for the other senses” (IV.iv.674-8). Since his heightened senses endow him with the ability to quietly and stealthily pick pockets, Autolycus believes he has no choice, after dabbling in professions as diverse an “apebearer” and “a…bailiff,” but to make a living through petty thievery. (IV.iii.97-9).

In tying his occupation to his hearing, vision, and smell, Autolycus asserts that his sensory perceptions, (what Cox calls “the ‘business’ so palpable to [his] senses)” are what inform his view of himself as a charlatan (Cox 299).

In his own songs, however, Autolycus paints a more complex picture of himself, expressing worries, fears, and a moral compass that challenges his simplistic characterization of himself as a scoundrel; music has the potential to unsettle his sense of reality as much as it does the shepherds’. David Lindley writes in Shakespeare and Music that “Autolycus, entering onto an empty stage, is singing not just to himself, but explicitly to the audience.”

There is a marked difference from the ballads pitched to the shepherds and Autolycus’ solitary songs, which constitute “a kind of musical soliloquy” that provides insight into his state of mind (Lindley 164). Initially, Autolycus seems to bask in lyrics

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The Musicality of The Winter’s Tale that support his roguish and unabashedly free lifestyle, singing “The lark, that tirralirra chants, / …Are summer songs for me and my aunts, / While we lie tumbling in the hay” (IV.iii.9-12) After this gleeful celebration of promiscuity, however, he suddenly interrupts the song, breaking out of verse to provide the surprising information that “I have served Prince Florizel and in my time wore three-pile,” the finest quality fabric (IV.iii.13-14). When the music resumes, Autolycus’ lyrics are decidedly more ambiguous; he wistfully sings, “But shall I go mourn for that [my lost employment], my dear? / The pale moon shines by night: / And when I wander here and there, / I then do most go right” (IV.iii.15-19). Seng points out that Autolycus’ use of the word “right” carries two meanings, as “a play on ‘wandering’ vs. ‘going in the right direction,’” but neglects to mention a third possible meaning: that of moral righteousness and the process of wandering in search of it (Seng 57).

These lyrics are a conflicted soliloquy by a man wistful for the privileged life he once lived, expressing guilt over his thievery that he only reveals as he sings in the night. The words that immediately follow support this reading, as Autolycus fearfully admits that “beating and hanging are terrors to me: for the life to come, I sleep out the thought of it” (IV.iii.29-31). Autolycus is more than a mere rogue, and his change of tone midway through his soliloquy- songs demonstrates music’s potential to unsettle his sense of self just as his ballads unsettle the senses of the shepherds.

Autolycus is not the only character whose sensory perceptions are challenged by unseen forces; the scenes featuring the ballad-seller are mirrored by those involving Leontes, a character who exists far more in the forefront of the play’s action. Leontes also finds his sense-based view of reality challenged – not by music, but by another unseen power in the play’s universe: the oracle of Apollo, who is the patron of music in Greco-Roman mythology. Leontes’ reliance on his senses is evident from the first act of The Winter’s Tale, when he describes his initial inkling of Hermione’s infidelity in terms of a perfunctory interaction between her and Polixines that Leontes perceives as anything but benign: But to be paddling palms and pinching fingers, As now they are, and making practised smiles, As in a looking-glass, and then to sigh as ‘twere The mort o’ th’ deer – oh that is entertainment My bosom likes not, nor my brows.

(I.ii.115-19) Once his “brows,” or eyes, view the “paddling palms and pinching fingers” that convince him of Hermione’s infidelity, Leontes relies on his senses to an even greater extent. He lambasts the skeptical Antigonus: “You smell this business with a sense as cold / As is a dead man’s nose: but I do see’t and feel’t / As you feel doing thus; and see withal / The instruments that feel” (II.i. 151-4). Leontes likens Antigonus’ senses to those of a dead man, criticizing him for not engaging with them and perceiving what to Leontes is obvious. Leontes’ settled senses are therefore crucial to his claim

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Thomas Erik Nielsen that Hermione engaged in infidelity, a point he makes explicit when he angrily tells Camilo “Dost think I am so muddy, so unsettled [emphasis mine] / To appoint myself in this vexation… / Without ripe moving to ’t?” (I.ii.326-33). Like Autolycus’ characterization of himself as a “settled” rogue bound to petty thievery, Leontes’ view of the world around him hinges on his “settled” sensory perceptions.

Just as music unsettles Autolycus’ sense of self, however, the oracle of Apollo unsettles Leontes’ senses and complicates his view of reality. Cox insightfully comments that the oracle’s effect on Cleomenes is described in markedly similar terms to the ballads’ effects on the Clown; this is unsurprising, considering Apollo’s legendary association with music. Cleomenes tells Leontes that “the ear-deafening voice o’ the oracle, / Kin to Jove’s thunder, so surprised my sense. / That I was nothing” (III.i.9-11). It is no shock that the power of Apollo’s divine force is likened to that of the ballads, as both music and the oracle of music’s patron engage with the metaphysical, imperceptible, overriding sensory perception in the process. Once the oracle proves true and Mamillius dies, Leontes expresses awe at Apollo’s heavenly power, crying, “Apollo’s angry; and the heavens themselves / Do strike at my injustice” (III.ii.141-3). Just as Autolycus’ dread of “what’s to come” is revealed through the power of music, Leontes’ fear for his wrongdoing and “my great profaneness ‘gainst [Apollo’s] oracle” only becomes apparent after his sense of reality is discredited by the invisible forces of the divine (III.ii.151).

The trajectories of Autolycus and Leontes are complicated, however, by the fact that both men continue to cling to their sensory perceptions even after their views of reality are challenged by the imperceptible powers of music and the oracle.

After tricking the shepherds into giving him money, Autolycus proclaims, “if I make not this cheat bring out another, and the shearers prove sheep, let…my name put in the book of virtue!,” asserting that, despite the misgivings he has regarding his profession, he will remain a rogue, since his heightened senses and ability to thieve are what provide him with income (IV.iii.123-5). If he does not “fleece” another victim and “make…this cheat bring out another,” his name may well end up in “the book of virtue,” but he will go hungry, leaving him, the “shearer,” as a powerless “sheep” (IV.iii.123-5). Similarly, Leontes does not believe the oracle until it proves true to his own eyes; he initially writes off the prophecy by saying “There is no truth at all i’ th’ oracle. / The sessions shall proceed” (III.ii. 137-8). What both men lack, and later acquire, is faith in the very imperceptible powers that unsettle their senses of reality – faith that can fill the gap left by rejecting sensory perception.

Autolycus and Leontes develop such a faith after their senses are further destabilized by the play’s unseen forces. Autolycus rejects thievery once Fortune, personified as a deity, gives him an opportunity to receive income and do good at the same time, reconciling his fear of the afterlife with his belief that his sensory talents restrict him to a life of petty crime. After he directs the shepherds to Florizel’s ship and they gift him gold in return for his help, he remarks, “If I had a mind to be honest, I see Fortune would not suffer me: she drops booties in my mouth. I am courted now with a double occasion, gold and a means to do the prince my master good” (IV.

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The Musicality of The Winter’s Tale iv.838-41). Autolycus develops faith in Fortune once she (as Autolycus describes her) proves to him that his view of himself as a rogue is erroneous and that he can make a living while also being honest. His decision to adopt this new lifestyle and his subsequent redemption in Act V reflect his embrace of the underlying morality that he reveals in his soliloquy-songs but realizes only after further aid from the invisible powers within the play’s universe.powers within the play’s universe.

Similarly, Leontes finds redemption after Paulina goads him to stop viewing the statue of Hermione in sensory terms and instead have faith that it can come alive.

He is initially reluctant to do so, telling Paulina, “What you can make [the statue] do, / I am content to look on: what to speak, / I am content to hear; for ‘tis as easy / To make her speak as move” (V.iii.92-4). These words are insufficient; Paulina responds that “It is required [emphasis mine] / You do awake your faith” (V.iii.94-5). Here, Paulina helps Leontes reject his sensory perceptions and embrace the “madness” that “no settled senses of the world can match” of believing that the statue can come alive (V.iii.90-91). As if to underscore this point, music accompanies Hermione as she comes to life, with Paulina announcing “Music, awake her! Strike!” (V.iii.99). It is no coincidence that, in the play’s most cathartic moment of redemption, the unsettling powers of music that affect the shepherds and Autolycus finally make their way to Leontes and accompany his embrace of faith.

Cox asserts that “in The Winter’s Tale nothing is quite what it seems to be, and the line between reality and unreality is hard to find” (Cox 300). Indeed, the universe of the play is rife with imperceptible and unsettling powers – music, a divine oracle, Fortune deified, a statue that comes alive – that challenge the sensory perceptions of its inhabitants. No power is more omnipresent than that of music, which exerts its effect on characters as wide-ranging as the shepherds, Autolycus, and even Leontes. Moreover, the ballad-seller Autolycus, long over- simplified by critics as the rogue he paints himself to be, parallels Leontes in both his initial reliance on his senses and his subsequent redemption once he develops faith in these indiscernible powers. Nevertheless, ambiguities remain at the play’s conclusion. Is the deity of Fortune a figment of Autolycus’ mind or an actual mystical force at work?

Was Hermione alive all along, hidden away by Paulina, or did the statue really come to life? Do either of these scenarios carry implications for the vindication of the two men or for the presence of inexplicable, unseen powers in the world of the play as a whole?

In making faith such a central theme to The Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare seems to assert that these questions cannot be resolved, and that the universe of the play is that of the theatrical stage itself, one where an audience’s sensory perceptions of what is real or imaginary must be suspended in favor of faith in the production.

To this end, by using the effect of broadside ballads­­­on the shepherds – and the faith in the unseen that the ballad-seller himself develops – to underscore Leontes’ own rejection of sense and subsequent redemption, Shakespeare encourages the audience to do the same by linking the mythological world of The Winter’s Tale to the nonfictional streets of London, themselves filled with singing ballad-mongers and their

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Thomas Erik Nielsen wares. In doing so, Shakespeare invites the audience to suspend their own disbelief – as they would while listening to a song about a usurer’s wife with an appetite for adders’ heads or a crooning fish floating in mid-air – and enjoy the performance.

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The Musicality of The Winter’s Tale Works Cited Cox, Lee Sheridan. “The Role of Autolycus in The Winter’s Tale.” Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, vol. 9, no. 2, 1969, pp. 283–301., www.jstor. org/stable/449781.

Lindley, David. Shakespeare and Music. London: Arden Shakespeare, 2007.

Print.

Seng, Peter J. The Vocal Songs in the Plays of Shakespeare. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1967. Print.

Shakespeare, William. The Winter’s Tale. Ed. Frank Kermode. New York: Signet Classics, 1998. Print.

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Namira

By Ashley Jablonski

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John Steinbeck’s T ​ he Grapes of Wrath​ Biblical, Anthropological, and Textual Intersections Toward Ecological and Social Harmony Spencer Polk

Suffocating as their feet bled, the soles of their shoes shredding against jagged rocks with icy wind numbing their hands and feet, Alexander von Humboldt and his three companions ascended Chimborazo on 23 June 1802, the highest mountain in the world.1 After hours of climbing, the fog surrounding them dissolved, revealing a snow-capped peak against the blue sky. Despite being obstructed by a huge crevasse, which prevented them from reaching the summit, they had gone higher than any other before them. At 19,413 feet, as a polymath, geographer, naturalist, and explorer gazing out upon the Earth beneath him, Alexander von Humboldt took on a revolutionary new perspective. Overlooking the vast mountain ranges in the distance affirmed what his observations lead him to believe: that the Earth was “one great living organism where everything was connected”, a web of life where inorganic and organic life interacted, a beautiful and humbling power (Wulf 2). With this ecological perspective, Humboldt became the first to document human-induced climate change while making profound connections between human ecological and social relationships, particularly regarding slavery. Profoundly new to Western ideas of nature, Humboldt’s ideas overturned millennia-old claims, asserted and reasserted by thinkers from Aristotle to Carl Linnaeus to Francis Bacon to Rene Descartes, that “all things [were] made for the sake of man” and that humans were “the lords and possessors of nature” (Wulf 59). While Humboldt’s new vision was holistic, the dominant paradigm at the time made a clear separation between the human and non-human worlds. One hundred years after Humboldt’s vision, John Steinbeck illustrates the perils of these human-centered perspectives of nature in his novel, The Grapes of Wrath. Echoing Humboldt’s ideas, The Grapes of Wrath exemplifies the persistence of the paradigmatic rift separating humans from the non-human world in the 1930’s American society, “an attitude of exploitation and belief in the human capacity to improve utility through opportunistic alteration of the environment...that separates us from the other occupants of this planet and gives us agency to use and treat it in whatever way we choose” (Srinivasan 2).

In The Grapes of Wrath, the North American Plains have transformed from a once fertile land into an overexploited and barren landscape, causing farmers to flee westward in search of work. These dark days are illustrated by Steinbeck as the result of humankind’s determination to change the natural world at their will and to their advantage based on their perceived separation from the non-human world. This chronicle of separation between man and nature is also at the heart of biblical and anthropological narratives, which saturate Steinbeck’s writing. These when measured by its distance from the Earth’s centre

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Spencer Polk connections are critical to understanding The Grapes of Wrath within a holistic and rich context of ideas. By framing Steinbeck’s account in ancient wisdom and contemporary observations, we can take important insights from the text. While the story of the Joad family in The Grapes of Wrath illustrates the manifestation of the paradigmatic humannature rift and its contribution to societal and ecological injustice in the 1930’s, this story transcends its time and place; it is a timeless reflection on what happens when human power over land and people becomes too domineering. Ultimately, Steinbeck uses the biblical-like narrative of the Joad family in the promotion of ecological and social harmony. In The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck advances an alternative to the view that humans and nature are separate. He promotes an ethic of caring and solidarity between individuals, society, and the Earth, a transcendentalist interconnection between the Earth’s provision of life and the humble acceptance and stewardship of this sacred offering we call home.

To begin, it is important to highlight the generalized anthropological narrative, which underlies Steinbeck’s writing and provides insight into the roots of the paradigmatic human-nature rift that has disrupted ecological and social harmony.

For the majority of human existence, we have lived in isolated pockets of egalitarian societies nourished by local ecosystems, fundamentally subject to natural forces and evolving Earth systems (Devlin; Boehm). Our immersion within the ecological community and our direct connection to our food source allowed us to develop a deep respect and harmony with the equilibrium of life, as seen in many hunter-gatherer societies that remain today (Descola). A changing climate in a post-glacial warming period and possible demographic pressure plunged us into a world of perceived scarcity in which we began to domesticate crops and animals (Baker). Subsistence horticulture using hand tools was dominated by women, but with the rise of intensive agriculture, pastoralism, and the animal-driven plow, power shifted from the ability to share stories, songs, and knowledge to the ability protect surplus food and plow the land (Boulding). We descended into an age of patriarchy and warfare, Cains and Abels, farmers and shepherds (Whitney-Smith). This Neolithic revolution “increased male bargaining power within the family, which over generations, translated into norms and behavior that shaped the cultural beliefs on gender roles in societies” (Hanson 2). We left the Garden of Eden and within a blink of geological time, propelled ourselves into a “fossil-fueled industrial modernity,” making us “an increasingly active and determining agent in our earth system” (Brooke). While current scientific documentation gives us a more complete picture of human development than Steinbeck would have had, his detailed and almost journalistic chronicle of the American Landscape in the 1930’s can be framed and analyzed through these current understandings. Infused with an intrinsic understanding of social and ecological patterns, Steinbeck’s writing critiques existing cultural systems and offers a new vision for human organization and interaction with the environment. Throughout this analysis and critique, contemporary anthropological ideas will provide a richer perspective on the underlying forces of Steinbeck’s narrative. These patterns will also lay the background for Steinbeck’s biblical allusions, which link the Joad family to

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John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath the entire human story.

At the beginning of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck uses biblical allusion to Genesis, especially the story of humankind’s exile from The Garden of Eden, to position The Grapes of Wrath in a world after Eden; a world of “dirt”; “labor and painful toil”, “thorns and thistles”, a ground that no longer yields its crops, “weed colonies”, “ruined corn” and, “black night” (Genesis; Steinbeck 1, 3). Steinbeck introduces this landscape of the Dust Bowl in order to emphasize the dissonance between humankind and nature while introducing the biblical flavor of his work. As a sacred, mythological representation of humankind’s harmony with nature, Eden evokes a time of abundance and a harmonious relationship between humans and non-humans. By contrast, the post-Edenic landscape exemplified in The Grapes of Wrath is a world of ecological and social disruption where society has attempted to dominate the natural world. To begin, Steinbeck characterizes the landscape with the ubiquitous presence of dust, an allusion to the biblical use of dust in Genesis: When the night came again it was black night, for the stars could not pierce the dust to get down, and the window lights could not even spread beyond their own yards. Now the dust was evenly mixed with the air, an emulsion of dust and air. Houses were shut tight, and cloth wedged around doors and windows, but the dust came in so thinly that it could not be seen in the air, and it settled like pollen on the chairs and tables, on the dishes. The people brushed it from their shoulders. Little lines of dust lay at the door sills (Steinbeck 3).

In this section, people attempt to prevent dust from entering their homes by wedging cloth around doors and windows, an exemplification of humans’ desperate attempt to isolate themselves from the consequences of their actions. In this section, the power of nature prevails as dust covers everything. Even the stars, a symbol of awe, wonder, and humankind’s humble circumstances, used for centuries for navigation and guidance, are covered up, leaving humankind disoriented under a black night.

Steinbeck’s emphasis and use of the word dust has biblical importance. In Genesis, man is formed from the dust of the ground, showing a clear and intended harmony and interconnection between man and nature. In fact, the name Adam is a play on the Hebrew word adamah, meaning “ground”. However, once exiled from Eden, dust not only signifies a connection to the Earth, but death: “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food until you return to the ground, since from it you were taken; for dust you are and to dust you will return” (Genesis 3:19). While these lines in Genesis could simply be a folklore motif speaking to the immortality of man, they may also be evidence for the speculative reconstruction and allegory in Genesis of societal change connected to the Neolithic revolution, an important societal and ecological transformation critical to the formation of the paradigmatic human-nature rift as illustrated by Steinbeck (Kugel). In this case, “by the sweat of your brow” and “through painful toil you will eat food” (Genesis 3:17) could refer to humankind’s

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Spencer Polk shift to plow-driven, intensive agriculture, which corresponded with a periodic decline of well-being2: “to dust you will return”. While the author(s) of Genesis may not have had first-hand knowledge of this historical development, it may have weaved its way into oral traditions of the time. When looking at the story of The Garden of Eden and Genesis more broadly, it intriguingly maps the human transition from gathering food (Adam and Eve) to growing food and raising animals (Cain and Abel).

These connections are critical to Steinbeck’s narrative. The omnipresence of dust throughout the beginning chapters of The Grapes of Wrath evokes a sense of scarcity and instability all around, an ever-present reminder of mankind’s shift from a harmonic relationship with the Earth in Eden to a relationship of mankind as a force over nature, a “metabolic rift”3 resulting in Adam’s exile and sentence to backbreaking labor, obtaining food “by the sweat of [his] brow” (Genesis 3:19). Steinbeck harnesses the power of biblical allusion to connect the seemingly insignificant daily life of Oklahoma farmers to the fabric of the human story.

Steinbeck’s second allusion to Genesis as a story of humankind’s broken relationship with nature is his description of the dying crops as ribs. This alludes to Eve, who was created from Adam’s rib: As the central ribs of strength grew weak, each leaf tilted downward...

The brown lines on the corn leaves widened and moved in on the central ribs. The weeds frayed and edged back toward their roots. The air was thin and the sky more pale; and every day the earth paled (Steinbeck 1).

Once again, the death of the Earth becomes inseparable from the death of human beings. Steinbeck consciously uses the words dust and ribs, alluding to Adam and Eve and the exile of humankind from its harmonious relationship with the Earth. In a final emphasis of this theme, Steinbeck personifies nature to once again highlight the agony of the landscape, human and physical: “The wind cried and whimpered over the fallen corn” (3). Immortal dust; weakened ribs; whimpering wind; symbols and personifications of death; a suffering landscape where nature and society have become dissonant. In The Grapes of Wrath, man’s will to dominate nature leads not only to the death of the Earth in the form of dust, ribs, and whimpering wind, but also to fractured social relations, which are ultimately inseparable from ecology. While Genesis begins by laying out humankind’s shift from gathering to growing, it ends in the Joseph saga, describing “what happens when large-scale agriculture makes Incomparison to their hunter-gatherer counterparts, early Neolithic farmers during the first agricultural revolution experienced a periodic decline of well-being when adopting intensive agriculture (Kugel; Rowthorn and Seabright). “Skeletal analysis of these early agricultural communities suggests that the transition to agriculture had an overall negative impact on human oral health, increased the incidence of infectious disease and nutritional deficiencies, and contributed to an overall reduction in human stature” (Latham).Early farmers were shorter, had bone lesions suggestive of disease, and stunted spines from the back-breaking labor relative to their hunter-gatherer counterparts (Diamond).

3 “the material estrangement of human beings in capitalist society from the natural conditions of their existence” (Foster 383).

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John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath possible not only domination over plants and animals but dominion by one ruler over farmers turned feudal slaves” (Northcott 16). Accordingly, in The Grapes of Wrath, the formation of hierarchical societal divisions unfold between man and woman, landowner and farmer, local and migrant.

In the beginning chapters of The Grapes of Wrath,a patriarchal society is clearly established. The landscape in a world after Eden has rotted into a culture of violence and elitism. Likewise, Genesis also points to the post-Edenic world as patriarchal; God proclaims that, for “the women…[their] desire will be for [their] husband, and he will rule over [them]” (Genesis 3:16). In The Grapes of Wrath, Man’s superiority is established by their power in land ownership, a relationship with the earth, which shapes and is shaped by social relations. Old Tom Joad is introduced as possessing a forty acres ranch, designating him power through land ownership (Steinbeck 8). This firmly exemplifies a patriarchal domination over the land, a patriarchal relationship rooted in the origins of civilization. With the shift from hunter-gatherer and horticultural societies to intensive agriculture emphasizing labor and surplus, men acquired the notion of private property, while the capacity of women to reproduce became a vital resource (Lerner). With institutionalized and cyclical norms, women were taught from a young age to consent to these patriarchal practices. We see evidence of this practice early in The Grapes of Wrath. With the prevalent custom of male decisionmaking. Ma Joad initially waits for the male option: “Ma looked to Tom to speak, because he was a man” (Steinbeck 2). Furthermore,the first mention of women in Grapes of Wrath presents them as sexual objects: “Tom carefully drew the torso of a woman in the dirt, breasts, hips, pelvis” (22). Likewise, in his discussion with Tom, Casy admits that he took advantage of his position as a preacher to have sexual intercourses with women: “A girl was just a girl to you. You could fuck’em an’ leave ‘em. It was nothin’ to you...An’ here with all that responsibility on me I’d just get ‘em frothin’ with the Holy Sperit, an’ then I’d take ‘em out in the grass (23).” The I-it relationship4 expressed in these statements reflects the objectification of women, a symptom of patriarchy and the commodification of the woman body. Patriarchy is also established by the hierarchy of seating in the truck: “Pa and Uncle John, as befitted the heads of the clan, had the honor seats beside the driver” (95). Likewise, patriarchy is evident through the “family government” (99), with grandpa, the “titular head” (101), at the center, surrounded by Tom, Pa, Connie, and Noah. Behind the men, Ma, Grandma, Rose of Sharon, and the children take their places (100). These depictions of patriarchy stand not in isolation but are ultimately connected to man’s will to dominate nature. In a sweeping illustration of violence in the beginning of The Grapes of Wrath, Steinbeck connects the culture of patriarchy to mankind’s rape of nature: Behind the harrows, the long seeders—twelve curved iron penes erected in the foundry, orgasms set by gears, raping methodically, raping without passion. The driver sat in his iron seat and he was 4

As introduced by Martin Bube, I-it relationships regard others as objects from which we can use.

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Spencer Polk proud of the straight lines he did not will, proud of the tractor he did not own or love, proud of the power he could not control. And when that crop grew, and was harvested, no man had crumbled a hot clod in his fingers and let the earth sift past his fingertips. No man had touched the seed, or lusted for the growth. Men ate what they had not raised, had no connection with the bread. The land bore under iron, and under iron gradually died; for it was not loved or hated, it had no prayers or curses (36).

In this section, social and ecological disruption are interconnected. Steinbeck elicits a deep relationship between man’s violent domination over the land and man’s domination over women by entangling the diction of sexual and ecological exploitation. The land is objectified and there is a detachment between it and the people.

Similar elements of social hierarchy in The Grapes of Wrath can be seen between the landowners and the tenant farmers, as well as between locals and migrants. When given a chance to visit their land, the landowners prefer to stay in their closed cars, disconnected from the land and the people, preferring to “talk out of the windows” (31). Likewise, as the Joads travel west, the people they encounter who have already settled down in the area seem to hate “their kind”: Them goddamn Okies got no sense and no feeling. They ain’t human.

A human being wouldn’t live like they do. A human being couldn’t stand it being so dirty and miserable. They ain’t a hell a lot better then gorilla’s...They’re so god dumb (221).

Once again, one group of humans see themselves as having superiority over another group. Whether it’s Man-Woman, Owner-Tenant, Local-Migrant, each of these dual cleavages exist within the framework of humankind’s domination over the land. The dominant group seeks to possess and commodify the Earth and, as a result, the people who inhabit it. Not only are social relations mediated through I-it relationships, but ecological relations are too. Despite this hopeless reality, a post-Edenic landscape shaped by broken, hierarchical, elitist, and I-it ecological and social relationships, Steinbeck offers a way forward.

If the barren landscape and hierarchical relationships in The Grapes of Wrath reflect a post-Edenic system characterized by eco-social dissonance, the transformation of the Joad family structure and the ideology established by Jim Casy, a Christlike figure, offers a counter culture, Steinbeck’s vision for an eco-social harmony.

As the Joads uproot their lives, the hierarchical post-Edenic culture is displaced, allowing many characters to challenge the hierarchy and injustice that plagues their environment. In contrast with the objectification and commodification of the land and the people, the ethic that Steinbeck promotes through these characters is rooted in holism, organismic psychology, biocentricity, deep ecology, and egalitarianism.

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John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath Through character dialogue, interchapters, and literary structure, Steinbeck introduces an I-thou5 eco-social ethic. First, he stresses the unity of all things: Can you live without the willow tree? Well, no you can’t. The willow tree is you. The pain on that mattress there - that dreadful pain - that is you (89).

This land, this red land is us, and the flood years and the dust years and the drought years are us (87).

In these cases, humans are not presented as a dominant force over non-humans, but rather as a cooperating and interconnected entity. This rejection of humankind’s hegemonic subordination of the natural world echoes Aldo Leopold’s land ethic and neo-Marxist ideas describing how society and ecology should not be classified as two different and unconnected entities: “Instead, they should be seen as one metabolism as one cannot function without the other”, much like the vision of Humboldt (Islam 5). This unified perspective also manifests in many modern hunter-gatherer systems today. Anthropology of modern hunter-gatherer systems reveals a strong relationship between humans and nonhumans within their shared ecosystem. Across linguistic and ethnic differences, from the Achuar of the Amazon to the Inuit of northern Canada, an intuitive homeostatic ecosystem has been maintained by these huntergatherer systems through rituals and beliefs6: “They regard themselves, not as a social collective managing their relations with the ecosystem, but rather as simple components of a vaster whole within which no real discrimination is really established between humans and nonhumans” (Descola 16-17). Within these systems, a hunter ethic emerges, expressing a deep understanding of the complex interrelations between the organisms within their environment; plants are the children of the women who nurture them, and animals are the brothers-in-law of the men who hunt them. There is no clear separation between the physical and social environment, two domains which we normally distinguish, yet which are “hardly contrasted within a continuum of interactions human and non human persons” (Descola 20). With such a relationship between the hunter-gatherer worldview and Steinbeck’s description of human-nonhuman unity, it may seem that the only way Steinbeck’s ethic can be reached is by rejecting modern civilization and technological advance; that in order to regain a respect of the natural world as found in hunter-gatherer societies, we must return to our days of living “outdoors” and in “the wild”. Characters like Muley, Grandpa and Noah seem to follow this path, but they do not represent the true ethic Steinbeck promotes. These characters reject society and family in order to In I-Thou relationships, “I” cannot stand alone. It establishes a world of relation from which unique entities have a full, direct, and mutual relation.

6 Shamanism, often characterized as a pagan, occult, and schizophrenic practice, actually maintains a practical role in hunter gatherer systems in the homeostasis of the ecosystem. Much like bureaucrats at the DNR, Amazonian shamans set quotas on the number of animals to be killed during a hunt and regulate the amount of plant poison prepared for fishing in a particular place in the river (Descola 12). However, even this analogy takes away from the embedded relationship and unity between nature and people that these societies maintain.

5

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Spencer Polk connect with the land. When the bank evicts his family, Muley refuses to leave his land, letting his wife and children move to California without him while he stays behind to live outdoors. This lifestyle also attracts Grandpa, who tries to stay behind and live like Muley as his family moves to California. However, he is subdued into leaving. This disconnect leads to unbearable anxiety, which kills him. Finally, Noah leaves the family to wander and live off the fish in the river. These characters see the land or wilderness as a pastoral escape from human problems, the last bastion of rugged individualism, a place void of monstrous tractors, free from the hassles of living within a society where one does not feel accepted. As noted by environmental historian William Cronon,“for many Americans wilderness stands as the last remaining place where civilization, that all too human disease, has not fully infected the Earth. It is an island in the polluted sea of urban-industrial modernity, the one place we can turn for escape from our own too-muchness.” However, “we mistake ourselves when we suppose that wilderness can be the solution to our culture’s problematic relationships with the nonhuman world,” for wilderness is “a product of that civilization and could hardly be contaminated by the very stuff of which it is made” (Cronon). While Muley, Grandpa and Noah attempt to escape into a mythical wilderness, Steinbeck illustrates that retreating into the periphery of civilization is not his counter-narrative to the post-Edenic landscape.

While some characters wish to embrace the land or “wilderness” and separate themselves from “society”, this idealistic pursuit is not what Steinbeck has in mind as a solution. On the other extreme, Connie Rivers leaves the family and his pregnant wife to pursue his dream of living in the city in order to take classes and work in radio someday. Both of these extremes operate within the nature-society rift. Muley, Grandpa, and Noah plan to escape society in pursuit of wilderness, while Connie seeks to escape the wilderness in pursuit of the city. However, Steinbeck’s ethic meets us where we are, challenging us to confront the injustice around us with a unified perspective on society and nature. As the Joads progress in their journey, characters are picked off one by one, but the characters that persevere in the narrative are the true bearers of Steinbeck’s ethic, which is one of cooperation, solidarity, and selfless generosity. These characters seek to transform the existing landscape instead of retreating into an idealistic “state of nature”. Beginning in the words of Jim Casey, this idea manifests itself in the migrant camps and within the individual actions of Joad family members.

First, Jim Casy lays out this ethic through his prayer: I been in the hills, thinkin’, almost you might say like Jesus went into the wilderness to think His way out of a mess of troubles...

Nighttime I’d lay on my back an’ look up at the stars; morning I’d set an’ watch the sun come up; midday I’d look out from a hill at the rollin’ dry country; evenin’ I’d foller the sun down. Sometimes I’d pray like I always done. On’y I couldn’ figure what I was prayin’ to or for. There was the hills, an’ there was me, an’ we wasn’t separate

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John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath no more. We was one thing. An’ that one thing was holy...An’ I got thinkin’, on’y it wasn’t thinkin, it was deeper down than thinkin’. I got thinkin’ how we was holy when we was one thing, an’ mankin’ was holy when it was one thing. An’ it on’y got unholy when one mis’able little fella got the bit in his teeth an’ run off his own way, kickin’ an’ draggin’ an’ fightin’. Fella like that bust the holiness. But when they’re all workin’ together, not one fella for another fella, but one fella kind of harnessed to the whole shebang—that’s right, that’s holy. An’ then I got thinkin’ I don’t even know what I mean by holy (Steinbeck 81).

This section portrays the wilderness not as a place to go in rejection of society, but rather as a place where humanity and nature are one, a place to confront our obligation to one another and take responsibility for the unjust systems we are a part of. Jim Casy’s reflection illustrates that Jesus did not retreat from society to pray forever, but with the mission to return to society and challenge the existing norms in an attempt to restore the relationship between humankind and the Almighty. Jim Casy defines holiness as the unity of the self with nature and society, a connection between himself and the hills as well as cooperation among humans. He states that this holiness is broken through selfish individualism. For some, the wilderness offers the illusion that they can escape the cares and troubles of the world, but for Steinbeck it is a place to deal with the cares and troubles of the world, a place of oneness, a place of transformation. In the migrant camps, “the twenty families became one family, the children were the children of all. The loss of home became one loss, and the golden time in the West was one dream” (193). Jim Casy calls this vision of cooperation and oneness “the human sperit” (24). Likewise, when praying over Granpa, he recalls that he “Heard a fella tell a poem one time, an’ he says ‘All that lives is holy’” (144). This reflects the biocentricity of Steinbeck’s proposition, that all life is sacred, whether human or non-human. Richard Schiffman echoes this sentiment in his articulation that humans “are equal partners with all that exists, co-creators with trees and galaxies and the microorganisms in our own gut, in a materially and spiritually evolving universe” (Schiffman).

Finally, Steinbeck illustrates the organismic essence of his ethic by first relating biotic and abiotic parts to their respective wholes, concluding that both man and the land are greater than their individual parts: For nitrates are not the land, nor phosphates; and the length of fiber in the cotton is not the land. Carbon is not a man, nor salt nor water nor calcium. He is all these, but he is much more, much more; and the land is so much more than its analysis. The man who is more than his chemistry, walking on the earth, turning his plow point for a stone, dropping his handles to slide over an outcropping, kneeling in the earth to eat his lunch; that man who is more than his elements knows the land that is more than its analysis (Steinbeck 115).

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Spencer Polk While Steinbeck illustrates that entities such as humans and the land are much more than their analysis, he also stresses the importance of their component individuality, that while the whole may act beyond any individual part, the parts of a whole are still important in their uniqueness. This individuality, when applied to an individual’s relationship to society, stands in contrast to individualism, which declares, “I’m out for myself, and I don’t care if my society benefits”. Rather, individuality declares, “I am myself, and my society grows when I express my uniqueness”; “we expand community by daring to develop individuality” (Manji 49-50). The structure of The Grapes of Wrath reflects the importance of individuality within a community. The book follows the Joad family while using intercalary chapters to frame their individual story within a larger context. Steinbeck’s ecological consciousness combines the macro, ecosystem-wide lens of the intercalary with the more micro, organismal relations that constitute it through the Joad family (Steinbrecher). Ma Joad, Jim Casy, Tom Joad, and Rose of Sharon all shed their individualism, developing a deep generosity and commitment to something greater than themselves while maintaining their concrete individualities. Their connection to a community is ultimately rooted in their individual experiences. The sacrifices made in The Grapes of Wrath are, in fact, intimate: Ma’s sharing of the soup to the children, Jim Casy’s death, or Tom Joad’s sacrifice to leave the group. Likewise, the ultimate sacrifice is also a deeply personal and intimate event. Amidst a massive deluge, the remaining Joads stumble into a barn where they find a young boy and a dying man. Learning that the dying man needs milk to survive after giving his remaining rations to the child, Rose asks everyone to leave. Alone with the man, she carries out the truly humble and intimate act of sharing her breast milk.7

This act reflects the great unity that Steinbeck promotes, a selfless love of all people that projects into the community and beyond the family unit,8 an intimate act connected to the fabric of life, something greater than any individual. This expansion of the community through the development of individual acts builds to create something greater than the individual, while preserving the fundamental relationship of the individual to the collective. Ultimately, Steinbeck wishes to transform the postEdenic landscape by embracing nature and society into one womb, metabolized into one fundamental unity and developed through intimate connections.

The insights that The Grapes of Wrath provide have profound significance for our time. It is a reframing of the human story, echoing biblical themes while shadowing anthropological patterns. When the wisdom resonated through this text is understood through contemporary ecological and societal challenges, the timelessness For a minute Rose of Sharon sat still in the whispering barn. Then she hoisted her tired body up and drew the comfort about her. She moved slowly to the corner and stood looking down at the wasted face, into the wide, frightened eyes. Then slowly she lay down beside him. He shook his head slowly from side to side. Rose of Sharon loosened one side of the blanket and bared her breast. “You got to,” she said. She squirmed closer and pulled his head close. “There!” she said. “There.” Her hand moved behind his head and supported it. Her fingers moved gently in his hair. She looked up and across the barn, and her lips came together and smiled mysteriously (Steinbeck 455) 8 Much like Jesus Christ, Steinbeck promotes “that we love our neighbor as ourselves”. However, his interpretation of this ethic “enlarges the boundaries of the community to include soils, waters, plants, and animals, or collectively: the land” (Steinbrecher 2).

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John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath of his narrativeis affirmed. From stones, fire, and wheels to tractors, transistors and artificial intelligence, the march of human technological progress has changed our ways of life with every new discovery. In a volatile world of changing climate and disease, technological innovation has kept us alive, but it has also become both a cause and effect of war, climate change, and inequality. While technological advance saves us, it simultaneously leads to ecological and social discord through processes that deepen and reinforce each other. The cultural and historical progression of humankind has developed into an unsustainable endeavor fueled by the paradigm of human-nature dualism.

While Steinbeck does not layout a step-by-step process for how we are to save our precious Earth and the intimate organic and inorganic elements that make it up from unsustainable exploitation and destruction, he provides a framework from which we can address these problems. By reorienting individuals, society, and the ecosystem into an interconnected fabric of processes and interaction, Steinbeck illustrates that ecological and social ills can only be addressed together. Culture can no longer be separated from nature. What is required is the reorganization of human logic towards a long-term vision and nurturing of the community of life (Mayda 12), the construction of a new environmental paradigm rooted in holistic ideology. Indeed, many indigenous eco-social systems today embody the ethic of unity that Steinbeck proposes. However, this does not mean the only way to save humanity is to recede from our modern technological advancement, for this is a radical environmental, fetishistic fantasy that will lead to ecological dystopia. Rather, we should pursue the integration and intellectual exchanges of scientific and indigenous knowledge, recognizing that the forms of knowledge identified as “indigenous” in fact resulted from strategies formed through trial and error over centuries to control environmental resources.

With these shifts in thought, we can steer human technology and living towards biomimicry and sustainability while making urban spaces more biophilic. Technology is, in fact, a double-edged sword. It can be used to wage death or to invigorate life.

Therefore, to proceed, we must embody Steinbeck’s ethic of unity. The story of the Joad family represents the importance of committing ourselves to something greater than ourselves through intimate acts of selflessness, emphasizing the need to shed our hierarchical, anthropocentric will to dominate over “the other” - human or nonhuman - in order to pursue a more Edenic and egalitarian existence. Humans need not “impose order on nature, [but should] rather discover and cooperate with the rhythms it manifests” (Finger 65). We must move away from the modern age, an economic, profit-based anthropocentric zeitgeist of domination, and into an ecological one, an era guided by holistic perspectives aiming to restore humankind’s symbiotic relationship with the ecological community, a relationship fostered by cooperation and global solidarity. With this vision, we can avoid environmental catastrophe and restore harmony between the human and non-human worlds.

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Spencer Polk Works Cited Baker, Donald D. “A BRIEF EXCURSION INTO THREE AGRICULTURAL REVOLUTIONS.” University Minnesota, St. Paul, Minnesota. Http://climate. umn.edu. Web. Boehm, Christopher. Hierarchy in the Forest: The Evolution of Egalitarian Behavior. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard U, 2001. Print.

Boulding, Elise. The Underside of History: A View of Women through Time. Newbury Park: Sage, 1992. Web. Brooke, John L. Climate Change and the Course of Global History: A Rough Journey.New York: Cambridge UP, 2014. Print.

Cronon, William. “The Trouble with Wilderness: Or, Getting Back to the Wrong Nature.” Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature,.New York: Norton, 1995. 69-90.Web. Diamond, Jared. “The Worst Mistake in the History of the Human Race.” Discover Magazine. May 1987: 64-66. Web. Descola, Philippe, Janet Lloyd, and Marshall David Sahlins. Beyond Nature and Culture. Chicago: U of Chicago, 2014. Print.

Devlin, Hannah. “Early Men and Women Were Equal, Say Scientists.” The Guardian.

Guardian News and Media, 14 May 2015. Web. Hansen, Casper Worm, et al. “Gender Roles and Agricultural History: The Neolithic Inheritance.” SSRN Electronic Journal, 2012, doi:10.2139/ ssrn.2170945.

Foster, John Bellamy. “Marx’s Theory of Metabolic Rift: Classical Foundations for Environmental Sociology.” American Journal of Sociology, vol. 105, no. 2, 1999, pp. 366–405., doi:10.1086/210315.

Islam, Md Saidul. “Sustainability through the Lens of Environmental Sociology: An Introduction.” MDPI. Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute, 22 Mar. 2017. Web. Kugel, James L. How to Read the Bible: A Guide to Scripture, Then and Now. New York: Free, 2008. Print.

Latham, Katherine J., “Human Health and the Neolithic Revolution: an Overview

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John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath of Impacts of the Agricultural Transition on Oral Health, Epidemiology, and the Human Body” (2013). Nebraska Anthropologist. 187.

Lerner, Gerda. The Creation of Patriarchy. New York: Oxford UP, 1986. Print.

Manji, Irshad. Allah, Liberty, and Love: The Courage to Reconcile Faith and Freedom. New York: Atria, 2016. Print.

Mayda, Chris. A Regional Geography of the United States and Canada: toward a Sustainable Future. Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, 2013.

Northcott, Michael S. Place, Ecology and the Sacred: the Moral Geography of Sustainable Communities. Bloomsbury, 2015.

Kellert, Stephen R., and Edward O. Wilson. The Biophilia Hypothesis. Island Press, 1993.

Rowthorn, Robert R., and Paul Seabright. “Property Rights, Warfare and the Neolithic Transition.” Toulouse School of Economic(2010): n. pag. Web. Schiffman, Richard. “We Need a Thousand-Year Worldview in the Face of Climate Change.” YES! Magazine, 13 Sept. 2016.

Srinivasan, Vinay. “The Separation of Humans and Nature as It Relates to Environmental Degradation.” Claremont Colleges - Scholarship @ Claremont, 8 May 2015.

Steinbeck, John. The Grapes of Wrath. Penguin Books, 2006.

Steinbrecher, Stephanie A., “ The Philosophy of Ecology in John Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath” (2016). Scripps Senior eses. Paper 866.

Whitney-Smith, Elin. Cain and Abel: Scarcity, Information and the Invention of WAR. N.p.: AFCEA, n.d. 27 Jan. 2013. Web. Wulf, Andrea. The Invention of Nature: Alexander Von Humboldt's New World. Alfred A. Knopf, 2016.

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who are YOU to tell ME

By Hattie Grimm

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Is it a Crime to be a Woman?

An Exploration of “Criminal” Women in Broadside Ballads Noa Levhar Legitimizing the Broadside Ballad

Scholars have struggled for years about whether to consider broadside ballads as legitimate sources for understanding early modern English culture due to their generally unorthodox fashion. The editors of Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800 argue that broadside ballads are “the truest and most immediate indicators of which way the culture wind b[lew] – that is, of current events and popular trends” (1). This is mainly attributed to their popularity and widespread influence, which Wurzbach claims has been persistently ignored due to the form’s inferior quality of both “the actual ballads” and “the genre per se,” because of its lower literary status (1). She further states that the ballads produced realistic representations of life and provided instructions in the manners of society, thus shifting scholarly perceptions towards “cultural-historical and anthropological consideration” (Wurzbach 5-6).

Because broadside ballads were the least expensive and most accessible form of print text, the medium touched “all levels of society” through both its oral and written tradition, and is thus important evidence regarding the attitudes and behaviors of non-elite classes on various social issues (Clark, “The Economics of Marriage in the Broadside Ballad” 104).

Women in Broadside Ballads

The representation of women in broadside ballads is especially intriguing because of the far-reaching effects of the ballads themselves; they often influenced public opinion and conduct. Sandra Clark’s article, “The Broadside Ballad and the Woman’s Voice,” points out that, contrary to popular view, the broadside ballad was in fact particularly appealing for women (103). A number of ballads are “specifically addressed to women, especially where the subject (marriage…gossip, confessions of criminal women) has gender-related interest” (Clark “The Woman’s Voice” 104).

This notion applies to the topic that I will be exploring in particular as I question how criminal representations of women in broadside ballads affected the cultural representation of the female gender during this era.

In order to delve further into this topic, I want to firstly examine a broadside ballad written by an anonymous author, “A Merry Dialogue between Thomas and John,” in order to shed light on the different ways in which men viewed women.

The lighthearted chat between the men discusses women as compared to wine, while Thomas demonizes women as John defends them. The language of demonry and superstition often comes up during this dialogue, as when Thomas states that “[w] omen have hooks, & Women have crooks” and that “[w]omen are witches when they may,/ so is the Wine…/Which causeth men from their wives to stray” (EBBA 30419).

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Noa Levhar Thus, Thomas believes that the husband’s infidelity can be blamed both upon the wine and the woman, and legitimizes this by using irrational theories of witchcraft to make his point known.

Conversely, John focuses on the positive qualities of women by stating that “[w]omen have beauty and fair looks” and that “[w]omen are witty when they may, so is not Wine…/And causeth Men at home to stay,” (EBBA 30419). John utilizes more grounded and earthly examples for what he believes to be feminine qualities in order to describe women in a positive light, stating that they use their wit in order to keep their husbands around. It is interesting to note that both of these lines defend women only in relation to men (i.e. we should keep women around because they are beautiful and witty).

Misogynistic language such as the kind portrayed in Thomas and John’s dialogue was common in broadside ballads, since the texts often created arguments about who was blamed in the case of spousal infidelity. Thus, the constant battle for power in the household is not only portrayed in this simple dialogue, but in broadside ballads more generally, prompting the question: is it possible that men used broadside ballads in order to control women’s behavior, therefore shunning acts that they found unfavorable?

In order to better understand the logistics of the main question of this paper, it is important to note what other scholars in the field are discussing. Clark’s “The Broadside Ballad and the Woman’s Voice” suggests that ballads do not enforce patriarchal control over women, but instead have the opportunity to use irony and satire to sacrifice male values (106). She claims that “the dramatic potential of the ballads’ presentation in the public forum creates the chance for comic performers to challenge or subvert their texts” (107). Her essay is littered with words such as “chance,” “possible,” “potential,” and these baseless and weak languages shows faultiness in her argument. Ultimately, readers of the essay must question not whether there is the possibility for irony, as she claims, but whether there is any evidence to suggest that public readers of ballads expressed this irony. Further, Clark restricts her discussion to ballads on marriage, and by doing so fails to take into consideration moments when women are placed into a position of authority or dominance. In order to account for this absence of material, my paper will take into account “criminal” women, because criminality often portrays dangerous authority while conflating it with negative and oppressive communal views.

In Warrior Women and Popular Balladry: 1650-1850, Dianne Dugaw explores the female warrior and her ability to dress and act like a man as a depiction of the misrepresentation of early modern women in the modern mind. She argues that the female warrior who walks around masqueraded as a man portrays the “preoccupations and the experience of people living in an age obsessed at all levels with disguise and cross-dressing” (122). However, this illustration of the female warrior seems to be far removed from the lives of average women as depicted in Clark’s essay on “The Economics of Marriage in the Broadside Ballad.” Clark instead depicts woman’s life as centered on finding a husband, and marriage life as “dominated by considerations

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Is it a Crime to be a Woman? of prudence, economy, the avoidance of waste, and the conservation of profit” as opposed to “oppressive patriarchy” (130). Thus, it is possible that contemporary readers would have looked upon the female warrior as a higher ideal to strive for, and not as an everyday possibility: a dream, and only a dream.

Simone Chess’s essay, “ ‘And I my vowe did Keepe’: Oath Making, Subjectivity, and Husband Murder in ‘Murderous Wife’ Ballads,” states that swearing was a tool that women in broadside ballads utilized in order to gain authority over their male counterparts. She explains how “vows and promises in husband killers’ speeches [are]…a key to understanding early modern perceptions of women’s agency and power” (Fumerton 147). Using this argument, Chess does what Clark’s “The Broadside Ballad and the Woman’s Voice” does not and considers the moment in which women claim agency and empowerment over their husbands. However, the question remains: what happens when the victim is not a dominant, abusive man, but a helpless child?

Representations of “Criminal” Women in Broadside Ballads

This paper will explore the representation of “criminal” women in broadside ballads of early modern England by looking at three different versions of the tale of the murderous midwife of Poplar. I will compare the difference in language usage in these three versions in order to better understand the author’s intention in portraying women, noting how such depictions can alter the general notions of the female gender. I will suggest that women were more susceptible to negative opinions and harsher consequences in society in comparison to their male counterparts; because of this, depictions of “criminal” women in broadside ballads contain oppressive material that lessened the quality of female agency in early modern English society.

It is important to note that “some of the main textual sources for the ballad trade were trial accounts and pamphlets, unreliable documents tainted with the author’s bias,” meaning of “criminal” women in broadside ballads contain oppressive material that lessened the quality of female agency in early modern English society.

It is important to note that “some of the main textual sources for the ballad trade were trial accounts and pamphlets, unreliable documents tainted with the author’s bias,” meaning that the broadside ballads I will examine are not merely representations of the events that occurred, but rather also portray the thoughts and opinions of the authors who wrote them (Williams 29).

The tale examined involves the discovery of a midwife who has allowed children to starve, murdering them through her neglect. The first version to be examined, “The Midwife of Poplar’s Sorrowful Confession and Lamentation in Newgate” portrays the confession and lamentation of the midwife via first-person narration. The second version, “The Injured Children” describes her actions in firstperson narration from an unrelated source; and the third version, “the Bloody minded Midwife,” uses similar language to the first version but is written from an uninvolved individual, similarly to the second version. These three versions were chosen because they were the ones featured in Pepys’ library, and their variations can yield a better understanding of the different (and similar) views of “criminal” women.

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Two out of the three ballads examined specifically emphasize the gender of the murderess. In “The Midwife of Poplar’s Sorrowful Confession and Lamentation in Newgate,” the ballad singles the murderess out as the “worst of woman-kind,” referring to the notion that women were meant to take care of children and, as she has failed in her only and greatest task, she has ultimately shamed her gender (EBBA 20808). The broadside ballad “The Injured Children” instead calls her a “wretched woman” and addresses the readers as “You Mothers,” forsaking the fathers to gear itself towards women specifically (EBBA 20807). This distinction highlights the role of women in society by subjecting them to taking care of the children, while the fathers remain unconcerned with the education or the safety of their offspring. While women were not entirely docile in comparison to men, they were expected to “maintain order in their home, educate their children, and…maintain a modest demeanor,” according to Williams (21). Therefore, by addressing the female gender specifically, the two authors of the ballads suggest a certain conduct expected of women that the midwife did not follow, ultimately leading to her demise. It is interesting to note that the third version of the ballad uses the phrase “Good people” to address the common audience and does not single women out as its intended target (EBBA 22227).Because the seventeenth century was a time of major economic and religious change, the shifting culture was regarded as partially responsible for the increase in perceived fears of the female gender (Williams 20). Yet, interestingly enough, none of the three versions of the broadside ballad suggests witchcraft as the source of the midwife’s evil. As Williams states, “women who committed petty theft… murdered…or were in any way a social nuisance were at risk of also being identified as a witch” (19). Nevertheless, religious language and customs play roles in depicting the midwife as a “criminal” woman. The title of “The Midwife of Poplar’s Sorrowful Confession and Lamentation at Newgate” declares the ballad to be a confession and lamentation, emphasizing the forgiveness and regret aspect of religious customs. Yet the midwife narrator of the ballad states that “the Laws cannot be too severe/for such a Wretch as I” (EBBA 20807). Whether she is referring to civil or divine law in this instance is unclear, but it seems that she agrees with her death sentence. By appropriating the midwife’s own perspective into this ballad, the anonymous author writes her condemnation of herself, thus providing no reason for the reader to be on her side. Therefore, this specific portrayal of a “criminal” woman is written not to defend her but rather to seal her fate. It does not show authority or dominance with regard to deconstructing gendered responsibilities, or even a clear and reasonable argument for why she neglected those children; it merely condemns her, and her confession and lamentation do nothing to empower her or the female gender even though she has access to the notion of criminal and dangerous authority.

The ballad “Bloody minded Midwife” contains more religious language that focuses on justice and vengeance rather than forgiveness and growth. By beginning with the words “Good People all I pray attend,/ unto a wicked deed,” the text immediately sets the audience against the murderess (EBBA 22227). The audience feels righteous because they are referred to as “good people,” and are thus waiting to

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Is it a Crime to be a Woman? condemn the committer of the “wicked deed” (EBBA 22227). The ballad continues by stating that “there did a Midwife dwell, / Whose Murders calls just Vengeance down, / since they do far excell / The greatest Villains in the Land,” (EBBA 22227).

This suggests that the murderess is “naturally disposed to base or criminal actions,” meaning that she is beyond justification or, more importantly, salvation (“villain, n., 1”). The narrator uses the plural “we” in the following line in order to group himself with the supposedly righteous audience: “And nothing can be hid we know, / from Gods all seeing eye” (EBBA 22227). By using an appeal to religion, the narrator condemns the criminal woman and takes away any authority that she might have gained by radiatinggained by radiating danger and power through violence. He mocks her, because she does not understand religion, therefore she does not understand that she will be condemned and suffer God’s vengeance, and thus uses religious language to entirely disregard her female agency through divine power.

The broadsides about the midwife of Poplar also highlight the supposedly gossiping nature of women by using the rhetoric of rumor and supposition. As quoted earlier in this paper, Clark states that ballads were often addressed to women, especially when the subject was gender-related, listing “gossip” as a potential topic of interest (Clark “The Woman’s Voice” 104). The OED defines a gossip as “a person, mostly a woman, of light and trifling character, esp. one who delights in idle talk: a newsmonger, a tattler” (“gossip, n., 3”). Thus, the language surrounding gossip in the ballads is used to emphasize the notion that women have time to dawdle and talk nonsense, unlike their more dominant male counterparts. In “Bloody minded Midwife,” the narrator tells the audience that “Full Three and Thirty Years ago, / the Midwife did begin, / And ever since, for ought we know, / she has been Murdering” (EBBA 22227). By speculating on what neither narrator nor audience know, the speaker can induce fear and to play on the rumors in order to sensationalize the events. Because the midwife is a confined (or deceived) criminal woman, she is unable to object to this allegation, and so the narrator takes away her power of testimony, leaving her without any agency to defend herself. The line “for ought we know” suggests that there may be other women committing such heinous acts that the audience does not know about and uses this questionable language to instill doubt in midwives, and in women in general. Joseph Swetnam’s, The Arraignment of Lewd, idle, froward, and unconstant women, states that a woman’s voice cannot be ruled and depicts her as powerfully dangerous and unable to be tamed (8). I argue instead that the authors of these broadside ballads use female agency and power in the form of criminality in order to silence them. Since they were unable to speak out against their supposed committed actions, these ballads concurrently spread rumors about women rendering them powerless to defend themselves.

The use of vague, speculative language shows up in “The Injured Children” as well, when the speaker states “Some say they’re By-blows she did take, / Or Bastards, which you will / And all was for the Moneys sake, / these Infants must be kill’d” (EBBA 20808). These likely false rumors are placed by the anonymous author of the ballad in order to portray the midwife as seemingly worse; not only is she killing

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Noa Levhar babies, but she is profiting from this evil business as well. Thus, the midwife becomes not deranged or mentally unsound, but rather greedy and baseless, reflecting poorly on her gender in general because of its sole responsibility in caring for the children.

In addition, the ballad fails to mention the name of the murderess, unlike in “The Midwife of Poplar’s Sorrowful Confession and Lamentation at Newgate,” which adds to the notion that any woman can become this murderess. Therefore, this fate is not personally ascribed to one woman, but appropriated as an objective demise for the entire gender. The concept of a murderess, as opposed to the Compton murderous midwife of Poplar, suggests more than one; thus, by leaving out this bit of important information, the author is able to cultivate rising fears of women by portraying one of the gender’s most criminal figure as unknown.

The descriptive language utilized in the three versions of the ballad adds to the sensationalism that creates an aura of fear and repulsion from the midwife of Poplar, and from women in general. In “The Midwife of Poplar’s Sorrowful Confession and Lamentation,” the author describes the dead babies found as “Young Infants in a basket dead / upon a shelf below” (EBBA 20807). By using such a casual tone of voice, the midwife as the speaker seemingly contradicts the regret and sorrow that she uses in the first half of the ballad to describe her repentance. This dissonance beckons the question: is the midwife psychopathic, or simply entirely unintelligent? By portraying her nonchalance and precisely describing the location of the dead babies (instead of showing a reluctance to relay such information, or a tactful manner of telling it), the author plays on the idea that something is not right with her, causing audience members to distrust her, ultimately limiting her ability to empower herself using her own authority and criminality. Other such cases involve the ballad divulging gory details, including that the “very Ears were rotted off” and the murderess’s “bloody hands imbrew in little Infants blood,” both emphasizing her crime rather than her sorrowful confession, ending the ballad on a criminal note as opposed to a repentant one (EBBA 20807).

Williams points out that tales of female murderesses and “criminal” women in general portray the “cultural fears of uncontrolled speech, overturned household hierarchies, and disorder” (23). As we can see through the different variations of the tale of the midwife of Poplar, the possibility that a woman can overturn her household responsibilities must be immediately shut down through specific language usage. This recapitulation of the acts and the trial account portray a more sensationalized tale for the audience but contains similar information than what was originally reported (Williams 29). Nevertheless, it is obvious that the anonymous authors of the ballads portrayed their biases and opinions throughout their respective texts. Infanticide was often seen as “the opposite of maternal love, family order, and socio- domestic stability” and because of this, the authors could not allow it to fuel and empower women outside of their domestic spheres (Williams 33).

Ross Hagan’s article “A Warning to England: Monstrous Births, Teratology and Feminine Power in Elizabethan Broadside Ballads” positions “monstrous birth ballads of the 1560s as responses to social changes in this time period regarding the

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Is it a Crime to be a Woman? position of women in England” (24). While the topic of the article has less to do with criminal women, Hagan’s point argues that many broadside ballads were published in an attempt to oppress the growing power of women for fear of a cultural repositioning of responsibilities. Women, he claims, did not have a lot of power over their domestic households, or even their lives, yet they “wielded significant power over the health and social legitimacy of newborn children” (Hagan 24). Thus, for the women depicted to take advantage of that power by robbing the children of their lives conflates too narrowly with their rise in power, and must ultimately be shut down, as done by the authors of our three versions of the midwife of Poplar tale.

Criminals are generally viewed negatively in society and are discriminated against and oppressed; however, they are also often seen as having authority and emitting dangerous power. Therefore, combining women with criminality allows for an intriguing interconnection between oppressive communal views and possession of dangerous authority. As Williams claims, men were often not punished as harshly as women because English society tolerated “a certain amount of male violence,” (24).

Men were allowed to physically abuse their wives because they had a patriarchal duty to “lawful and reasonable correction” of their wives’ supposedly inappropriate behavior (Phillips 18). Because patriarchal society was ruled by men, women were often more susceptible to harsher punishments and damaging opinions. Their positive and negative tendencies were emphasized; a good wife was complimented, an evil murderess was harangued by ballad authors and readers alike. Therefore, the notion is about power. Men, as the more powerful gender in society, lay claim to deciding punishments, and established that the supposedly lesser gender should be subjected to harsher consequences. Therefore, when that gender stands up to this injustice and disregards the law heedlessly, the men must immediately revoke that increase in power. These ideals are seen in practice in the three versions of the tale of the midwife of Poplar that are explored in this paper. The authors of these ballads revoke the authority of women by utilizing typically deployed stereotypes of female behavior such as gossiping, and religion, in order to dismiss the “criminal” woman and ultimately suppress female agency throughout this ballad culture in this paper.

The authors of these ballads revoke the authority of women by utilizing typically deployed stereotypes of female behavior such as gossiping, and religion, in order to dismiss the “criminal” woman and ultimately suppress female agency throughout this ballad culture.

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Noa Levhar Works Cited Anon. “A Merry Dialogue between Thomas and John. / In the praise, and dispraise of Women, and Wine. / Thomas against the Women doth contend, / But John must stoutly doth their cause defend, / Young and Old, read these lines that ensue, / You’l all confess that which I write is true,/ I know no reason, but that without despute, / This may as well be printed, as sung to Lute.” UCSB English Broadside Ballad Archive. Pepys Ballads 3.88, 3.89, EBBA 30419. British Library. Web. 27 April. 2017. <https://ebba.english. ucsb.edu/ballad/30419/image>.

Anon. “The / Bloody minded Midwife, / Containing an Account of many Infants whom / she Murthur’d, or starv’d to Death, some of which were found in a / Hand-Basket above Ground, others digg’d up in a Cellar, where she / had Buried them. To the Astonishment of all Spectators.” UCSB English Broadside Ballad Archive. Pepys Ballads 5.10, EBBA 22227. Pepys Library.

Web. 27 April 2017. < https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/22227/image>.

Anon. “The Injured Children, / OR, / The Bloudy Midwife; / Being / A Discovery of a Barbarous Cruelty to several Children that had / been made away, and buried privately in a Sellar, and two hid / dead in a Hand-basket.” UCSB English Broadside Ballad Archive. Pepys Ballads 2.193, EBBA 20808.

Magdalene College. Web. 27 April. 2017. <https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/20808/image>.

Anon. “The Midwife of Poplar’s / Sorrowful Confession and Lamentation in Newgate / Who was Condemned to Dye for that Horrid and Unheard of Murder, which she / committed on the Bodys of several young infants, whom she Starved to Death, / and was accordingly Executed for the same in Holbourn, upon the 23d. of this / instant October, 1693.” UCSB English Broadside Ballad Archive. Pepys Ballads 2.192, EBBA 20807. Magdalene College. Web. 27 April. 2017. <https://ebba.english.ucsb.edu/ballad/20807/ image>.

Fumerton, Patricia., Anita Guerrini, and Kris. McAbee. Ballads and Broadsides in Britain, 1500-1800. Farnham, Surrey, England; Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2010. Print.

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Denial, Diagnosis, and Witness The Tension Between the Soldier and the State in the Work of Siegfried Sassoon and Virginia Woolf ’s Mrs. Dalloway Sinclair Willman

In the summer of 1917, Siegfried Sassoon, the celebrated British war captain, telegraphed his opposition to World War I in a manner both public and divisive. A letter addressed to his commanding officer stating that he would not return to his military duties was read out loud in the House of Commons on July 30th and was then printed in The Times the next day. In the closing line of the letter, he wrote, “On behalf of those who are suffering now I make this protest against the deception which is being practiced on them; also, I believe that I may help to destroy the callous complacency with which the majority of those at home regard the contrivance of agonies which they do not, and which they have not sufficient imagination to realize,” (Giddings 111). To assert one’s own confrontation with suffering as unjust in such powerful political and cultural realms is no cowardly feat. The consequences of this gesture - Sassoon’s institutionalization at Craiglockhart War Hospital for the ostensible treatment of shellshock – reveals a primary technique adopted by the British state to control its dissenters during World War I.

To prohibit the uncanny realities of World War I warfare from entering the British civilian awareness, medical diagnoses became an essential tool to assign meaning and order to otherwise traumatized and uncategorized bodies and minds.

The doctor became the embodiment of order and structure through his ability to control and confine the patient and the patient’s illness. However, witnesses to the war were able to counteract these diagnoses and created immortalized accounts, honoring the pervasiveness of the war’s effects through their own faculties – narration. The tool of narration ultimately proved itself more enduring then medicine’s diagnostic categories, as narratives, unlike medicine, can be immortalized through the technology of literature and print. This paper will focus on two significant modernist British literary figures, war poet Siegfried Sassoon and novelist Virginia Woolf, and how their distinct acts of witnessing, translated into narration that allowed them to transcend the apparatus of medical diagnosis and therefore exist immortalized in the “an epoch rich in the literature of aftermath” (Beidler 1).

Sassoon, a valiant, tenacious war captain who experienced the uncompromising realities of the World War I trenches vividly, was interested in deconstructing the collective denial surrounding Britain’s involvement in World War I. His act of witness during the war was far from passive – known amongst throngs of army men as “Mad Jack”, Sassoon flung himself into war campaigns with such vitality that he quickly became considered by both the British military and by war-supporting civilians back on the home front as an “outward embodiment of ‘the perfect English gentleman’” (Sassoon, et al. 16). However, Sassoon was far more complex than the token golden

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Sinclair Willman boy, which was how he was presented by the military. Sassoon’s war poetry viciously attacked both the war effort and how the oversimplification of its trauma affected soldiers.

In his seminal work The Great War and Modern Memory, Paul Fussell writes about the power of irony and antithesis in the poetry of British soldiers bearing witness to the war. Of the antithesis featured in Sassoon’ poetry, he says, “the oppositions become the more extreme the more he allows his focus to linger on the Staff [British military powers] and its gross physical, moral, and imaginative remove from the world of the troops,” (90). This separation between the individual experience of witnessing war and the nation’s representation of war mediated by antithesis is demonstrated strongly in Sassoon’s 1917 poem Does It Matter. In the poem’s three versus the narrator thrice asks the titular question – does it matter when a soldier loses his legs if those he fought for do not recognize his sacrifice, and furthermore does it matters if a soldier loses his sight when (with no great lack of cynicism) “there’s such splendid work for the blind”. The last verse moves from war’s ability to rupture the physical to war’s ability to rupture the psychological and asks: “Do they matter? – those dreams from the pit?...

You can drink and forget and be glad, And people won’t say that you’re mad; For they’ll know that you’ve fought for your country, And no one will worry a bit.” (Giddings 108).

Sassoon’s implementation of antithesis here relies on asking a question that should have a simple answer – yes. Yes, ideally, the uncomfortable, unthinkable tragedies war produces should matter. But the irony is that many people don’t choose to make them matter – especially those who believe they have enough separation from the war to not be affected by it. This collective denial might be set into motion by the nation’s high-ranking officials and militaristic powers, but ultimately the civilian is also just as complicit in deciding to what extent they take responsibility for their act of witness.

Virginia Woolf, who experienced the war through osmosis, was not interested in denying her culpability as a witness. The prevalence of print culture and the emergence of new technologies allowed her to act as a witness who was simultaneously involved with and disassociated from the “realities” of the war. In unprecedented ways, World War I was brought out of the trenches and into civilian life, and this presented itself as a major threat to a nation attempting to regulate public opinion on such a divisive conflict. No longer could the lines between battlefront and home front be drawn distinctly and definitively. This fact is in large part the focus of what Woolf’s celebrated 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. Woolf likely would have read Siegfried Sassoon’s letter of protest in The Times and was also familiar with Sassoon’s war poetry during his time in active duty. On The Old Huntsman, Sassoon’s collection of war poems, Woolf wrote, “As these jaunty matter-of-fact statements succeed each

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Denial, Diagnosis, and Witness other, such loathing, such hatred accumulates behind them that we say to ourselves: ‘Yes, this is going on; and we are sitting here watching it,’ with a new shock of surprise, with an uneasy desire to leave our place in the audience, which is a tribute to Mr. Sassoon’s power as a realist,” (Giddings 110). Sassoon’s act of witness, rendered through his writing, allowed Woolf to also think of herself as a witness to the war – as an agent with the ability to either be complicit or to retaliate. She, like Sassoon, understood that ramifications of war are not contained within categories, but instead exist in a kind of liminal space deserving of acknowledgment.

In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf taps into the “deep resources for dramatizing and mediating violence both psychic and social: the violence of war and of everyday death; the violence of everyday life; and the violence intrinsic to mourning…” (Froula 126) by constructing in Mrs. Dalloway a novel of witnesses who subsist across the social spectrum. Mrs. Dalloway depicts a landscape of almost irreconcilable witnessing, where everyone is attempting to quietly work through the violence of everyday life produced out of the grotesqueness of a war that could not stay confined to the battlefield. Anyone who exacerbates the pervasiveness of war’s violence is pushed away or prescribed as unstable - such is the case with Septimus Smith, the war veteran flung back into civilian life of Mrs. Dalloway. Like Siegfried Sassoon, Septimus is condemned for his act of witness and as such, provides another lens through which to understand medical diagnosis as a tool for enforcing nationalistic power.

To appreciate the tension between medical diagnosis and narrative, it is important to establish an understanding of how medical diagnosis emerged as an apparatus of national power in the first place. There was no shortage of slaughter during World War I and in order to maintain force in the fight, Britain encouraged the development of medical corps to salvage as many men affected by active combat as possible. The development of wartime medicine became focused on quick and dirty conservation of necessary bodies rather than properly healing these soldier’s ailments and trauma. Dr. Leo Van Bergen, World War I medical historian and scholar, notes, “furthermore, more and more sick and wounded were quickly declared ‘healthy’, a word defined as ‘healthy enough to return to the field of battle’. As a result, medical care became anof slaughter during World War I and in order to maintain force in the fight, Britain encouraged the development of medical corps to salvage as many men affected by active combat as possible. The development of wartime medicine became focused on quick and dirty conservation of necessary bodies rather than properly healing these soldier’s ailments and trauma. Dr. Leo Van Bergen, World War I medical historian and scholar, notes, “furthermore, more and more sick and wounded were quickly declared ‘healthy’, a word defined as ‘healthy enough to return to the field of battle’. As a result, medical care became an important source of ‘fresh’ warriors, and therefore an indispensable part of the war effort…” (2). Implicit within this model of health care is the sense that the physical body exploited for warfare is indefinitely more important than the lived individual who has ownership over that body and who experiences that trauma. Doctors and medical professionals thrived off this severing of the physical being from the human, as it allowed them to view

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Sinclair Willman their role in the war effort as productively self-serving. Bergen acknowledges when he writes: Many doctors were indeed eager to get involved in the war effort…

Social Darwinist and/or eugenicist physicians in particular saw an abundance of possibilities for experimentation. Wounds never seen before, in numbers never seen before, promised there would be unlimited research possibilities, on an individual and societal scale…

Furthermore, physicians saw war as an opportunity to demonstrate the worth of their particular specialty, including besides obvious fields such as psychiatry, surgery or orthopedics, also cardiology and gynecology (Bergen 2).

It is important to recognize the embedded schism between the soldier’s lived experience and the way his experience is observed and encountered by those in charge of treatment.

It is within this schism that the nation assigns and categorizes through diagnosis.

Doctors wield the power to ascribe meaning onto bodies and individuals but to what end they use this power determines whether the patient will either be subjugated or liberated by their treatment. During and after World War I, severing the ailment from the individual and focusing on the personal and professional benefits of these war-related medical cases, gave doctors a way to avoid the breadth and depth of the trauma they were surrounded by. In Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf interrogates the idea of medical professionals profiting from the suffering of their patients through her presentation of Sir William Bradshaw, one of Septimus Smith’s psychiatric physicians in the novel. Before Sir William Bradshaw is introduced as a character in the story, his “low, powerful grey [motor car] with plain initials interlocked on the panel,” (Woolf 92) appears first. The opulent car, with its “grey furs, silver grey rugs… heaped into it” (92) becomes a meaningful signifier of Bradshaw’s approach to his practice and also acts as the means by which he’s able to “travel… into the country to visit the rich, the afflicted, who could afford the very large fee which [he] very properly charged for his advice,” (92). The car acts both as the bridge and the divider between Bradshaw himself and his patients. While the car is the very thing that allows Bradshaw to reach those under his care, these trips serve as means to a very specific end - attaining more financial success, not helping the ill.

The fact that this technological signifier precedes any characterization of Bradshaw as a medical professional is indicative of the medical culture that emerged out of World War I. It is easier to believe that it is possible to make sense of and produce categories for the immense trauma many veterans experienced when the doctors handling these cases focus on the personal and professional dimensions of their work rather than the mass psychological devastation they are being confronted with as healers. How else could Bradshaw be able to articulate such an oversimplification of mental wellness as, “health is proportion… divine proportion,” (Woolf 96-7)? Doctors must will themselves to feel comfortably separated from the trauma they bear witness

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Denial, Diagnosis, and Witness to by any means necessary. Bradshaw’s car is a technological means by which to easily manufacture this sense of comfortable distance.

The patients of these doctors who will themselves into denying their act of witness cannot afford this same privilege. Soldiers are stuck with the constancy of the war’s damage in a pervasive and unceasing way – left asking, as Sassoon does, if their fighting ever even mattered. In her book, The Peculiar Sanity of War, Celia Kingsbury articulates this point, writing, “The soldier is in a double sense betrayed, not just because he has been sent to the front where he may be asked to sacrifice his life, but because it is not politic for those at home to acknowledge the truth of his mission,” (116). The soldier’s inability to escape his infliction allows him a fullness of sight that those mediating his trauma could never acknowledge – and so the complexity of his experience is denied and categorized through diagnosis. As Septimus and Reiza leave Dr. Bradshaw’s office, Septimus sees Bradshaw’s car and notes, “that the upkeep of that motor car alone must cost him quite a lot,” (Woolf 96). The irony here is that Septimus, who moments before was condemned and patronized for his lack of “divine proportion”, experiences a paralyzing insight about Dr. William Bradshaw no one else, except, perhaps, the reader, is willing to acknowledge. For a nation attempting to defend its involvement in a contentious and destructive conflict, harnessing doctors who denied the severity of injuries, was an important aspect of utilizing medical diagnosis as an apparatus of power. Bradshaw no one else, except, perhaps, the reader, is willing to acknowledge. For a nation attempting to defend its involvement in a contentious and destructive conflict, harnessing doctors who denied the severity of injuries, was an important aspect of utilizing medical diagnosis as an apparatus of power.

However, there is evidence showing how ultimately Sassoon and Septimus’s insights of the war as witnesses were inherently threatening to the national apparatus of diagnosis. Sassoon, who, in one brief moment of dissent, transformed from the physical quintessence of all an army man should be into an unclassified, “broken” enemy to the country, understood that the inflictions of war do not stop at the mere suffering of physical wounds. The state must reckon with the fact the war disintegrates these embodiments of heroes. So, in an attempt to preserve nationalistic power, they isolate these figures into spaces where their dissent is categorized as a condition of their unsteadiness and can be contained. Though figures like Sassoon were ostracized and contained into medical spaces to counteract outward social defiance to the war, categorizing these one-time war heroes as “damaged” had the potential to undermine the masculine sense of heroism war often hinges upon.

In her book The Female Malady, Elaine Showalter writes, “By 1916… shellshock cases accounted for 40 percent of the casualties in the fighting zones. By the end of the war, 80,000 cases had passed through army medical facilities... This parade of emotionally incapacitated men was in itself a shocking contrast to the heroic vision and masculinist fantasies of men,” (168-9). Britain was scrambling to figure out how to simultaneously contain the trauma its participation in the war had wrought, keep enough men fighting out on the field, and maintain a sense of illusion

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Sinclair Willman that all was well for the public, civilian sphere. Their approach was to exacerbate denial. “[The] pressure of public opinion, persuaded the Army Council to classify shell shock as a ‘wound’ late in 1915 and rather than risk ‘lunatics at the loose in their rear’ it organized rapid evacuation of these cases,” writes A.D Macleod in his article “Shell Shock: Gordon Holmes and the Great War”. Shell shock was a loaded and threatening phenomenon and the solution the British devised was to simply avoid acknowledging it when diagnosing patients. General Routine Order. No 2384 declared if any soldier “without any visible wound become[s] non-effective”, their doctor was supposed to write “Not Yet Diagnosed, Nervous” (Kingsbury 116). The nationalistic medical protocol put the blame of shell shock on the soldier and his “nerves” and in doing so, shows the extent to which the nation was uninterested in taking responsibility for the deterioration of these men’s minds and bodies. At the same time, evading obvious causation at the root of this trauma – the war itself – reveals the anxiety of the nation and its fear that they will not be able to contain the uncontainable.

It is in the spaces of Craiglockhart War Hospital and, in Mrs. Dalloway, “Holmes’s homes (95), where the tension between the denial the nation was attempting to cultivate through the apparatus of diagnosis and the patient’s understanding of his act of witness comes to a head. In his essay “The Blameless Physician: Narrative and Pain, Sassoon and Rivers”, Robert Hemmings dissects the powerful potential of narrative that arises out of medical diagnosis. He writes, “the narratives exchanged between patient and physician in the therapeutic models that prevailed in early twentieth-century psychoanalysis were typically mediated by the physician through the case study, over which he had absolute narrative and interpretive control in spite of the patient’s resistance” (109). Hemmings then articulates the concept of “surnarratives” – the physician’s attempt “to fill in (the patient’s) gaps with carefully considered supporting interpretations that draw up the dissociated memory from the murky depths of the unconscious to the consciousness, and to the surface of the narrative,” (110). He ultimately argues that the patient then retaliates with his or her own sur-narrative and certain narratives enter into the twentieth-century modernist literature of patients – as was the case for Siegfried Sassoon. What Hemmings describes is a tension between the doctor and patient located in the fact that there is respective power in their interpretation of the treatment. While the doctor exerts a more systematic apparatus of power through diagnosis, there always remains the possibility that the patient will examine his or her own experience and find means to express his or her own version of the treatment. These patients’ narratives reveal the instability of medically defined categories and allow us to understand the war’s destruction in more nuanced, divisive terms.

During his time at Craiglockhart War Hospital, Siegfried Sassoon finished the last volume of his autobiographical fiction series Sherston’s Progress. In the novel, he changes the name of the hospital to “Slateford War Hospital” (11) but keeps the name of his doctor, “Rivers”, preserved. While in truth much of the novel is dedicated to examining the amicable relationship the protagonist, Sherston,

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Denial, Diagnosis, and Witness and Rivers, develop (as Sassoon and W.H.R. Rivers also enjoyed during Sassoon’s institutionalization), Sassoon’s decision to preserve the name of his physician in a narrative he was constructing was not insignificant. This choice, I believe, operated as an active retort to the implicit struggle between the doctor and patient to control the narrative of “truth”.

When bearing witness, one must always grapple with the question of their individual culpability. After long having his own witness to the war systematically shut down and obscured, Sassoon was able to express his insight and experience of trauma through a technology that preserves perspective throughout time. However, medical diagnosis, as a politically motivated apparatus, changes with time. Its implementation is dependent on circumstances that make it unstable in its function and rhetoric. One need only recognize the rhetorical transformation in how we discuss the trauma of war today.

The diagnoses of shell shock and “nerves” have converted into the notably more nuanced diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder. Surely, this is a positive shift in rhetoric, one that acknowledges the realities and complexity of trauma that war can produce. But the very fact that rhetorical transformation is possible within this apparatus indicates medical diagnoses’ inability to contain bodies and minds indefinitely – eventually, the state will lose power of these categorizes they defined. Siegfried Sassoon’s writing and Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, however, have been successfully canonized in this “literature of aftermath” (Beidler 1). They endure steadily in a technological tradition that cannot and does not ask its content to transform. It matters not that Septimus Smith eventually meets his end in the course of the novel - he remains immortalized through Woolf’s words and willingness to accept her own act of witness. Narratives, unlike diagnosis, have the power of endurance. They last meaningfully in our minds, time, and space.

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Sinclair Willman Works Cited Beidler, Philip D. “The Great Party-Crasher: Mrs. Dalloway, the Great Gatsby, and the Cultures of World War I Remembrance.” War, Literature & the Arts: An International Journal of the Humanities, Vol. 25, Jan. 2013, pp. 1-23.

EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login. aspx?direct=true&db=mth&AN=9 4829631&site=ehost-live.

Bergen, Leo Van. “Medicine and Medical Service.” 1914-1918 Online: International Encyclopedia of the First World War. Freie Universitat Berlin, 8 Jan. 2017.

Web. 9 Feb. 2017.

Froula, C. “Mrs. Dalloway’s Postwar Elegy: Women, War, and the Art of Mourning.” Modernism/modernity, vol. 9 no. 1, 2002, pp. 125-163. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mod.2002.0007 Fussell, Winter, and Winter, J. M. The Great War and Modern Memory. New ed.

New York: Oxford UP, 2013. Print.

Giddings, Robert. “Finished With The War: A Soldier’s Declaration”. The War Poets: the Lives and Writings of the 1914-18 War Poets. London: Bloomsbury, 1990. Print.

Hemmings, R. “”The Blameless Physician”: Narrative and Pain, Sassoon and Rivers.” Literature and Medicine, vol. 24 no. 1, 2005, pp. 109-126. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/lm.2005.0026.

Kingsbury, Celia Malone. The Peculiar Sanity of War: Hysteria in the Literature of World War I. Lubbock: Texas Tech UP, 2002. Print.

Macleod, A D. “Shell Shock, Gordon Holmes and the Great War.” Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine 97.2 (2004): 86–89. Print.

Sassoon, Kain, Lyre, Corrigan, and Corrigan, Felicitas. Siegfried Sassoon: Poet’s Pilgrimage. London: V. Gollancz, 1973. Print.

Sassoon, Siegfried, Saul Kain, and Pinchbeck Lyre. Sherston’s Progress. London: Faber and Faber, 1983. Print.

Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady : Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin, 1987. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando: Harcourt, 1925. Print.

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Denial, Diagnosis, and Witness Showalter, Elaine.â&#x20AC;ŻThe Female Malady : Women, Madness, and English Culture, 1830-1980. New York, N.Y., U.S.A.: Penguin, 1987. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Mrs. Dalloway. Orlando: Harcourt, 1925. Print.

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Authors and Artists Kayla Beckman graduated from UCLA in the summer of 2018 with a B.S. in Applied

Math, a B.A. in Classical Civilizations, and a Minor in Latin. This paper is the third she wrote while at UCLA which cites a comic book or graphic novel as its primary source material. She continued to study different depictions of lesbian relationships while in the Classics department, during which time she worked on an independent research paper titled Considering Representations of Female Same-Sex Relationships In Roman-Era Antiquity. She is currently the marketing manager at an independent bookstore in the Bay Area.

Hattie Grimm is an undergraduate Art Education student at UW Madison from

Oak Park, IL. Her explorations in collage focus on relationships with color and the immediacy of material. “Things are Beautiful If You Love Them” and “who are YOU to tell ME” deal with personal appreciation and independence. She is very excited to be a part of the Journal!

Ashley Jablonski is an artist and poet who resides in Wausau, Wisconsin. Currently,

she is attending the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point for a Bachelor Degree in Sociology, and had received her Associate’s Degree in Arts and Science from the University of Wisconsin-Marathon County in 2012. You can further connect with her with Instagram at @AshleyJablonskiArt.

Noa Levhar was born in Israel in 1995 and moved to the United States when she

was 6 years old. She fell in love with the English language, ironically, after reading Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince. In 2014, she moved to Illinois to attend Northwestern University and study English literature. She was published in Illinois’ Best Emerging Poets: An Anthology, and currently writes in Chicago, where she consumes an absurd amount of coffee and tacos (separately) while daydreaming about Jane Austen.

Daniella Martino is a third year student at Northwestern University, majoring in

English Literature and Theatre with a certificate in Musical Theatre. Her academic interests include Renaissance poetry, nineteenth-century American literature, and book history. Her senior honors thesis will focus on John Donne’s Poems from the 1633 edition onwards.

Maggie McMillin is a recent graduate of the University of Michigan, where she

majored in English and International Studies. Her academic interests include feminist and postcolonial theory, modernist poetry, and contemporary world literatures. She recently completed a senior thesis examining the international scope of Richard Wright’s haiku poems.

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Authors and Artists

Thomas Erik Nielsen is a New York City-based writer and film score composer

with a lifelong passion for music and its relationship to storytelling. Currently a senior at Columbia University, Thomas is majoring in music and English literature with a concentration in Chinese. His latest composition is a piano trio score for the silent film Manhatta (1921), considered to be the first American avant-garde film; this soundtrack was recorded by the Longleash piano trio in 2018. He also recently completed an extended essay on music and distraction in Shakespeare’s plays. When he is not writing or composing, Thomas enjoys exploring New York City or finding a new coffee shop to try.

Spencer Polk, author of “John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath: Biblical,

Anthropological, and Textual Intersections Towards Ecological and Social Harmony” is from Verona, WI and is a sophomore at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota where he is majoring in Geography, Justice and Peace Studies, and German with a minor in Sustainability. He enjoys researching human-environment systems and the physical and cognitive process of change towards sustainability, especially in the context of climate change. In his free time he likes biking, photography, hiking, playing the viola, and rowing on the Mississippi River.

Joscelyn Sager is a sophomore at UW Barron County and is working towards her

BFA. Her love is painting, she uses both acrylic and oil as a medium depending upon what she wants from a piece. Her favorite genre of art is surrealism. Artists like Dorothea Tanning, Salvador Dali, and Vladimir Kush are inspirations. Most of her artwork is nature based, and in many of her pieces she tries to highlight different conservation issues that are deeply concerning to her.

Sinclair Willman is a senior studying English Literature and Theatre at Northwestern

University. Born in London and raised in Hong Kong and Seattle, her academic interests lie in colonialist phantasmagorias, the abject feminine, queer theory, and environmental literature. She is fascinated by the role of adapter as author in the transmutation of literature into performance and hopes to engage with this subject deeply as she begins her career in the arts.

Cover Art: “You’re Gonna Miss Me When I’m Gone”

By Joscelyn Sager