Apollon eJounal - Issue XII - Spring 2021 by Apollon eJournal

Apollon

SPRING 2021

UNDERGRADUATE DIGITAL JOURNAL FOR THE HUMANITIES AT FAIRFIELD UNIVERSITY

ISSUE XII

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CONTENT “The Dead Walking Behind Us: Queer 'Elegy,' Classical Eros, and Desire as Translation in Oscar Wilde and A.E. Housman” by Kit Pyne-Jaeger, Cornell University

pages 4-25

“Was One Franc Enough to ‘Buy Your Way In’ to the Belle Epoque?” by Xavier Reader, the University of Western Australia

pages 26-45

“The Use and Abuse of Philosophy in History: James Warley Miles and the Dangers of Racist Dehistoricization” by Patrick Wohlscheid, College of Charleston

pages 46-67

“Stars – They’re Just Like Us!: Confidential Magazine and the Power of the Public” by Renee Ong, Yale University

pages 68-84

“Fate in a Fatalistic World” by Emily Ward, University of Notre Dame

pages 85-99

“The Real Jews”: Defining Israeli Identity in Politics and Cinema” by Sophia Hernandez Tragesser, University of St. Thomas

pages 100-116

“THE DEAD WALKING BEHIND US: QUEER 'ELEGY,' CLASSICAL EROS, AND DESIRE AS TRANSLATION IN OSCAR WILDE AND A.E. HOUSMAN”

BY KIT PYNE-JAEGER, CORNELL UNIVERSITY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Kit Pyne-Jaeger is a senior at Cornell University, majoring in Victorian Studies, Classics and English Literature in the College Scholar Program and graduating in Fall 2020. They have been awarded the Corson-Browning Poetry Prize and the George Harmon Coxe Fiction and Poetry Awards from the English Department as well as the 2020 Harry Caplan Travel Fellowship from the Classics Department. Their work has previously appeared in The Haley Classical Journal.

In his 1997 play The Invention of Love, Czech playwright Tom Stoppard includes a scene wherein Oscar Wilde's close friend, the journalist Frank Harris, is seen rowing the River Styx in a murky, classicized underworld with two ahistorical companions: politician Henry Labouchère and Chamberlain, an acquaintance of the fin-de-siècle English poet A.E. Housman. Harris mentions offhandedly his first introduction to Housman's poems:

HARRIS. Robbie Ross gave me this man's poems. He got several off by heart to tell them to Oscar when he went to see him in prison. [...] CHAMBERLAIN. Housman? I know him! HARRIS. I think he stayed with the wrong people in Shropshire. I never read such a book for telling you you're better off dead.1

This exchange offers an elegant summary of the network of influences, temporalities, and cultural points of reference this paper will apply to the poetics of Wilde and Housman. Robert Baldwin "Robbie" Ross, Wilde's supposed first male lover, did in fact memorize poetry to recite to Wilde during prison visits, including a number of poems from Housman's first and best-known poetry collection, A Shropshire Lad. Though their sexual relationship lasted only a short time, Ross remained wholeheartedly devoted to Wilde, nursing him on his deathbed and defending his literary legacy after his death. Housman, too, nurtured a steadfast devotion to a man

Tom Stoppard. The Invention of Love. London: Faber & Faber, 1997, p. 88.

inaccessible to him—his heterosexual college friend Moses Jackson—after Jackson's death and until his own. The image is a poignant one: Ross, separated physically from Wilde by the bars of his cell and emotionally by Wilde's love for his "lily of lilies" Alfred Douglas, communicating his affection by reciting the poems of another man whose beloved was both physically and emotionally out of his reach. (When A Shropshire Lad was published in 1896, Jackson was married with children and living in India as the principal of Sind College, Karachi.) Stoppard locates Harris' narration of this moment in a stylized Greco-Roman underworld, contextualizing its evocation of love, longing, absence, and "translation" in a landscape that both Wilde and Housman, gifted Oxonian classicists, would have recognized as appropriate. Using Anne Carson's characterization of classical "eros as lack" in Eros the Bittersweet, this paper will explore the queer resonance of depictions of eros directed at an inaccessible or unresponsive love object in Wilde and Housman's poetics, focusing specifically on the positioning of death as a component of, rather than an obstacle to, eros. To contextualize both the genre of Victorian elegy as Housman and Wilde would have understood it and the poetic framework available for the erotic lack of eros at the end of the 19th century, it is necessary first to turn to the text that helped to define elegy within its century and was certainly formative to the late Victorian perspective on the literary homoerotic. Alfred, Lord Tennyson wrote his magnum opus, the 732stanza "In Memoriam A.H.H.," over the course of sixteen years following the untimely death of his beloved friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Though it can be argued that Tennyson's flights into metaphysics and theology render it something other than a

simple elegy, "In Memoriam" exemplifies Cavitch's definition of elegy as "a poem about being left behind [...] a genre that enables fantasies about worlds we cannot yet reach."2 In a passage that is the opposite of metaphysical, Tennyson mourns that, not knowing of Hallam's death, he was "Expecting still his advent home; / And ever met him on his way / With wishes, thinking, 'here to-day,' / Or 'here to-morrow will he come.'"3 This is a simple expression of the ordinary experience of grief, recalling one's hope and realizing once again that the loved one's "advent home" will never occur again, and that, with "no second friend," the poet is left behind, helpless. He goes on to envision "worlds he cannot yet reach" both in allegorical conceits of fantasy—comparing himself to "a happy lover" discovering his beloved's absence,4 a widower feeling his wife's "place is empty,"5 and so forth—and in death itself, the only event that promises the potential of a reunion: "My Arthur, whom I shall not see / Till all my widow'd race be run."6 Carson, defining eros as a process of triangulation, explains that "as the planes of vision jump, the actual self and the ideal self and the difference between them connect in one triangle momentarily"7—the "ideal self" being the imaginary self able to join with and possess the love object, which operates in the mirage-like context of an unreachable, imaginary future.

Max Cavitch. American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to Whitman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007, p. 1. 3 Ibid, p. 7, 21-24. 4 Ibid, p. 9, 1-8. 5 Ibid, p. 14, 1-4. 6 Ibid, p. 10, 17-18. 7 Anne Carson. Eros the Bittersweet. McLean: Dalkey Archive Press, 1986, p. 62.

Photo by Hulton-Deutsch from the Hulton-Deutsch Collection via Getty Images from Poetry Foundation

The gulf between those selves, Carson says, is the space where eros is experienced, eroticizing lack not only through the absence of the love object but through the absence of an (under)world where contact with the love object is possible. When Tennyson imagines renewed contact, spiritual or physical, with Hallam, it is in the context of Hallam "from the grave / [Reaching] out dead hands to comfort me,"8 or of their being welcomed into heaven as a "single soul,"9 unified both in body and mind. Referring specifically to "In Memoriam," Craft concludes that "the elegiac mode constrains the desire it also enables: the sundering of death instigates an insistent

8 9

Cavitch, p. 81, 15-16. Ibid, p. 85, 44.

reparational longing, yet it claustrates the object of this desire on the far side of a divide that interdicts touch even as it incites the desire for touching."10 The death of Hallam functions as the catalyst for the new-found lack of the love object that makes possible the tender longing of "In Memoriam"'s homoerotic eros, and thus death, having produced Tennyson's eros, is also the only possibility for its resolution, the only space where desire can be fulfilled. (The River Styx, as it were, must be crossed.) However, Craft also argues of "In Memoriam" that "death and not gender is the differential out of which longing is so painfully born; it is death that breaches the perfect male couple and opens it to the circulations of desire."11 Conversely, I argue that in applying Carson's interpretation of classical eros to "In Memoriam," it becomes clear that both death and gender enable the opening of the gap of eros, firstly because Tennyson's portrayal of his relationship with Hallam relies on conceptions of "love" and "death" mediated specifically by Victorian archetypes of male homosociality, and secondly because Tennyson's rhetoric, scope, intertextuality, tradition—in short, his poem's historicity—are in many ways unique to the experience and education of the Victorian man. Commenting on the poetics of male love in The Invention of Love, Reckford says that "'love of comrades,' as Stoppard suggests, is more than euphemism or late-Victorian sentimentality,"12 and that "the true lover-friend, the true comrade,

Craft, p. 58. Ibid. 12 Kenneth Reckford. "Stoppard's Housman." Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the Classics 9, no. 2 (2001): 128. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20163845. 11

will die for his friend, or descend to Hades to (try to) rescue him, or die by his side in battle."13 The 'love of comrades' so extolled by Stoppard's Housman is not merely the playwright's invention, nor is it the historical Housman's; it is a trope, perpetuated by Victorian classicists like John Addington Symonds who advocated a doctrine of spiritualized male love, that played a substantial role in the English literary and cultural conception of male homosociality at least until the Second World War.14 In "In Memoriam," Tennyson declares, "Ah yet, ev'n yet, if this might be, / I, falling on his faithful heart, / Would breathing thro' his lips impart / The life that almost dies in me."15 This is the quintessential "love of comrades," holy and self-sacrificing, that would be given its purest form in the likes of Wilde's speech propounding "the love that dare not speak its name" during his trial at the Old Bailey and poems like Housman's "Diffugere nives" (a translation of Horace) or "If truth in hearts that perish." "In Memoriam" "[discloses] homosexual desire as indissociable from death,"16 because, in the developing literary tradition of comrade love, death—death as proof of devotion to one another, death as the instigator of longing and suffering but also the sole opportunity for that suffering to end—defined intimate male friendship and, by extension, queer desire as Wilde and Housman understood it.

Reckford, p. 129. The trope is common in poetry of the First World War, much of which, tonally and prosodically, recalls the classicized homoerotic friendships of the fin-de-siècle; cf. Ivor Gurney's "Servitude" ("only the love of comrades sweetens all"), Siegfried Sassoon's "Absolution" ("what need we more, my comrades and my brothers?"), and "Modernism, Male Intimacy and the Great War," Sarah Cole. 15 Cavitch, p. 19, 13-16. 16 Craft, p. 57. 14

Wilde's first and only collection of poems, published in 1881, three years after his graduation from Oxford's Magdalen College, postdated "In Memoriam" by some thirty years, but made extensive use of both its stanzaic structure and its treatment of desire as eroticized lack. Though few of Wilde's poems from this period are explicitly queer, and none to the elaborate and erotic extent of "In Memoriam," there is nonetheless a queer significance to be found in his characteristic treatment of the love object as inaccessible or forbidden. His earliest surviving poem, "Ye Shall Be Gods," written while he was a student at Trinity College Dublin (1871-1874), includes a quatrain already redolent of Tennyson's eros: "But the life of man is a sorrow / And death a relief from pain, / For love only lasts till tomorrow / And life without love is vain."17 Though this is an aside in a poem about religious tensions between Hellenism and Christianity, in a matter of four lines it evokes Tennyson and presages Housman in identifying love as life's ultimate achievement, the loss of love as the instigator of the pain that produces the poetry of eros, and death—even though it may have been the cause of love's loss—as the only possible resolution to that pain. The first of Wilde's poems that can genuinely be said to eroticize elegy in the manner of Tennyson, however, is not written for a literal lover, but for a literary one: it is "The Grave of Keats," a figure to whom Wilde would return as an idealized "lost love" throughout his verse. He laments the poet's untimely demise as Tennyson does Hallam's sudden loss, with reference to his beauty, his conversion from lover to love object, and his potential

Oscar Wilde. Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New York City: HarperCollins, 2003. First published 1908, p. 1, 9-12.

as a Christ figure: "Taken from life when life and love were new / The youngest of the martyrs here is lain, / Fair as Sebastian, and as early slain." 18 Fulfilled and mutual love is once again prioritized as the primary purpose of life (the reference is likely to Keats' fiancée Fanny Brawne), but exists only in the past tense or the imaginary future; just as Keats' lackless love was disrupted by his death, the speaker's love can only ever be the classical eros of lack, fulfilled in romantic fantasy, because its object is no longer living. Per Carson, "Who ever desires what is not gone? No one. The Greeks were clear on this. They invented eros to express it."19 The speaker of "The Grave of Keats" desires him specifically in his goneness, eroticizing his body in its "martyred" state with a telling comparison to the Early Christian martyr Saint Sebastian, who had become a highly recognizable "icon of erotically charged and then specifically homosexual meaning" in Victorian literary and aesthetic culture by about 1850.20 Though there is no evidence that Keats himself was queer, Wilde's use of Sebastian as imagistic comparison renders Keats a newly queer love object whose beauty stems from his death and whose queerness stems from his absence. (By this I mean not that the dead Keats retroactively becomes queer himself, but that he is invoked in a "queer" role as the object of the classical eros that Tennyson, with "In Memoriam," had already established as a paradigm of male intimacy and homoerotic desire.) Wilde reaffirms Keats' transposition into this role in apostrophe that associates him simultaneously with queerness, desirability, and loss: "O proudest heart that broke

Wilde, p. 1, 3-5. Carson, p. 11. 20 Kaye, p. 271. 19

for misery! / O sweetest lips since those of Mitylene!"21 Keats, once the lover elegizing the "misery" of his loss, is now himself elegized in terms that resemble the list of body parts characteristic of, for instance, the Renaissance blazon, in which the passive love object is described in sensuously physical terms by the poet-lover. Poetry of eros, Wilde seems to suggest, is an intergenerational cycle of queer love and loss in which lover and love object change places fluidly, in a manner reminiscent of the aging of eromenos into erastes in the Platonic paradigm of same-sex love. The reference to "those of Mitylene" emphasizes the historicity of the cycle by bringing Keats, and thus Wilde, into conversation with some of the earliest known classical poets, Sappho and Alcaeus, both of whom lived in Mytilene on Lesbos in the sixth century B.C. and wrote in praise of queer love and sexuality. Sappho was already a lesbian icon of sorts in late Victorian queer culture—lesbian couple Katharine Bradley and Edith Cooper, friends of Wilde's who published under the pseudonym "Michael Field," were known for their translations of her verse—and no less a personage than Cicero had once "complained that [Alcaeus] was extravagant in writing of 'the love of youths.'"22 The Keatsian "Charmides" references yet another classical text whose tacit presence lends a queer subtext to a poem ostensibly about heterosexual relationships, though depicted in the same elegiac terms of eros as lack, devoted to an inaccessible or absent lover. Behrendt reminds the reader that "Charmides is the beautiful youth to whom Socrates is attracted in Plato's dialogue entitled 'Charmides, or Temperance,'"23

Wilde, p. 1, 9-10. Louis Crompton. Homosexuality and Civilization. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006, p. 28. 23 Patricia Behrendt. Oscar Wilde: Eros and Aesthetics. New York City: St. Martin's Press, 1991, p. 48. 22

and the poem's first line—"He was a Grecian lad"—seems a wry confirmation to the classically educated reader that this Charmides, subtextually if not narratively, is the same as Plato's, a figure in whom one can recognize beauty and queerness. This Charmides' foremost desire is to make love to a statue of the virgin goddess Athena, despite the risk he runs by doing so: "Ready for death with parted lips he stood, / And well content at such a price to see / That calm wide brow, that terrible maidenhood, / The marvel of that pitiless chastity."24 Carson, treating again the triangular geometry of eros, comments that "the ruse of the triangle is not a trivial mental maneuver. We see in it the radical constitution of desire. For, where eros is lack, its activation calls for three structural components —lover, beloved and that which comes between them."25 Charmides grasps that death is what will interpose itself between himself and his love object in order to produce eros' eroticized lack and thus the poem's queerness, both in terms of the same-sex intimacy of its elegiac-erotic tradition and in terms of the object of queer desire being historically inaccessible to the Victorian lover. Appropriately for the conventions of queer eros, then, it does not first seem to be Charmides who is "dead," but Athena, whose stone body is described in terms not unlike those of a corpse ("pale and argent body," "chill and icy breast”26). Ultimately, however, the first section of this poem proves to be a subversion of the paradigm of queer eros Wilde enacts elsewhere: after a sojourn in the wilderness (in which he is compared to Herakles' young lover Hylas, Narcissus, and the androgynous Dionysos

Wilde, p. 1921. Carson, p. 16. 26 Wilde, p. 1922. 25

rather than uncomplicatedly heterosexual figures), Charmides is killed by his love object, who descends from Olympus to exact justice for his crime, thus upending the necessity of eros for a love object who will not or cannot respond. In noting "the problematic characteristics Wilde associates with heterosexual passion [...]," Behrendt characterizes those of "Charmides" as "(1) self-centered sexual desire where the love object is unresponsive, inanimate, or dead [and] (2) sexual activity which prompts violent retribution."27 I would argue that these do not reflect Wilde's distaste for "heterosexual passion," but rather, allegorically, his anxieties about the threats Late Victorian society posed to the expression of queer desire. Athena represents potential negative outcomes of the unlawful desire that precedes the eroticized separation of eros, in which the love object reverses the paradigm, claims the active role, and punishes the lover for their desire with legal repercussion or even death. Conversely, in the second section of "Charmides," the body of Charmides (now itself the passive love object) washes up on the shore near Athens, where a dryad in Artemis's service finds him and attempts to make love to him: "one white girl, who / [...] nor thought it sin / To yield her treasure unto one so fair, / And lay beside him, thirsty with love's drouth, / Called him soft names, played with his tangled hair, / And with hot lips made havoc of his mouth / Afraid he might not wake."28 Here the dryad, too, seeks intimacy and contact with a love object unable to respond to her, but unlike Athena, Charmides is definitively dead and thus fulfills the demand of Tennysonian

27 28

Behrendt, p. 50. Wilde, pp. 1934-1935.

eros, where the possibility of the love object being revived by the lover's touch must remain only a sorrowful fantasy. Shortly thereafter, the dryad's role as elegiac lover is disrupted by her own death from an arrow wound, a punishment for her having "broken the law" of chastity as a servant of Artemis: "This murderous paramour, this unbidden guest, / Pierced and struck deep [...] / Sobbing her life out with a bitter cry / On the boy's body fell the Dryad maid, / Sobbing for incomplete virginity / And raptures unenjoyed, and pleasures dead."29 It appears that, like Charmides, the Dryad has been "caught" in her unlawful desire and punished, meaning that she cannot outlive him, as the lover in the paradigm of eros must, to elegize him and aspire to a reunion in death. Even in her dying moments, she enacts the eros-as-lack of the lover, mourning the mutual, fulfilling love that was never accessible to her in much the same terms as the speaker of "The Grave of Keats" mourns Keats' death before his own birth.

Wilde, p. 1943.

Photo by Time Life Pictures via Getty Images from Poetry Foundation

Yet in the third and final section of the poem, the paradigm renews itself and achieves the completion, in the fantasy of afterlife, that must otherwise remain mere fantasy for elegists like Tennyson; the two find one another in "melancholy moonless Acheron,"30 where "nigher ever did their young mouths draw / Until they seemed one perfect rose of flame,"31 and "once their lips could meet / In that wild throb when all existences / Seemed narrowed to one single ecstasy."32 Admittedly, this passage is more nakedly sexual than Tennyson's image of himself and Hallam entering the afterlife as a "single soul," but Wilde's description of the unification of two lovers into one mouth,

Wilde, p. 1947. Wilde, p. 1948. 32 Wilde, p. 1950. 31

one body, and one existence in their post-death passion nonetheless operates on the same principle—that eros, the desire that hinges on absence, can only be resolved by death as the ultimate experience of absence, moving oneself from reality into a landscape of the poetic unreal. In another poem of lost love, "Quia Multum Amavi," Wilde makes use of a strikingly Housmanian turn of phrase to refer to a lover who has left him grieving: "Hadst thou liked me less and loved me more [...] I had not now been sorrow's heritor."33 Coincidence or imitation, more than ten years later, Housman would begin an elegy of unrequited queer desire, XXXI in A Shropshire Lad, with the quatrain "Because I liked you better / Than suits a man to say, / It irked you, and I promised / I'd throw the thought away."34 This poem, which progresses to the pair bidding one another farewell, the offended love object asking the lover to "forget him,"35 and, with violent immediacy, the lover dead and informing the love object that, in dying, he has "kept his word,”36 both subverts and upholds the conventions of queer eros that were previously defined and explored by Tennyson and Wilde. The love object is not dead but is inaccessible to the lover and resistant to his unlawful desire in a straightforward, historical sense, thus literalizing Wilde's Olympian allegories and keeping the lack essential to eros intact. Though the lover, unusually, does die, that death does not lead his friend to compose an elegy of homoerotic longing, but seems rather to provide a

Wilde, p. 2018. Alfred Edward Housman. A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems: The Collected Poems of A.E. Housman. Edited by Archie Burnett. London: Penguin Classics, 2010, p. 31, 1, 1-4. 35 Housman, p. 31, 2, 3. 36 Housman, p. 31, 4. 4. 34

medium by which the lover can demonstrate his own steadfastness and the sacrificial depth of his devotion: he is prepared to die to keep a promise to his friend and the object of his love, a degree of complete commitment to the role of grieving yet constant lover that the reader sees mirrored in Tennyson's sixteen-year effort to memorialize his beloved Hallam. More conventional in their performance of classical eros are XXXII and XXXVII, poems presenting the speaker as the lover whose queer desire for other men is premised, first, on their having died before him, and, secondly, on his willingness to die for or with them, were it possible. XXXII presents the paradigm within the fantasy of an adolescent boy—"When I would muse in boyhood / The wild green woods among"37—emphasizing from the beginning the degree to which any potential for the superseding of eros-as lack to achieve genuine, permanent queer intimacy exists, for Housman as for Tennyson and Wilde, only in an imaginary context. The speaker goes on to describe his idealization of comrade love and elegiac eros as a young person: "It was not foes to conquer, / Nor sweethearts to be kind, / But it was friends to die for / That I would seek and find. / I sought them far and found them, / The sure, the straight, the brave [...] / They sought and found six feet of ground, / And there they died for me."38 Even in the fantasy of his own play, the speaker is aware that queer desire is a matter of death and loss, and that the best he can hope for as an adult with unlawful homosexual desires is either to express those desires in action, by dying for someone

37 38

Housman, p. 32, 1, 1-2. Housman, p. 32, 1, 5, … p. 32, 2, 8.

in sacrificial comrade love, or in language, by elegizing those friends who have died for him with a Tennysonian vocabulary of erotic lack. Housman's oeuvre is generally absent even the optimism that Tennyson and Wilde's depictions of queer reunion after death offer, as in XXXVII, a soldier's thoroughly star-crossed experience of queer love: "In blood and smoke and flame I lost my heart. / I lost it to a soldier and a foeman, / A chap that did not kill me, but he tried; / That took the sabre straight and took it striking, / And laughed and kissed his hand to me and died."39 Here, the lover must settle for a moment of admiration before the death of his love object—which he inflicted himself. This is perhaps the most brutal depiction of eros that has been treated in this paper, in its failure to offer the lover any comfort or amelioration for the lack that catalyzes his desire. It is impossible, however, to discuss Housman in relation to the question of erotic lack without addressing at more length his poems to and about Moses Jackson, whom he clearly loved deeply from a very young age and continued to love, judging by his poems and references to Jackson in his daybooks, until the end of Jackson's life, if not his own as well. Among his best-known poems, and certainly the best-known that is widely thought to refer to his relationship with Jackson, is VII of Additional Poems, the four-line verse that runs: "He would not stay for me; and who can wonder? / He would not stay for me to stand and gaze. / I shook his hand and tore my heart in sunder / And went with half my life about my ways."40 What is less often discussed, and what

39 40

Housman, p. 37, 1, 4-2, 4. Housman, p. 7, 1, 1-4.

is essential to a reading of this poem in the context of eros, is the fact that this is an almost direct quotation from "In Memoriam," wherein, leaving Hallam's funeral, the poet says to his sister, "Come; let us go; your cheeks are pale; / But half my life I leave behind."41 Though in Housman's verse the love object has not died, merely departed the speaker's company, the quotation of the phrase "half my life" suggests the profound loss of death and thus the necessity of so acute a loss to the space of longing into which the queer poet of eros writes. Carson says that "if we follow the trajectory of eros we consistently find it tracing out this same route: it moves out from the lover toward the beloved, then ricochets back to the lover himself and the hole in him, unnoticed before. Who is the real subject of most love poems? Not the beloved. It is that hole."42 In that sense, despite the emphasis this paper has placed on death as a signifier within the context of a theory of erotic lack in Victorian queer poetics, this verse is the best example present of classical eros in Carson's definition: its poignancy and its vividness are both engendered by the image of that sundering, the wound in the lover's body, emotion, and self that the love object's absence has created and that only complete reunion, and communion, with the love object can heal. Though it falls outside the scope of this paper, a further examination of Carson's theory of classical eros as applied to queer Victorian literary culture might shift its focus from the eros aspect to the classical aspect—that is, discussing the role of historicity and the historicizing process, specifically with reference to classics, in the paradigm of

41 42

Cavitch, p. 58, 5-6. Carson, p. 30.

eros as it applies to the queer Victorian consciousness. Poems like Tennyson's, Wilde's and Housman's—by highly educated scholars who had a wealth of knowledge of historical and literary context on which to draw, and an ability to deploy that context with an awareness of exactly the effect a given reference would produce—use a necromantic vocabulary of events, people, and modes of thought already past and dead, communicating erotic lack by translating it into a language made up of absence. Consider, for example, the relationship of Housman's "Epithalamion," "yielding" his "friend and comrade" to a wife, to Sappho 31, in which the speaker can only look on as a man charms the woman she loves, or the literary significance of the Greek adjective γλυκύπικρος, literally "sweetbitter," in the title of Wilde's highly homoerotic and sexually charged "Γλυκύπικρος Ερως." Stoppard's play concerns itself with these men's invention of love, and this paper has concerned itself with the invention of a triangulated paradigm of queer desire in the texts themselves, but what might we find if we turned instead to a triangulation of their selfhood, their writing, and the literary and historical traditions within which they identified themselves? What remains to be said about the translation of queer love?

BIBLIOGRAPHY Behrendt, Patricia. Oscar Wilde: Eros and Aesthetics. New York City: St. Martin's Press, 1991. Carson, Anne. Eros the Bittersweet. McLean: Dalkey Archive Press, 1998. Cavitch, Max. American Elegy: The Poetry of Mourning from the Puritans to

Whitman. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007. Craft, Christopher. Another Kind of Love: Male Homosexual Desire in English

Discourse, 1850-1920. Berkeley: U of California P, 1994. Crompton, Louis. Homosexuality and Civilization. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2006. Housman, Alfred Edward. A Shropshire Lad and Other Poems: The Collected Poems

of A.E. Housman. Edited by Archie Burnett. London: Penguin Classics, 2010. Kaye, Richard. "'Determined Raptures': St. Sebastian and the Victorian Discourse of Decadence." Victorian Literature and Culture 27, no. 1 (1999): 269-303. https://www.jstor.org/stable/25058450. Reckford, Kenneth. "Stoppard's Housman." Arion: A Journal of Humanities and the

Classics 9, no. 2 (2001): 108-149. https://www.jstor.org/stable/20163845. Stoppard, Tom. The Invention of Love. London: Faber & Faber, 1997. --. "The lad that loves you true." The Guardian (London, UK), June 3, 2006. https://www.theguardian.com/books/review/story/0,,1788971,00.html.

Tennyson, Alfred Lord. "In Memoriam A.H.H. OBIIT MDCCCXXXIII." Poems. New York City: Macmillan, 1908. Representative Poetry Online, University of Toronto Libraries. https://rpo.library.utoronto.ca/poems/memoriam-h-h-obiit-mdcccxxxiii-all133-poems. Wilde, Oscar. Complete Works of Oscar Wilde. New York City: HarperCollins, 2003. First published 1908.

“WAS ONE FRANC ENOUGH TO ‘BUY YOUR WAY IN’ TO THE BELLE EPOQUE?”

BY XAVIER READER, THE UNIVERSITY OF WESTERN AUSTRALIA

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Xavier Reader is a current undergraduate student majoring in history at the University of Western Australia. As of July 2020, he embarked on an Honours year to continue his interest in historiographical research and writing.

La Belle Epoque — translated as the good times or the beautiful era — was a phenomenon that took place throughout pre-war Western Europe, but is no better preserved than in metropolitan Paris, where the feeling and conceptualisation of Belle Epoque existed in a highly concentrated form. La Belle Epoque, encompassing the period between 1870 until the dawn of the First World War, saw Paris transform into the destination for pleasure and leisure, within a modern, healthful, and aesthetic metropolis. Paris was, by the fin de siecle [turn of the century], perceived as the most cosmopolitan city in Europe.1 Belle Epoque, a terminological creation of the post-war world, sought to reminisce in the nostalgia of these times, as above all, Belle Epoque was an experience, a feeling enjoyed by all who encountered it: “during the Belle Epoque, life in France was wonderfully, unmistakably good.”2 But to what extent is such nostalgia reflective of historical truth? Was this Belle Epoque the experience of all Parisian citizens? Historian Stephen Gundle, amongst other scholars, wholeheartedly disagrees with this assessment, under the pretext that this image of Belle Epoque has fully ignored the predominantly working-class composition of Paris at the time. For the working classes and the poor of Paris, the Belle Epoque was widely inaccessible, reserved almost exclusively for more “desirable” classes. Metropolitan Paris during la Belle Epoque sought to prescribe right to space and place within the urban landscape according to class distinctions. Public works and

Stephen Gundle, “Mapping the origins of glamour: Giovanni Boldini, Paris and the Belle Epoque,” Journal of European Studies 29, no. 1 (1999): 271. 2 Alistair Horne, Seven Ages of Paris (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), 291. 1

beautification projects — begun by Georges-Eugene Haussmann and continuing throughout the Third Republic — re-oriented Parisian streets and widened boulevards, created more green spaces, and improved sewerage networks and the city’s water supply,3 under the precedents of beautification, healthfulness, and modernisation: the physical hallmarks of la Belle Epoque. Haussmann’s urban renewal was equally responsible for geographically displacing approximately 350,000 people — all of whom were overwhelmingly poor4 — making huge swaths of central urban housing comparable to wealthy western arrondissements,5 and thus out of economic reach of the working-class population. For the working classes, barring an elite ten percent of highly skilled workers such as jewellers and mapmakers, the upper limit of annual rents was established by contemporary economist Arthur Raffalovich at 300 francs. 6 This made, by 1900, only 47.6 percent of central housing affordable to the working classes. 7 The result pushed the working classes to the periphery of Paris, an exodus reflected most prominently between 1872 and 1896, when the population of outlying areas inflated 62.3 percent.8 Here, the urban centre was, for the period of la Belle Epoque, “permanently reclaimed … for the affluent,”9 whilst the working classes were, if not

Harold Platt, “Exploding Cities: Housing the Masses in Paris, Chicago and Mexico City, 1850-2000,” Journal of Urban History 36, no. 5 (2010): 578. 4 Tyler Stovall, Transnational France: the Modern History of a Universal Nation (Boulder: Wallflower Press, 2015), 131. 5 Ann-Louise Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, 1850-1902 (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985), 59. 6 Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, 62. 7 Ibid, 62-3. 8 Ibid, 56. 9 Stovall, Transnational France, 131. 3

completely spatially excluded, far less visible from their isolated position on the periphery.

Figures 110 and 211 - These illustrations demonstrate the effect of Haussmannisation on the social composition of central housing. Figure 1, reflecting 1852, contains residences that accommodate a variety of social classes, with the working classes and the poor situated in the top rooms. Figure 2, from 1891, differs markedly, with all levels virtually identical, rendering them economically inaccessible to the working classes. Note the artistic inclusion of the outside, including a wide boulevard, sewerage pipes, and streetlight illumination.

Conditions on the metropolitan periphery were characterised by a complete lack of urban services,12 most notably roads and sanitation.13 In direct comparison to the urban centre, an investigation by Du Mesnil observed that “rarely was there any water

Bertall, “Coupe d’une maison Parisienne: five floors of the Parisian world,” Illustration, 11 January 1845. Artist unknown, “Electricité chez soi,” Le Magasin Pittoresque, May 1891. 12 Platt, “Exploding Cities: Housing the Masses in Paris,” 576-7 13 Michael Adcock, “Remaking Urban Space: Baron Haussmann and the Rebuilding of Paris, 1851-1870,” in University of Melbourne Journal 2, no. 2 (1996): 26-7. 10 11

at all,” and that up to sixty inhabitants would share a single toilet.14 In the first ten arrondissements of central Paris, however, 85 percent of buildings were directly serviced with spring water in 1900, with a low 11 percent not yet provided for.15 Similarly, by 1900 the majority of buildings in central arrondissements benefited from a direct sewer, compared with only 10-30 percent of buildings in outlying areas.16 This evidence led Shapiro to conclude that over half of citizens on the periphery lived in “less than sufficient conditions,”17 which, according to contemporary observers, had “surround[ed] Paris with a formidable belt of suffering humanity.” 18 Paris had, effectively, “been turned into two cities, one rich and one poor, and with the latter encircling the other.”19 The result situated central Paris – the space aligning to the representation of Belle Epoque – for exclusive use of more desirable social classes, and to the almost complete exclusion of the working classes. In line with Shapiro’s determination, the development of the centre — the physical manifestation of the Belle Epoque — was only “achieved at the expense of the periphery.”20 Yet, the workingclass presence didn’t entirely disappear to the periphery. Those that remained were forced into central side-streets and back-streets, resulting in massive — although almost invisible from the Haussmanised boulevards — overcrowding and increasing squalor.

Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, 72. Ibid, 74. 16 Ibid, 75. 17 Ibid, 76. 18 Ann-Louise Shapiro “Housing Reform in Paris: Social Space and Social Control,” French Historical Studies 12, no. 4 (1982): 488. 19 Platt, “Exploding Cities: Housing the Masses in Paris,” 576. 20 Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, 54. 15

As Shapiro observes, the “working class population was obliged to withdraw to the small, sordid lanes and dark alleys flanking the new boulevards.”21 Both here and on the periphery, working-class citizens reaped practically zero benefits from the public works that had secured the beautiful, healthful and modern era of Belle Epoque.22

Living conditions of the working classes in the urban centre and at the periphery. Figure 3 (left) shows an illustration of the Hôtel Brémant, a working-class residence, Eleventh Arrondissement, 1886.23 Figure 4 (top right) depicts the inside of a workingclass dwelling in 1900, with all occupants sharing one bed lacking a mattress.24 Figure 5 (bottom left) reflects typical workingclass accommodation in the Thirteenth Arrondissement in 1910.25

Ibid, 60. Platt, “Exploding Cities: Housing the Masses in Paris,” 577. 23 Norma Evenson, Paris: A Century of Change, 1878-1978 (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), 205. 24 Shapiro, Housing the Poor of Paris, 86. 25 Ibid, 49. 22

Scholarly literature reporting on the condition of the Parisian working classes during the Belle Epoque is deeply divided. For some, the working classes are situated as strong beneficiaries of the Belle Epoque era. Richard Wires points to evidence of “higher real wages” and “shorter working hours”26 to suggest that the working classes, alongside other social groups, experienced increased standards of living and greater opportunities for leisure.27 Paris was, for Wires, “not yet a city where life was too costly,”28 whereby even classes of limited income could experience the pleasures of Belle Epoque Paris, citing the picturesque boulevards of central Paris, with carousels and entertainment on every corner, and the plethora of “affordable” cafes and guinguettes found throughout.29 Stovall suggests that workers “began to have enough disposable income to take part in the burgeoning consumer culture”30 so characteristic of Belle Epoque, “especially in Paris.”31 There is some evidence to support this picture. As Gundle observes, “workers visited the stores and the great exhibition of 1900 … [and] people of all classes spent leisure time in public parks.”32 Alistair Horne points to an emergence of classist “levelling,” whereby throughout the Belle Epoque period, a plethora of affordable pleasures and forms of entertainment became accessible to the working-classes: café-concerts, bale musettes, guinguettes, and cabarets artistiques.33

Richard Wires, “Paris: La Belle Epoque,” Conspectus of History: Cities in History 1, no. 4 (1977): 60. Wires, “Paris: La Belle Epoque,” 60. 28 Ibid, 64. 29 Ibid, 64. 30 Stovall, Transnational France, 185. 31 Ibid, 185. 32 Gundle, “Mapping the origins of glamour, 273. 33 Horne, Seven Ages of Paris, 290. 26 27

Granted, from the early 1880s, café establishments developed over much of the metropolis, and by 1907, cinemas numbered over ten thousand.34 However, Jeremy Popkin’s considerably more thorough assessment demonstrates that while this vision does reflect a minority, the condition of the working classes “did not always rise in the years of expansion,”35 and with respect to the cost of living — which increased faster than wages post-190236 — definitively worsened. Successive legislation in 1892 and 1900 reduced male working hours from eleven to ten,37 and similarly for women in 1904.38 Whether this constituted a substantial improvement for workers is debatable: the campaign in 1906 for the eight-hour workday had been defeated,39 and new shorter hours were poorly enforced,40 making the workday still arduously long. The Journal du Dimanche reflected this aptly in 1893, reporting that “in most working households in Paris, the husband works, and so does the wife; they leave home at dawn, each one in a different direction, go to the shop [and] the factory … and they see each other again only in the late evening.”41 Stovall’s analysis led him to conclude that for 1900, the standard working week for the “lowest” classes “remained twelve hours per day, Monday through Saturday.”42 Further, a

Jeremy Popkin, A History of Modern France, 4th edition (New York: Routledge, 2016), 184-185. Popkin, A History of Modern France, 192. 36 Ibid, 192. 37 Ibid, 192. 38 Horne, Seven Ages of Paris, 294. 39 Keith Mann, Forging political identity: Silk and metal workers in Lyon, France, 1900-1939 (New York: Berghahn Books, 2010), 90. 40 Popkin, A History of Modern France, 192. 41 Martin Bruegel, “Workers’ Lunch Away from Home in the Paris of the Belle Epoque: The French Model of Meals as Norm and Practice,” French Historical Studies 38, no. 2 (2015): 260. 42 Stovall, Transnational France, 185. 35

comparative analysis of conditions between British and French workers found that, despite the heavily historicised poor conditions associated with British industrial workers, in 1907 the French worked 17 percent longer hours, for one quarter of the wage of their British counterparts.43 Additionally, Berlanstein evidences the tendency of workers to forego time off: “many laboured without a rest all week … or took days off out of sheer exhaustion … breaks in the work week were irregular and often nonexistent.”44 Thus, arguments cemented in the legislative improvement of working conditions should be not be taken exclusively at face value. Here, as Berlanstein aptly points out, “shorter hours” “did not … translate directly into increased leisure time”45 — an observation most scholars overlook — with increasing travel time between home and work continuing to exacerbate, to the point where any given factory “could expect to draw workers from several communes.” 46 Travel accessibility had, to some degree, been improved through a variety of new transportation systems: the unified city bus network, tramway, and omnibus system had “facilitate[d] commuting between peripheral neighbourhoods and the city centre”47 since as early as 1854. Yet, the extent to which these benefited the working classes was limited. In response to an 1883 recommendation to establish coordinated urban transportation services with “a uniform rate for all distances within the city and

Michael Dintenfass and Jean-Pierre Dormois, The British Industrial Decline (London: Routledge, 1999), 224. Lenard Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris, 1871-1914 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1984), 123. 45 Ibid, 123. 46 Ibid, 123. 47 Stovall, Transnational France, 132. 44

… special trains for workers early in the morning and late in the evening,” no measures eventuated.48 Supporting this theory, an investigation by Turot and Bellamy into conditions on the periphery noted the time and expense of traveling to and from the periphery would continue to limit lower-class accessibility to the central metropolitan space.49 For some, however, the changes invoked during the Belle Epoque era greatly transformed their work-leisure experience. In Jeanne Bouvier’s personal recollection of her work as a seamstress, the reduction in working hours was welcomed: before their implementation, she had been forced to work “until two in the morning nearly every day, and without … having eaten…”50 By the fin-de-siecle, however, Bouvier’s condition had improved markedly: earning five francs daily, she occasionally indulged in a visit to the Opera-Comique.51 On the whole, however, it is difficult — within this conceptualisation of long working hours, low wages, and cumbersome travel journeys to the centrality — to integrate the working classes with the typical image of la Belle Epoque. Exactly when and how — apart from rare opportunities — were the working classes expected to participate?

Shapiro “Housing Reform in Paris: Social Space and Social Control,” 492. Ibid, 498. 50 Popkin, A History of Modern France, 182. 51 Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris, 1871-1914, 136. 48 49

Figure 6. This illustration appeared on the cover of prominent newspaper Courrier Francais in 1888. It was accompanied by the quote, “Yes, papa, all day long, it’s against the rule for us to sit down.” Note how the landscape surrounding these figures suggests they reside on the periphery, away from the urban centre.52

Another useful way of assessing the extent of working-class participation is through comparison of working-class earnings compared to entry prices. Du Mesnil’s investigation into the working classes suggested that one franc was the minimum daily income required per household to meet life’s most basic necessities; however, over half of the households captured in his investigation failed to earn one franc per day.53 Similarly, a 1907 study encompassing over eight-hundred working-class budgets concluded that 80 percent of income was spent on food and rent. 54 The Expositions

Jean-Louis Forain, “Do as we do-ditch them!” Le Courrier Francais, 5 August 1888, 1. Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris, 1871-1914, 40. 54 Ibid, 40. 52 53

Universales are often hailed as, fittingly, universally accessible, even for classes of most limited income. This had been largely deliberate — the State kept admission prices at an “affordable” one franc in both 1889 and 190055 with subsidised train tickets providing further incentive for working classes to take part.56 The vast number of attendees provides some evidence that the expositions were largely accessible: welcoming 32 million in 1889 and 50 million in 1900.57 Importantly, however, one franc was equal to, if not more than, the daily earning power of at least half of Paris’ working class.58 Therefore, it seems ahistorical to interpret the Universal Expositions as a wonderland “anyone could enter.”59 Evidence of such sentiment existing at the time is expressed by the illustrator Widhopff in a 1900 edition of the Courrier Francois, which depicted “an old man in ragged clothes turning out his empty pocket and gesturing toward the Universal Exposition while remarking, ‘fortunately, there’s the fair.’”60 Similarly, a proposal to waive the 1889 Exposition fee on a particular day was not only shot down, but was justified under the pretence that “the saving of admission was not enough …f or a worker to pass up a day’s pay.” 61 Here, the “one franc

Charles Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: entertainment and festivity in turn-of-the-century France (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985), 89. 56 Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque, 89. 57 Ibid, 89. 58 Berlanstein, The Working People of Paris, 1871-1914, 20 59 Ibid, 83. 60 61

Ibid, 34-5. Ibid, 114.

benchmark” for the working classes is revealed as insufficient to “buy one’s way” into Belle Epoque.

Figures 762 (above) and 863 (on next page): The establishments frequented by the working class, above, often differed markedly from those, such as the Café de la Paix, below, which reflect the typical vision of la Belle Epoque.

Heidbrinck, “Rue de Tocqueville, 59 - Attendant L’Ouverture des portes,” Le Courrier Francais, May 27, 1888, p9. 63 Raymond Rudorff, The Belle Epoque: Paris in the ‘nineties (New York: Saturday Review Press, 1973), 68. 62

Café-concerts — the Folies Bergere and the Moulin Rouge in particular — reflect a similar phenomenon. Compared to other forms of entertainment, caféconcerts were among the cheapest and therefore most accessible to the working classes.64 In the lead up to the fin-de-siecle, the majority of seats at the Folies

Bergere were priced at two francs,65 whilst the Moulin Rougein 1900 would charge two to three.66 Entrance was, in relation to working-class income, not easily affordable, but an occasional decadence. However this “democratisation of leisure” was short-lived, and would exclude more swaths of the working classes by 1903, when the Folies

Bergere’s pricing increased to three francs for standing room, and four to six for a seat,67 with the Moulin Rouge following suit, but charging four to nine.68 It becomes clear, in line with Rearick’s characterization of the era, even a few francs were often

Rearick, Pleasures of the Belle Epoque, 83. Ibid, 84. 66 Ibid, 91. 67 Ibid, 95. 68 Ibid, 95. 65

“beyond the means of the poor,”69 making the case that, with respect to pleasure and leisure — two central tenets of the Belle Epoque — the working classes, by and large, were not great beneficiaries. From this analysis, it is clear that this Parisian image does not evoke Belle Epoque. Gundle appears completely correct in his assertion that, “this [Belle Epoque] atmosphere, which … was associated with the image of Paris tout court, was in reality largely confined to the West and centre, the parts that Haussmann had made over.”70 What was for the middle classes and the bourgeois Belle Epoque, was, for the working classes, to borrow Edward Udovics’ terminology, la misere: reflecting the “collective experiences of marginalisation … [and] poverty”71 — a relationship that was evidently inversely proportional to one another. Such nostalgia for the pre-war era — encapsulated through Belle Epoque — reveals itself to be, for large stratifications of society, mere construction of a memory, an unsurprising creation of the post-war world yearning to return to the irretrievable past. Belle Epoque was “only for the wealthy, and only in retrospect after the war.”72 To accept Belle Epoque — for the working classes — as more than deliberate myth would be a poor practice of history, that does not stop to look to the periphery, or scrutinize those who passed by under the illumination of the city of light.

Ibid, 11. Gundle, “Mapping the origins of glamour,” 273. 71 Edward Udovic, “What About the Poor?’ Nineteenth-Century Paris and the Revival of Vincentian Charity,” Vincetian Heritage Journal 14, no. 1 (1993): 71. 72 Charles Sowerine, France since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society (New York: Palgrave Publishing, 2001), 94. 70

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adcock, Michael. “Remaking Urban Space: Baron Haussmann and the Rebuilding of Paris, 1851-1870.” in University of Melbourne Journal 2, no. 2 (1996): 25-35. Artist unknown, “Electricité chez soi,” Le Magasin Pittoresque, May 1891. Berlanstein, Lenard. The Working People of Paris, 1871-1914. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1984. Bertall, “Coupe d’une maison Parisienne: five floors of the Parisian world.” Illustration, 11 January 1845. Bruegel, Martin. “Workers’ Lunch Away from Home in the Paris of the Belle Epoque: The French Model of Meals as Norm and Practice.” French Historical Studies 38, no. 2 (2015): 253-280. https://www.doi.org/10.1215/00161071-2842577 Dintenfass, Michael., and Dormois, Jean-Pierre. The British Industrial Decline. London: Routledge, 1999. Evenson, Norma. Paris: A Century of Change, 1878-1978. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Forain, Jean-Louis. “Do as we do-ditch them!” Le Courrier Francais, 5 August 1888. Gundle, Stephen. “Mapping the origins of glamour: Giovanni Boldini, Paris and the Belle Epoque.” Journal of European Studies29, no. 1 (1999): 269-295. https://www.doi.org/10.1177/004724419902900303

Haine, Scott. “The Development of Leisure and the Transformation of Working-Class Adolescence, Paris 1830-1940.” Journal of Family History 17, no. 4 (1992): 451-476. https://doi.org/10.1177/036319909201700407 Heidbrinck. “Rue de Tocqueville, 59 - Attendant L’Ouverture des portes.” Le Courrier Francais, May 27, 1888. Horne, Alistair. Seven Ages of Paris. New York: Vintage Books, 2004. Kalba, Laura Anne. “How media were made: chromolithography in Belle Epoque France.” History and Technology 27, no. 4 (2011): 441-453. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/07341512.2011.622154 Magraw, Roger. A History of the French Working Class, volume II: Workers and the Bourgeois Republic 1871-1939. Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 1992. Mann, Keith. Forging political identity: Silk and metal workers in Lyon, France, 1900-1939. New York: Berghahn Books, 2010. McMillin, James. France and Women, 1789-1914: Gender, Society and Politics. London: Routledge, 2000. https://www.taylorfrancis.com/books/e/9781134589586 Merriman, John. “The Language of Social Stigmatisation and Urban Space in Nineteenth-Century France.” In History on the Margins: People and Places in the Emergence of Modern France by John Merriman, 63-83. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018. http://www.jstor.com/stable/j.ctv80ccfr.8 Merriman, John. The Margins of city life explorations on the French urban frontier, 1815-1851. London: Oxford University Press, 1991.

Noiriel, Gérard. Workers in French Society in the 19th and 20th Centuries. New York: St Martin’s Press, 1990. Periton, Diana. “The Coupe Anatomique: Sections through the nineteenth century Parisian apartment block,” The Journal of Architecture 22, no. 5 (2017): 933-948. https://doi.org/10.1080/13602365.2017.1351805 Platt, Harold. “Exploding Cities: Housing the Masses in Paris, Chicago and Mexico City, 1850-2000.” Journal of Urban History36, no. 5 (2010): 575-593. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0096144210365454 Popkin, Jeremy. A History of Modern France, 4th edition. New York: Routledge, 2016. Rearick, Charles. “The Charms of Paris…Yesterday.” Historical Reflections 39, no. 3 (2013): 10-25. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42703768 Rearick, Charles. Pleasures of the Belle Epoque: entertainment and festivity in turnof-the-century France. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985. Rudorff, Raymond. The Belle Epoque: Paris in the ‘nineties. New York: Saturday Review Press, 1973. Saalman, Howard. Haussmann: Paris Transformed. New York: George Braziller, Inc, 1971. Shapiro, Ann-Louise. “Housing Reform in Paris: Social Space and Social Control.” French Historical Studies 12, no. 4 (1982): 486-507. https://www.jstor.org/stable/286422

Shapiro, Ann-Louise. Housing the Poor of Paris, 1850-1902. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1985. Sowerine, Charles. France since 1870: Culture, Politics and Society. New York: Palgrave Publishing, 2001. Starostino, Natalia. “Nostalgia and the Myth of the Belle Epoque in Franco-Russian Literature (1920s-1960s).” Historical Reflections 39, no. 3 (2013): 26-40. https://www.jstor.org/stable/42703769 Stovall, Tyler. Transnational France: the Modern History of a Universal Nation. Boulder: Wallflower Press, 2015. Toulouse-Lautrec, Henri. Marcelle Lender dancing the Bolero. open access, retrieved https://www.nga.gov/collection/art-object-page.72012.html Udovic, Edward. “What About the Poor?’ Nineteenth-Century Paris and the Revival of Vincentian Charity.” Vincetian Heritage Journal 14, no. 1 (1993): 69-94. https://via.library.depaul.edu/vhj/vol14/iss1/5 Wires, Richard. “Paris: La Belle Epoque.” Conspectus of History: Cities in History 1, no. 4 (1977): 60-72. http://libx.bsu.edu/u?/ConspectusH,411

“THE USE AND ABUSE OF PHILOSOPHY IN HISTORY: JAMES WARLEY MILES AND THE DANGERS OF RACIST DEHISTORICIZATION

BY PATRICK WOHLSCHEID, COLLEGE OF CHARLESTON

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Patrick Wohlscheid is a rising Senior at the College of Charleston, majoring in Philosophy and English. He is primarily interested in aesthetics and 19th century literature. He is the Managing Editor for Miscellany literary and art magazine, President of CofC’s Philosophical Society, and has several other forthcoming publications on topics from Emerson to contemporary American poetry. His next projects will be focusing on the connections between Victorian Gothic literature and philosophy, and the aesthetics of style in the English Renaissance. After college, he hopes to attend graduate school in the humanities.

Over the course of his life, the prominent South Carolina philosopher James Warley Miles addressed students at the College of Charleston at least three times: general

commencements

1851

and

1863,

and

Chrestomathic

Society

commencement in 1874, one year before Miles' death. Reflective of the intellectual culture of the mid to late 19th century, each of these addresses, and Miles' public philosophy more generally, is hyper-fixated on the roles of history, sociopolitical institutions, and a foundational undercurrent of race to both. As a thinker, Miles' work is derivative and over-encumbered with an antiquated style, even for the period. Examining some of the methodological issues in the history of 19th century philosophy and philosophical critiques of his influences, we will see that Miles is morally condemnable as a fierce defender of slavery and racial domination, and that his work illustrates the often complex entanglement between doing philosophy and doing history. The most accessible point of entry into this discussion is to first look at what has been written about Miles previously and fill in any gaps with Miles' own arguments. The secondary literature is sparse, and appropriately so, with the germinal works being historian Ralph Luker's article “God, Man, and the World of James Warley Miles, Charleston's Transcendentalist,” and later sections of his book A Southern Tradition in Theology and Social Criticism, 1830-1930: The Religious Liberalism and Social Conservatism of James Warley Miles, William Porcher DuBose, and Edgar Gardner Murphy. Luker presents a detailed account of Miles' life in each text, from childhood 48

to his preaching positions and tenures at the College of Charleston as Chair of the History of Intellectual Philosophy and Greek Literature from 1850-1854 and 1865-1871, as well as Librarian for several years in between.1 Miles is generally portrayed as a key but often ostracized member of the Charleston literati, a philosophical outcast who preferred the company of only a few other intellectuals with similar interests in German philosophy and literature.2 Interestingly, the focus is often put on Miles’ depression and restlessness, the reason for his inability to commit to any post, religious or professorial, for a great amount of time. According to Luker, we are to believe Miles is a figure predominantly defined by misunderstanding, both in his own day and by contemporary scholars. This portrayal is flawed. The biographical sections in the article and book are overly sympathetic, considering that the subject was in reality an influential member of the Southern intellectual and religious elite, even if less so than other more wellknown figures in U.S. history. Descriptions of Miles’ frequent socializing in the back of Russell’s Bookshop overwhelm the reader with a list of famous names, from the writers William Gilmore Simms, William J. Grayson—who coined the term “master race”—and Paul Hamilton Hayne to the young classicist Basil Gildersleeve.3 It is clear that Miles’ style of life was completely different from that of the majority of white Southerners at the time, and worlds away from the experiences of enslaved peoples

Luker, “God, Man, and The World of James Warley Miles, Charleston’s Transcendentalist,” 115-16, 119. Luker “God, Man,” 111. 3 Luker, “God, Man,” 110. 1 2

under the system which Miles so ardently defended. This pattern of understatement and over-explanation is characteristic of Luker's work, as the thorough examination of interpersonal details leaves little room for the sociopolitical and cultural factors that afforded Miles the opportunity to lead churches, travel internationally, eulogize John C. Calhoun, and hold (or turn down) teaching positions at well-regarded universities. A sympathetic historiography of Miles does not in itself raise serious questions for this project, but does segue into a related methodological problem in Luker’s analysis of Miles’ philosophy. As we will see, by mischaracterizing Miles’ philosophy as a Southern form of transcendentalism simply because of shared influences, Luker dehistoricizes and depoliticizes Miles, which allows him to avoid genuinely recognizing racial attitudes as foundational to Miles’ philosophy. Abstraction from history, primarily of racist historical ideas, and subsequent misreading of the philosophical content is not limited to Miles and his commentators. Work

G.W.F.

Hegel,

Miles’

greatest

philosophical

influence,

and

the

transcendentalists with whom Luker attempts to link Miles illustrate the same problem, in which the avoidance of morally condemnable attitudes of race are ignored or made so abstract that the content itself becomes misunderstood. In the following sections, this project aims at something of a rehistoricization, in which Miles and his philosophical influences can be examined as a reflection of a larger trend in the historiography of the 19th century, and ultimately urges a recentering of race as truly foundational to its intellectual climate and philosophy. 50

Luker’s philosophical analysis of Miles in the early article and later book chapter relies

heavily

the

categorization

Miles

“transcendentalist.”

“Transcendentalist” in this case, though, is not at all its common usage, that is, the loosely connected literary and philosophical tradition of early/mid-19th century New England exemplified by figures who loom large in the American imagination: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Margaret Fuller, and later Walt Whitman. Luker defines his transcendentalism specifically to fit Miles’ philosophy, as “one who shared a particular pattern of religious liberalism, [and] a peculiar philosophical and theological perspective.”4 The evidence for this abstract connection for Luker is a “guilt by association of ideas,” or shared list of influences. Luker argues that Miles’ reading list, like the Transcendentalists’, similarly included, with the exception of utopian socialism, “the pre-Socratics, Plato, Neo-Platonism and its seventeenth century revival at Cambridge, the mysticism of Böhme and Swedenborg, Calvinism, Unitarianism, British moral philosophy, the English romantics, the French eclectics ... and oriental philosophy, as well as German idealist philosophy and literature,” but with the most obvious shared lineages still ending up being the ideas of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, and Schleiermacher.5 While this may be true, and can be easily evidenced by looking through Miles’ personal library catalogue, which does contain

4 5

Luker, “God, Man,” 121. Luker, “God, Man,” 122.

many of the aforementioned sources, there are still several problems with Luker’s transcendentalist claims. First, it could be argued that a reading list of philosophy and theology from some of the most essential to relatively obscure traditions is not at all enough to connect two figures to an intellectual movement, especially one as eclectic as transcendentalism. Luker himself seems somewhat uncertain about the label in his book chapter, writing the following on Miles’ philosophy in relation to his geographical location:

“Something far richer and more diverse was at work in the mind of Warley Miles. Had he lived in Hartford, he would have enjoyed the company of Horace Bushnell. Had he taught with John W. Neven and Philip Schaff at the little German Reformed Seminary in Pennsylvania, he might have been known as an advocate of the Mercerburg theology. Had he moved west to St. Louis, he would have found kindred spirits in its small community of Hegelians. Had he grown up near Boston, he might have been called a Transcendentalist. But James Warley Miles was a Southerner, and that would shape his use of the language he shared with these American idealists in ways they would have found repugnant.”6

Luker, A Southern Tradition in Theology and Social Criticism, 1830-1930: The Religious Liberalism and Social Conservatism of James Warley Miles, William Porcher DuBose, and Edgar Gardner Murphy, 55-56

Here, Luker somewhat gives the game away, revising his own earlier categorization. Rather than transcendentalists, Miles is even more broadly associated with disparate groups of “American idealists,” where regional identity seems to play a greater part in one's philosophy than the ideas themselves. Though this does raise several interesting questions about the role of geography in the formation of philosophical movements, Luker’s explanation of Miles’ philosophy is much more intentional. In relying on Southern identity and the traditional political and ethical views associated with the 19th century American South, Luker severs Miles’ actual stated philosophical arguments from his “philosophy” in a more general sense, chalking up any repugnant political views to mere differences in belief. So, in the case of J.W. Miles, if racial attitudes are abstracted out of the philosophical content as Luker attempts, it becomes impossible to see that Miles’ racial views are not just central to his explicit texts on race, but also necessary to explain his philosophy of history and misuse of Hegel. Similarly, this particular move of Luker’s allows him to associate Miles with philosophers who are much more engaging, but as we will see, can also easily trigger the issue of dehistoricization in regard to race. As to Miles’ actual philosophical beliefs, Luker’s admission that to Miles’ list of influences “one would want to add the names of Aristotle, Richard Hooker, [and] Edmund Burke” is much more telling.7 In “The Relation Between the Races at the South,” his primary treatise on race, Miles lays out an argument for slavery that he 7

Luker, A Southern Tradition in Theology and Social Criticism, 1830-1930, 57.

believes will shift the conversation away from weak and easily objectionable talking points and toward supposedly indisputable claims of slavery that utilize the Aristotelian language of natural law. In abhorrently casual terms, Miles writes in a footnote before his main argument that the discussion of slavery he is about to enter into is framed incorrectly due to the language of “slavery” itself. Referring to it as “so called slavery,” he explains that because he defines slavery as “forcible subjection of a race equally endowed with the subjecting race,” and because black people are, according to Miles, so obviously inferior to whites by their nature, the master/slave relationship between the races in the South can obviously not be called slavery, as “the negro in the South is not properly a slave [and] is really in his highest and most favorable position as a human creature.”8 Besides its moral reprehensibility, this line of thinking presupposes the rest of Miles’ argument that “the relations of the white and black races result from a natural Law, just as much as do the effects of the Law of gravitation,” and that to justify such a claim is as unnecessary as trying to justify the existence of the Moon orbiting Earth.9 With these normative claims, but without normative justification, Miles argues that any objections can be circumvented by the establishment of slavery as a natural law. To question a natural law would not only be unreasonable, but essentially futile, thus turning his original normative claims about slavery into merely descriptive ones that serve specific political ends.

8 9

Miles, "The Relation Between the Races At the South,” 4. Miles, “The Relation Between the Races At the South,” 6

Even with such a position, Miles does think it necessary to offer a historical perspective and justification for the blanket claim that Africans are naturally inferior, as opposed to other people groups who have been enslaved like the Hungarians. The historiography that Miles offers is taken directly from Miles’ philosophy of history, which in turn shares many of its ideas with G.W.F. Hegel’s philosophy of history and writings on Africa.10 For Miles, Africans are distinguished from the Hungarian, Greek, Roman, and Far Eastern slaves by their inability to develop a society and culture equal to that of their masters, or in other words, gain an equal footing in order to free themselves from slavery. In this view, Africa is a land outside the purview of history itself, “a vast continent enriched with every various bounty of nature, with the attrition of diverse and even more highly developed tribes,” but populated by a people who have created no civilization “above the gross savagism which he seems to have exhibited centuries ago.”11 This false history echoes Hegel’s own thoughts and conspicuous silences on Africa in the Lectures on the Philosophy of History. Hegel calls Africa “the land of childhood, which lying beyond the day of self-conscious history, is enveloped in the dark mantle of Night,” excluded from the progress of the World Spirit due to the Africans’ supposed lack of any developed socio-political culture or higher concepts that

Here it should be noted that in the catalogue of Miles’ library, there are no texts by G.W.F. Hegel. However, as Luker himself puts it, “the absence of Hegel remains an anomaly,” and even though Miles is likely to have read Hegel in the original German, the other German theologians who greatly influenced him were themselves greatly influenced by and wrote on Hegel. 11 Miles, “The Relation Between the Races,” 9-10. 10

demonstrate universality.12 In this faux-historical narrative, Hegel relied on widely published travel narratives of Africa, but consistently embellished details of African, particularly Ashanti, society in order to paint a vivid picture of Africans as cannibalistic, primitive, and violent.13 Engaging in historical erasure and caricatures of an entire continent, both Miles and Hegel tell us plainly enough that if history is the unfolding of a rational (and for Miles, providential) plan that fully realizes the character and destiny of human beings, then Africa has no place in it but to be carved up, violated, and enslaved. The only way to raise up the African people, then, would be to forcibly take them out of Africa and place them under the control of a white master, who would elevate their very nature through protection and servitude. Similarly, for Miles, as with Hegel, the Spirit of History moves westward, beginning with the ancient eastern civilizations, to the classical age of Greece and Rome, and once more to Christian Europe. As Hegel puts it, “world history goes from East to West: as Asia is the beginning of world history, so Europe is simply its end.”14 Methodologically, Hegel and Miles’ account of history itself might be seen as a racial dehistoricization or abstraction, as the removal of Africa and its innumerable contributions to world history at that point served to promote simple racial attitudes common among elite European and American intellectuals of the 19th century. Similarly, it allowed them to avoid confronting the idea that if Africa is part

Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 109-111. Bernasconi, “Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti” 14 Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, 92. 13

of the development of World History, then the enslavement of its population would be much more easily condemned. It is not a great leap to see how Hegel’s philosophy of history and its exclusion of Africa would have easily appealed to James Warley Miles, a staunch supporter of the Confederacy, an institution he believed could carry on the unfolding of human progress through universal history. In an American century of civil unrest leading to war, growing industrialization and global power, and debates over westward expansion and manifest destiny, a figure like James Warley Miles could take Hegel’s history, infuse it with American sentiments and prejudices, and easily ask the question of continuing universal history, what is west of Europe if not the United States? There is, however, a key piece in Miles’ philosophy that allows us to see the misuse of Hegel’s philosophy in defense of slavery. This piece relates to Miles’ and Hegel’s opinions on the Haitian Revolution, Hegel’s master/slave dialectic and echoes of that dialectic in Miles’ view of slavery, and finally, Susan Buck-Morss’ masterful work on some of these connections, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. In making these philosophical and historical comparisons, I take seriously Buck-Morss’ idea of thinking of facts “not as data with fixed meanings, but as connective pathways that can continue to surprise us,” and that traveling these pathways is a valuable act in itself. 15 As I have mentioned before, Miles’ philosophy is quite derivative of his philosophical and

Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 13.

religious influences, and his life full of the production and promulgation of morally heinous ideas of the Southern ruling class. But these facts seen as connective pathways lead us to more engaging and complex philosophers like Hegel, and in the process allow us to observe methodological problems of racist dehistoricization that we may have not noticed before. In Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, Buck-Morss makes the claim that, although downplayed, ignored, or erased in the secondary scholarship, Hegel’s knowledge of the Haitian Revolution served as a direct inspiration for the master/slave dialectic. In the section Self-Consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel creates a narrative depicting a key process in the journey of the individual spirit toward recognition of its own self-consciousness. In order for this self-recognition to be realized, the individual consciousness must come up against the will of another rational consciousness who also has the power of recognition. This conflict is a violent and dramatic one, and “the relation of both self-consciousnesses is thus determined in such a way that it is through a life and death struggle that each proves its worth to itself, and that both prove their worth to each other.”16 There are only two outcomes of such a conflict for Hegel, that of death or the subjugation and bondage of one party by the other, thus the establishment of the master/slave, or lord/bondsman roles. But in that process of subjugation, the master’s self-consciousness has become necessarily tied to the slave’s recognition and can no longer be called a self-consciousness by and for16

Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, 111.

itself. The slave, on the other hand, through the master’s dependence on their labor and the realization that their own agency is being expressed through the products of that labor, becomes conscious of their own freedom, or “the true nature of rational agency” and the value of free will itself.17 By this process of sublation (a simultaneous negation and affirmation), the slave becomes free and the master is now dependent on the products of the slave’s labor. For Buck-Morss, this narrative, with its language of revolutionary struggle and slavery, has obvious real-life historical inspiration. Just three years before the publication of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the French were finally expelled from then-Saint-Domingue by formerly enslaved peoples, and the Republic of Haiti established. This defining moment in Transatlantic history, the only successful slave revolt leading to the establishment of a state free from slavery, was widely reported on in Europe and the United States, including publications that Hegel, and later in the century J.W. Miles, would have read. This struggle, a long-fought sublating process of dependence, recognition and the gaining of true freedom by the formerly enslaved, and which Hegel certainly knew of, was not just a realization of Enlightenment ideals by those who were explicitly denied them, but a concrete example of Hegel’s phenomenology and world history. As Buck-Morss says, “the actual and successful revolution of Caribbean slaves against their masters is the moment when the dialectical logic of recognition becomes visible as the thematics of world history, the story of the 17

Krasnoff, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: An Introduction, 101.

universal realization of freedom,” and as a newly rediscovered moment in the historiography of Hegel, was the method “by which philosophy burst out of the confines of academic theory and became a commentary on the history of the world.”18 Returning to the philosophy of J.W. Miles, we can see the ways in which the master/slave dialectic was torn apart, with some ideas discarded and others repurposed with racist ulterior motives. While the masters may be dependent on the labor of their slaves, by denying Africans the very ability to have or create a culture, society, and even individual rationality “equal” to that of the whites, there would be no way for the enslaved to see the expression of their free will, and thus become conscious of their freedom. But more importantly, with this misuse of the master/slave dialectic in a fauxhistorical context, there would be no way for the enslaved to utilize the consciousness of their own freedom to gain practical freedom from bondage. In this manner, Miles divides the very concept of Hegelian sublation, allowing for only negation without affirmation. Besides the undertones of Hegel in his writings, we can look to Miles’ explicit thoughts on the Haitian Revolution to further examine the misuse of Hegelianism. In The Relation Between the Races at the South, Miles anticipates the example of Haiti as an objection to his argument, touting a group of enslaved people who were able to gain their freedom from the supposedly superior race. In response, Miles argues that

Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 59-60.

the Haitian Revolution as a revolutionary political project was not of the Haitians’ own volition, nor was it a success. According to this line of reasoning, “the negroes in Hayti did not emancipate themselves, but, under the influence of ignorant, foreign fanatics, they murdered their protectors, and relapsed into barbarism.” Accepting Buck-Morss’ Hegel/Haiti connection, Miles’ view of Haiti seems a repudiation of the master/slave dialectic, both in practice and in theory. Finally, it is generally thought that despite his views on Africa and the master/slave relationship, Hegel’s views on slavery are more complicated than an endorsement of the practice or a hardcore abolitionist stance. In her article “Hegel, History, and Race,” for instance, philosopher Rocío Zambrana distinguishes between Hegel’s positions on African slavery, an arbitrary practice based on conquest and an “absolute injustice,” or “outside of proper political relations,” and Transatlantic slavery, a practice “Europeans had begun...by which Africans could become conscious of their own freedom,” best eliminated gradually in an educational process.19 While this does position Europeans as necessary for the freedom of Africans whom they enslaved in the first place, a path for abolition is still left open. Similarly, in his introduction to the Phenomenology, Larry Krasnoff notes that the master/slave dialectic should not be read as an endorsement of slavery. While for Hegel violence and slavery are not in themselves rationally incoherent, problems arise in the public sphere when such practices are attempted to be justified.20 With this in mind, the gulf

19 20

Zambrana, “Hegel, History, and Race,” 254. Krasnoff, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: An Introduction, 104.

between Miles’ extreme pro-slavery philosophy and Hegelian thought seems to have widened even further, resulting in what looks to be an untenable position as a proslavery Hegelian, with the explanation being a misuse of Hegel on Miles’ part. While the previous sections’ discussion of Miles’ mis-Hegelianism and the connections between Haiti as a bridge between the two thinkers, and between theory and reality are crucial, Buck-Morss’ methodological critique, in the end, turns out to be much more important to the practical aspect of this project. Buck-Morss uses Rousseau as an example of the historiographical paradigm based on disciplinary methods of “moral neutrality” that, “while based on a variety of philosophical premises, result in the same exclusions.” In this way, “today’s philosopher,” who is trained to analyze theory totally abstracted from historical context, will attribute a universality to Rousseau’s writings that transcends the author’s own intent or personal limitations in order to avoid thereby the fallacy of reduction ad hominem. In both cases, the embarrassing facts are quietly allowed to disappear.21 Though this specific example refers to Rousseau, the critique still stands for Hegel in regard to the Haiti connection, and for Miles. This methodological critique is especially effective when applied to Ralph Luker’s treatment of James Warley Miles. Suddenly, statements in Luker’s work like “[Miles was] in thought and deed a cosmopolitan, who would attempt to articulate the world-view of Charleston’s ruling

Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History, 34.

class in terms of the most advanced thought of the day” is not a harmless declaration of historical fact, but a failure to critically engage with Miles’ racial attitudes that form the basis of his social philosophy and philosophy of history. 22 Hence, Luker’s analysis of Miles’ transcendentalism or idealism can also be re-evaluated by considering what ugly truths may have been shied away from through dehistoricization, or more specifically, focusing on Miles’ more abstract epistemology as evidence of his transcendentalism at the exclusion of political and social beliefs. Even as Luker admits that Miles’ language in service of his separatist and proslavery politics would have repulsed other idealists, he—in a move of philosophical abstraction—does not consider that to be an American idealist may come with certain ideological commitments. The move is quite glaring in the case of the American Transcendentalists, who are strongly associated with abolitionism and other reform movements. Regardless of some of the Transcendentalists’ personal racial attitudes falling into a category of “romantic racialism,” abolitionism is almost always emphasized as necessary in understanding the Transcendentalists’ political and social philosophy, as well as their commitment to individualism. 23 The Transcendentalists’ convictions against slavery ran deep, with Theodore Parker even referencing the city of James Warley Miles, Charleston. Margaret Fuller’s “On The Narrative of Frederick Douglass,” Ralph Waldo Emerson’s lecture “The Fugitive Slave Law,” and Henry David

Luker, A Southern Tradition in Theology and Social Criticism, 57, 81. Fredrickson, The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on Afro-American Character and Destiny, 18171914, 100-102. 23

Thoreau’s “A Plea for Captain John Brown” all express a commitment to abolitionism and the recognition of slavery as not only a national political ill, but a profoundly immoral practice.24 Where does this leave J.W. Miles and Luker’s abstracted categorization of his philosophy as “Charleston’s transcendentalist,” or a “Southern variant of the Romantic heresy”?25 We have shown that a shared list of influences, or even certain shared metaphysical views, is not enough to group Miles with other more interesting philosophers like the Transcendentalists. This is not because a shared list of influences is not important. But in light of Buck-Morss’ treatment of Hegel and Miles’ own misuse of Hegelian thought, we can see Luker’s argument for regional difference as a clear case of what Buck-Morss refers to as abstraction or relativization, and what I have before called “dehistoricization.” By characterizing Miles’ racism as a product of his environment, the philosophical language he used, and as if his racism was confined only to the texts explicitly dealing with race, Luker is able to treat Miles’ racial views as peripheral to his philosophical project. This critique asks us then to consider: what might a rehistoricization of J.W. Miles look like? We have already seen what a partial rehistoricization and recentering of race in Hegel’s thought achieves, as Buck-Morss demonstrates throughout her book. With the Hegel/Haiti connection, we are able to see a wider picture of transnational

24 25

Buell, The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings, ix Luker, “God, Man,” 102.

intellectual culture and gain an interesting perspective on the master-slave dialectic based on its historical inspirations. A similar perspective appears if we think of Miles’ explicit racism and support of the Confederacy as a motivation for adopting a misHegelian philosophy of history that excludes all black people and Africa itself from the providential unfolding of World History and allows the Confederacy to be the next great step in that progression. Similarly, if the natural law tradition is misused in a way that makes an entire race only capable of slavery and paternalized care by virtue of their racial inferiority, we can see Miles’ philosophy is of practical import in arguing for slavery during a time just before its abolition, and in protecting the material interests and very lifestyle of Miles’ Southern ruling class. Though Luker admits that this is what Miles’ project is, he does not consider race to be central or necessary to understanding his philosophy. More importantly, though, this rehistoricization of Miles urges us to consider the implications of the methodological problem of racist abstraction away from philosophical content. If this pervasive problem can be seen in historiography of Miles all the way to Hegel, one of the most influential philosophers of the 19th century, it stands to reason that other texts and figures can be reinterpreted or understood in more complete ways when racial attitudes are not pushed aside or abstracted away. Rather, they should be thought of as foundational to the philosophical content itself, and the ultimate goal to be the activity of recentering race or rehistoricizing should be thought of as reaching toward using facts as “connective pathways.” 65

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bernasconi, Robert. “Hegel at the Court of the Ashanti.” Hegel After Derrida, 51–73. Routledge, 1998. Buck-Morss, Susan. Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History. Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009. Buell, Lawrence. The American Transcendentalists: Essential Writings. Modern Library pbk. ed. New York: Modern Library, 2006. Fredrickson, George M. The Black Image in the White Mind: The Debate on AfroAmerican Character and Destiny, 1817-1914. Middletown, Conn: Wesleyan University Press, 1988. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fredrich. Lectures on the Philosophy of History. England: Henry G. Bohn, 1857. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Fredrich. The Phenomenology of Spirit. Edited by Terry Pinkard and Michael Baur. Cambridge Hegel Translations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. Krasnoff, Larry. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: An Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 2008. Luker, Ralph. “God, Man and the World of James Warley Miles, Charleston’s Transcendentalist.” Historical Magazine of the Protestant Episcopal Church 39, no. 2 (June 1, 1970): 101–36.

Luker, Ralph E. A Southern Tradition in Theology and Social Criticism, 1830-1930: The Religious Liberalism and Social Conservatism of James Warley Miles, William Porcher Dubose, and Edgar Gardner Murphy. New York: E. Mellen Press, 1984. Miles, James Warley. God in History; a Discourse Delivered before the Graduating Class of the College of Charleston on Sunday Evening, March 29, 1863, by James Warley Miles. Published by Request of the Class. South Carolina: Steam Power Press of Evans & Cogswell, 1863. Miles, James Warley. “The Relation Between the Races at the South.” Charleston: Presses of Evans & Cogswell, 1861. Zambrana, Rocio. “Hegel, History, and Race,” The Oxford Handbook of Philosophy and Race. Oxford University Press, 2017.

STARS – THEY’RE JUST LIKE US!: CONFIDENTIAL MAGAZINE AND THE POWER OF THE PUBLIC

BY RENEE ONG, YALE UNIVERSITY

ABOUT THE AUTHOR Renee Ong is currently a senior at Yale University majoring in Political Science. At Yale, she has been primarily involved in undergraduate organizations concerned with international relations, student government, and non-profit giving. Outside of university, Renee has worked for various financial institutions and elected officials on Capitol Hill.

During her time at university, Renee took a well-known and well-loved lecture class taught by Professor Camille Thomasson called Classical Hollywood Narrative. Long a secret fan of films from the Golden Age of Hollywood and contemporary gossip rags, Renee explored the intersection between these two interests in Thomasson’s class, producing this essay in the process.

1. INTRODUCTION Though Confidential magazine now languishes among the many small publications of yesteryear, it was once considered one of the controversially popular darlings of the American fan magazine scene. To those unaware of its small, yet unmistakable impact, the tale practically reads like David and Goliath: on one side, the unparalleled power of the Hollywood studio system over the industry and its roster of stars, and on the other, scrappy newcomer gossip rag Confidential magazine brazenly attempting to challenge this very control by harnessing the power of the public. During the Golden Age of Hollywood, the studio system consisted of a small number of studios that vertically integrated the production, distribution, and exhibition aspects of the moviemaking business, thus achieving near-total domination of Hollywood. Between 1930 and 1948, the eight major studios of Hollywood together produced almost ninetyfive percent of motion pictures exhibited in the United States; perhaps unsurprisingly, they also maintained absolute domination over the images of the actors and actresses that drove legions of adoring fans to the movie theaters.1 Given this monopoly, it was astounding that Confidential magazine, the forefather of gossip journalism, would eventually disrupt their iron grip on stars’ public personas. Though the studios exerted a heavy hand on stars’ images through strict oversight of the media in- and out-ofhouse, Confidential undermined this control by using media oversight against the

Frank Grady, "The Studio Era," University of Missouri-St. Louis, http://www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/film/STUDIOS.htm.

studios and empowering the public with the moral authority to judge stars themselves. In doing so, Confidential transformed the relationship between stars and the public by fully subjecting celebrities’ images and careers to the court of public opinion.

2. STUDIOS AND CONTROL OF THE MEDIA Studios’ extensive control of the media began with their in-house publicity departments, which allowed them to actively create and manipulate actors’ images. In particular, these publicity departments strove for harmony between a star’s public persona and the on-screen characters they played, expertly concealing any potentially career-damaging aspects of stars’ private lives by issuing “phony, laudatory biographies and news releases that portrayed actors as upstanding, wholesome, and moral.” 2 Publicity agents dutifully disseminated these sanitized, feel-good stories of stars’ home lives to the media and their unsuspecting audiences. As added security, studios further strengthened their internal oversight of the media through the creation of the Motion Picture Industry Council (MPIC) in 1948, a trade organization that used the collective powers of the publicity departments to ruthlessesly kill any negative publicity; in essence, “whenever anything negative was printed about stars, the MPIC would rush out press releases championing the good work being done by the movie industry.”3

Samantha Barbas, "The Most Loved, Most Hated Magazine in America: The Rise and Demise of Confidential Magazine," William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal 25, no. 121 (2016), 131. 3 Samantha Barbas, Confidential Confidential: The Inside Story of Hollywood's Notorious Scandal Magazine (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2018), 65.

Needless to say, studio publicity departments wielded near complete authority in crafting the careers of their respective celebrity rosters. Bolstering the already intimidating influence of their publicity departments, studios often coerced media outlets into bending to their will by exploiting the dependence of fan magazines on the studios, and the media’s self-censorship. As fan magazines heavily relied on the studios for access to the stars (and thus, their very existence), many had no choice but to serve as thinly veiled press releases. The studios were not shy in abusing this asymmetrical relationship, as evidenced by an article from fan magazine Film Daily titled “Fan Writers on Coast Sign Pledge of Purity”: “Following a meeting called by John LeRoy Johnston of Universal, all fan magazines representatives here signed a pledge to adhere to a policy of clean and constructive material.” 4 This “pledge” to publish only “clean and constructive material” entailed consenting to submit all content to studio publicity departments for their approval; in the same vein, celebrity interviews were only allowed in the presence of a studio publicist.5 Put bluntly by Metro Goldwyn Mayer publicist Esme Chandlee, “we controlled the fan magazines.”6 Indeed, the studios also controlled magazines and newspapers through self-censorship of the media. Other media outlets were not only similarly reliant on the

The Film Daily (Jul-Dec 1934): “Fan Writers on Coast Sign Pledge of Purity,” Film Daily, August 23, 1934." Internet Archive, https://archive.org/details/filmdailyvolume666newy/page/364. 5 Barbas, "The Most Loved, Most Hated Magazine in America,” 131. 6 Henry E. Scott, Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, America's Most Scandalous Scandal Magazine (New York: Pantheon Books, 2010), 40. 4

studios for access and therefore revenue, but also constrained by their “conservative business backers and the norms of polite society,” taking care not to “[offend] the sensibilities of the average reader and the advertisers who courted those readers.”7 Not satisfied to rely on the tenuous non-binding nature of media self-discipline, the studios decided to cement their power over the wider press industry by forcing journalists to comply with the studios or risk losing their livelihood altogether. More specifically, major studios established a credentialing system by which all reporters covering Hollywood would first require approval from the Motion Picture Producers and Distributors of America (MPPDA), a trade association that imposed harsh guidelines on film content: “fan magazine writers were required to obtain identification cards from the MPPDA, a badge of recognition that became known as the Hays Card… writers with cards were described as being on the ‘white list,’ consisting of some fifty or so individuals.”8 Failure to adhere to the studios’ rules by publishing negative press would entail a revocation of the Hays Card, rescinded access to the studio lots, an end of invitations to press conferences, and essentially a complete blackballing from the industry. Thanks to heavy-handed supervision of the publicity machine both in- and out-of-house, the studios held the media under their thumbs. These internal and external tactics of media oversight paid off immensely, granting studios the unchallenged ability to shape the image of stars according to their whims. 7

Barbas, Confidential Confidential, 24. Anthony Slide, Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers, (Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2010), Google Books, 88, https://books.google.com/books/about/Inside_the_Hollywood_Fan_Magazine.html?id=5hDG6auRCJ4C 8

The success of this publicity system was undoubtable, and actor Ricardo Montalbán even compared the ruthless efficiency of these publicity departments to General Motors: “they could project the product, and the product was not any individual movie, it was the actor. They created a persona that they thought the public would like; they tailor-made the publicity to create a persona throughout the world.”9 More often than not, men were portrayed as “strong, solid, exemplifying the integrity and rightness of America itself,” while women “ran the narrow gamut from… beauty, integrity, and wholesomeness on one end of the spectrum, to beauty, integrity, and sexiness on the other.”10 Fans idolized stars who were at once untouchably flawless icons of success and yet “ordinary folks” who lived morally upstanding lives. Studios, the true masterminds behind image-making, more than delivered on providing ample fodder for this lucrative adoration.

3. PRIORITIZING THE PUBLIC However, this oppressive media environment also left an unfulfilled public desire for sensational Hollywood stories and a seemingly endless amount of potential content, which Confidential magazine eagerly exploited by upending the conventional magazine business model. Confidential did not need studio-permitted access to studio stars to produce content, nor was it financially dependent on studio advertising

Barbas, Confidential Confidential, 62. Scott, 7.

revenue.11 In fact, the unabashedly brazen gossip rag thrived off of the exact opposite. Confidential’s content was crafted by going behind the backs of studios to write about how stars’ images clashed with information from their vast network of secret informants, while its main income was derived from its newsstand sales.12 Though Confidential was not the first exposé publication by any means, this clear market differentiation and the radical business strategy that purposefully catered to public demand for salacious tales enabled it to become the first fully mainstream gossip magazine. As the magazine’s success soared, Confidential further emphasized its prioritization of the public by staying true to its unique market positioning as the self-procclaimed purveyor of “truth.” As Confidential was largely unpolluted by studio manipulation, many of its wild claims had basis in fact, and the magazine’s moments of devastating accuracy were a breath of fresh air in the stuffy media industry. While Confidential reported its fair share of untruths and exaggerations, the scandalous magazine still “stood out in a business characterized by inaccurate reporting, puffery, and collusion with sources.”13 Confidential thus positioned itself as a publication that truly served the public by delivering the “facts” to its readers, no matter how gruesome or implausible. Furthermore, as Confidential grew in popularity and strict studio oversight prevented

Scott, 35. Barbas, Confidential Confidential, 144. 13 Scott, 119. 12

traditional media outlets from publishing such vulgar stories, it used its unique market positioning to heighten its status as the preeminent source of intrigue. For instance, the January 1955 Confidential article “Does Desi Really Love Lucy?” detailing the marital woes of “I Love Lucy” stars Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball came out the same week as Look magazine’s picture-perfect cover story “Lucy and Desi, TV’s Favorite Family.” In highlighting this juxtaposition, Confidential again emphasized how it “served” the public by supposedly exposing the artificiality of other publications. Confidential had clearly crowned the average reader as king in its business model. Soon, its visual and narrative content would reflect the importance of the reader as well.

4. CONFIDENTIAL EMPOWERS THE READER Confidential’s deliberate photo choices, as well as its sparing and deliberate use of color, visually implied that readers had the authority to expose and judge the moral depravity of stars. The September 1955 cover of Confidential featuring Marilyn Monroe14 is a particularly excellent example of how the magazine used photo choice to visually debase stars, thus implicitly granting the moral high ground to the reader. Confidential often used grainy black-and-white photos with such stark contrast that subjects appeared unbecoming at best and ghastly at worst. Monroe’s treatment was no different, as she looks directly at the reader with wide eyes, raised eyebrows, and

"Err Raid: Vintage Cover of Confidential from September 1957 with Marilyn Monroe," Pulp International, September 25, 2013, http://www.pulpinternational.com/pulp/entry/Vintage-cover-of-Confidential-from-September1957-with-Marilyn-Monroe.html.

her mouth wide open. Her expression gives the impression that the reader has caught her in the midst of a socially unacceptable act. Furthermore, Monroe’s photo is taken from an elevated viewpoint, such that the reader is literally (and morally) looking down upon her. Color was similarly used to place the reader in the position of moral authority over the stars. Though Confidential used garish shades of yellow, blue, and red, it was the third that was particularly potent, as the color often evokes strong emotion. On the cover of the January 1957 issue of Confidential,15 the most prominent use of red was on a giant red circle behind a headshot of the actress Joan Crawford. The red circle resembles a target trained on the seemingly nervous Crawford, who bites her own finger while worriedly avoiding direct eye contact with the reader. This selective use of red not only forces the reader’s eye to zero in towards Crawford’s face, but also suggests she has been caught red-handed by the reader themself. By employing these visual techniques, the reader was no longer a passive consumer of content, but an active contributor to the judgment of stars’ actions. The moral authority of the reader over stars and Confidential’s role in serving the reader was further reinforced in the magazine’s narrative conventions. In many of its articles, Confidential achieved this by using vague, suggestive language, such as in its March 1956 article “Have You Heard the Latest About Sammy Davis, Jr.?” concerning entertainer Sammy Davis Jr., actress Ava Gardner, and pinup model Meg Myles:

Wilson, Frank. “Lowdown on Hollywood High Society… Joan Crawford and the Handsome Bartender!” The Best of Everything: A Joan Crawford Encyclopedia. https://www.joancrawfordbest.com/magconfid.htm. 15

“Sammy’s a sensation these days — in more places than on stage… There were even published photos showing Sammy and Ava [Gardner] as a cozy twosome… he’s picking off movieland’s snappiest sirens. By no means all of these cozy conquests reach the public print… The lowdown is that, when she wasn’t on camera, [Myles] was steaming it up with Sammy.”16

Nowhere in the above excerpt did it plainly state that Davis slept with Myles or Gardner, nor did Confidential offer a clear moral judgment. However, in referring to Davis’s past “cozy conquests” and stating Davis and Myles were “steaming it up” in “more places than a stage,” Confidential left it up to the reader to read between the lines and formulate their own thoughts. Confidential also reinforced the notion that the magazine itself is “on the reader’s side,” so to speak, revealing the “lowdown” on affairs that fail to “reach the public print.” Apart from using suggestive language, Confidential would also directly question the reader to form a moral opinion. The magazine used this technique in its July 1955 article “The Wife Clark Gable Forgot!” which covered the neglected state of Clark Gable’s first wife and his supposed indifference towards her plight:

Scott, 72.

“Is it wrong to ignore the woman who launched you on your way to the top, while showering gems, furs, gowns and money on a little French model? Is it wrong to hand one wife a million-dollar settlement — and let another grub to pay the grocer?”17

Here, Confidential again “present[ed] the facts” by selectively mentioning Gable’s actions that would obviously sway one’s opinion, but stopped short of stating an explicit judgment. Instead, Confidential directly asks the reader if Clark Gable’s actions are “wrong,” thus transferring the responsibility of moral judgment and reinforcing the notion that even Gable is subject to the court of public opinion. The power of the reader as moral judge was even more unmistakable in Confidential’s September 1954 article “How Rita Hayworth’s Children Were Neglected!” which ended with the unnamed author questioning “were Rita Hayworth’s children neglected? You’ve seen the pictures, you’ve read the facts. Now, you be the judge!”18 By presenting itself as the faithful collector of damning “pictures” and “facts” while imploring the reader to “be the judge,” Confidential empowered the reader to assume the role of definitive moral authority on stars’ misbehavior.

Scott, 111. CONFIDENTIAL MAGAZINE, September 1954, “Where Danger Lives,” May 29, 2012, http://wheredangerlives.blogspot.com/2012/05/confidential-magazine-september-1954.html. 18

5. A NEW ERA In encouraging the reader in this manner, Confidential harnessed the power of the public to overcome the studios’ grip on stars’ images. To illustrate this phenomenon, we may turn to Confidential’s March 1955 article “What Makes Ava Run for Sammy Davis Jr.?” which implied a sexual relationship between Gardner and Davis. Though their supposed romance was actually an outright lie on Confidential’s part, the very thought of an interracial romantic affair enraged the public. Studios did their best to stem the backlash via their trusty in-house publicity departments and loyal fan magazines. Modern Screen’s July 1955 article “Everywhere That Ava Goes” claimed exclusive knowledge of Ava’s secret relationship with the Earl of Granville, a distinguished and very much Caucasian member of the English aristocracy.19 Their efforts were to no avail, as the public had decided that such an affair was morally despicable and deserved to be met with professional retribution. Following the (fabricated) unveiling of their personal lives, Gardner and Davis’s careers suffered from public backlash, particularly in the conservative South. Gardner was hit particularly hard, as towns angrily boycotted and banned her current and future films, Gardner’s own hometown in North Carolina “took her name out of its publicity brochure,” and Gardner-Davis photos “were even used as campaign material by Southern bigots against integrationist candidates.”20 Confidential clearly damaged the studios’ iron grip on

Modern Screen (Dec 1954-Dec 1955): "Everywhere That Ava Goes," Modern Screen, July 1955." Internet Archive, https://archive.org/stream/modernscreen49unse. 20 Barbas, Confidential Confidential, 115-126.

shaping stars’ images by disguising figurative participation as morally offended judgment. Through flipping the script and giving agency to the public in this way, Confidential’s irrevocably transformed the relationship between the public and stars by vigorously legitimizing the court of public opinion. Studios catered towards the public desire that stars be both unattainable idols and the best kind of “ordinary folk.” However, with the rise of Confidential, stars could no longer hide behind the bulletproof walls of studio publicity departments and were instead held accountable for their actions in private and professional life. Confidential enabled the public to approach stars as regular people whose highs and lows were simply magnified by wealth and fame. Though its methods were oftentimes cruel, Confidential truly humanized stars by destroying the pedestal on which they were placed; they had marital issues, drinking problems, family fall-outs, and unrequited love affairs, just like any other person. In other words, stars were “just like us,” and therefore were not exempt from the judgment of the wider community. By taking advantage of studios’ strict oversight of the media and empowering the public, Confidential both broke the studio monopoly on stars’ images and forever changed how celebrities were perceived and treated by the public. Confidential eventually met its demise following a 1957 grand jury case that ended in mistrial, after which it agreed not to publish exposés on stars’ private lives to avoid retrial. Though the magazine ceased publication in 1973, its successors – including well-known

contemporary names like the National Enquirer, TMZ, Access Hollywood, E! News, and countless others – certainly live on. On one hand, Confidential’s methods and content represent media at its worst: openly prejudiced, merciless in their pursuit of scandal, and unforgivingly invasive. On the other, Confidential is media at its best, challenging the audience to seek out and confront the truth for themselves. Either way, Confidential’s rise reflects the intoxicating power that comes with handing out judgment at no personal cost. Whether the public deserves this power, and what this power entails, remain open questions.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Barbas, Samantha. Confidential Confidential: The Inside Story of Hollywood's Notorious Scandal Magazine. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2018. Barbas, Samantha. "The Most Loved, Most Hated Magazine in America: The Rise and Demise of Confidential Magazine." William & Mary Bill of Rights Journal 25, no. 121 (2016). "CONFIDENTIAL MAGAZINE, September 1954." Where Danger Lives. May 29, 2012. http://wheredangerlives.blogspot.com/2012/05/confidential-magazineseptember-1954.html. "Err Raid: Vintage Cover of Confidential from September 1957 with Marilyn Monroe." Pulp International. September 25, 2013. http://www.pulpinternational.com/pulp/entry/Vintage-cover-of-Confidential-fromSeptember-1957-with-Marilyn-Monroe.html. "The Film Daily (Jul-Dec 1934): “Fan Writers on Coast Sign Pledge of Purity,” Film Daily, August 23, 1934." Internet Archive. https://archive.org/details/filmdailyvolume666newy/page/364. Grady, Frank. "The Studio Era." University of Missouri - St. Louis. http://www.umsl.edu/~gradyf/film/STUDIOS.htm. Modern Screen (Dec 1954-Dec 1955): "Everywhere That Ava Goes," Modern Screen, July 1955." Internet Archive. https://archive.org/stream/modernscreen49unse.

Scott, Henry E. Shocking True Story: The Rise and Fall of Confidential, America's Most Scandalous Scandal Magazine. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010. Slide, Anthony. Inside the Hollywood Fan Magazine: A History of Star Makers, Fabricators, and Gossip Mongers. Mississippi: University Press of Mississippi, 2010. Google Books. https://books.google.com/books/about/Inside_the_Hollywood_Fan_Magazine.html?i d=5hDG6auRCJ4C Wilson, Frank. “Lowdown on Hollywood High Society… Joan Crawford and the Handsome Bartender!” The Best of Everything: A Joan Crawford Encyclopedia. https://www.joancrawfordbest.com/magconfid.htm

STARS – THEY’RE JUST LIKE US!: CONFIDENTIAL MAGAZINE AND THE POWER OF THE PUBLIC

BY EMILY WARD, UNIVERSITY OF NOTRE DAME

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Emily Ward is a sophomore Classics and Political Science Major from Princeton, New Jersey studying at the University of Notre Dame. She is particularly interested in the intersection of classical political ideology and modern views of citizenship.

Are freedom and fate mutually exclusive concepts? Can we accept our own insignificance without devolving into personal existentialism? What is the value in making a choice if we are condemned to a predetermined destiny? These are the questions Sophocles attempts to answer through his works Oedipus Rex and Antigone. Athenian society, which these plays are referencing and interpreting, heavily centered around the conception of democracy. Unique at the time, Athenian democracy granted individuals power in an otherwise deterministic world. Sophocles's friend Pericles, the famous orator, said of Athens, "each single one of our citizens, in all the manifold aspects of his life, is able to show himself the rightful lord and owner of his own person."1 In the context of Athenian political life, free-will was necessary to maintain the entire concept of their democracy, to believe that each choice the demos, or the populace of Athens, makes matters. In direct contrast to this political system, the religion of Athens was highly deterministic, relying on prophetic mechanisms such as oracles and divination to determine external circumstances. According to Adkins, portents were a common aspect of ancient Greek society to divine the will of the gods.2 This divination is the practice that Tiresias participates in throughout the Oedipus corpus. The gods could act indiscriminately, and the men had no power over them. This imbalance served to explain tragedies that are exempt from human influence. The actions of angry and

Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War. Trans. by Rex Warner. (New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1972), 147. 2 Lesley and Roy A. Adkins, The Handbook to Life in Ancient Greece. (New York: Facts On File, 2005), 373-375.

temperamental gods, whom the Athenians had no control over, could explain plagues, floods, famine, and earthquakes. Greek tragedy as a genre derives immense meaning from the distinction between gods and men. The prescribed order of the world was called cosmos, and it delineated completely distinct aspects of society. Moreover, these tragedies were written as entries into a competition, thus relying on an aspect of relatability within the characters and themes of the plays. Therefore, Sophocles first wrote the Oedipus Rex trilogy in fifthcentury Athens with the full understanding that the audience would relate dilemmas presented within his work to potentially problematic aspects of their contemporary society. With this social awareness in mind, Sophocles creates conflicting depictions of fate within the Oedipus tragedy, specifically by illustrating Antigone as an individual agent and Oedipus as a victim of destiny. How does Sophocles rationalize these contradictory presentations, and what might they imply for Athenian society in a broader sense? Throughout this paper, I will utilize the terminology of "determinism" and "predestination" interchangeably as descriptors for fatalistic philosophy that disregards free will, particularly in reference to Athenian religion. In Oedipus Rex and Antigone, Sophocles reconciles the personal autonomy of democracy with the determinism of divination through clear distinction of ideological domain.

Sano, Egisto. The Lateran Sophocles - II. 2014. Museo Gregoriano Profano. Città del Vaticano, https://flic.kr/p/md1ppB.

I. THE CRUEL IMPARTIALITY OF FATE In Sophocles's Oedipus, the titular character, Oedipus, discovers his pre-existing tragic fate: one that ends with his wife and mother's death and his own blinding and exile. The progression of his character throughout the play, in combination with other literary aspects, illustrates an intensely fatalistic representation of destiny, specifically as it applies to a seemingly powerful and upstanding individual. When Oedipus is first introduced, he is a character with agency, so much so that his subjects call to him for aid against the indomitable tragedies that befall them. Oedipus had already saved the people of Thebes from the Sphinx, which is why he was granted dominion over the city. The Thebans also call upon him to save them from

the plagues that currently wrack the population. Oedipus is glorified as a man more powerful than all others, with supplicants saying, "You cannot equal the gods… But we do rate you first of men, both in the common crises of our lives and face-to-face encounters with the gods."3 This quote is of particular interest because it places Oedipus in a position of authority within the given crisis, and yet these petitioners specifically designate Oedipus as below the gods. Even prior to the discovery of his prophecy, Oedipus is implied to be powerless against the will of the gods. This vulnerability becomes more prominent as the story progresses, and Oedipus uncovers more about the truth of his life and the destiny he has already partially fulfilled. This discovery is partly due to the words of the prophet Tiresias, who makes an appearance in Antigone as well. Tiresias proclaims Oedipus as a perpetrator of patricide and incest, stating, "Revealed at last, brother and father both to the children he embraces, to his mother, son and husband both - he sowed the loins his father sowed, he spilled his father's blood!"4 This certainty, since it comes from the soothsayer who initially proclaimed Oedipus's destiny, implies a distinct inevitability in such destiny. This prophecy refers to Oedipus’s unwitting murder of his father Laius at crossroads, where Laius — the king of Thebes at the time — offended Oedipus and refused to move. Obviously, Tiresias is correct in his predictions; Oedipus' crimes are revealed. Later in the play, this tragedy surrounding the king goes even further back in

Sophocles. “Oedipus the King.” In The Three Theban Plays. ed. and trans. Robert Fagles. (New York: Penguin Books 1984), lines 39-43. 4 Sophocles, “Oedipus the King,” lines 520-523. 3

his life, with the shepherd who rescued him as a child saying, "you were born for pain."5 There was not a moment in Oedipus' life where he was free of his fate; from birth, he had been destined for this tragedy and punishment. Moreover, the Olympian gods' role in this play presents an evident lack of Oedipus’s personal autonomy. First, the chorus explicitly illustrates the powerlessness of men in the face of the Olympians: "Destiny guide me always, Destiny find me filled with reverence pure in word and deed. Great laws tower above us, reared on high born for the brilliant vault of heaven.”6 The Olympians are not limited in the same ways as men, and their will is law, even if that will goes against mortal notions of justice, as it happens with Oedipus. This hero is morally innocent but suffers, just as life has certain tragedies that are exempt from human influence. Apollo hails plagues and natural disasters upon the city of Thebes, causing the innocent people of the city to suffer without cause or method of redress.7 This intense focus on the weakness of men compared to the power of the gods indicates the play’s setting in the divine cosmos. The text operates within the societal rules and understandings of that context in particular, which further exemplifies how beholden Oedipus’s destiny is to external forces. Certain scholars have attempted to disagree with the previous argument by arguing that Oedipus is still an actor with free-will; they prescribe ancient understandings of

Ibid. lines 1305. Ibid, lines 954-963. 7 Ibid, line 120. 6

justice to his choices at the crossroads. One such scholar is R. Drew Griffith, who states that Oedipus is not morally innocent, specifically arguing that predestination does not constitute a compulsion. Thus, Oedipus committed patricide of his own free-will. However, this notion only functions when we analyze the play through a lens of justice that does not apply the concept of fate.8 This argument holds Oedipus morally responsible, but the death of Laius at the hands of Oedipus in any circumstances would constitute a tragedy. As Griffith states, “Oedipus’ fate does not absolve him of blame, since he could have fulfilled it in total innocence.”9 While Griffith uses this example to indicate Oedipus’s own culpability in the face of unconditional fate, this idea also illustrates a deeper truth: tragedy was destined to befall Oedipus, even if he made this specific choice of 'free-will' in a temporal or moral sense. The possibility of Oedipus remaining innocent only further underlines the lack of justice in external forces. Thus, while these are intricate and valid interpretations of the text, they do not apply in this specific analysis of Oedipus's lack of free will because there was no mechanism for him to escape the tragedy, only perhaps the moral responsibility.

II. ANTIGONE AS THE AGENT In contrast to Oedipus, Antigone focuses on the political realm and, as a result, gives complete agency to its characters. This difference is most evident in the words of

R. Drew Griffith, "Asserting Eternal Providence: Theodicy in Sophocles' 'Oedipus the King,'" In Illinois Classical Studies 17, no. 2 (1992): 193-206. 9 Griffith, “Theodicy in Sophocles,” 205.

Tiresias, the same prophet who damned Oedipus to his tragic fate. Tiresias warns Creon after his actions in the first half of the play; Creon, the king of Thebes following the death of Oedipus, declared that the body of one of Oedipus’s sons, Polynices, would not be buried on account of crimes against the state. This declaration constituted sacrilege and was immensely dishonorable to the dead. In Antigone, Tiresias only advises Creon; he does not determine his fate, "Take these things to heart, my son, I warn you. All men make mistakes, it is only human. But once the wrong is done, a man can turn his back on folly, misfortune too, if he tries to make amends, however low he's fallen."10 Tiresias gives Creon a way out, a way to atone for his mistake, proving that he is not doomed to the tragedy that eventually comes. Within that same speech, Tiresias also makes an interesting claim about the mechanisms of prophecy, "The rites failed that might have blazed the future with a sign… No birds cry out an omen clear and true."11 The typically reliable methods of prediction are failing in this specific case, thus separating the results of the play from predetermined certainties. This distinction places the blame, and the action, entirely in the hands of the key characters, not gods or prophecies. This separation is further exemplified by the lack of godly action in the play. Whereas in Oedipus, Apollo's plague was the catalyst for the entire act, the actions and will of men and women entirely determine Antigone's plot.

Sophocles. “Antigone.” In The Three Theban Plays, ed. and trans. Robert Fagles. (New York: Penguin Books, 1984), lines 1131-1135. 11 Sophocles, “Antigone,” lines 1120-1129. 10

The character Antigone also clearly acts with agency, openly taking full responsibility for her choices: refusing to obey the orders of the king and refusing to remain silent about this action. This freedom is exemplified in her words to Creon after she buried her brother against the king's edict, "Die I must, I've known it all my life… And if I am to die before my time I consider that a gain."12 This statement is particularly fascinating as it deals with an immutable facet of human life, death, yet it applies a tremendous amount of personal choice. Scholar Sarah Iles Johnston further highlights Antigone’s agency in death by arguing that her entombment mirrors other ancient depictions of the sacrifice of virgins, yet with the critical distinction that Antigone hangs herself. In doing so, she does not allow herself to be killed for the crime, choosing her method and time of death instead. This agency, in the face of inescapable mortality, powerfully underlines the importance of individual choice throughout the play. Johnston also argues that this individuality corresponds with a revolutionary implication. In her analysis, she equates the sacrifice of virgins with the sacrifice of potential children and families that might serve the state, which is why they have power. In keeping with this belief, Antigone's suicide allows her to strip the power that the state has over her and her body.13 Antigone's death also differs from these sacrificial murders through the mechanisms of law in place of religion. The Thebans do not kill 12

Ibid, lines 512-515. Sarah Iles Johnston, "Antigone's Other Choice" In Antigone's Answer: Essays on Death and Burial, Family and State in Classical Athens, Helios, ed. R. Lauriola and K. Demetriou (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2006). 179-184. 13

her to appease some god, but to appease their king Creon. These implications support the play's occupation of the democratic, rather than religious, cosmos. To conclude, Sophocles’ Antigone highlights the human agency of the central characters, Creon and Antigone. Their actions are the driving force behind the whole narrative. The only inevitability of tragedy in Antigone comes from the natures of the characters themselves, from the stubbornness of their actions, but no external force decides for them.

Harrsch, Mary. Oedipus at Colonus by Jean-Antoine-Theodore Giroust 1788 French Oil (5). 2006. Dallas Museum of Art. Dallas, Texas, https://flic.kr/p/rY5MX

III. CONCLUSION Oedipus suffers at the hands of an immutable fate, a predetermined destiny of tragedy. Despite his immense heroism and strength, he is powerless against the gods and divine external forces. Antigone and Creon suffer by their own hand; their choices lead to their demise. Though both of these plays are steeped in tragedy, the misfortune is derived from opposite sources. Oedipus is about the divine and the religious. Antigone is about the earthly and the democratic. By having these two plays exist in the same trilogy, Sophocles rationalizes seemingly opposing ideologies of free-will and determinism. He states that so long as the divine and the democratic are clearly delineated, free-will and predestination can coexist. Thus, in combining these two aspects of society, Athenians operated with a sense of personal, political autonomy while simultaneously being victims of indiscriminate fate. Sophocles recognized this apparent contradiction and attempted to represent and simultaneously reconcile it through depictions in Oedipus and Antigone. He did so by dividing the two plays into separate cosmos. Oedipus is part of the divine cosmos, Antigone is part of the democratic one. As a result, Oedipus's 'choices' lead him to an inevitable destiny, while Antigone's choices are impactful and actionable, just as they must be to serve in a democracy. Antigone is limited to the actions of men, as seen in the conflict. The protagonist disagrees with Creon, who then kills her. There is no godly or external influence involved. This independence mirrors the conception of democracy, that these are the

choices of men, and those choices will impact men. Oedipus is a conflict between man and the gods or destiny, and the main character Oedipus is powerless against them. The play is set after he has killed his father and married his mother, which further emphasizes the inevitable nature of Oedipus’s two crimes. Overall, these two seemingly contradictory depictions of fate are actually complementary, as they allow Athenians to rationalize unavoidable tragedy that seemingly happens to good people, with a belief in an impactful autonomy of men. It also allows the Athenians to avoid any culpability when things go wrong, blaming such a result on the gods or destiny, while at the same time they could laud themselves when things go well, claiming credit. What purpose does this reconciliation by Sophocles between the democratic system and religion serve in modernity? Although these plays are over two thousand years old, the progression of time has not led to a greater understanding of the human place in the world. Democracy has become far more commonplace, and the everpopular liberalist philosophies have guaranteed individual freedoms, but even in modern Christian society, there is a common discomfort with the religious concept of an omnipotent God. Countless philosophers and theologians have attempted to reconcile free-will with and an omnipotent God, just as Sophocles did. Moreover, we still feel just as helpless as the ancient Athenians in the face of tragedies and just as angry or disillusioned when they befall innocent people. Humans are naturally empathetic, and the knowledge that the world is not inherently moral is

often hard to digest. The works of Sophocles remind us that we cannot be gods, invincible to the indomitable whims of the universe. However, we can find comfort in the fact that over two thousand years, we have retained that empathy and that desire to make the world less tragic than it appears. We strive to create pockets of civilization, places where our thoughts and our choices matter, even if it means suffering for them.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adkins, Lesley and Roy A. Adkins. The Handbook to Life in Ancient Greece. New York: Facts On File, 2005. Griffith, R. Drew. "Asserting Eternal Providence: Theodicy in Sophocles' 'Oedipus the King,'" In Illinois Classical Studies 17, no. 2, 1992. Johnston, Sarah Iles. "Antigone's Other Choice" In Antigone's Answer: Essays on Death and Burial, Family and State in Classical Athens, Helios, ed. R. Lauriola and K. Demetriou Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2006. Sophocles. “Antigone.” In The Three Theban Plays, ed. and trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books, 1984. Sophocles. “Oedipus the King.” In The Three Theban Plays. ed. and trans. Robert Fagles. New York: Penguin Books 1984. Thucydides. The History of the Peloponnesian War. Trans. by Rex Warner. New York, NY: Penguin Books, 1972.

“THE REAL JEWS”: DEFINING ISRAELI IDENTITY IN POLITICS AND CINEMA

BY SOPHIA HERNANDEZ TRAGESSER, UNIVERSITY OF ST. THOMAS

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Sophia is a senior studying history at the University of St. Thomas in St. Paul, Minnesota. Her research interests include Reconstruction legal history, African American history, modern Middle Eastern film history, and medieval Middle Eastern slavery

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In 1933, a Zionist film crew produced a cornerstone Israeli film, Oded Hanoded, depicting a child’s adventures in the Jezreel Valley at the forefront of Jewish civilization amidst Arab Bedouins. This film embodied the Zionist struggle for an ethno-religious homeland by presenting strong European-Jewish characters engaged in a life-and-death battle for survival against hostile land and backwards tribes.

These sentiments

dominated early 20th century settler politics and culminated in the successful creation of the state of Israel in 1948. Early immigrants to Israel between 1880-1940 came from diverse ethnic and national backgrounds within Europe; Zionists actively overcame those differences by creating a modern, secular society. Notably, through social institutions like the agricultural communities known as kibbutzim and the revival of Hebrew as a spoken language, a particular national Israeli identity emerged. In the 1940s, Ashkenazim (European Jews), who comprised most of the Jewish settlers in the former mandate, largely accepted the vision and culture promulgated by Zionists. In 1950, however, Israel passed the Law of Return, offering any Jew in the world the promise of Israeli citizenship should they immigrate to the homeland. Jews from the Middle East and North Africa, called Mizrahim, along with post-Holocaust Ashkenazi refugees, responded by rapidly immigrating to Israel to flee persecution. Between 1950 and 1980, Israel’s demographics transformed from a predominantly European Jewish nation to a multi-ethnic society, with a politically engaged Mizrahi population. Throughout the 20th century, the question of belonging in Israel, particularly for Mizrahim, was settled on both political and cultural fronts.

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Israeli cinema grappled with these transformations, inviting the public to reflect on the evolving character of Israel. The prominence of Ashkenazim in positions of power created the vision of a fair-skinned, European Israel, which dominated popular cultural until the Six-Day War.

Reflecting the political landscape, Israeli film projected

European aesthetics in contrast to the surrounding Arab culture, which was dismissed as antiquated and backward. Mizrahim were treated and represented as products of their immutable Arab heritage and excluded from the Israeli identity until after 1967, when both heritages were joined together against the hostility of the Muslim Arab world. This unity, however, was short-lived. Israel’s failures in the Yom Kippur War of 1973 and the rise of Likud—a largely Mizrahi working-class party— to political hegemony produced a struggle to revive and display Mizrahi heritage as legitimate Jewish and Israeli culture. The 1980s embrace of individualism in economics and politics was mirrored on screen, where personal cinema displayed individual stories of Mizrahim and prompted discussion of a multicultural Israel, rather than a European ‘Melting Pot’. After the 1948 War of Independence, Israel held its first legislative election. In the one-hundred-and-twenty-member parliament, only two members were recorded as born in Arab countries; the rest were European Jews. This political majority gave Ashkenazim the power to formalize early Israeli identity through politics. The political rhetoric and policy from this era reveals that Israeli culture was assumed to be inherently European and superior to surrounding ‘backwards’ Arab nations. Prime 103

Minister David Ben-Gurion focused efforts on mass population growth through immigration and birth-rate to occupy and develop land and build a self-sufficient military force. Between 1948 and 1956, 450,000 Jews immigrated to Israel from Asia and Africa,

overwhelming Israel’s immediate housing resources. The government

placed these refugees and voluntary immigrants in transit camps and shantytowns with minimal infrastructure. Prime Minister Ben-Gurion, who unabashedly argued for Ashkenazi superiority, justified the poor conditions of Mizrahi camps. He expressed his view of Mizrahi as least among the Jews in a meeting on immigration: “even the immigrant from North Africa, who looks like a savage, who has never read a book in his life, not even a religious one, and doesn't even know how to say his prayers, either wittingly or unwittingly has behind him a spiritual heritage of thousands of years.” The Labor Government and elite Ashkenazim asserted an Israeli identity rooted in European sophistication and culture. Conversely, those in power encouraged Mizrahim to abandon Arab culture and assimilate into an Israeli identity rooted in European Zionism and Ashkenazi tradition. Economic and social disparities developed between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi due to limited housing. The state housed Ashkenazi immigrants in growing urban centers and the homes of Palestinians who fled in 1948.

These areas gave Ashkenazim access

to well-paying, white collar jobs. As Ashkenazim occupied former Palestine, the Israeli government launched development campaigns of unoccupied desert by relocating Mizrahim into transit camps, or moshavim; these collectives were significantly less 104

developed and funded than the Ashkenazi-majority kibbutzim.

Social practices in

moshavim tended to hold “more traditional and idiosyncratic values, as against communal upbringing in the kibbutz”. Movashim did not have large preexisting economies with professional jobs, thus Mizrahim genrelly took labor jobs regardless of former work experience or education. This political change trickled down into Israeli culture, most notably in cinema. After the War of Independence, Israeli film shifted away from the pre-1948 documentary genre and embraced fiction as a means of projecting a unique Israeli identity that stood out from the surrounding Arab culture. The victory of 1948, along with a realization that Israel’s future would demand constant military force, launched an era of independent films depicting physically strong and independent Ashkenazim. Themes of war and military dominance over Arabs dominated the screen and created an Israeli image juxtaposed to Arabs in all characteristics. During early state-building, the Israeli government did not perceive great value in filmmaking despite their heavy investment in other areas of the arts as part of their socialized policy. However, the globally acclaimed 1960 American film Exodus, which was shot in Israel, transformed the state’s understanding of cinema. The Zionist epoch centers around Kitty, an American aid worker after the Holocaust, who falls in love with Haganah rebel Ari Ben Cannan. The film follows several characters’ lives in the kibbutz and moshav, unraveling histories of physical and sexual abuse of Holocaust survivors by the Nazis and of kibbutz dwellers by Arabs. The 105

character’s lives are impacted by the political events of the late 1940s, the prospects of statehood, and the British pursuit of Ari following the bombing of the King David Hotel. The film’s main child character, a young Danish girl who survived the Holocaust, is murdered by a gang of Arabs on her way to join the army for the War of Independence.

Figure 1. Exodus film title cover

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At the same time, another character is murdered, mutilated, and hung in a village by an ex-Nazi. The film concludes with the burial of the two martyrs and the survivors getting on a truck to enter battle. The film’s stark imagery stirred sympathy for Israel and Jews in the hearts of Americans and demonstrated the power of cinema to garner international support for Israel while serving as a mythic origin story for the modern state.

After Exodus succeeded in portraying Israelis as strong, moral characters,

righteous in the face of savagery, the Israeli government invested in the domestic film industry as a tool for building the Israeli image at home and abroad. The Commerce Ministry began funding film in the 1960s-70s as part of a campaign to finance the arts. Known as bourekas after a common Mediterranean dessert, this 1960s film genre address issues of ethnic misunderstanding and immigration through comedy and drama. Israeli bourekas engaged with questions of racial identity by depicting Mizrahi-Ashkenazi relations and ethnic tropes from an Ashkenazi view. Plots featured stereotypically flawed Mizrahi characters who often resolved their struggles with identity and socio-political structure by marrying into an established Ashkenazi family. When it came to casting these characters, Ashkenazi actors filled all major roles regardless of the character’s race. Directors emphasized stereotypical Mizrahi characteristics, such as accents, religious piety, and dress, to create convincing Mizrahi characters.

Ashkenazi and Mizrahi characters were always

portrayed as distinct and separate, even beyond their aesthetics. Bourekas framed Mizrahi Jews as foreigners who struggled to understand Israel but could ultimately 107

assimilate and become Israeli—an identity derived from Ashkenazi culture. This vision of a Eurocentric Israel reflects the political sentiments of the era. Then Foreign Minister Golda Meir addressed arriving Soviet Jews as “the real Jews...a superior breed [who] will provide [Israel] with heroes.” Political and economic preference for Ashkenazi intensified racial strife in social settings. In Tel Aviv, newly immigrated Ashkenazi filed complaints against “black” Mizrahi neighbors, prompting the separation of Mizrahi and Ashkenazi children in school and recreation. Mizrahi resistance to social hostilities resulted in neighborhood skirmishes which resulted in deaths of both races. Amid the strenuous racial divisions, the Israeli identity maintained one common experience: immigration. Ephraim Kishon’s 1964 film Sallah follows the story of Mizrahim Yemeni Jew Sallah Shabati and his family as they begin life in Israel. The film opens with a line of passengers deboarding a plane. The first to get off are Ashkenazi women in heels and western dress, who wave ostentatiously and disembark in regal fashion. Behind them emerge several dark-skinned Mizrahi children in traditional garb, carrying supplies and clothing without trunks. Sallah emerges last, behind his wife and eight children. His first words are “Praise Him who brought us to this Land”, a quotation from the Pentateuch. Here, in just the first minute, four stereotypes of Mizrahi are depicted: poverty, large families, traditional dress, and religiosity. Sallah takes a headcount of his family and discovers one child is missing. He yells, then the screen turns to the luggage port of the plane as a little boy rides down inside a bag. This scene reinforces 108

stereotypes of Mizrahi as loud, rambunctious, and disorganized. As the introductory credits appear, the background alternates between Sallah’s disheveled family walking across the tarmac and a group of Ashkenazi travelers. Characteristics of each are emphasized and aspects of each group satirized. This image reflects the sociopolitical division between Ashkenazi and Mizrahi. Though both racial groups immigrated on the same plane, the experience did not produce a kinship between parties and they immediately dispersed once on Israeli soil. Even as they complete the same tasks, the Ashkenazi group stay together in the front of the plane and processing lines, leaving the Mizrahim behind. Next, the government sends the family to a kibbutz where Sallah struggles to assimilate into the commune practices. For the first half of the film, he drinks and plays backgammon, only socializing with his poor drunkard neighbor. He interrupts and undermines the communal meeting, interferes with a kibbutz forestry operation, and demands to be paid for his daughter’s hand in marriage so that he can afford a new home elsewhere. Though the character is largely a mockery of Oriental backwardness, the film validates certain Mizrahi customs. When in deliberation with the parents of his daughter’s soon-to-be fiancé, they denounce his request as a “barbaric custom” irreconcilable with their “progressive way of life”. Sallah replies with an appeal to tradition: “Why do you want us to forget it? Suppose it is our custom to give you 1,000 pounds. You tell us to forget only what is not good for you…Barbaric or not, we pay a father because he raised his girl... What you sew in the kibbutz don’t you want to reap?” Sallah’s rebuttal emphasizes the hypocrisy of casting Mizrahi culture as un-

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Israeli. He bridges the “barbaric” Mizrahi customs with basic human sentiments, which are expressed even within kibbutz life, thereby reconciling Oriental customs with life in modern Israel. The stereotypical yet redemptive portrayal of Mizrahim in Sallah exhibits several political challenges during this time. Sallah also served as a platform for criticism of the socialist foundation of Zionism. Although many cultural traditions of Mizrahi immigrants were denounced as inferior by Ashkenazi leaders, they could not all be stricken from the Israeli identity. The kibbutz leadership in Sallah are portrayed as corrupt, lacking moral authority and depth. This reflected the Israeli political shift away from the Soviet Union prompted by the fall of the Mapai coalition, a democratic socialist political party which previously dominated Israeli politics until the 1960s. In 1963, Ben-Gurion stepped down after a series of disgraces; this softened the image of Ashkenazi superiority within the Israeli identity. Sallah, which was produced a year after the prime minister’s resignation, demonstrated that certain aspects of Mizrahi culture could exist within the Israeli identity, though it was undergirded by European superiority. Mizrahi characters in Israeli film were often presented as extremely religious to reflect the religiosity of Mizrahi population at large in the 1960s. In the 1966/1967 school year, 40.3 percent of Mizrahi children enrolled in State Religious schools, compared to 27 percent of all children nationally. The Mizrahi to Ashkenazi ratio in Religious Schools was +55 versus –24 percent in the secular State Schools. The Six-Day War reinvigorated eschatological politics, undergirding public policy with religious motivations. In 1968, 110

the government authorized the resettling of Jews in Hebron; these settlements bridged the gap between the ultra-orthodox, right who desired the Biblical lands of Judea Samaria and the Zionist nationalists, who envisioned Israeli expansion. The settlements roused religious pride, reconciling Israeli identity with a larger Jewish religious identity inclusive of Mizrahim who tended to be more religious. This created space, particularly as the Mapai political hold receded, for Mizrahi-religious coalitions to gain representation in the Knesset and take on political leadership. After defeat in the Yom Kippur War of 1973, Israel experienced more dramatic political shifts away from the Labor Ashkenazi establishment, culminating in the election of Likud figurehead Menachem Begin as Prime Minister in 1977.

This

realignment stirred cultural questions over Israeli identity and the validity of BenGurion’s Mizug Galuyot (melting pot) vision for immigrant integration. Film of the 1980s and 90s, a genre dubbed personal cinema, “viewed itself as the polar opposite of commercial cinema” and established an “Israeli New Wave” which rejected the socially collectivistic ideals of previous genre and embodied a “spirit of new individualism”. Israeli film scholar Ella Shohat interprets this as an allegoric mirror of contemporary politics, embodying the Likud resistance to Zionist-socialist values on screen. Personal cinema examines Mizrahi and Ashkenazi identity through individual experiences. According to Shohat, the ability to portray the personal experience of Mizrahim on screen, independent of assimilation schemes, marks a historical engagement with Arabness among Mizrahim and Palestinians in Israeli culture.

This ‘New Wave’ 111

exploration of the individual paid particular attention to the Sabra, the “Jews born in Palestine toward the end of World War I through the 1920s and 1930s”.

By the late

20th century, it had encompassed both Israeli-born children of recent immigrants and second or third genretion Israelis. Narratives like Beyond the Walls (1984) display Mizrahi characters, culture, and experiences in a way that challenged the Ashkenazi worldview.

Daniel Gutwein refers to this cultural phenomenon as post-Zionist

multiculturalism. This social multiculturalism, including the on-screen inclusion of Mizrahi sabra identity, according to Gutwein, is a manifestation of the “ideology of privatization” prominent in 1980s ‘post-Zionist’ economic policy.

Figure 2. Beyond the Wall film title cover

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Cinema played a central role in imagining a Jewish homeland for Zionists and settlers in the early 20th century. The creation of Israel in 1948 solidified Zionist sociopolitical precepts but was quickly upended by mass immigration from Eastern Europe and the Middle East. Between 1950 and 1970, the interplay of politics and culture produced an Israeli identity initially centered in European culture, but pliable enough to incorporate Mizrahi culture over time. As Mizrahi presence in Israel was marginalized politically, their roles on screen were either muted or misconstrued to present the Oriental Jews as they were imagined by Ashkenazim. Non-Jewish Arabs were depicted as execrable hostiles, as seen in Exodus and implied in Sallah, which harmed the Mizrahi image further. After the Yom Kippur War in 1973, political tides shifted and the Mizrahi-religious coalition gained power through the Likud party. The political shift away from Ashkenazi Labor politics created room for differing Israeli identities to coexist, which enabled personal cinema to seriously interrogate questions of Mizrahi and Arab-Israeli identity.

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Kanovsky, Eliyahu., The Economy of the Israeli Kibbutz. (Cambridge, Distributed for the Center for Middle Eastern Studies of Harvard University by Harvard University Press, 1966). Kimchi, Rami N. "A Turn towards Modernity: The Ideological Innovation of Sallah." Shofar 29, no. 4 (2011): www.jstor.org/stable/10.5703/shofar.29.4.1. “Likud.” A Dictionary of Politics in the Middle East. Oxford University Press, June 21, 2018. Light Out of Nowhere (Or Min Hahefker), Directed by Nissim Dayan. Tel Aviv, Israel. 1973. Film. Loshitzky, Yosefa. “National Rebirth as a Movie: Otto Preminger’s Exodus.” National Identities 4, no. 2 (July 2002): Massad, Joseph. "Zionism's Internal Others: Israel and the Oriental Jews." Journal of Palestine Studies 25, no. 4 (1996): Naaman, Dorit. "Orientalism as Alterity in Israeli Cinema." Cinema Journal 40, no. 4 (2001). Oded Hanoded (1933), Directed by Haim Halachmi, Film Arets- Israeli Chaim Halachmi & Co. Picard, Avi., “Tradition Versus Tradition: Mizrahi Pupils in National Religious Schools in Israel, 1948-1990.” Journal of modern Jewish studies 17, no. 2 (2018). Sallah. Chaim Topol. Directed by Ephraim Kishon. Produced by Menahem Golan. Israel 1964. Film.

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