Criterion, Volume 33, 2015

© 2015 Criterion. All rights reserved.

Criterion, a journal of literary criticism by students, is published each spring by the Loyola Marymount University English Department through the support of the Denise L. Scott Memorial Fund. Edited by undergraduates, Criterion seeks contributions representative of undergraduate and graduate writing within the department. Submissions are preferably between five and fifteen double-spaced pages. No material may be reproduced in any form, except by the author, without written consent from the editor(s).

Please adress correspondence to: Criterion Loyola Marymount University Department of English 1 LMU Drive, Suite 3800 Los Angeles, CA 90045-2659 Senior Editors Jimmy Kehoe Megan Brown Reviewers Jimmy Kehoe Elise Cimino Bryan Rollofson Maria Carolina Gomez Sarah Litz Michelle Yee Megan Brown Jo Aquino Liz Holland Cruz Quinonez Faculty Advisors Dr. Aimee Ross-Kilroy Graphic Designer Kathryn Zimmermann Faculty Director Garland Kirkpatrick Department of Art and Art History College of Communication and Fine Art

Dear Reader, Well look at you picking up the 33rd edition of Criterion, Loyola Marymount University’s literary criticism journal; now when people see you reading it they will think that you are smart and know a lot about literature and criticism (and we all know how sexy those things are). We are very excited to have included some very interesting and unique pieces this year, with subjects ranging from revolutionary monsters, to possesed children’s toys, to drug using Mayors. As you peruse these pieces, we hope that you are able to appreciate the value of our authors’ insights into a diverse group of texts; as well as recognize the significance that literary criticism holds, not only in the academic realm but also the political, social, and personal, and realize all that it has to offer us today.

We would like to thank our wonderful faculty advisor Aimee Ross-Kilroy for her support and wisdom throughout the entire publishing process. To all of the editorial staff, we extend our thanks for contributing your time, effort, and insights. We would also like to thank Maria Jackson and the English Department, who make this journal possible.

We thank our graphic designer, Kat Zimmerman, for her stunning work on this year’s journal, and also faculty director Garland Fitzpatrick for his continued guidance and support.

And last, but certainly not least, we thank the authors, the reason this journal exists.

On behalf of everyone on Criterion, we thank you, Megan Brown and Jimmy Kehoe, Senior Editors

The Ford Fiesta: Mayor Rob Ford and the Private Lives of Public Officials Nick Lepore

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The Terby, Victor, and the Cat: Bizarre Animals and Personal Demons in Lunar Park Erika Rothberg

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Voice for the Disenfranchised: Mary Shelley’s Political Advocacy for Revolution by the Lower Classes in Frankenstein Morika Fields

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Wuthering Heights and the Mockery of Civilization: The Problems of Society and Identity Megan Brown

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The Transcendent Victim: The Role of Different Personas in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry Roshan Berentes

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Begging for Sexual Freedom: Examining Feminist Representations of the Erotic in Ellen Bass’s Like a Beggar Kennedy Roberts

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The Commodification of the “New Man” & The Radicalization of Heroine/Hero: Austen the Writer Comes of Age in Northanger Abbey Michael Robinson

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Compassion & Concern: The Dichotomy of Riis’s Reform A closer look at How the Other Half Lives Alana Schlemm

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Song Of Memory: Finding Music & Meaning In the Childhood Reflections of Lynn Emanuel & Susan Mitchell Mat Levitt

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Combination: Water Is A Cold Thing With No Shape André K. Enriquez

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The Ford Fiesta: Mayor Rob Ford and the Private Lives of Public Officials

I’m Nick Lepore, a senior English major and History minor at LMU from San Jose, California. I have a pretty wide array of interests, and politics is definitely one of many things which occupy my mind. This piece was written for an honors class called, “Beyond Good and Evil,” a political ethics class taught that semester by professor of political science, Emily Hallock. Not long prior, I had been fascinated by the Rob Ford scandals, since the public reaction seemed to be totally different from most other narratives of scandalized politicians.

I wanted to know why this was the case, and so for my final project in this course, I used Ford’s scandals as a case study to examine how and why we, the public, react the way we do to the behavior of certain politicians.

It is a narrative that has become more and more familiar in politics over the last few decades: a politician gets caught in an extramarital affair, or sending illicit pictures via text message, or even caught with drugs under their nose. Regardless of the indecent act of private conduct exposed, the outcome is usually somewhat choreographed. Despite attempts to assert that they “did not have sexual relations with that woman,” the truth eventually comes out. After widespread vilification at the hands of the media and the masses, the public figure admits their guilt, apologizes in a highly neutral and PR-friendly manner, and often resigns from their position in shame. It is this exact scenario in which Toronto mayor Rob Ford found himself this past year, but with an unusual twist.

Ford’s story at first looks similar to the countless others which preceded him. After much public attention for his poor drinking habits, allegations of sexual assault, and even rumors that he had been spotted with a prostitute, Ford finally broke international headlines in late 2013. Toronto police confirmed the existence of a video depicting the mayor smoking crack cocaine. However, what accrued even more attention than Ford’s behavior was the way he handled the fallout. His reactions to the scandals that beset him can only be described as apologetic, yet unabashedly Ford-like. Take, for example, his comments about the cocaine video: “Yes, I have smoked crack cocaine but ... am I an addict? No. Have I tried it? Um, probably in one

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of my drunken stupors.” Even more brazen was his denial of sexual harassment allegations raised by a former staff member, about which he remarked, “Olivia Gondek said that I wanted to eat her p****. I’ve never said that in my life to her; I would never do that. I’m happily married, I’ve got more than enough to eat at home.” Each statement he made left reporters and the public in disbelief. His actions were totally unpredictable and outlandish for even the most scandalous of politicians. Yet, even less predictable was the public’s response.

Stunningly enough, Ford’s handling of the situation was not as politically suicidal as it might have seemed. His approval rating actually increased by 5%, even though 98% of those polled were aware of the video depicting Ford smoking cocaine (Harper 2013). This unexpected reaction on the part of the public brings to light a number of questions about the role of private conduct in the evaluation of our public officials. When and why does such private behavior matter in our judgments, and why do some, like Ford, seem to get away cleaner than others in the court of public opinion? Ford’s case reveals that an ability to clearly differentiate between public and private behavior, as well as a consistent and well-defined sense of character – as opposed to the overly-rehearsed, PR-friendly image to which we are a ccustomed in our politicians – are the keys to retaining the public’s favor in the face of such scandals.

Personality in Politics The Ford incident is only the most recent in what has been a growing trend of the personal becoming political over the last half century.

Much of what led to this heightened focus on personality and private conduct in politics has to do with the evolution of the news media in the last several decades. As news expanded in its distribution, it also began taking on new forms, such as televised broadcasts and ultimately digital media. To keep up with the demands of their audiences, however, many outlets – particularly dying newspapers – transitioned to more populist or even entertainment-oriented content (Stanyer and Wring 1-2). Stories that detail the mysteries of a public figure’s private life generally attract more interest from audiences than dry explications of policy debates (Balkin 396). As a result, politics – especially electoral politics – have become an increasingly personal affair.

This transition was not just fueled by media outlets struggling to appeal

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to broader audiences and changing demand. Some politicians were also instrumental in shifting the media’s focus. As the news media continued to expand, certain politicians were able to take advantage of personal ties to large names within the industry, or even personal ownership of media outlets, in some cases (Stanyer and Wring 2). By using their influence, they were able to reap the benefits of media attention when committing good deeds or exhibiting positive character traits – both of which previously might have been considered minor or even apolitical factors in electoral politics. These personality traits became more and more significant in determining who would get a constituent’s vote. American politicians in particular were forced to adapt to these changes, vulnerable as they were to rapid changes in public opinion due to short election cycles (King 3). Whether they liked it or not, electoral hopefuls soon found themselves spending as much money and energy on molding their personal images as they did on their political platforms.

With this heightened focus on personality and private conduct, electoral candidates now spend huge amounts to employ an army of PR managers and other image consultants, who aid them in producing a favorable image.

Among other things, this has resulted in the emergence of an image of “a kind of cloned politician, well groomed in a suit and tie, whose every move appears rehearsed and choreographed” (Stanyer and Wring 3). Ironically, this stereotypical image of the “cloned politician,” despite having been created to appease the public’s demand for more personality in their politicians, seems to have backfired. People have grown skeptical and even distrustful of this type of cookie-cutter public official. With every word and action so heavily scripted, it becomes impossible to tell sincerity from pandering, and any measure of true personality is lost. As a result, public confidence in their officials has plummeted in the last decade, and most believe that traits like honesty and integrity are at all-time lows in their politicians (Allen and Birch 49-50).

This brings us to one facet of the answer as to why some, like Ford, seem to get off with the public easier than others when dealing with behavioral scandals. Ford’s unabashedly PR-unfriendly public statements completely defied the stereotypical pattern many have come to expect of PR-reinforced politicians. In doing so, Ford achieved a level of sincerity and a true sense of character which no “cloned politician” could ever match, thus providing one potential reason why Ford might have received lighter

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treatment from the public than others.

Public Office; Private Behavior Despite the increasingly personal nature of politics, where individual character matters so heavily in winning elections, there seems to be a contradiction present in both the people and the officials that they elect. Both of these groups, even as they continue playing their respective roles in personalizing politics, somehow maintain the notion that private behavior is, in fact, separate from public action. Distinguishing between these two types of conduct may even be necessary for politicians, to a certain extent. In light of the people’s mistrust of the “cloned” variety of politician, “trying to maintain consistency between private and public conduct, while seemingly a mark of integrity and authenticity, actually may be destructive of the public good and the public’s trust” (Paine 216). In other words, a public official acting as if their behavior is consistent in both the public and private spheres gives off a sense of arrogance, falseness, or even hypocrisy. When all are aware of the highly-constructed nature of a public image, any politician claiming to behave the same in public and private matters cannot be seen as anything but a liar.

Ford, himself, seemed acutely aware of the dangers of this type of attempted consistency. In an interview with CNN, he mocked “elitists” by accusing them of this very type of hypocrisy: “all these rich elitist people…no no, they’re perfect. They don’t do nothing. Get out of here, they don’t do nothing!”

Some theorize that an ability to separate between private and public conduct explains why Bill Clinton, similarly to Ford, benefitted from higher approval ratings during his sex scandal (Bennett and Lawrence 425). Ford invoked this distinction when defending his right to continue serving as mayor. In a city council hearing, he remarked: “you’re absolutely right I’ve made mistakes. Personal mistakes. But these mistakes…was not made in this council chamber. It was made in my personal life.” Thus, if the private behavior of Ford, Clinton, and others is seen to be separate from their respective political careers, then this could provide another explanation for why the public reacts more favorably to some, but not others.

Context also plays a role in determining when private behavior matters in our judgment of public officials. Returning to the example of Clinton’s scandal, one common reason given to explain the generally mild nature of the public’s reaction is the quality of life experienced under Clinton’s administration. The economy was in good order, and Clinton’s policies were

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popular, for the most part. Precedence also seemed to play a role. Many during the Clinton scandal said that they did not care much about the president’s private behavior because they thought that “other presidents have had equally bad private lives” (Aday and Jamieson 857). While there might not have been much precedence for the type of behavior Ford exhibited, his attempts to differentiate between his private acts and his role as a public official were actually well-founded. Similarly to Clinton’s case, Ford had several policies which were popular among his constituency. For example, he had created a subway system in the region of Scarborough, where he subsequently received the most support after his scandal broke headlines (Harper 2013). In the minds of these people, Mayor Ford’s indulgence in alcohol and cocaine apparently was not inhibiting his ability to provide for their interests. As a result, they saw no reason why his private behavior should matter in measuring his performance as a public official.

This idea that political context matters in our judgments of politicians is reinforced by the case of another man who did not fare quite so well with the public’s favor: Eliot Spitzer. Prior to his scandal – involving numerous rendezvous with prostitutes funded by laundered money – Spitzer had come under fire for several controversial policies and political activities. First came a scandal involving the use of state police to surveil Senate majority leader Joseph Bruno. Later, a policy which would grant driver’s licenses to undocumented immigrants, while barring them from airplanes and federal buildings, further contributed to divided opinions about the New York governor. Due to such controversies, Spitzer was already more vulnerable to public vilification before his prostitution scandal even began. More importantly, however, his behavior critically differed from Clinton’s and Ford’s in that Spitzer’s private behavior was seen to intersect with his role as a public official. The public saw his laundering of money during the prostitution scandal and surveillance of Bruno as directly conflicting with his duties as a public official. The former act demonstrated his willingness to use money irresponsibly or even illegally, while the latter constituted an outright abuse of authority – both of which painted him as an untrustworthy or even corrupt official. Ford’s and Clinton’s actions had no such direct political consequences. As a result, Spitzer fared poorly in the court of public opinion, while Ford and Clinton managed to survive at least somewhat intact.

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The Public, the Media, and Privacy: Ethical Considerations Throughout this discussion, the news media have been a consistent theme.

We have seen how the media both “constructs the positive aspects of public lives,” and simultaneously “destroys and pulls down these lives,” by fueling public outcry against scandalized officials (Seaton 178). Thus, these issues of personality in politics and private conduct affecting public judgment of political officials also bring into question the role of journalism in a democratic society.

Particularly in exposing the private misdeeds of public officials, news reporters walk a fine ethical line. They must balance their duty to keep the people informed with the right to privacy of those on whom they report. In particular, if their information is seen as erroneous, they face public backlash at best, and costly defamation lawsuits at worst. Moreover, in cases of behavioral scandal, too much media coverage of the wrongdoer can actually increase public sympathy for them. In Clinton’s case, for instance, public opinion of the media declined rapidly, as people saw the attempts of the ravenous press to report on the Lewinsky scandal as overly-intrusive (Aday and Jamieson 858). Since prevailing opinion saw Clinton’s private behavior as separate from his presidential activities, much of the public turned against the media for unnecessarily invading Clinton’s privacy.

Similarly, Ford’s case also saw minor backlash against the press. The sight of Ford being “hounded at his home” (Harper 2013) by reporters may have generated sympathy for the mayor, further contributing to his boosted approval ratings post-crack-video. Another danger present in overly-aggressive reporting on private issues is its potential to undermine journalism’s role in a democratic society. By overemphasizing stories of private misconduct, attention is drawn away from actual political issues relevant to the general public (Balkin 393, 396). Thus, overly-emphatic reporting on the private scandals of politicians seems to detract from the press’ ability to fulfill its most important duty: keeping the public informed of issues that matter to their wellbeing.

Still, the issue of invasive reporting is far from black and white.

Incidents like the Watergate scandal heavily reinforce the notion that a certain amount of nosiness is often necessary for the media to keep the people informed about political events. Of course, the key difference between Watergate and something like the scandals plaguing Rob Ford is that the former was very clearly a public affair, as opposed to a private one.

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However, this distinction could prove useful in providing reporters with a set of guidelines so as to know when they have crossed from investigative journalism into voyeuristic slander.

Much of the public backlash against the media during private conduct scandals comes in the form of outrage over the sheer amount of coverage given to the topic – as seen in Ford’s and Clinton’s cases. In light of this, reporters should take steps to publish their work “reasonably” – in other words, well-verified and proportional to the consequence of the story being reported (Williams 748-749). Since personal character has become such an important facet of electoral politics, it makes sense that the personal scandals of public figures should, in fact, be reported. However, these matters – when they are truly issues of private conduct, and therefore have no bearing on things like public policy – should not receive the same amount of presence in the news media as incidents which directly impact the public good or public policy. On the other side of the coin, the media must still be allowed a certain degree of leniency for occasionally getting a story wrong.

Overly-stringent laws against libel only stifle journalists’ ability to report on matters relevant to public interest (748).

Lastly, we must consider the role played by the citizenry at large in these dilemmas. In particular, it is important to remain conscious of our habits as consumers of information. Demand for more entertaining stories and more personality in our politicians helped create the intense focus on private scandal which is now so prevalent in the media (Savigny 234). Therefore the general citizenry, through its preference for entertainment over discourse about public policy, is at least partially responsible for the emergence of the current, highly-personalized nature of politics. Moreover, perpetuating the demand for more information about the private lives of public figures also makes us complicit in any violations of their privacy. Hand in hand with this reality, though, we must also remember that we are capable of forming political judgments independently of the influence of the media, as the public opinion polls during the Clinton scandal demonstrated (Bennett and Lawrence 426). Ultimately, the people should remain aware of the broader consequences of personalized politics, as well as their role in creating this phenomenon through their own demand.

Conclusions Mayor Ford’s case was not just shocking, it was atypical. Although the

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Toronto City Council eventually voted to reduce his powers as mayor, he fared relatively well with the public for a number of reasons. The brazen and unconventional nature of the remarks he made in response to the scandal defied the overly-scripted, PR-friendly, apologist image of politicians to which we are accustomed. As a result, Ford gave off a sense of sincerity unparalleled by most other “cloned” public figures. Additionally, he was able to successfully differentiate between his private conduct and his actions as mayor. The context of his effective public policies contributed greatly to achieving this goal. Since his constituents were mostly pleased with the job he was doing for them, they were less likely to see his personal shortcomings as a major issue. Finally, the news media – though justified in first bringing to light Ford’s private issues – perhaps went too far. As Ford’s story grew to disproportionately dominate domestic and international headlines, and as reporters continually pestered him at his own home, many grew to sympathize with Ford. Thus, he survived the court of public opinion in far better shape than many other scandalized politicians who failed to meet the same criteria.

The Ford incident has once again brought to light a number of issues regarding the highly personalized nature of today’s politics, as well as the forces that determine who gets a pass from the public and who does not.

We, the citizens, must take care to remember the relationship between public officials and the media; the media’s role in creating and fueling a culture of personalized politics; and our own role in supplying the demand for the most intimate details of the private lives of our public officials. In the meantime, the distinction between private and public, for politicians, remains a blurry and often highly context-sensitive one.

Works Cited Aday, Sean and Kathleen Hall Jamieson. “When Is Presidential Behavior Public and When Is It Private?” Fall 1998: 856-860.

Allen, Nicholas and Sarah Birch. “How Honest Do Politicians Need to Be?” The Political Quarterly 9 February 2010: 49-56.

Balkin, J.M. “How Mass Media Stimulate Political Transparency.” Cultural Values 17 March 2009.

Bennett, W. Lance and Regina G. Lawrence. “Rethinking Media Politics and Public Opinion: Reactions to the Clinton-Lewinsky Scandal.” Political Science Quarterly 3 August 2001: 425-446.

Harper, Stephen. “Rob Ford Approval Goes Up 5% Despite Video Scandal.”

Huffingon Post Canada 2 November 2013.

King, Anthony. “The Vulnerable American Politician.” British Journal of Political Science 1 January 1997: 1-22.

Paine, Scott C. “Private Manners, Public Roles: Recognizing Different Standards for Public Board Service.” State and Local Government Review December 2012: 216-219.

Savigny, Heather. “The Media and the Personal Lives of Politicians in the United States.” Parliamentary Affairs January 2004: 223-235.

Seaton, Jean. “Public, Private, and the Media.” The Political Quarterly 1 April 2003: 174- 183.

Stanyer, James and Dominic Wring. “Public Images, Private Lives: An Introduction.” Parliamentary Affairs January 2004: 1-8.

Williams, Kevin. “Defaming Politicians: The Not So Common Law.” The Modern Law Review September 2000: 748-756.

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The Terby, Victor, and the Cat: Bizarre Animals and Personal Demons in Lunar Park

Erika Rothberg is a graduate student and teaching fellow at Loyola Marymount University. Her main fields of research are the horror genre and graphic novels. She recently presented her thesis on demonic pregnancies at the PCEA 2014 “Oh the Horror!” conference and her paper on shared trauma in Maus at Wondercon’s Comic Arts Conference in April 2015. This summer, she will be representing America on the International Gothic Association’s graduate student blog as July 2015’s guest blogger of the month. She also writes for LeglessCorpse.com.

Bret Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park is a novel full of hauntings. This quasi-autobiographical tale (“ostensibly true,” as Bret describes it) is a largely fictionalized account of Bret’s supposed experiences in a haunted house. As the novel progresses, we begin to question how much of this purported haunting is real, and suspect that this supernatural activity is most likely purely in Bret’s imagination, because every haunting is representative of one of Bret’s personal demons. Proof of this assertion can be found by examining the animals within the novel: Bret’s step-daughter’s bird toy that comes to life, the Terby; Victor, Bret’s dog; and a cat belonging to the object of Bret’s lust, Aimee Light. Each animal corresponds to Bret’s fears of fatherhood, his ego and loss of personal identity, and emasculation/ sexuality, respectively. These animals are lingering creatures that continually follow Bret, haunting him physically as these parallel personal demons haunt him mentally and emotionally.

The Bret we meet in Lunar Park is both a fictional character and a representation of the real Bret Easton Ellis. We never get to truly realize how much of this Bret is real and how much is false; this is a clear and obvious move on Bret-the-author’s part. For the sake of clarity-- whenever I say “Bret” I’ll be talking about Bret as a character. If I want to talk about Bret as a writer, I’ll refer to him as “author Bret.” It is, at times, a difficult distinction to make within the book itself, which is quite confounding but a huge part of what

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makes Lunar Park so intriguing. With such an intricate and difficult to decipher blend of reality and fiction, we’re left to question everything that Bret tells us, and wonder exactly who (or what) is haunting whom.

One thing is certain: Bret is, to put it frankly, a train wreck; he is an alcoholic and perpetual drug user/abuser. He is rife with anxieties, and we see him chug endless gallons of alcohol and guzzle countless pills. In fact, Xanax is mentioned 12 times1 , Klonopin is mentioned 10 times2 , and vodka alone—not to mention Bret’s preferred brand names, beer, wine, or other booze—is mentioned 17 times3 in the 400-page novel. Bret is in some state of inebriation during nearly the entire book, as he typically starts drinking when he awakens and passes out drunkenly or high into a fevered stupor/ slumber nightly. His sobriety is found in extremely fleeting moments that become increasingly rare as the book progresses.

A man haunted by alcoholism and drug addiction is typically haunted by other things—in Bret’s case, his emotional hauntings concern his status as a parent, man, and writer. His major physical haunting is the ghost of his father, who seems to be reaching out to him from beyond the grave to warn him of something. Of what? We are never sure—closure isn’t something Lunar Park leaves us with—but a strong suggestion is a warning against being a bad father.

Enter the Terby.

The Terby is a bird doll that Bret’s wife’s daughter, Sarah, begged for as a birthday present. Bret describes it in sinister (and highly gothic) detail: Terby was the bird doll I had bought Sarah in August for her birthday. It was a monstrous-looking thing but very popular toy that she’d wanted badly yet the thing was so misconceived and grotesque—black and crimson feathers, bulging eyes, a sharp yellow beak with which it continuously gurgled—that both Jayne and I balked at buying her one until Sarah’s pleas drowned out all reasoning (Ellis 55).

1 2 3

Pages 13, 35, 36, 51, 61, 74, 76, 99, 100, 118, 148, and 164.

Pages 56, 74, 76, 87, 108, 131, 247, 248, 254, and 259.

Pages 23, 24, 93, 96, 97, 116, 117, 119, 120, 125, 131, 179, 202, 235, 247, 248, and 304.

The Terby is a difficult item for Bret to face. Bret’s willingness to buy the bird toy for Sarah—a child not his own, but one he has no choice but to help raise—does not come from the warmth of his heart: it comes from a desire to stop listening to his stepdaughter. He rejects the Terby much like he rejects both Sarah and his biological son Robby, unwilling to take the doll into his household but does so after it becomes seemingly unavoidable. This is the same spirit in which he enters fatherhood: an unavoidable and inevitable burden that Bret pushes away as much as possible.

The demonic animal doll becomes alive (or possibly possessed by a spirit? We never know for sure) as Bret’s descent into madness/haunting deepens. The Terby bites Bret on the hand after he rushes home from a dinner party after seeing a mysterious figure in the window of his house (Ellis 185). The hand is an extremely significant place for this bite to occur. It is the part of the body Bret most strongly associates with his parental responsibilities. This is the part of Bret’s body that his son reaches for the first time they meet: [Robby] wouldn’t let people touch him. Yet at the wedding in Nashville he had instinctively reached for my hand—I was still a stranger, his mother’s friend, nobody—to show me a lizard he thought he had seen…The wedding—after Robby took my hand for the first time—was the beginning. This was the moment where the son suddenly became real to the father (Ellis 22-23).

Robby’s gesture is subverted by the Terby when it bites Bret on the hand. When Bret is bitten, he is high. He is at a dinner party with a group of parents from his neighborhood when he and some of the other fathers go outside to smoke weed. When Bret sees a shadow (which could either be a hallucination or an indicator of a real haunting/supernatural occurrence), he springs into action by leaving the party and dashing to his house. The sequence in which Bret runs around the house with a gun, threatening the unseen entity, ends with him being bitten on the hand by the Terby: “I found the light switch…And that was when something bit me on the palm of the

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hand that was reaching for the light switch. There was a hissing noise and then a stinging sensation in my hand” (Ellis 185). Bret is bitten by the Terby while he is in Robby’s room. This is the reversal of the gesture Robby had performed upon meeting his father for the first time. Instead of finding his child in his bedroom, Bret is greeted malevolently by the Terby, who inflicts an injury on the hand that Robby once used in an attempt to be near to his father. This is reflective of Bret’s fear of facing his parental responsibility.

Robby’s gesture was an open hand, trying to bring his father closer; the Terby bites him on the hand in a parallel gesture of admonishment, taunting Bret for his unwillingness to return the gesture to a son that just wants to have a father.

But that’s not the first time we see the Terby tied to Bret’s personal demon regarding denial and fears of parental responsibility. The first party scene is a costume party that Bret and his wife Jayne throw for Halloween.

Sarah comes downstairs and enters the party, from which she had unsurprisingly been banned, supposedly since it was a school night but more likely because Bret wanted to be Bret and not Bret-the-dad. Sarah is extremely frightened and tries to tell Bret that the Terby scratched her and is currently flying around the ceiling (Ellis 61-62). Bret shrugs his stepdaughter off; to his credit, this is, at first, an understandable response to such a fantastical story, easily attributed to the wild imagination of a child, until he says “Let’s get Mommy. She’ll get him down [from the ceiling]” (Ellis 62).

Sarah has literally just told him that her bird toy is flying on the ceiling and Bret simply tells her to get her mother. He doesn’t calm her down, assuring her that this is not possible because a doll isn’t animate, but rather, he passes the buck along to his wife, the only responsible parent in the household. Immediately after he urges Sarah to get her mother to handle this fantastic situation, Sarah denies him and Bret says, “Then I’ll get a broom and knock Terby off the ceiling. Jesus, where’s Marta?” (Ellis 62). When Sarah refuses to involve her mother, he briefly agrees to help before immediately demanding to be assisted by his housekeeper, nanny, and parent by proxy, Marta. Bret does not want to deal with the Terby which is an extension of Sarah herself, so he involves the two women to assist him,

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further denying his parental duties.

Bret finally breaks down and agrees to help Sarah deal with the Terby.

He says: “So I walked up the curving staircase to the second floor to check out Sarah’s room—using my investigation of the alleged Terby incident as an excuse to do more blow” (Ellis 64). Even when Bret does take on his parental responsibility, he does so half-heartedly, only keeping his own interests in mind. Again, he has haunted by his addictive personality, while he goes to investigate another representation of one of his personal demon hauntings, the Terby.

Throughout the novel, the Terby continues to haunt Bret. While this isn’t explicitly stated, the next day, the Terby makes another unsettling appearance directly connected to his fears of fatherhood. Bret finds a headstone in his backyard that he at first assumes is part of the decorations left over from his Halloween party. However, upon closer inspection, Bret finds an alarming message upon the headstone. He is transfixed by his fear of this headstone as he investigates: The ground beneath the headstone was split—as if something buried there had clawed its way out. Over the roar of the wind I could hear an oddly distinct flapping sound…Something huge and black was passing over the house—it was flying—and then it spun around in midair and it was suddenly beneath me…and then the thing began circling above me as I knelt in front of the headstone next to the hole in the ground…And scrawled on it in red letters was ROBERT MARTIN ELLIS 1941-1992 (Ellis 127).

The headstone with Bret’s father’s name on it appears as a mysterious creature which we can easily assume to be the Terby flies over Bret. This represents his fears of fatherhood on two fronts: his father’s headstone represents Bret’s fears and apprehensions regarding his own father and the Terby represents his fears of his own responsibilities as a parent. The Terby circles above him while his father’s headstone looms directly in front of him, which is representative of Bret’s deep fear of

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becoming a father, as these two demons physically trap him from above and below. He is haunted by both of his personal demons regarding fatherhood: one stemming from a difficult childhood, having been raised by a cold and distant father, and the other, his fear of becoming that same cold and distant father to his own child.

The Terby is also linked to Bret’s fears on the deepest level, as the two share a name: Terby is, Y B R E T (Why Bret) backwards (Ellis 344). Bret realizes this only when it is pointed out to him by the demonologist, Robert Miller, who is sent in to cleanse Bret’s house of the hauntings. Interestingly, Robert Miller shares a first name with Robert Ellis, Bret’s father, so it is apropos that a mock/stand-in father figure points this out. So, it can be justifiably surmised that when Bret pushed away Sarah’s doll, he was also pushing away himself. An inversion of the bachelor Bret would be father Bret, because the inversion of Terby is Why Bret—a questions Bret poses to himself as he struggles to identify as a dad.

This sinister plot device—an obvious clue underneath our noses all along—is a clear nod to the Freudian definition of the uncanny at its root: making the familiar unfamiliar, or, turning the German word for home, heimlich, into unheimlich, a strange version of the home. As Freud notes, “the uncanny…is a species of the familiar, the homely” (134). The element of the uncanny is here for us in two senses: one, because Terby is, again, Y B R E T backwards and two, because it evokes in the reader a remembrance of the toy Furby, an extremely popular toy with a very similar description. The bird’s name in reverse is uncanny because Bret’s name is so familiar to us, having been mentioned hundreds of times in this novel before the Terby’s name origin is exposed; seeing the connection between Bret and Terby is unsettling because they are familiar identities made strange by their new meaning. The Terby also will remind any reader who lived through the 1990s of the Furby doll. It, too, like the Terby, had “bulging eyes, a sharp yellow beak with which it continuously gurgled” (Ellis 55). In fact, the Hasbro website to this date has a (rather terrifying) Furby page including an interactive portion where you can click on the Furby to make it gurgle (Furby Boom | Hasbro). The toy is less popular today but was hugely popular in the

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1990s, with 40 million Furbys sold within the first three years of the toy’s manufacturing start (Fera). It is not an unreasonable assumption that any current reader would have a very instant connection between the description of the Terby and the Furby, both due to the similarities in name and appearance. This, too, is the uncanny because a Furby is something many readers will either have had in their homes or friends’ or relatives’ homes; by comparing the demonic toy to something so familiar to his readers, author Bret is making a conscious move towards the uncanny in order to unsettle the reader. By its very definition, the uncanny relates to the home, so it is easy to trace the uncanny nature of the Terby. Because Bret is actively rejecting his place as a father within the home, a demon bird representing the home is rejecting him—heimlich, unheimlich.

Bret’s familial troubles do not end with the Terby. One of Bret’s other largest personal demons is that of his ego and personal identity. Throughout the novel, Bret continually complains about the pressures he feels to continue to be a prized author; he smarmily tells Jayne after she accuses him of getting wasted, “Look, being America’s greatest writer under forty is a lot to live up to. It’s so hard” (Ellis 63). While his fear of fatherhood can certainly be tied to his fear of loss of his personal identity, he has a separate fear of a tarnished version of himself, which his dazzling narcissism profoundly dreads. He worries about losing his career, producing subpar work, and being forgotten; he is completely concerned with being Bret and Bret alone. He is fearful of anything that tries to take him away from himself; his somehow simultaneously enormous and fragile ego cannot tolerate anyone doubting him.

Enter Victor the dog.

Victor is the family’s golden retriever. Over the course of Lunar Park, Victor is constantly anthropomorphized by Bret, continually taking on humanlike traits. This is because Victor is a vessel upon which Bret lays his insecurities and projections. Victor is a representation of either how Bret sees himself or represents what Bret fears other people see when they look at him.

Victor is frequently described by Bret the way one might describe a teenager. The first time we meet Victor, Bret says that Victor “kept staring” at

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him as he spoke and “then yawned” (Ellis 41). Later, there is a longer passage regarding Victor and Bret’s presumption that Victor is suspect of his actions: Victor shuffled in. The dog stared at me. You bore me, it was thinking. Go ahead—make my day, it was thinking… “Why does that very rude golden retriever bark all night long?” I asked, glaring back at the dog… “I never see that dog frolic,” I muttered.

“He’s been depressed ever since I moved in and I never see him frolic” (Ellis 75-77).

The former part of this excerpt parallels how Bret feels his family views him: disinterested at best, hostile at the worst. The latter part of the paragraph is parallel to how Bret himself feels about his new role as a father and husband: depressed. Bret is in the kitchen the morning after the party when this exchange-of-sorts occurs, which is the only place his family gathers together, as the only meal they regularly take together is breakfast.

Jayne, Sarah, and Robby are all in the kitchen when Bret tells us it is “the last time [he] ever saw [his] family together again” (Ellis 229). The kitchen is a place of the family, which, therefore, is a place that makes Bret uncomfortable. He is depressed with his situation, stuck in the room that represents his situation, projecting onto a dog that represents his ego.

Victor continually represents Bret’s ego and desire to reclaim his own personal identity, free from the responsibilities of parenthood and marriage.

After a day at the mall the family sits down for dinner and has “a long discussion about Victor (who didn’t want to sleep in the house anymore but whose panicked barking outside at night made this demand impossible to meet)” (Ellis 165). This can be seen as a metaphor for Bret’s circumstances.

He has been reluctant to push away his new identity as a father and husband, wanting to be free to do all the drugs and drink all the booze he could ever want. However, with his marriage to Jayne came the responsibilities of a dedicated relationship and fatherhood; he knew this entering into his new life. So, like Victor, he longs to be outside the house, but

his own personality (in Bret’s case, his reliance on drugs and incredible talent for self-harm) prevents him from leaving. He is trapped into his new identity.

Victor is so closely related to Bret that he, too, is on drugs. Bret claims: [Victor] did not like to be left alone in any room that I was in. The dog had been a mess ever since I’d arrived in July…a canine behaviorist…prescribed [Victor] Cloinicalm, which was basically puppy Prozac, but since the drug caused “excessive licking” a kind of canine Paxil had been prescribed (the same medication Sarah was on, which we all thought was extremely distasteful.)

But it still did not like to be left alone in any room that I was in (Ellis 42).

Victor has not only been prescribed antipsychotic drugs, but he has been prescribed two different drugs including the one Bret’s stepdaughter takes. (This is yet more evidence of the strange state of the Ellis household concerning animals and identity; it is troublesome—and disturbing—that the dog and the child share an anti-depressant.) Bret says that Victor cannot be alone with him, which, again, parallels Bret’s inability to deal with his own ego. He doesn’t seem to have any qualms about recognizing his giant ego, but he does have problems dealing with it. His mental instabilities are the reason Bret drinks and uses drugs; his inability to cope with his personal demons is what forces him to self-medicate to escape. Victor the dog leaves the room whenever he is alone with Bret for this reason: Bret absolutely cannot stand to be alone with himself.

More proof of this connection between Victor and Bret’s ego/identity is found on page 221. Bret is standing in the place of familial issues, the kitchen, when he looks over to see Victor sleeping on the deck despite the rain, “shivering, lost in a dream, baring his teeth at some unknown entity.”

This is representative of Bret’s ego throughout the entire span of Lunar Park.

We see Bret constantly fighting the manifestations of the haunting which no one else appears to see; he is, like Victor in his dream, trying to scare something away. This is a defense mechanism, a defensive move, because

you don’t bare your teeth at a friend—only a foe. Bret’s ego is constantly battling his new status as a father and husband, his resigned life in the suburbs, and physical hauntings.

Victor’s sad and violent end is a reference to a widely respected horror film, John Carpenter’s The Thing. It is about an alien being—the titular Thing—which is awakened after thousands of years of being trapped in ice when a team of arctic researchers accidentally release it from its snowy prison. The Thing can mutate and perfectly replicate any being which it chooses, making it nearly imperceptible to detect. It is apropos that author Bret chose this film as a reference point, since both Lunar Park and The Thing are works concerning assimilation and identity.

The first time in which we see the Thing’s power of transformation and mimicking ability is one in which a researcher’s dog is consumed. Like Victor, the dogs in this film seem to have a preternatural ability to detect the supernatural. The unfortunate dog that is consumed/mutated is ripped apart from the inside, again, like Victor. This violent transformation scene is unquestionably similar, down to specific details of Victor’s mutation: Then the dog started expanding. The dog began mutating into something else. His bones were growing and then began breaking out of his skin. The noises Victor was making were shrill and high-pitched. The dog looked surprised as his back suddenly bent up—and his body stretched another foot on its own accord….But then the dog’s lips peeled back and he started shrieking. His eyes began rolling in their sockets involuntarily until only the whites were visible…The dog stopped moving again and started shuddering as its face elongated and became lupine (Ellis 376-378).

These details are lifted directly out of the transformation scene in The Thing. Author Bret’s reference to this film is directly tied with Bret’s personal demon of ego/identity. The major tension in The Thing is discovering who is actually a human and who is actually the Thing masquerading as a human.

This is similar to Bret’s fear of assimilating: he does not want to become the suburban father like everyone else in his community. He wants to stay the same Bret he’s been for years—pill-popping, vodka-swilling bachelor Bret, eternally in a state of arrested development. This fear of losing his identity to a greater structure (society’s expectations of a father and a “responsible” adult) is represented here by Victor’s transformation, which connects with The Thing’s themes of identity and assimilation.

Here is where the similarities between the two transformations end: Victor begins vomiting black and crimson feathers, which are the feathers of the Terby (Ellis 377). This is the point in which two of Bret’s personal demons collide: his fear of fatherhood and his many apprehensions regarding his personal identity. The Terby is literally consuming Victor: by metaphorical extension, fatherhood is consuming Bret’s personal identity. Because the dog is literally turned inside out by the Terby, we can appropriate this same tension to Bret’s mentality. His entire world is being shifted as he is forced to assimilate into fatherhood, which, to him, feels like he is being consumed.

Finally, it is important to briefly examine the nameless cat belonging to the late Aimee Light. Aimee is a graduate student at the local college at which Bret teaches. She is writing her thesis on Bret’s work but maintains a cool distance from the man himself (much to Bret’s chagrin.) Bret tells us that he “had been trying to get her into bed for about a month now, but so far had only managed a few makeout sessions in [his] office at school and one in her off-campus apartment” (Ellis 50). Bret continually pushes himself upon her only to have Aimee reject his advances. Aimee, despite her academic interest in Bret’s work, does not allow Bret to, as it were, seal the deal. Bret tells us “she was enamored of me, but coolly, objectively, and this distance made her far more alluring than the usual round of sycophants I was accustomed to” (Ellis 50). Aimee should be the easiest woman in the world for Bret to bed but instead she remains at a playfully aloof distance, leaving Bret to lust after her without resolution.

Interestingly, there is a surprisingly large lack of scholarship regarding Lunar Park, and there are no publications about Bret’s sexuality and masculinity in this novel. But because Lunar Park is so strongly associated

with American Psycho, texts on the latter work are particularly helpful when examining Bret’s masculinity in the former. Bret is closely connected with his character Patrick Bateman (the protagonist serial killer from America Psycho); he has admitted in interview Sabotage Times that “Patrick Bateman was me…I was writing about myself” (Brown). The character of Clayton in Lunar Park is a reflection of both Patrick Bateman and young Bret himself, further linking the two novels and Bret with his fictional double, Patrick. It makes sense, then, to examine Patrick Bateman’s masculinity since it is closely tied to Bret’s masculinity.

Critic Mark Storey, in his essay ““And as things fell apart”: The Crisis of Postmodern Masculinity in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Dennis Cooper’s Frisk,” writes about Patrick Bateman’s rather confused sense of his own masculinity as it relates to the postmodern world. He writes: “the fear of things ‘falling apart’—pomophobia—both affect and redefine different types of masculine identity, whether those who represent an old order or those who are presumed to represent the new” (Storey 71). This is also relevant to Bret in Lunar Park. Bret does not want to be looped into the old order—he has no desire to fit the standard role of the straight husband and dedicated father.

Instead, he prefers to shirk his parental responsibilities and continue to have affairs with both sexes—an extremely complicated post-modern sexuality.

But he is unable to do so: he fails in his marriage because he doesn’t even have a sex life with his wife, and he fails outside his marriage because he cannot have a sex life with a new partner, either.

Enter the cat.

Aimee’s nameless cat represents Bret’s masculinity, and therefore, his personal demon of fear of emasculation/sexuality. Bret is in a failing and sexless marriage; he no longer lusts for his wife and has been banished to sleep in the guest bedroom due to his inability to be a partner. His troubles in bed are not limited to his own bedroom, but in a potential lover’s bedroom as well: Bret is “deeply allergic” to Aimee’s “obnoxious” cat that had ruined the “single tryst” they had attempted at her apartment (Ellis 99). Bret’s allergy to the cat also points to his own apprehensions about his sexuality and masculinity: just like Victor, he cannot face the cat alone, because he is

unable to deal with either of his personal demons regarding his ego problems and sexual dysfunction.

Aimee Light’s cat is a creature that makes very few appearances in the book, the most important of which is posthumous. There is an entire chapter dedicated to it, titled “the cat,” which also includes a major showdown with the Terby. Bret finds a mangled and bloody mess on the front of his house. It turns out to be Aimee’s cat, viciously eviscerated: It was lying on its side, spine arched, its small yellow teeth locked in a frozen grimace, and its intestines leeched the ground, clinging to the dirt they had poured onto. Its eyes were squeezing tight with what I first thought was pain. But when the writer forced ne to look more closely, I realize that something had pecked them out. The ground was soaked with blood and viscera that the Terby had slashes from the cat’s belly were sprayed across the daisied hedge, now hovering with flies….But I could not imagine how the Terby had captured the cat (Ellis 270).

We can use Noël Carroll’s theory regarding repression set forth in his book, The Philosophy of Horror, to examine the gruesome end that Aimee’s cat meets. Carroll theorizes that when an object represents something that is deeply repressed, its death or destruction will “release repression in a way that is pleasurable” (Carroll 174). Directly after finding the slayed animal, Bret thinks: “But there was a part of the writer that wanted the Terby to have killed the cat” (Ellis 270). Through the lens of Carroll’s theory, this would represent Bret’s unconscious desire to submit to the pressures of becoming a father and let his masculinity die out, allowing the role of the father to usurp the role of the bachelor. However, it’s important to note that Bret only says “a part of the writer,” which is just one part of his, at this point in the novel, nearly split-persona. The waking, conscious Bret, in reality, does not want his sexuality/masculinity to die, which is why this impulse is a part of his subconscious desires.

The novel does end in a house-cleaning ceremony which should

supposedly free Bret from his hauntings. However, the result of the climax is Robby’s disappearance and Bret’s divorce from Sarah. Bret takes a lover, a young sculptor interestingly named Mike Graves, which allows him to spiral back into his previous hedonistic lifestyle filled with drugs, booze, and sex.

This leads us to believe that Bret didn’t really escape his hauntings; his personal demons still lurk. Bret is allowed, once again, to just be Bret. The fact that Bret’s lover is named Graves, which is an image tied to hauntings, is quite telling: by abandoning the pressures of fatherhood, heteronormativity, and ego, Bret retreats into a lifestyle over which his personal demons have free reign.

Lunar Park is a complicated and rich novel. Bret Easton Ellis weaves his tale ingeniously, leaving readers to question every aspect of the story.

Bret’s personal demons are countless; a dissertation could be written on the things Bret is haunted by—he is haunted by a myriad of issues, a list that would take months to write out entirely. The animals in Lunar Park are not any ordinary animals: they are either daemonic, following Bret like a spirit, or demonic, malevolently haunting Bret—or in the case of the Terby, both daemonic and demonic. The fears each animal represents are the things Bret fears, his personal demons, as his responsibilities as a parent and desire to maintain his personal identity and sexuality despite these “adult” obligations haunt him in the truest sense of the word: they are fears that will not leave him. All of the animals eventually die: the Terby’s disappearance parallels Robby’s disappearance, echoing Bret’s loss of his son; Victor dies, as the Terby destroys him before he leaves Lunar Park, and the cat, too, is killed by the Terby. The destruction of the manifestations do not, however, represent Bret’s personal demons being resolved; rather, by the close of the novel, his personal demons are simply free to come to the surface, after Bret escapes his roles of a father and husband. The animals do not end this novel alive, but Bret’s personal demons are more alive than ever as he regresses back to the place he started at the beginning of the novel: an alcoholic, drug-addled child in a middle-age man’s body.

Works Cited Brown, James. “Bret Easton Ellis Interview: “Patrick Bateman Was Me” Sabotage Times.” Sabotage Times Bret Easton Ellis Interview Patrick Bateman Was Me Comments. Sabotage Times, 16 Aug. 2014. Web. 08 Dec. 2014.

Carroll, Noël. The Philosophy of Horror. New York: Routledge, 1989. Print.

Ellis, Bret Easton. Lunar Park. New York: Vintage, 2006. Print.

Fera, Rae Ann. “How Furby Became A Hot Toy Again.” Co.Create. Fast Company & Inc, 10 Dec. 2012. Web. 08 Dec. 2014.

Freud, Sigmund, David McLintock, and Hugh Haughton. The Uncanny. New York: Penguin, 2003. Print.

“Furby Boom | Hasbro.” Furby Boom | New Furby | Furblings | Furbish | Hasbro. N.p., n.d.

Web. 08 Dec. 2014.

Storey, Mark. “”And as Things Fell Apart”: The Crisis of Postmodern Masculinity in Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho and Dennis Cooper’s Frisk.” Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 47.1 (2005): 57-72. Taylor & Francis. Web. 8 Dec. 2014.

The Thing. Dir. John Carpenter. Universal Pictures, 1982. DVD.

Morika Fields is a senior English major. She loves sweets, coffee, and bible studies, especially when all three are combined. In addition to writing essays, she writes poetry and short stories. She plans on serving communities in need by teaching middle school English, with the hope of encouraging the next generation of writers.

Set in a class-driven society to be a reflection of her own political climate, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley explores the plight of the disenfranchised. Shelley’s most apparent ostracized character is Frankenstein’s abandoned Creature. However, she also uses members of the aristocratic Frankenstein household, Elizabeth and Justine, to illustrate how arbitrary justice can indiscriminately snatch the lives of innocent victims.

With no remedy in social or legal channels, the only avenue left for the lower classes was to demand reform by any means necessary. Shelley illustrates this powerless state of the lower classes in the text. For example, Frankenstein’s lack of ethics in his treatment of the poor corresponds to the same lack of regard that governments showed. Just as natural law should have forced Frankenstein to care for his Creature, it should have led the government to protect the rights of its poor. Likewise, the justice system should have ruled fairly in Justine’s trial, in the same way it should have for the real trial of servant Eliza Fenning. Through Frankenstein, Shelley argues that the poor, lower-class and outcasts are at the mercy of ethical law, natural law and the legal system in a way that makes revolution the only option for those without a voice.

The history of revolution and distrust of government that would have been recent in Shelley’s time is pertinent to understanding the revolutionary rhetoric throughout the text. Geneva’s government, in particular, is important

because Shelley chose Geneva as the home of the Frankenstein family, and much of the novel takes place there. 18th century Geneva was “a relatively peaceful Protestant enclave governed by a patrician oligarchy and celebrated as a paragon of natural order and of civil liberty” (Vincent 646).

This natural order pertained to the hierarchical relationships within the society, such as servants and masters, and children and fathers (Vincent 653). It was similar to England in this way, and the two countries were connected through extensive travel (Vincent 646), which is why it is not surprising that their uprisings shared similar traits. Geneva was said to have an efficient system of public justice and to be an exemplary model for its type of government to other countries (Vincent 648). Further, it was described as a family where all five classes of citizens live in harmony (qtd. in Vincent 648). Geneva had few codified laws, and a magistrate system, which meant there was no jury (Vincent 648). There was also no habeas corpus, and no legal framework to keep magistrates from ruling in an unjust manner if they wished, though they were lauded for being mild (Vincent 648-649, 652). In short, the Genevan system was arbitrary and tilted in favor of the bourgeoisie; therefore, citizens had no assurance for how the law would respond to a grievance until an actual verdict came out against the accused.

The fragile peace of Geneva did not last once the lower classes began to scrutinize the legal system. In 1760, ripples formed atop the placid waters of Geneva as the “republic’s disenfranchised classes [began] to call into question the ruling elite’s ideology” (Vincent 656). One anglophile and influential reformist aristocrat, who was described by Vincent as a “radical republican,” called the existing legal system “a system calculated for subduing the citizens, and forcing them to silence by authority and fear” (qtd. in Vincent 648). The disenfranchised classes’ struggle for basic rights was not the only source of unrest: even the privileged classes wanted codified law and legal standards for justice (Vincent 647), although the lower classes were in far more desperate need of legal protection. From the 1760s onward, it was hard for lower classes to accept the patricians’ “rationalization of arbitrary rule or to isolate criminal procedure from larger constitutional questions” (Vincent 648). Because Rousseau was banished is 1762, this only

added to the people’s suspicion of their government. The working classes used the lack of a criminal and civil code as a vehicle to demand constitutional reforms (Vincent 648).

The revolutions brought civil unrest from within and criticism from outsiders. Geneva saw an imperfect revolution in 1786, spurred by political rhetoric from both revolutionaries and conservatives that divided the republic’s ideologies (Vincent 648). This questioning and unrest culminated in two more revolutions in 1782 and 1792 (Vincent 656), however, many political commentators argued that the people should have waited to see the rights that they earned in 1768 mature before entering into another round of revolutions (Vincent 649). One commentator, speaking of the 1782 revolution, blamed revolutionaries for leading “a dangerous spirit” of which all of Europe felt its ill effects (Vincent 650). Yet the disenfranchised felt called to protect themselves against further encroachments of arbitrary power as they entered into the second revolution (Vincent 649). By 1792, the foundations of the Genevan civil government were destroyed by revolution efforts, even though the aristocratic class had negotiated a legal code in 1791 (Vincent 649).

Though revolutionaries eventually gained power, their rule had little lasting impact. The Ancien Régime, Geneva’s pre-revolution governmental structure, ended on December 28, 1792. With the fate of the new government in their hands, revolutionaries were under pressure from the lower classes and from France. Two sets of trials where 11 patricians were shot culminated the revolutions in the summer 1794. British critics saw the acts of the Régime as mild in comparison and asserted that they were worse than the system they replaced. Geneva’s international reputation was permanently tarnished by the upheavals (Vincent 649). All of this was, in the end, to little avail because the old system of Genevan government resurfaced after the Treaty of Vienna [in 1815] without much protest from citizens; the jury system was eliminated, and the people ironically said that they trusted fully in their judges (Vincent 657).

The Treaty of Vienna was in close proximity to time when Shelley was writing Frankenstein. It likely would have been fresh in the public discourse and heavily debated by politically-aware circles. In the years 1816 and 1817,

just one year after the Treaty, Shelley was drafting volumes two and three of Frankenstein. In those same years, Britain experienced “a revival of radicalism” due to post-war unemployment. The British government responded by turning to a system of arbitrary rule like Geneva to “stave off reform” (Vincent 646). Again, these controversial events were happening alongside the drafting of the novel. Shelley published Frankenstein in 1818 (Wolfson 180). With this in mind, I surmise that the politics of upheaval and top-heavy power in Shelley’s day spurred the political critique which permeates the text. The novel is Shelley’s voice in the conversation of political rhetoric.

With this historical perspective, the discreet political references become apparent. Shelley deliberately intertwines identical details between the Genevan revolutions and Frankenstein as a cue to contemporary readers to pick up on her political commentary in the novel. First, Geneva is Rousseau’s birthplace (Vincent 646). This implicitly inserts the novel into a revolutionary context. Secondly, the Creature’s birth coincides with the 1792 Revolution in Geneva (Vincent 651). This specifically aligns the novel with the Genevan Revolution. Justine’s trial further embeds the Revolution into the novel because it is set in the summer of 1794, the same time as the trials and executions of Genevan patricians and Robespierre’s trial (Vincent 651). The “Revolutionary executions” took place in Plainpalais, which is where both William and Justine died (Vincent 656). Shelley compared the trial of the innocent Justine to the corrupt Revolutionary trials by giving them the same location to show that there is not much difference between the two, though one is the lauded legal system. Further, Justine’s trial fit the historical conditions of Geneva’s actual legal system, and Shelley’s readers would have recognized this (Vincent 651). By using the real-life conditions of the legal system, readers who empathize with Justine’s character would have to then empathize with the citizens who were subjected to this treatment without protection, which is part of Shelley’s agenda.

Because the Frankenstein family represents the benevolence of Genevan aristocrats, Shelley reveals the problems that persist in a system of arbitrary law that relies upon patrician benevolence and mild magistrates.

The family had a history of generosity toward those of lower social classes than them, though this had apparent, self-serving motives (Vlasopolos 126-127). In Justine, the family received a servant who could be a good intellectual influence upon young William. In Elizabeth, the family received a pre-selected mate for Victor. Regardless, they “rescued” young girls from the confines of their societal statuses (Vlasopolos 126-127). However, these girls still did not escape their classist confines. The upper classes would have adopted this position, yet “by the end of Volume 1 [of Frankenstein], Elizabeth’s remark…that a servant in Geneva does not need ‘a sacrifice of the dignity of the human being’ cannot be taken at face value” (Shelley 43-44, Vincent 651). Elizabeth’s remark reflected the “family” reading that travel writer George Keate employed in praising Geneva (qtd. in Vincent 648).

On the contrary, Justine’s trial shows that the arbitrary nature of justice meant that cases could be bent to the prejudices of society, which never fell in the favor of the masses. Additionally, a false confession was “exacted from her in order to preserve the court’s good name” (Shelley 62-63, Marshall 106).

In short, the family façade was only a figment of Geneva’s image. In the real Geneva, the difference between the classes was apparent in both everyday life and the justice system, which was part of the reason that citizens called for change.

The trial of servant Justine Moritz demonstrates the moral boundaries that Victor Frankenstein, representing the patrician class, would breach to protect their own interests at the expense of the lower classes. Justine was accused of killing little William, even though she was actually framed by the real murderer, the Creature (Shelley 60, 109). Shelley takes the “cautionary tale” element out of the text by making the elite Victor the one who carries blood on his hands: he remains silent out of self-preservation (Shelley 56-57), and he left the Creature with no guidance or assistance after he created it (Shelley 38, 54, 67). This shows how Frankenstein flippantly violated natural law. Because cases were tried by how damaging the offense could be to society, a servant who killed their charge was seen to disrupt the hierarchy of society and was certain to be punished (Vincent 653), so Frankenstein condemned Justine to death before the verdict even came in. Seen most

clearly in Frankenstein, “the survival of the upper class and its will-to-power appears in incident after incident in the novel” (Vlasopolos 125). Justine’s trial proves that the benevolence of the upper class only applies to self-serving matters, not life-and-death matters for lower class citizens. Shelley pulls readers into solidarity with the lower classes by showing them the workings of a system where the bourgeoisie create problems for which the lower classes suffer, laying the persuasive groundwork for them to support revolutionary efforts as she does.

The desire to defend themselves that Justine and the Creature share represents the desire of the lower classes to be fairly protected by the law, which makes both characters revolutionary figures. Justine proclaims her innocence at her trial to a hostile crowd (Shelley 58-59). She fights her unjust punishment but never curses the system, which means that she sees that it has potential to be better (Shelley 57-64). The Creature, likewise, appeals to the human legal system in persuading Frankenstein to make a mate for him (Shelley 73). However, he wisely reflects on the “bloody nature” of this law (Shelley 73). Though it cannot be proven, he may have known that Justine was executed, and he certainly heard the stories of injustice told by the DeLaceys and Safie (Shelley 91-95, Vlasopolos 127). The fact that he appeals to the flawed law shows that he still believes in the system – rather than desiring to abolishing it for anarchy – which is the stance of a revolutionary. In his article This Wretched Mockery of Justice, Patrick Vincent agrees that both characters are linked as revolutionaries (Shelley 73, Vincent 651). He also argues that the Creature has no other option but violence once he is denied any redress from Frankenstein (Vincent 656), like the Genevan Revolution that led to actual violence. I assert that Justine’s execution and the manhunt that Frankenstein issues for the Creature both speak to the nature of political extermination that Britain enacted in 1816-1817 in its efforts to stifle radical efforts (Vincent 646). With this strong political stance, Shelley again brings the reader to a place where they are aware of the blaring injustice, and they feel appalled by the impossible plight of the Creature and Justine. This presents at least a plausible justification for the Creature’s actions, though controversial, just as for the real revolutionaries.

The trial of Justine is a fictionalized account of the British trial of Eliza Fenning, which Shelley included to give historical credence to the arguments for justice that result from the trial in the novel. The first edition of Frankenstein came out three years after Fenning’s death, and Shelley and her husband moved to London when the trial controversy was just two months old (Marshall 101). It can be inferred that Shelley was made aware of the case. Fenning was a servant who was wrongly accused of poisoning the family she worked for (Marshall 98-99). Not only was she tried on merely circumstantial evidence, but the employee who threatened to poison the family was never mentioned at trial (Marshall 99), and she was sentenced to death on July 26, 1815 (Marshall 104). In the article Not Forgotten by Tim Marshall, he explores the many similarities between the two women: they are both young, pretty, caregivers of families, and both are unjustly condemned to death (Marshall 102). The clear link between the women in the novel is Shelley’s way of putting the city of Geneva on trial for way it treats the poor in its courts, not just honoring Fenning’s memory.

Additionally, Shelley uses Fenning and Elizabeth as foils to show that the injustices of the system are not just a matter of concern for the poor.

Fenning was executed on her wedding day (Marshall 109). Elizabeth was executed on her wedding night, in accordance to the threat that the Creature made to take vengeance on Frankenstein on that night (Shelley 149-150, 154). Collateral damage of a system she did not create, Elizabeth was adopted into the upper class Frankenstein family (Shelley 19-20), and still culpable in the Creature’s eyes. Eerily, Fenning was executed in her wedding dress by choice (Marshall 109). It is noteworthy that painting on the cover of the Second Longman Cultural Edition of the text shows the Creature sitting atop of a bed on which a lifeless woman (presumably Elizabeth) lies in a white gown; this could easily have been her wedding dress, which shows that other interpreters of the text also deduce that Elizabeth was in her gown at the time she was murdered as I do. The implication of Elizabeth’s death is that the injustice represented by Fenning’s case does not remain isolated. It will trickle down to poison the rest of society, which gives the aristocracy a stake in reform.

There is no question of the ethical disaster of Frankenstein using stolen body parts from mortuaries to experiment in what led to the Creature’s formation (Shelley 32, 34-35). This is a matter of both class and the way he feels it is appropriate to treat those whom he feels superior to (Shelley 127-128). However, this also makes Frankenstein metaphorically culpable in the case of Eliza Fenning because her father had to pay a high price for her body to not go to anatomists for dissection (Marshall 109). While Fenning’s family fought for her body to be respected, Frankenstein showed no regard for the bodies that he butchered and spliced (Shelley 34-35, 133). This punishment for executed felons was designed to deny them funeral rights, the dignity of burial and the certainty of Christian physical resurrection (Marshall 109). Therefore, Fenning is coupled to the Creature in the sense that her body was preserved by her family, but the Creature was formed from people like her, (Shelley 35) and he has no family because of the same attitudes that convicted Fenning (Shelley 60). It is because of this lack of human connection that the Creature turns to his murderous and vengeful ways (Shelley 107). With this dichotomy, Shelley makes the point that society creates monsters by its systems, which will only keep forming as long as the system remains the same. These monsters, as revolutionaries and radicals, are not a product of chance but a deliberate response to forge for themselves a place in humanity.

In regard to natural law, Frankenstein is fully culpable because he created a being who he abandoned in a society of which it had no knowledge (Shelley 72). I contend that Frankenstein’s own thoughtless actions led to the formation of a Creature who never should have been formed. Just as parents are responsible for providing care and means for survival for their children, Frankenstein was indebted to the Creature. Though the parent/child analogy to government and its people is problematic, it still holds value. The government functioned in a way that enforced the societal systems which worked against the poor and then punished them for their low position in society through the way law was adjudicated. As Vincent argued, the “arbitrary justice system, relying on moral character rather than on codified reason, protects institutionalized class difference” (Vincent 652). This

further demonstrated that the abandonment of the poor was a “public matter” (Vincent 651). Shelley’s commentary is that the society has a duty to those who are born into it, which includes basic rights.

As easy as it is to focus on the Creature’s atrocious acts, Shelley provides an opportunity for readers to see the emotional and psychological trauma that the lower classes endure as a means for advocating against their condition. The many times that the Creature is run out of towns and attacked because he is seen as a threat shows that he has a reason to hold anger toward society (Shelley 72,78,103, 108). Anca Vlasopolos in her article Frankenstein’s Hidden Skeleton states that the Creature tells of “his suffering to give us the perspective of the alien/alienated” (125).While it does not excuse his actions in the eyes of all readers, Shelley uses this to force readers to see how brutal society was toward the Creature before he was ever brutal toward them. Even after all he endured, the Creature still hoped he could make a place for himself in society through the DeLacey family (Vlasopolos 127). He loved them; he just wanted to live with them in companionship and continue their mutually beneficial relationship (Shelley 82, 100-101). This tender side of the Creature confirms that the only reason he became a criminal was because his last hope was shattered by their rejection (Shelley 103, Vlasopolos 127). Here, Shelley insists that the revolution is not just about policies, but also about people who do not want to be marginalized anymore. The revolutions provided them a way to assert themselves are people who could not be dismissed.

Through the plot and themes of Frankenstein, Mary Shelley shows that politics of her day were in a volatile, but necessary state. All of the issues that she addresses through the novel could not have been solved through the channels that were available to the lower classes at that time. It was not an option to remain ignored like Justine, nor was it an option to act out aimlessly like the Creature. Instead, the people in Geneva took it upon themselves to have a revolution to potentially form a government that more accurately represented all citizens. Frankenstein is a political novel, amongst its other characteristics, that can be read alongside other political writings of the time.

It is a persuasive means to sensitize the public to the issues surrounding the

revolution and carries its own direct political position for the readers who are able to recognize it. Shelley used Frankenstein to illustrate her pro-revolutionary stance and as a means of political support for the lower classes, whom she gave a voice in her novel.

Works Cited Marshall, Tim. “Not Forgotten: Eliza Fenning, Frankenstein, and Victorian Chivalry.” Critical Survey 13.2 (2011): 98-114. EBSCO Host. Web. 28 Oct. 2013.

Shelley, Mary W. Frankenstein. Ed. Susan J. Wolfson. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Pearson Longman, 2007. Print.

Vincent, Patrick. “‘This Wretched Mockery of Justice’: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Geneva.” European Romantic Review 18.5 (2007): 645-61. EBSCO Host. Web. 28 Oct. 2013.

Vlasopolos, Anca. “Frankenstein’s Hidden Skeleton: The Pyscho-Politics of Oppression.” Science Fiction Studies 10.2 (1983): 125-36. ESBCO Host.

Web. 17 Nov. 2013.

Wolfson, Susan J. “From Frankenstein, by Mary W. Shelley.” Frankenstein. By Mary W. Shelley. 2nd ed. New York, NY: Pearson Longman, 2007. 180. Print.

Megan Brown grew up reading stories of wizards, lady knights, damsels who were not-so-in-distress—and knew before she entered high school that she was going to try her hand at writing a tale or two (or twelve) to add to their numbers. She’s currently studying English and Screenwriting as a third year student at Loyola Marymount University, and hopes to have a novel (or screenplay) finished sometime in the near future. Until then, she enjoys piña coladas, getting caught in the rain, and lazy days full of writing.

Introduction What happens when one attempts to shove a square peg into a round hole? First, it remains steadfastly outside the accepted mold; second, upon trying, perhaps, to hammer it in place, one finds that much of what made the piece so originally unique vanishes—and what remains behind is not so much singular as a poorly made copy. The characters in Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights face a similar—though certainly not as simplistic— problem, with the intrusion of society upon the fragile entity that is identity As Matthew Beaumont notes in “Heathcliff’s Great Hunger,” “the atomized community on the moors is uncannily susceptible to the stir of society” (149).

Brontë’s narrative ultimately shows that the “laws” of such a society that “do effectively prevail” are such stuff as characterizes the worst of civilization—namely, a “merciless competition for survival” (149).

The moors of Brontë’s work play host to a countless variety of other, outcast both spiritually and physically from the civilization bordering rugged Northern England. An attempt made by the first generation of the Heights and the Grange to gain such “civilization”—to follow supposedly normal societal tropes—ultimately traps all in a mockery of the “civilization” they wish to attain. By denying the otherness inherent in their very natures, those residents of Brontë’s desolate moors shave away the essence of their character until only the worst aspects of human nature remain. These

aspects manifest themselves in the form of many of the deadly sins of Christian rhetoric, and it is only through the overcoming of such sins by the second generation, and a return to the acceptance of the otherness that comes, inherent, from living in such a remote place, that the disorder and disruption created by the fine balance between society and identity is reversed.

The Presentation of the Other The text wastes no time in establishing the moors as a place far and away from any known civilization. Here in the “atmospheric tumult” to which the house itself is subject, with its “few stunted firs” playing host to a “range of gaunt thorns all stretching their limbs one way, as if craving the sun,” we find ourselves immersed in harsh, hostile vistas echoing Romantic sentiments of the sublime (Brontë 4). Even the architecture of the house plays into the severe image—“narrow windows” set “deeply” into the wall give a sense of very little natural light, and seem almost prison-like in their scarcity (4). An unfriendly attitude manifests in the “quantity of grotesque carving lavished over the front” (4).

The “grotesque carving[s]” made note of by Lockwood serve as a rather ironic foreshadowing of those “grotesque” figures he is soon to encounter inside. There is Mr. Heathcliff, a “dark-skinned gipsy in aspect”; Cathy, a “real goddess” who very quickly dispels any sense of her having had a good upbringing (with Lockwood describing her as “exceedingly embarrassing and disagreeable”); and Hareton, whose “dress and speech were both rude,” and who is described in almost frightening animalistic terms as “rough” and “uncultivated,” with “bearish whiskers” coming over his cheeks (Brontë 12). Instead of finding a pleasing gentleman, his homely wife, and strong-armed boy, as, perhaps, Lockwood would be accustomed to in outside society, he is greeted with a host of bad-tempered residents who make no attempts to be kind or polite in any way; to further complicate matters, Lockwood rather blunders through the social connections he fancies rests between these figures—attempting (and failing) the first reconciliation of the novel between society and identity. “‘It is strange how custom can mold

our tastes and ideas: many could not imagine the existence of happiness in a life of such complete exile from the world as you spend, Mr. Heathcliff,” Lockwood begins, going further to call Cathy Heathcliff’s “‘amiable lady’” (Brontë 13). By doing so, he is unwittingly presenting the solution that would have fixed the problems of the first generation—namely, a marriage between Catherine and Heathcliff. In his next assumption, attempting to attach Cathy to Hareton—“‘Ah, certainly—I see now: you are the favored possessor of the beneficent fairy’”—he once again unknowingly presents a fix to the present problems of social disorder (Brontë 14). These foreshadowings of what we, as readers, will soon come to understand—namely, the bond between Catherine and Heathcliff in the past, and Cathy and Hareton in the future—serve also as an attempt by Lockwood to fit these increasingly strange figures into societal roles of domesticity he can understand.

Lockwood’s character, the first touch of society upon this desolate place, is subsequently repelled back by his reception at the Heights to the “agrarian capitalist culture of Thrushcross Grange,” as Matthew Beaumont describes it—a culture significantly more like his own, a culture from whence he is able to examine the other of the Heights through the safety of Nelly Dean (138).

The concept of the other manifests itself fully in the figures of Catherine (the mental other) and Heathcliff (the social other). Heathcliff is, as Beaumont aptly summarizes, “discovered by old Mr. Earnshaw among the refugees that populate the port of Liverpool,” and is thus “associated with various victims of British colonialism, from displaced African slaves to itinerant Irish laborers” (138). A social other, he is a foundling, a “dirty, black-haired child,” who is separated by the others at his very first appearance by language—repeating “over and over again some gibberish that nobody could understand” (Brontë 37). He breaks the harmonious existence experienced by the Earnshaws at Wuthering Heights, being the figure that has no counterpart within the otherwise symmetrical families of his home and the Grange—named instead for “a son who died in childhood,” Heathcliff is at the very first attempting to fit within an identity that does not belong to him, an identity enforced by Mr. Earnshaw taking “to [him] strangely” (Brontë 38). “Miss Cathy and he were now very thick,” Nelly notes, implying that Catherine has accepted

Heathcliff’s new identity as the brother she lost, rather than rebel against it like Hindley with his beatings (Brontë 38). She slowly forms into the mental other, a character far and away from the empathetic understanding that is normally cultivated by the author and instilled within the readers, partly placed so far outside our realm of understanding by the biased nature of our narrator—“I own I did not like her,” Nelly admits, “after infancy was past; and I vexed her frequently by trying to bring down her arrogance” (Brontë 66, emphasis mine). James Phillips notes, interestingly, that the “foundling Heathcliff” had “precedents in literary history,” whereas Catherine is “more ferocious” and so “more of an outsider” (99). It is the ultimate machinations of these two characters to reconcile society’s notions of what they should be with what they actually are, that craft the disorder inherent in the novel.

The First Generation: Fitting the Square Peg into the Round Hole In the attempt to reconcile society with identity, many of the characters experience “confinement,” as Jamie S. Crouse writes, noting that those “primary instigators of confinement in the novel, Catherine and Heathcliff,” attempt to control the world around them through “gender-related patterns” (179). This is an interesting juxtaposition to the “androgynous whole” presented by Catherine and Heathcliff at the beginning of the work, when “[t]hey both promised fair to grow up as rude as savages,” as Nelly notes of them; when “it was one of their chief amusements to run away to the moors in the morning and remain there all day” (Brontë 46). The two children, at the beginning of their lives, are able to “carve out a small piece of power within the household politics” without sacrificing their identities (Crouse 183). However, society intrudes with Catherine’s stay “at Thrushcross Grange five weeks,” where she takes to “fine clothes and flattery…readily,” contrasting to Nelly’s description of her as previously being “a wild, hatless little savage” (Brontë 53). She is, during this time, “inducted into the world of society and taught her place as a woman,” a vision completely at odds with her running rampant across the moors with her gipsy-other of a playmate (Crouse 183). The androgynous whole of

childhood is ripped apart. Catherine begins her ascent to “lady.” As Crouse suggests, however, this confinement “is symbolically forced on her as she is pressed into adolescence and the confining position of a lady in society” (183). Society, imposing itself through the go-between of the Grange, begins to shape her rural nature into something it is not—and so, rather than craft the perfect lady, the forcing of Catherine into this role chafes against the very nature of her character. She is unwilling to fully accept the tropes dictated to her by society—that of housewife, and lady—yet she is unwilling to, once in possession of knowledge about the finer things in life, give them up. Though she “[flies] to embrace [Heathcliff]” upon her return from the influence of society, she notes how “‘black’” and “‘funny’” he appears—she is now, ostensibly, aware of his otherness, yet simultaneously, in her running to him, not ready to part (Brontë 54).

This inability to fully accept or fully deny societal tropes stems from the love she has for both Edgar and Heathcliff—one representing societal duty, the other rural nature. James Phillips further discusses this idea in “The Two Faces of Love in Wuthering Heights.” “With regard to Linton, Catherine’s love is determined empirically,” whereas her attachment to Heathcliff does not require “sensuality and social ambition” (96). One is clearly bound up in the needs and views of society, but her decidedly other nature—formed of a prolonged attachment with Heathcliff, the ultimate other—ensures that she is unable to fully divulge herself of her past. Yet she “rejects Heathcliff as a suitor because he is socially inferior to Linton” (Phillips 100). “‘It would degrade me to marry Heathcliff now,’” Catherine tells Nelly. “According to Freud,” Phillips writes, “love is frustrated, not because any object whatsoever is inadequate,” (read: “degrading” Catherine) “but because the first object is placed under a taboo” (103). The taboo, here, is a social one—it is unacceptable for the lady Catherine is fashioning herself into to marry beneath her status. It is from this decision, Phillips notes, that “the train of destruction follows” (100).

Unable to reconcile these two halves of her personality, Catherine’s character becomes increasingly unstable. Attempting to play the mother figure at Thrushcross Grange, it becomes apparent that, having

never “learn[ed] gender roles through relationship[s]” to other women, Catherine herself is not truly prepared for the society she is attempting to emulate (Crouse 181). She regresses to a child-like mindset, attempting to keep ties on all the things she wants in life—“‘No, I’ll swallow the key before you shall get it!’” she proclaims hotly at one point, locking both Heathcliff and Linton together in an attempt at forced reconciliation—swallowing of key as if, by making it disappear, she will make her problems disappear forever (Brontë 114). Catherine’s character becomes, then, increasingly defined by her pride. Her husband, after Catherine locks herself in her room, has the “vague expectation that [she], repenting her conduct, would come of her own accord to ask pardon, and seek a reconciliation—and she fasted pertinaciously, under the idea, probably, that at every meal Edgar was ready to choke for her absence, and pride alone held him from running” to her (Brontë 120). This pride that she projects upon her husband is, for the most part, misplaced—it is Cathy that is too proud to seek solace out of her room, too proud to attempt reconciliation, and therein lies the irony (“‘She’s been fretting here,’” Nelly states, “‘and eating scarcely anything, and never complaining’”) (Brontë 127). In choosing to be Edgar’s wife she does nothing more than make a mockery of the role—becoming instead the child that needs to be taken care of.

Heathcliff, the other other of the work, uses societal tropes in the opposite sense of Catherine (fitting, as the two are arguably halves of the same whole). For Heathcliff, society is a means to an end—he fits himself into the molds offered in order to rebel against those who have crushed him, and in doing so lets the worst parts of his nature shine through. Nelly notes of Catherine that she loves Edgar “‘because he is handsome, and young, and cheerful, and rich, and loves you’” (Brontë 79). Upon Heathcliff’s return, Nelly is quite amazed at his transformation—he “had grown a tall, athletic, well-formed man”—suggesting “handsomeness,” or at least looks not above being somewhat admired—beside “whom [Edgar] seemed slender and youth-like” (Brontë 96). The term “young,” which Nelly applies to Edgar, no longer is something to be praised—instead, next to this new man, Catherine’s husband appears “youth-like,” calling to mind an image of a

child, weak because he is “slender.” Heathcliff looks “intelligent,” and retains “no marks of former degradation”—suggesting that he has forgone his rural nature; and his lack of schooling and education, which so put him behind Edgar in Catherine’s thoughts, is no more an issue, as he has evolved into something much more along the lines of what society dictates he should be.

Nelly sounds almost surprised to note that “his manner was even dignified” (Brontë 96). He is certainly “rich,” as well, able to cheat Hindley out of much of his holdings at the Heights—“‘He has nobody knows what money,’” Nelly tells Lockwood of Heathcliff, “‘and every year it increases’” (Brontë 34). A far cry from the “‘black’” and “‘cross’” boy Catherine encounters after her stay at the Grange (Brontë 54). In this way, Heathcliff becomes a figure to rival—and in some cases surpass—the rather weak-willed figure of Edgar Linton.

However, as society has a less-than-civilizing effect on Catherine, so, too, does it affect Heathcliff—causing him, as Matthew Beaumont discusses in his article, “Heathcliff’s Great Hunger,” to be associated with “the emblematic figure of the cannibal, which, historically, has functioned in imperial discourse as the ultimate emblem of enlightened civilization’s dark other” (139). Heathcliff has a “colorful fantasy,” as Beaumont writes, “of systematically effacing the lives of his chief persecutors” upon his return to the Heights after society has “civilized” him (141). This not only evokes “ritual human sacrifice,” related through religious practices to the cannibal, but also shows the extreme depths of two of Heathcliff’s greatest flaws, which the civilizing effects of society allow him to more fully explore—that of wrath and gluttony. “‘[Heathcliff’s] hair and clothes were whitened with snow,’” Isabella relates to Nelly of an encounter at the Heights, “‘and his sharp cannibal teeth, revealed by cold and wrath, gleamed through the dark’” (Brontë 178, emphasis mine). The direct reference to being a “cannibal” is seemingly confirmed in the following sentence with his “‘girning’, which may mean to snarl or bare one’s teeth” (Beaumont 147). Cannibals are defined by their eating habits, and, indeed, Heathcliff returns—an apparently civilized man—with the hope of consuming all in sight—of marrying Isabella to spite Catherine, of taking away Hindley’s money and land, of corrupting the second generation as revenge for what the first did to him. There is a

gluttony at work here, in a materialistic sense; but also there is wrath, to even the score for the wrongs committed upon his own person. He becomes a mockery of the concept of the gentleman—not gentle at all, but, rather, an avenging angel come to extract his revenge. He becomes, as Beaumont states, “a cannibal who serves as the very instrument of a critique of civilization” (151). “Heathcliff’s savage character testifies to the savagery of the culture that occasioned it” (152). There was, perhaps, and sadly, never any hope for Heathcliff; Catherine’s five-week stay at Thrushcross Grange, the changing of his other half, ensured that he, too, would have to change to fit the new needs of the relationship. In doing so, he lost himself.

The Second Generation: Reconciling Society and Identity It is the responsibility of the second generation, then, to restore balance to the upheaval played out across the moors by the first. Not surprisingly, they do so in an opposing way—rather than attempt to reconcile rural and civil, Cathy and Hareton (being direct representations of Catherine and Heathcliff), do not force their characters to mold to societal tropes; rather, they expand their characters beyond society’s limitations, and in doing so craft an identity that is entirely more stable than either of their predecessors’.

Hareton’s identity is one defined by the 19th century concepts of idiocy, as brought about by what those who raised him (specifically Heathcliff). As Baldys notes in her article, “Hareton Earnshaw and the Shadow of Idiocy,” the “narrative and characters frequently animalize, infantilize, and insult Hareton in language consistent with that used to refer to idiots in contemporary popular and medico-legal discourse” (50). This is compounded by his appearance, which reflects “a nineteenth-century conception of what idiocy ‘looked like’” (Baldys 50). When Nelly encounters the child at the age of six, she still calls him a “ ‘stammering little fellow’ with ‘distorted baby features’ in language that invokes both disability and its attendant infantilization” (Baldys 55). “Stammering” and “distorted” being the phrases that “invoke disability;” the use of “baby” instead of “child” being that which specifically lends to his appearance being beneath his actual age.

“Even when Hareton has attained the age of eighteen, Heathcliff still refers to him as an “‘infernal calf,’” Baldys notes (55-56). He “lives in his own house as a servant, deprived of the advantage of wages,” and, most importantly, with “ignorance that he has been wronged” (Brontë 188). Relegated to being such a “slave” in his own house, and enforced in his brutishness by the language of those surrounding him, Hareton’s identity is socially limited from the start.

Beyond this, he displays the wrath prevalent in Heathcliff, lashing out at those around him, almost sloth-like in his contentment to stay in the dark in concerns of academics.

Cathy is similarly born with an identity partially pre-established for her, in that she is constantly being compared to her mother. “Her spirit was high, though not rough,” Nelly says—“rough” drawing our mind back to similar depictions of her mother, and so forming an inevitable tie between the two, even though Cathy is denied as being as such (Brontë 189). “That capacity for intense attachments reminded me of her mother: still she did not resemble her,” Nelly further explains (Brontë 189). There is a strangeness to the language here used—Cathy simultaneously “reminds” Nelly of Catherine, and yet does not “resemble her”—yet clearly she must, to some extent, for such a comparison to be made. On the other side of such things, she is facing the same societal conventions that her mother had to. “‘Papa wants us to be married,’” Linton says, and so Cathy finds herself forcibly trapped—as Hareton was forcibly trapped—into crafting an identity for herself based on what society demands she should be—here, a housewife; here, like her mother (Brontë 272).

Yet Hareton and Cathy are able to overcome such confinement of their own identities. The “‘girl-widow,’” as Lockwood describes her, is very quickly set free from her loveless marriage (Brontë 33). With this comes a new power that is not afraid to combine the “disruptive power of the female gaze,” as Cory writes in her article, “‘Out of My Brother’s Power,’” with the independent nature of the moors (13). “She kept her eyes on me, in a cool, regardless manner, exceedingly embarrassing and disagreeable,” Lockwood says of Cathy—thus turning herself into one “refusing the position of object and temporarily reversing the gendered order of dominance” (Cory

14). Though such “rebelliousness” certainly, as Cory notes, links mother and daughter, the rebellion of Cathy is against the societal norms that entrapped her mother, turning her identity into a hybrid of femininity and free-spirit (16).

In much the same way, the forced identity of Hareton is formed anew through the erasure of his apparent “idiocy.” As Baldys notes, “Hareton’s presence at the tranquil fireside brings him into more frequent contact with his cousin… which in turn sparks their romance, his attainment to literacy, and other subsequent improvements in his situation” (62). The healing factor of heteronormative romance pulls Hareton from his ignorance and subsequently crafts for him a new identity that is decidedly less about what society dictates he should be and decidedly more about what he is actually capable of. In a stark contrast to his foster father, it is love that brings Hareton from the depths of darkness, not a desire driven by wrath, just as Catchy is able to let go of her pride and see her cousin as more than a brutish lout—which it is unclear if her mother was ever able to truly do.

Conclusion: Erasing the Sins of Our Fathers The second time Lockwood approaches the Heights, it is with “a beamless amber light along the west” (Brontë 307). This diffuses the landscape into something warm, and almost welcoming, compounded by his ability to clearly see “every pebble on the path, and every blade of grass” (Brontë 307). There is no longer darkness hiding things beneath its folds, and the house itself—surrounded by “a fragrance of stocks and wallflowers” wafting “on the air from amongst the homely fruit-trees”—has all the “doors and lattices” open, with a “fine red fire” illuminating “the chimney” (Brontë 307). There is brightness, here, decidedly at odds with the dark, brooding home that Lockwood met with at the novel’s beginning. Hareton, “seated at a table,” is described as having “handsome features” that glow “with pleasure,” and Cathy as having “smiting beauty” (Brontë 307-08). Those figures that Lockwood expected to see at the novel’s beginning are now the ones before them—because no longer are Hareton and Cathy defined solely by what civilization says they should be. Instead, the reconciliation of societal tropes with original landscape and characters brings an end to the sins of the first generation, and allows for, instead, a tentatively bright look at the future.

Works Cited Baldys, Emily M. “Hareton Earnshaw and the Shadow of Idiocy: Disability and Domestic Disorder in Wuthering Heights.” Philological Quarterly 91.1 (2012): 49-74. PDF. Beaumont, Matthew. “Heathcliff’s Great Hunger: The Cannibal Other in Wuthering Heights.” Journal of Victorian Culture 9.2 (2004): 137-63. PDF. Brontë, Emily. Wuthering Heights. Ed. Pauline Nestor. New York: Penguin, 2002. Print.

Cory, Abbie L. “‘Out of My Brother’s Power’: Gender, Class, and Rebellion in Wuthering Heights.” Women’s Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 34.1 (2005): 1-26. PDF. Crouse, Jamie S. “‘This Shattered Prison’: Confinement, Control and Gender in Wuthering Heights.” Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society 33.3 (2008): 179-91. PDF. Phillips, James. “The Two Faces of Love in Wuthering Heights.” Brontë Studies: The Journal of the Brontë Society 32.2 (2007): 96-105. PDF.

Roshan Berentes is a Senior English major and French minor at Loyola Marymount University and a current member of Pi Beta Phi Fraternity for Women, Signma Tau Delta, and Alpha Sigma Nu, as well as an active participant in the Loyola Marymount Choruses. She will be graduating this Spring and attending law school in the Fall to pursue a career in human rights advocacy.

As a confessional poet, much of Sylvia Plath’s work is at least semi-autobiographical in nature, with many of her “confessions” reflecting her personal life experiences woven into persona poems in which its speakers are fictional characters. This narrative technique calls for the reader to endeavor on a quest to uncover the extent to which each poem serves as a mode of confession, and consider other possible intentions behind the author’s employment of personas other than herself. Modern interpretations of Plath’s works have unfortunately become shrouded in the infamous “Sylvia Plath myth,” which paints a portrait of a clinically depressed victim of her adulterous husband, Ted Hughes. In evaluating the motives behind Plath’s usage of fictional personas, it becomes clear that such personas serve to retell Plath’s own life situations in such a way that allows her to transcend the victim status she feels society has wrongfully bestowed upon her. This technique, particularly evident in her later poems “Daddy” and “Lady Lazarus,” in turn acts as a mode of conveying Plath’s criticism of traditional societal norms and gender roles.

Plath’s 1962 poem “Daddy” retells her experiences with both her father and husband through the perspective of a Jewish girl speaking to her German, probably Nazi father. At first reading, it seems as though the poet aims to elicit pity from the reader, thus characterizing the speaker as a victim of the addressees’ actions. In the first few lines, the speaker describes

herself as “poor and white / Barely daring to breath or Achoo.” This early impression of victimhood could be Plath’s attempt to address the prevailing perspective one would have of her situation: that of a now-abandoned wife whose father died when she was a child. The following line “Daddy, I have had to kill you,” quickly upsets this victim persona. This jarring turn marks the poem’s shift toward the speaker’s slow gain of agency as the poem progresses. Plath’s diction in evoking the image of her deceased father lacks the precious tone one would expect. She characterizes him as perhaps the most deplorable figure imaginable, a Nazi, in order to direct the reader away from her innate reactions of horror and pity at the speaker’s situation. The poet instead attempt to evoke anger: “I have always been scared of you, / With your Luftwaffe, your gobbledygoo. / And your neat mustache / And your Aryan eye, bright blue.” The harshness of the speaker’s tone and clear conviction of her father’s Nazi status quickly subverts the grand illusion of a loving father the speaker previously clung to, in which she imagined him as “Marble-heavy, a bag full of God.” The melodramatic nature of these two sentiments—that of extreme adoration and overwhelming disgust—perhaps reflect Plath’s intent to draw attention to the role male figures factor into the lives of women. In some ways the poem reads as a criticism of the seeming importance, even necessity, society places on male presence in the lives of women. As a young child, a girl is expected to blindly look up to her father as a perfect role model, which eventually grooms her into the traditional structure that dictates a woman’s transition from a fatherly male presence to a husband. For Plath, this structure manifested itself in her marriage to Ted Hughes. Donald E. Morse in his article Sylvia Plath and the Trope of Vulnerability notes that “Plath could no longer maintain her façade of the dutiful, happy, successful daughter married to the ideal husband and help mate” (Morse 2000). The male influence in a woman’s life is what seemingly completes a woman, in that he protects and looks after her. This is likely the reason Plath assigns the term “daddy” to both father and husband; in society, these two are exactly the same, fulfilling the same role as protector. She sarcastically includes the lines “Every woman adores a Fascist, / The boot in the face, the brute / Brute heart

of a brute like you” so as to point out the absurdity of this accepted societal model in which men wield control over women to the point of mimicking “fascism.” If it is true that women are always either submissive to their fathers or husbands, then women live their entire lives as victims of a fascist regime.

Plath’s methodology in this poem, however, is not to convey a victimized individual, but rather an individual who consciously recognizes the system in which she has become entangled, and chooses to abandon the two most significant men in her life entirely.

Plath incorporates aspects of her own life throughout the poem. The lines “But they pulled me out of the sack, / And they stuck me together with glue” refer to her suicide attempt when she was twenty. The next lines “And then I knew what to do. I made a model of you, / A man in black with a Meinkampf look” likely refer to her marriage to Ted Hughes, who had left her after an adulterous relationship shortly before this poem was written. It seems at first odd that Plath would employ such an eerie situation (that of a Holocaust victim) to convey her feelings toward these two figures, yet this technique allows Plath to assert the agency she could not claim in reality. In reimaging her father and husband as Nazis, Plath summons all the hate in the world to condemn them for their actions. These actions are those of unspeakable Nazi crimes against Jews, such as the speaker. For Plath, the feelings of abandonment she experienced created hatred stronger than imaginable, and thus she uses the most despicable symbols of hate to evoke her own sentiments. By the end of the poem, Plath has manipulated the situation such that she ultimately triumphs, and the entire town of “villagers” supports her in “dancing and stamping” on the remains of the “daddy” figure she has killed. In a world in which Plath likely experienced little support or empathy toward her situation, such an outcome provides the ultimate satisfaction. She signs off with a declaration that marks the finality of her decision: “Daddy, daddy, you bastard, I’m through.”

Another one of Plath’s later works, “Lady Lazarus,” employs the same technique of using a fictional persona to assert the poet’s agency in the retelling of her personal story. In this poem the speaker acts as a sort of mythical creature who has “nine times to die,” and is reborn after every

death. The addressee is unclear, yet seems to address society as a whole.

Plath criticizes those who regard her life situations with awe, taking a sort of sick pleasure in witnessing her pain. “Lady Lazarus” largely focuses on Plath’s first suicide attempt, which led her to being institutionalized. While in “Daddy” the speaker starts as a “victim” of the outcome of submitting to the social necessity of a male presence in her life, in this poem the speaker attempts to subvert the victim status with which society has attempted to brandish her. Plath protests her victim characterization by reimagining herself as someone with the power to intentionally die and come back to life, reborn and stronger than ever. The presence of choice with regard to death allows for the speaker to condemn the “peanut-crunching crowd” for its ignorance of her powers, rather than the same crowd bestowing its unwarranted pity upon her. Plath’s condemnation of the crowd indicates that she hoped to evoke empathy, rather than pity, from the reader (Morse 2000). The speaker notes the apathetic nature of her onlookers, who are too preoccupied with the sensational nature of her ailment to extend empathy: “There is a charge / For the eyeing of my scars, there is a charge / For the hearing of my heart— / It really goes.”

Morse believes that the speaker’s ill feelings toward her onlookers reflect Plath’s own sense of betrayal for not having had the proper support during her time of sickness (Morse 2000). Her feelings in this poem are similar to those in “Daddy,” in which she attempts to undermine those who have betrayed her. The speaker subverts her vulnerable position as a sort of roadside carnie and uses the poem as an opportunity to address her gathered crowd. She explains her true motives behind her theatrical deathly performances, noting that “Dying / Is an art, like anything else. / I do it exceptionally well.” In characterizing death as an art form rather than a sentence, the speaker conveys her suicide as something to be praised, rather than gawked at. This narrative technique, in which the speaker is “surrounded by a cast of characters, and the interchange between the characters is essential to the meaning of the poem” helps to underscore Plath’s scorn for society’s mistreatment of mental illness (Dickie 1982).

Society has turned her into a spectacle, nearly stripping her of her humanity.

In order to restore her sense of self-respect, she turns herself into a creature greater than ever imagined, one that even God and Lucifer must “beware.”

As a whole, the poem’s social commentary element could come down to Plath’s sense of disappointment in a society that she hoped would lend her more support, but in which she only found “pettiness, destructive gossip, [and] viciousness” (Dickie 1982). The poem’s final lines, “Out of the ash / I rise with my red hair / And I eat men like air” demonstrates the speaker’s “urgent drive toward liberation and self-determination” (Sanazaro 1983). The speaker has thus broken free and transcended the victim status with which she once grappled. Her death in the poems final lines brings not pity or amusement, but newfound strength.

While Plath clear attempted to manipulate her life situations in such a way that renders her a strong, capable figure, the “Sylvia Plath myth” continues to disrupt modern interpretations of Plath’s life and work. There is a tendency to “[divorce her poem’s] from the poet’s life and interests, thus denuding them of the important personal and world milieu in which they came to being” (Sanazaro 1983). Preoccupied with the confessional nature of her poems, readers overlook the important social messages that accompany much of her works. Margaret Dickie notes that one critical problem with attempting to discover “what really happens” in each of Plath’s poems has led to many vastly different interpretations of the specific events that are depicted in her poems, which detracts from discovering their intended purpose (Dickie 1979). The role of the fictional persona is often ignored in favor of discovering what precise bits of each poem reflect Plath’s own life happenings. This methodology misleads readers from Plath’s sense of agency, which can often only be uncovered by first understanding the role of the persona specific to each poem.

Despite the distracting nature of the “Sylvia Plath myth,” dedicated readers can easily uncover the desired convictions behind Plath’s persona poems. As a poet, Plath possessed the power to manipulate situations however she pleased, and tell a story that is perhaps truer than the truth itself. Plath’s manipulation of her life through different personas and fictional tales allows the reader to better understand the desired sentiments of the

author, rather than simply digest the horrific nature of her tragic life story, much like the “peanut-crunching crowd.” The poet asks more from the reader: to extend the sort of empathy absent in her own life, and recognize the agency she could not claim in reality.

Works Cited More, Donald E. “Sylvia Plath and the Trope of Vulnerability.” Hungarian Journal of English and American Studies 6.2 (2000): 77-90. Print.

Sanazaro, Leonard. “The Transfiguring Self: Sylvia Plath, a Reconstruction.”

The Centennial 27.1 (1983): 62-74. Print.

Uroff, Margaret Dickie. “On Reading Sylvia Plath.” College Literature 6.2 (1979): 121-128. Print.

Uroff, Margaret Dickie, “Sylvia Plath’s Narrative Strategies.” The Iowa Review 13.2 (1982): 1-14. Print.

Kennedy Roberts is a sophomore Sociology major with minors in English and Women’s Studies. “Begging for Sexual Freedom” was written for Sarah Mclay’s Language of Poetry class. Interested in poetry as activism Roberts synthesized feminist theory with the critical analysis in order to theorize Ellen Bass’s most recent work, Like a Beggar as a pop feminist text.

During the 2013 MTV Video Music Awards Miley Cyrus poised herself on stage with an oversized foam finger and proceeded to touch herself, performing an undeniable signification of masturbation. Post-performance, Cyrus and MTV received continual criticism in regards to the overt sexuality of the performance. The criticism of the performance carried an explicitly patriarchal subtext, which felt that Miley’s construction of her sexuality as an aspect of her own pleasure, instead of as a construction of pleasure for the male gaze, made her actions “unnatural” or “dirty”. This narrative becomes characteristic of the understanding of female sexuality in a patriarchal culture––when female sexuality is employed merely for the pleasure of women it is coded as unnatural. In order to maintain the status of masculinity, society forces female sexuality and pleasure into a subjugated position. This position makes female sexuality unnatural but also renders it inherently useless, or otherwise powerless. Within this context of subjugated female sexuality, contemporary feminist theory and literature such as Audre Lorde’s “Uses of the Erotic”, works to reclaim female sexuality and pleasure as both natural and powerful, empowering women to explore their deepest desires in a comfortable and supportive space. Within this feminist space Ellen Bass uses her poetry in Like a Beggar to artistically discuss this reclamation of female power. Contrasting the constricting nature of sexual socialization embodied within a contemporary patriarchal society to the use

of sexuality for personal pleasure, Bass’ poetry slips into a space where the erotic becomes a natural feminist commentary on female power. By peppering metaphorical equations of sexual experience and nature throughout her work, Bass works to reclaim the personal pleasure of the female sexual experience as natural, powerful, and spiritual.

In her nonfiction work, Bass discusses the construction of female sexuality as a highly contested space that often feels unnatural for those who inhabit it. “Almost from birth, girls are given mixed messages about their sexuality. They are alternately told to hide it, deny it, repress it, use it, flaunt it, or give it away. Sex is promoted as a means of power, seduction and exchange. As a result, many women grow up with conflicts around sex” (“The Courage to Heal” 289). Bass’s nonfiction work provides societal context for the space in which she constructs and understands sexuality in her poetry. In this space, women are encouraged to utilize their sexuality to gain power in a patriarchal society by attaching themselves to masculine bodies, yet at the same time they are encouraged to hide their sexuality. This discussion acknowledges the virgin-whore dichotomy, and addresses the discouragement of societal structures to discuss and discover female sexuality as an important aspect of personal development. While her nonfiction work describes this concretely and through theory, her poetry alternately imagines sex as an act deeply rooted in the nature that surrounds us, bringing the highly theoretical and thematic discussion of female sexuality embedded within her nonfiction to mainstream audiences.

Bass uses her poetry, first to discuss how her sexuality and sexual relationships have functioned as elements of her participation in the feminist movement, subtly referencing her nonfiction work. Utilizing herself as the agent of the poem, Bass begins the piece describing an image of her childhood: Bert Parks winning Miss America. Bass then transitions to referencing this image as an element present in her socialization: “When I grow up, I could be her” (“How I Became Miss America” 4). The prominence of this image signifies her desire to satisfy the expectations of a patriarchal society as a child. This narrative describes that one day she hopes to be beautiful, with presumably large hair, and a body satisfactory to a male gaze.

As the poem transitions to imagery of her adult life, Bass shifts to understanding herself as a product of feminism instead of as a product of her patriarchal socialization. “No one could predict that twenty-five years later / I’d be chanting No more profits off women’s bodies” (“How I Became Miss America” 24-25). Bass explains her involvement in the protesting of societies use of women for profit, a specific reference to the culture of the Miss America competition. She has come to a realization that the things she consumed mindlessly as a child are not constructed to satisfy her, but rather to oppress her. Bass continues this discussion of her involvement in the feminist movement by transitioning her imagery into the deeply personal realm of the familial and sexual.

From the minute my child fell asleep until we collapsed, Exhausted on her water bed, we made love As one of Nikki’s statuettes in a glow in the dark blue gown and tiara watched over us, Miss Ogyny (39-41).

Describing how her involvement extended beyond the signs and chanting of a protests, she understands her sexuality as being watched over by a figure of the feminist movement, examining how the personal seeps into the political in the feminist movement. Bass has been empowered by the movement to “make love” or in a sense to reclaim her erotic in order to satisfy her own desires. Using Nikki’s statuettes as a synecdoche for the feminist movement, Bass also tells the reader that the movement has been constructed to watch over their personal relationships, their sexual relationships, and their children. Bass is firmly rooted in the feminist movement at the beginning of the poem, but by the end she has moved to argue for the necessity of feminism in all lives. Before discussing the notion of female sexuality as natural, Bass establishes herself through “How I Became Miss America” as a testimony to the feminist movement––Bass is living proof of the personal as political, and of the freeing qualities of feminism, ultimately allowing her to embody more of the qualities valued in

Miss America.

Beginning her discussion of female sexuality as natural, Bass examines the ways in which sex will likely deviate from the societal imagination of sexuality. “Nakedness” acts as a contrast to Bass’s more natural depictions of sexuality throughout other poems in the collection.

Using this poem as a reference point to the more human sexuality imaged throughout the collection, a reader may begin to understand how sex will deviate from the popular imagination of sexuality when it is rooted in the natural desires and pleasures of the bodies involved. While the sexuality popularized in media acts within a perfect pornographic script, remaining fluid, rude and exciting, Bass connotes that sex which caters to female desires will often not look like this. “…Half the shows

were women flashing their breasts, jamming themselves in front of the camera or on all fours being fucked from behind…” (“Nakedness” 46-49).

By first referencing television shoes, Bass pulls the reader into an explicit reference of popular culture. After a double space, Bass recedes into the content of this popular culture, depicting the objectification of women present across mediated imagery. Use of words like “jamming” and “fucked” evoke a sense of force in the description of the sexual acts discussed, rousing imagery of pornography. By compounding this with the image of “being on all fours” and “flashing breasts”, the image works to vilify the camera lens, and connotes the objectification of women as the sex act and imagery is separated from any knowable identity or character of the women. This imagery is rooted deeply in the definition of objectification, which reduces female characters to their sexual parts and sexual service. We know nothing of the television show that Bass works to describe––we do not know the station, the name, or have an ounce of feeling about the character, yet we still know every necessary detail. We can run our minds over all the kinds of

women we have seen doing this on TV, and suddenly we realize we have objectified them ourselves, reduced them to their sex act, and removed agency and power from these feminine bodies entirely. These words also conjure imagery of pornography, an aspect of patriarchal culture which works to subordinate the power embedded within female sexuality by subjugated women and forcing them into positions of submission. Feminist scholar Audre Lorde discusses this same issue in her work, “Uses of the Erotic”: “The erotic has often been misnamed by men…for this reason we have often turned away from the exploration and consideration of the erotic as a source of power…confusing it with its opposite, the pornographic” (Lorde 184).

Understanding both “Nakedness” and “Uses of the Erotic” as commentary on the popular imagination of the female sexual experience, we may understand a space working in the feminist movement to critique the way patriarchy imagines female sexuality in order to colonize and reduce it. Both Bass and Lorde open a sub-textual narrative through which they explain that in order to remain powerful patriarchy will work to reduce the female erotic.

In order to do this, patriarchy will image sexuality as domination, it will entail being “fucked from behind” and “breasts flapping” as separate from a feminine body. As pornography works to inspire fantasy and essentially controls popular sexual gaze, women will be inspired and forced to constantly search for a new way to contort their sexuality in order to please a male gaze. The quest to satisfy idealized sexuality will be never ending and, as Lorde discusses, never truly satisfying.

Bass critiques this constant search for progessive sexuality in her piece, “Ordinary Sex”. “You don’t need to invent a thrilling / new position, two dragonflies / mating on the wing” (“Ordinary Sex” 19-21). Referencing the notion that all sex needs to be thrilling, wrought with new positions, and four letter words, Bass sets this poem in a space promoted largely by the pornography presented to us as natural. In this instance “two dragonflies/ mating on the wing” refers to the “thrilling new position”, noting that society so often will make use believe that these wild things are “natural” and thus “necessary”. While in other pieces, sex is equated with nature as an element of empowerment, this work reverses this metaphor, critiquing the societal

equation of “wild animalistic sex” with answering the natural callings of ones body. Using repetition throughout the poem, Bass emphasizes the repetition of sexual imagery in our culture—that is impossible to obtain: “If no swan descends”, “if we stay right here”; “You don’t need to strew rose petals”, “You don’ need to invent a thrilling” (“Ordinary Sex” 1, 12, 16, 19). This repetition also works to underscore her ultimate point that she “like(s) it / when you do the same old thing / in the same old way” (“Ordinary Sex” 26-27). It becomes apparent that, to Bass, “Ordinary Sex” is reality—it will include “a little sweat and sunscreen” and “the removal of boots” (“Ordinary Sex” 22-24). It will not be wild, or objectifying as in media. And as she says herself, “ Making love…will probably not fit the description in a popular romance novel: You fall into your lover’s arms, your clothes magically drop away, you have no need to talk about fears or discomforts, and you come together in a burst of spontaneous passion” (“The Courage to Heal” 298).

As Bass works to critique societal norms, she also presents a vision for sexuality that is spiritual and natural. In her work “Neighbor” she describes a neighbor plagued by a turbulent relationship with her children: “our neighbor yelled at her kids / who were old enough to yell back…Get out!

Fuck you, you bitch!” (“Neighbor” 2-6). This first tells the story of a woman whose abuse is concrete—“fuck you” and “bitch” function to demean her in a way that society will often do to women. Throughout the first movement of the poem, Bass structures this woman’s narrative as one immersed deeply in the denial of any of life’s pleasures. Yet during the second movement, these pleasures are set free; “…And late at night

when I hear her cry out,

I can’t help but be happy for her.

She, who’d been so miserable and alone

Now thrown into the democracy

of the body’s pleasure, set free” (“Neighbor” 24-29).

The break at “cry out” allows the reader to pause and understand his or her

own feeling, most likely penetrated by societal norms. Many readers will stop and think that sex is dirty, and see this situation through a dark shade of disgust. Yet Bass follows this with her truth—“That she is happy for her,” a woman whose pleasure is a part of a “democracy” and is “set free”. Using imagery of America, Bass references the way that our country, so focused on democracy has stifled our visions of sex deeply, an experience she created for us just lines before. Done in a space of love and respect sex allows us “to abandon the place where we have been most completely invaded and colonized, in our determination to make the bombed and defoliated lands flower again and bear fruit, here where we have been most shamed is one of the most radical and sacred places from which to transform the world. To shamelessly insist that our bodies are for our own delight and connection with others…” (Levins-Morales 284).

Finally Bass makes her ultimate point that as sex and sexuality are deeply rooted in the images of nature, female sexuality is not only spiritual but deeply natural; it belongs fully to women, and is powerful when shared. “…until / the petals splay like a woman stretched, flung / open, blood blooming through her veins” (“Neighbor” 4-6). The use of woman is a synecdoche for the sexual anatomy of a woman. Prior to this description, Bass inserts the phrase¬¬ “––the house/ it might take for a baby to be born––“ (“Neighbor” 2-3). This constructs a metaphorical space in which the reader begins to deconstruct the imagery as reminiscent of female sexual organs. Not only is Bass understanding of the functions of anatomy as natural, but she equates the organs themselves with petals. Using such a beautiful part of nature to describe the anatomy of a woman grounds female sexuality in nature. She repeats this imagery again as “blood blooms through her veins”. Using the phrase “blood through her veins” is reminiscent of the physiology of female sexuality, as arousal comes from the pumping of excess blood to the genitals (Levin). Grounding the sexual process in science, Bass continues her natural imagery, extending her metaphor of petals to the “blooming of the blood”. This continues to equate to female sexuality—from the desire of a deep spiritual relationship depicted in “Neighbor”, to another equally important part of sexuality, the arousal.

Next, Bass works this natural imagery into explicit sexual acts.

“Intricate, curved labellum like bones / of a tiny pelvis and slender tongue reaching out” (“Moth Orchids” 10-11). The elevated language that describes the pelvis, allows for the center of female sex to become a type of altar for worship. Instead of depicting the female sexual space as highly contested, colonized, or degraded (as it so often is), words such as “intricate” and “curved” ground the imagery in an almost artistic space. The agent of the poem becomes the curator of an artful, natural place where sex, a spiritual and natural act, will occur. Further, the emphasis on the anatomical structure of this space asserts that the space is natural itself, and need not be equated with nature outside of itself. As a “labellum” is the central petal in an orchid as well as a lobe on an insect, Bass’s adjective choices point towards her title, suggesting again her grounding of the sexual in nature.

These images work in collusion to argue that while the female sexual space has been “encouraged as a sign of female inferiority”, it can be reclaimed as a natural and artistic space (Lorde 185). A space where both desire and the erotic is reclaimed.

Bass empowers women who have been socialized in a culture of deep shame about their sexuality to reclaim their sexuality. Understanding Bass as a feminist, we see her poetry as a critique on society’s imagination of sexuality that moves to praise sexuality both spiritual and natural. Bass closely equates sex with nature and natural elements of our culture, such as democracy, in order to explicitly place sex as a part of our lives––freeing, wonderful, and glaringly necessary. Sex cannot be separated from female personalities or lives—and when we allow it to become merely a facet of patriarchal society, we allow it to control us. We feel shame. We feel that our desire has been removed from us. Bass’s work begs for the decolonization of female bodies in American culture and the empowerment of women towards female sexual freedom.

Works Cited Bass, Ellen, and Laura Davis. The Courage to Heal: A Guide for Women Survivors of Child Sexual Abuse. New York: Perennial Library, 1988. Print.

Bass, Ellen. “The Morning After.” Like a Beggar. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2014. 30. Print.

Bass, Ellen. “Moth Orchids.” Like a Beggar. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2014. 14. Print.

Bass, Ellen. “Nakedness.” Like a Beggar. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2014. 10. Print.

Bass, Ellen. “Neighbor.” Like a Beggar. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2014. 33. Print.

Bass, Ellen. “Ordinary Sex.” Like a Beggar. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon Press, 2014. 38. Print.

“Ellen Bass.” Poetry Foundation. Harriet Monroe Poetry Institute, n.d. Web. 13 Nov. 2014.

Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic.” Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives.

Comp. Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, 2004.

183. Print.

Levins Morales, Aurora . “Radical Pleasure.” Women’s Lives: Multicultural Perspectives. Comp. Gwyn Kirk and Margo Okazawa-Rey. Boston, MA: McGraw-Hill, 2004. 283. Print.

Levin, R.J. “Result Filters.” National Center for Biotechnology Information. U.S. National Library of Medicine, 31 Oct. 2002. Web. 04 Dec. 2014.

Wit is the most dangerous talent you can process. It must be guarded with great discretion and good nature, other wise it will create you many enemies…. Humour…may sometimes gain you applause, but will never procure respect…. [I]f you happen to have any learning, keep it a profound secret, especially from the men, who generally look with a jealous and malignant eye on a woman of great parts, and a cultivated understanding (Gregory 221).

Michael Robinson is a first year graduate student majoring in English and an alumnus of the undergraduate program.

He began his research into “The New Man,” in Dr. Youngkin’s course on the Nineteenth Century English Novel where he focused on Austen’s Northanger Abbey; her novice/penultimate novel began at seventeen and finally published after her death in 1817 at the age of forty-one. To the extent that The Commodification of the “New Man” succeeds as a paper is the product of, in large part, the tutelage of Dr. Youngkin, one of the department’s many scholarly giants, and the nuanced craft and genius of Jane Austen.

If love have made some women wretched—how many more has the cold unmeaning intercourse of gallantry rendered vain and useless! Yet this heartless attention to the sex is reckoned so manly, so polite that, till society is very differently organized, I fear, this vestige of gothic manners will not be done away by a more reasonable and affectionate mode of conduct (Wollstonecraft 223).

A generation separates Dr. John Gregory’s book of conduct to young women1 from Mary Wollstonecraft’s proto-feminist rebuttal2, and, within that generation, Jane Austen is twice born: first as a baby (1775) and next as a 1 2

A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774) A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

writer (her Juvenilia, around 1792-93). In 1809, her seventeenth year as a writer, Austen fails to win the publication of Susan, the book that would become Northanger Abbey (NA), but in the following year Thomas Egerton publishes Sense and Sensibility. In a real sense, then, Austen comes of age upon her eighteenth year as a professional writer just as her unlikely heroine, Catherine, in NA, comes into her own at 18, as a married woman having weathered duplicity and the mechanations of the socio-economics of early nineteenth century women, in general, and the women of the gentry, specifically. In the case of Austen the writer, the duplicity came in the form of Crosbie & Company’s ambivalent purchase of Susan which implied a promise of publication and the seeming subsequent change of heart, reminiscent of Isabella Thorpe’s turns in courtship within the pages of the eventual Northanger Abbey; the mechanations of achieving book publication being akin to a dance, like the balls in Bath, insofar as dance allowed the necessary intimacies that form matches. In publishing, the match was between writer and a “New Publisher” (for NA and Persuasion, it would be John Murray instead of Egerton). In the romance, the match is the inevitable one between heroine and hero—but the embodiment of those tropes are radically different: Catherine Morland, the former infant that “no one…would have supposed her…to be an heroine” and Henry Tilney as “New Man,” an answer to Wollstonecraft’s plea for the nullification of “gothic manners” and a usurpation of “a more reasonable and affectionate mode of conduct” with regard to societal courtship.

One can link Henry with Tennenhouse’s wide-ranging discussions in The Importance of Feeling English of “the man of feeling,” the male counterpart to British fiction’s sentimental heroine from which the protagonists of the gothic romances derive. Although ultimately focused on the American development of new maleness, Tennenhouse gives a literary lineage to the conceptualization of Henry as “New Man,” tracing his development from Scottish novelist Henry Mackenzie’s, Man of Feeling—and back-and-forth across the Atlantic before reaching the time and pages of Austen and others. Key in his assertions is that the “man of feeling” is no longer “simply a foil to the ‘man of reason’... [but] a necessary component of

a new ruling-class masculinity” (Tennenhouse 74). Though, the “man of feeling” was initially unpopular in England, the prototypes resonated in America. It is the introduction of 0American Charles Brockden Brown’s novel, Clara Howard, to England—retitled Philip Stanley: or the Enthusiasm of Love, the subtitle identifying Stanley as a “man of feeling”—that sets the stage for a reflourishing of the “man of feeling” in Britain, this time, principally from the pens of English writers William Godwin and Jane Austen. (Tennenhouse also makes connections to Samuel Richardson, a writer known to have influenced Austen, with regard to creating an eighteenth century prototype for the British “figure of male sensibility,” Sir Charles Grandison, from the book of the same name.)

Approached as a bildungsroman, Northanger Abbey depicts Catherine Morland’s formation or coming-of-age after a season at Bath and an encounter with the Thorpes and Tilneys. Austen creates a “New Man,” Henry Tilney, to develop her heroine. From his introduction in Volume I, chapter 3, Henry mirrors heroine Catherine, who is from the very first line of the book, and, repeatedly, thereafter, portrayed as not of the typical female heroic mold of gothic romances (Austen 15). In strict violation of Gregory’s counsel against women being witty, humorous and learned, Henry encourages Catherine from the beginning to display all three feminine “vices” by involving her in a role-play: “I have hitherto been very remiss, madam, in the proper attentions of a partner here; I have not yet asked you how long you have been in Bath; whether you were ever here before; whether you have been at the Upper Rooms….” Catherine plays along which leads to an extended back and forth on journal writing; which gender is most adept at keeping and writing journals; and, a critique on male/female abilities in terms of grammar and so forth prompted by Henry before Mrs. Allen interrupts them.

Henry then carries on a very non-masculine conversation with Mrs. Allen about muslin. As Clery emphasizes in “Gender”: He immediately demonstrates his own ‘genius’ in a realm of taste and judgment conventionally held to be the preserve of

women: dress. The dress-obsessed Mrs Allen…joins the pair and is struck by his exact knowledge of the price and durability of textiles: ‘Men commonly take so little notice of those things’.

But the younger woman is disturbed even while she is amused by this deviancy (Clery 160).

The chapter closes with Henry displaying other aspects at odds with the gothic hero (and even at odds to later Jane Austen “New Men” like Mr. Darcy). Not only is he talkative, his talk has a purpose: honest discussion.

When Catherine fears that Henry, in his conversation with Mrs. Allen, “indulge[s] himself too much with the foibles of others”—he notices a tale-tell change in her demeanor. “What are you thinking of so earnestly… not of your partner, I hope, for, by that shake of the head, your meditations are not satisfactory.” Embarrassed, Catherine endeavors to get away with “I was not thinking of any thing” to which Henry replies: “That is artful and deep, to be sure; but I would rather be told at once that you will not tell me.”

Catherine immediately responds with, “Well then, I will not.” Henry thanks her for her candor and adds that “now we shall soon be acquainted, as I am authorized to tease you on this subject whenever we meet, and nothing in the world advances intimacy so much.” Teasing, the exercising of wit, serves as the catalyst for intimacy between men and women in this Austen-created scenario (Austen 25-29).

Henry Tilney’s specialness is underscored by comparison with two other, literary-typical males in the novel: his father, General Tilney and, the romantically unsavory, John Thorpe. Whereas, Henry exists as the face of the 19th century’s new romantic leading man, one that can be a partner and companion in marriage rather than a mere appendage for social status and child-rearing; the General is the calculated charm of the previous generation who held marriage as a necessary part of their portfolio of holdings and acquisitions. Thorpe lies in a no person’s land between the Tilneys. He is an uncomprehending, clueless dolt—a consequence of his not changing with the times—who believes marriage should persist as it has since before the General’s time and women, like horses and riggings, are mere

commodities to be obtained through not-necessarily-straight-forward, unilateral negotiation. The latter two men are emblematic of Wollstonecraft’s “cold unmeaning intercourse of gallantry” that savages the ranks of women and renders them “vain and useless”.

General Tilney originally comes on the scene as an older, handsome version of Henry. Austin writes that Catherine is struck by the overall good looks of the family. This underscores the two-way reality of the Bath Pump/ Upper/Lower Room scenes—a reality of the gaze: women are the objects to be gazed but they are also able to objectify and make their own evaluations to an extent of the gentlemen engaged in coldly gazing and evaluating the women walking around the Bath rooms. The General, as we learn, is in Bath for his health but that does not prevent his opportunistic tendencies. Charming and personable, he is, however, a man that, increasingly, makes Catherine anxious. It is not just his words but his behaviors--what her evaluative gaze of him imparts to her--that. much as Thorpe gives her increased distaste. It is as though she can sense the cold militarism hidden beneath his impeccable manners and authoritive air.

Austen presents him as subtly dangerous at Northanger Abbey. Although, the novel is far from a political treatise, Hopkins points out some of the agrarian politics in the scene when the General discusses his “low” pineapple crop output with Catherine: The General’s complaint would contain its own moral condemnation. The serious grain shortage of 1795 combined with the inflationary grain prices led to riots and parliamentary action. The poor suffered the most, General Tilney’s hot-houses producing a hundred pineapples while, to Catherine’s eyes, a “whole parish” seems to be at work, suggests a callous lack of concern for the commonweal (Hopkins 296).

The General appears even more the epitome of corporate greed later when he visits his son’s parsonage in Woodson. Catherine is enthralled by the the cottage’s—Henry’s home—drawing room and its view:

“Well, if it was my house, I should never sit any where else.

Oh! What a sweet little cottage there is among the

trees—apple trees too! It is the prettiest cottage!”

[General Tilney] “You like it—you approve it as an object;-- it is enough. Henry, remember that Robinson is spoken to about it.

The cottage remains” (Austen 200).

Hopkins draws attention to the General’s reduction of the cottage to “an object” and concludes that: [H]is dehumanization of the ‘cottage,’ verbally if not literally, evokes a truly sinister image. We are reminded of Raymond Williams’ observation that the most flagrantly aggressive capitalists of the eighteenth century were agrarian. At a time when…large landowners [were urged] to consider providing plots of land for cottages and gardens to laborers displaced by enclosure, readers of the 1790s and early 1800s would surely have winced at Catherine’s innocence and the General’s totally mercenary attitude (Hopkins 296-7).

Catherine, despite, Hopkins above, is not so innocent that she is blind to the General’s dark side. This is not so of his son, Henry.

In a key scene in the novel, Henry catches Catherine investigating his dead mother’s rooms. She, overly influenced by the gothic novels she has been reading (and which Henry teased her about enroute to Northanger Abbey), has convinced herself that the General has, perhaps, murdered his wife. He corrects her: “You have erred in supposing him not attached to her. He loved her, I am persuaded, as well as it was possible for him

to—We have not all, you know, the same tenderness of disposition—and I will not pretend to say that while she lived, she might not often have had much to bear, but though his temper injured her, his judgment never did. His value of her was sincere; and, if not permanently, he was truly afflicted by her death….” (Austen 185).

Pausing here for a moment, we can see that even Henry, perhaps subconsciously, cannot help attributing financial parlance for his father’s esteem of his mother when he says that the General’s “value” of his mother was “sincere.” Additionally, examining the phrase, “tenderness of disposition,” it is an attribute that one might map “men of feeling (or nonfeeling)” along an axis. Here, father and son would plot on different ends.

Continuing: “If I understand you rightly, you had formed a surmise of such horror as I have hardly words to—Dear Miss Morland, consider the dreadful nature of the suspicions you have entertained. What have you been judging from? Remembering the country and the age in which we live. Remember that we are English, that we are Christians. Consult your own understanding, your own sense of the probable, your own observation of what is passing around you— Does our education prepare us for such atrocities? Do our laws connive at them? … Dearest Miss Morland, what ideas have you been admitting?” Austen 185-6).

It is part of Catherine’s nature, repeatedly demonstrated through her interactions with Isabella and John Thorpe (and, to a lesser extent, Mrs Allen), not to think ill of anyone, to give the benefit of the doubt. Though Austen sets up Catherine’s suspicions using the tropes of the gothic romance, it is actually the overload of her innate ability to see the best in people—in tandem with her inability to put herself in other people’s shoes (and, thus, see

the world in terms other than her own) as observed by Henry 3 that puts her on the path of seeking the General’s ominous side. Ultimately, Catherine is guilty only in the degree of darkness she suspects of him.

Henry is more problematic. For one, his list of questions to Catherine is hardly convincing. Does Henry truly believe that being English or Christian makes one incapable of horrors? Or is this yet another instance of the renowned Austen wit? His whole Socratic methodology—used effectively with Catherine from their first meeting—falls down in this exchange for it is beyond belief that Henry’s list intrinsically staves off crime. In this one instance, Henry is the innocent and remains so until his confrontation with his father—his coming-to-terms with the man behind Catherine’s over-the-top suppositions—and learning that the man he defended cruelly abandoned Catherine to the Fates, ousting her from the security of the Abbey and onto the potentially treacherous road back to Fullerton. Here, the General is seen to be his unequivocal self—stripped of the charm mustered for Catherine’s benefit, for the Catherine who had, in his mind, wealth. Here, too, Henry comes into himself, comes of age, himself: Henry’s indignation on hearing how Catherine had been treated, on comprehending his father’s views, and being ordered to acquiesce in them, had been open and bold. The General, accustomed on every ordinary occasion to give the law in his family, prepared for no reluctance but of feeling, no opposing desire that should dare to clothe itself in words, could ill brook the opposition of his son, steady as the sanction of reason and the dictate of conscience could make it (Austen 230-31).

Tennenhouse cites John Locke and his Second Treatise of Government, which argues against patriarchies, specifically, the idea that sons needed to wait until the death of their fathers in order to become heads of households. This implied that manhood and full citizenship, in a Lockean

3 Henry tells her, referencing how she missed his brother’s motives for asking to dance with Isabella, that “With you, it is not, How is such a one likely to be influenced?....but how should I be influenced, what would be my inducement in acting so and so?” (Austen 126).

sense, would be deferred until the young man was no longer a dependent.

In other words, young men were economically feminized and awaited independence to truly enter into manhood in Georgian/Victorian society. In Clara Howard/Philip Stanley, the novelist “combines the excessive subjectivity required of a compassionate man with the education necessary to convert that excess into self-government” (Tennenhouse 83), “self-government” being self-determination, independence. Thus, the independent Philip Stanley models for Austen how an ideal hero—like Henry Tilney—should be.

The third male to contrast Henry Tilney against, John Thorpe, is referred to by James Morland, Catherine’s brother, as a “rattle,” an excessive talker. This seems to be a character trait for all the Thorpes. The difference—as opposed to the numerous similarities—is that John is one note. One could say that of all the Thorpes—the mother always talking about her children; Isabella always talking about herself or ingratiating others to keep them in her Victorian pocket; even the two youngest daughters in constant practice to one day be Isabella—but all of them adapt their speech to the circumstance of their situation. They can sustain a listener’s interest, even when they don’t themselves listen. John Thorpe rattles to the point of alienation. Then keeps rattling.

Herrle notes that when Austen introduces John (and James Morland) he is “driving his gig with ‘all the vehemence that could most fitly endanger the lives of himself, his companion, and his horse” (Herrle 239). This foreshadows, following up on the General, John Thorpe’s own sinisterness.

There is one other incident where he drives like a mad man in his gig—when they (Isabella, James and Catherine) are off for Blaize Castle at the expense of Catherine’s planned walk with the Tilneys (John, effectively, “kidnaps” Catherine by not stopping and letting her join the Tilneys when they pass them on the road). At his introduction: Thorpe sets the pattern for speeches to come, exaggerating the distance they have travelled and the speed with which horses go; he then boasts the superiority of his carriage and emphasizes his magnanimity by telling Catherine that he was above haggling for

it when he purchased it. Not surprisingly, when Catherine meets him again, Thorpe renews him conversation about the gig after a few minute’s silence, this time extolling its value and desirability…[after three more meetings]… Although at this point Catherine is unable to read Thorpe for what he is, just as she is unable to discern the difference between gothic fiction and gothic reality, she already knows that she does not like him. In less than five pages a neutral opinion of Thorpe changes to one of increasing distaste (Herrle 239).

Herrle indicates that the only attentive listener to Thorpe is General Tilney, who has, arguably, a “more deluded” notion of his import. Thorpe puts the General on the hunt for Catherine by telling him of a connection between her and the wealthy Allens as well as, in his hyperbolic style. Later, in a pique, he alleges a reversal of fortunes (Austen 228-31). The author sets Thorpe to play the foil or the fool, by having him be preoccupied with “delusional attempts to render [himself] as [an] attractive, important, well-bred young gentle[man]” (Herrle 238). His failure, in contrast to Henry Tilney, is that, though initially a capable conversationalist, he is a horrid listener [per Herrle, his conversational skill set worsens and devolves along the way—“we get a sense that Thorpe almost speaks like the animals with which he so enjoys spending time—he yelps, squeals, and whinnies wildly when he is excited, and barks and snorts at strangers” (Herrle 239-40).]

Reconsidering the General and Thorpe together in a broader way, yet still distinct from Henry, both men are considered rude (to be fair, Henry is told by his sister, Eleanor, to correct a jest he made at her expense if he doesn’t wish Catherine to think him rude towards his sister). Clearly, the General’s behavior with regard to the expulsion of Catherine nearly exceeds the scope of the word. Likewise, Thorpe going behind Catherine’s back to reschedule her walking plans with Eleanor and Henry for his own purposes is far from polite. Worse, most of the grief Catherine and Henry experience in the second volume of Northanger Abbey sprung from misinformation that Thorpe passed on to the General without regard to civility. According to

Michele Cohen and her research on masculinity politeness: A critical aspect of polite gentlemanliness was precisely that it was not homogeneous but, rather, rent with anxieties, in particular the anxiety about effeminacy, because tensions between masculinity and refinement made it difficult for a man to be at once polite and manly…. By the end of the eighteenth century, Philip Carter has argued, polite society…broke down, with consequences for “the definition of the gentleman as well as concepts of manliness in the nineteenth century. Indeed, John Tosh’s remark that politeness is not “a quality we readily associate with Victorian men” (Cohen 313-14).

The erosion of polite behavior in England likely correlates with Tennenhouse’s earlier observation that the “New Man” did not take off in Britain at the time of Mackenzie’s 1771 publication of Man of Feeling. By contrast, however, Henry Tilney seems like a throwback to the seventeenth century. Even while confronting Catherine and her spurious accusations against his father, Henry is remarkably even-tempered and is quick to support her later during dinner.

Again, pointing to Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice, Austen’s “New Men” do not have to project warmth and Darcy often comes off as rude in keeping with the trend observed by Cohen.

In “Locke, Richardson, and Austen: or, How to Become a Gentleman,” another vantage point in considering the “New Man” is offered by Isabelle Bour who states that “civility will be seen as a defining feature of the gentleman—civility rather than politeness” (Bour 159). As was seen earlier, Locke believed in the importance of citizenship—connected to civility—and, thus, the need for young man to be independent of their fathers to acquire their citizenship. Bour observes that in Richardson’s Pamela and Austen’s Pride and Prejudice that: …the proud and well-born gentleman marries below his station

after being chastised by the woman he loves and overcoming his pride… The female protagonist is the agent of this reformation.

Again, in both cases, the education is mutual… In Pride and Prejudice …when Elizabeth thinks that she has lost Darcy…

she becomes aware that as his wife she would greatly

benefit “from his judgment, information and knowledge of

the world….” The education of the gentleman is thus

also about the education of the gentle woman. But, most

important, it is women who make their suitors true

gentlemen (Bour163).

In Northanger Abbey, one can see parallels in “gentleman marries below his station” and, as a consequence, one can glean yet another obstacle of a match between Catherine and Thorpe: Thorpe is likely below or at about the same station as Catherine. This is not an ideal Austen coupling.

Secondly, though Henry, as “New Man” is a “well-born gentleman” he still requires Catherine as an impetus to become a “true” gentleman. It is in the confrontation of his father—the transformation of his civility to citizenship—that creates Henry’s independence. Further, there is that most manly of pastimes, the dance. Bour adds the following: That Jane Austen had thought seriously about the pedagogical usefulness of dancing and its importance as a social activity is confirmed by Henry Tilney’s lengthy declarations about dancing…: “We have entered into a contract of mutual agreeableness. …I consider a country-dance as an emblem of marriage”. This formulation gives specificity to the “manliness” Locke thinks dancing teaches (Bour, 166).

It can be noted, should further proof of unsuitability be required, that Thorpe stands Catherine up at the big dance in Vol. I, chapter 8.

Just as Henry as “New Man” has his counters in the General and John Thorpe, Catherine, as the unlikely heroine has a counter. Catherine

muddles through as a heroine in Northanger. Her heroism is internal and slowly blooms. Isabella Thorpe, on the other hand, embodies the surface of the heroine. She possesses none of the fine feelings one expects of a true heroine but she emphatically personifies the look. Isabella is a sketch of desperateness that all ticking cattle calls warrant. Unlike Catherine—young, naïve, innocent Catherine—she is at her first season at Bath. Isabella is four years older than her—four years more experienced. A undergraduate degree in college difference. And she reads. Esther Godfrey writing about Wilkie Collins’ The Women in White notes that: Nineteenth-century literature abounds with stories of women’s struggles to secure their futures through fortunate marriages to wealthy husbands. Throughout the period, women lacked equal access to the law, education, or the workforce, and, unless women were independently wealthy, marriage often proved essential to their economic stability even as it deprived them of economic autonomy. This sexual economy largely benefited middle- and upper-class men, who could capitalize on gender inequities to exchange their wealth for youth and beauty (Godfrey 162).

Like Catherine, Isabella lives one foot in the dream fantasy of novels and the other in the real world. But Isabella’s world is decidedly different than the close-knit nuclear family world of the Morlands.

Austen summarizes the Thorpe women via her narrator in the final two paragraphs of Volume I, chapter 4, a couple of brief (50 to 70 words each) in one of several “breaking the fourth wall” asides in the novel. The narrator speaks directly to the reader in order to save time and pages. Mrs. Thorpe is “a widow,” “not very rich,” “good-humoured,” “well-meaning” and a “very indulgent mother.” One could argue that she is, perhaps, not “well meaning” given the impact of her boasts about her children on Mrs Allen and, too, given the sense that Isabella is her conversational offspring and is not at all “well meaning”. But as this is reported by the narrator—and the

narrator is assumed to be reliable—we readers accept these traits as truths.

(Further, as we know the “widow” and the “very indulgent mother” traits to be true, why would we assume the others not to be?).

Isabella is “her eldest daughter,” “a great personal beauty,” (not the “indulgent mother” ascessment but the narrator’s). The younger sisters “by pretending to be as handsome “ as Isabella “imitating her air and dressing in the same style” did “very well”. This lends a ‘feminine pragmatism” to the proceedings. If Isabella is successful in getting attention in these cattle calls for marriage and prosperity held at Bath and other places, the safe thing to do is emulate the success. There is order to this dance to catch the eye—in truth, dance is ordered mating, allowing the buyers to view the stock and make inqueries about specific animals. In one’s fourth year of doing these things, it would not be a surprise that Isabella would start to feel like a slab of meat on display. Unless she shut down, emotionally. Which would explain a great deal. The manipulation. The concern for the best deal (i.e., marriage).

The narrator concludes volume 1, chapter 4 with a confession that the brief capsulation of all things Thorpe “is intended to supercede the necessity of a long and minute detail from Mrs. Thorpe herself, of her past adventures and sufferings, which might otherwise be expected to occupy the three or four following chapters; in which the worthlessness of lords and attornies might be set forth, and conversations, which had passed twenty years before, be minutely repeated.” Again, as Isabella is four years older than Catherine, she would be twenty-one. Austen, then, directs our attention to a time when Mrs. Thorpe’s husband was alive and still vital enough to produce two additional heirs. Thus, the narrator invites the reader to speculate on the conversations—who, for example, was conversing, and upon what subjects.

In the gothic tradition, “lords and attornies” commonly bilked virtuous widows out of their fortune. If such was Mrs Thorpe’s situation since Isabella’s childhood, the importance of obtaining a good match for her children would be paramount. Isabella, however, does not play the demure lady waiting to be romanced. Perhaps she feels, at 21, that she is running out of time. Thus, the aggressiveness, the gambling—risking a sure thing (James Morland) for a riskier, higher (monetary) stakes bet (Capt. Tilney).

But for Austen, it is about the relationship, the conversation, not the money. That is why Catherine and Henry work, why Mr and Mrs Morland work. Why the Thorpes don’t work. Conversation is dialogue. It is, in violation of Dr. Gregory’s legacy, the sharing of wit and humor and experience. For Austen, it is about the journey and the conversations, learning, laughter that takes place durning the journey. Marriage, money, properties—these are constructs and mean little to Austen. Unless you can see marriage in a dance, see riches in friendships and families and find that one room with a view that makes you feel like your home. ###

Works Cited Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Ed. Marilyn Butler. London: Penguin Classics, 2003.

Hopkins, Robert. “General Tilney and Affairs of State: The Political Gothic of Northanger Abbey.” Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Ed. Susan Fraiman.

New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1980. 294-301.

Bour, Isebelle. “Locke, Richardson, and Austen: of How to Become a Gentleman.” Persuasions: The Jane Austen Journal 30 (2008): 159-169.

Morini, Massimiliano. Jane Austen’s Narrative Techniques: A Stylistic and Pragmatic Analysis. Farnham: Ashgate Publishing Limited, 2009.

Clery, E. J. “Gender.” The Cambridge Companion to Jane Austen. Ed. Edward Copeland and Juliet McMaster. 2nd. Vol. . Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2011. 159-75.

Tennenhouse, Leonard. The Importance of Feeling English: American Literature and the British Diaspora, 1750-1850. Princeton: Princeton UP, 2007.

Cohen, Michele. “”Manners” Make the Man: Politeness, Chivalry, and the Construction of Masculinity, 1750-1830.” The Journal of British Studies 44.2 (2005): 312-29. <http://journals.cambridge.org/abstract_S0021937100007735 >.

Godfrey, Esther. “”Absolutey Miss Fairlie’s own”: Emasculating Economics in the Woman in White.” Economic Women: Essays on Desire and Dispossession in Nineteenth-Century British Culture. Ed. Lana L. Dalley and Jill Rappoport. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2013. 162-78.

Gregory, John. “From A Father’s Legacy to His Daughters (1774).” Austen, Jane. Northanger Abbey. Ed. Susan Fraiman. Norton Critical Edition. New York: W.W. Norton and Co., 2004. 220-22.

Grundy, Isobel. “Why Do They Talk So Much? How Can We Stand It?: John Thorpe and Miss Bates.” The Talk in Jane Austen. Ed. Bruce Stovel and Lynn Weinlos Gregg. Edmonton: The University of Alberta Press, 2002. 41-56.

Herrle, Jeffrey. “The Idiolects of the Idiots.” The Talk in Jane Austen. Ed. Bruce Stovel and Lynn Weinlos Gregg. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2002. 237-252.

Alana Schlemm is a senior English Writing major at Loyola Marymount University. Born and raised in Montreal, Alana is a poet, playwright, essayist, and short-story author. She currently resides in Venice, CA and has a short play running in New Works Festival and L.A.’s Fresh Produce’d.

The essay “Compassion & Concern: The Dichotomy of Riis’s Reform” was written in the spring of 2014 for Carla Bittel’s history course, “The U.S. and the World.” Written as a response to Jacob Riis’ powerful book, How the Other Half Lives, Alana’s essay investigates the portrayal of struggling immigrants and the urban poor, exploring whether or not Riis’ book works to advance the interests of its subjects, or reinforce the stereotypes of the time.

In 1890, Jacob Riis published a book titled How the Other Half Lives, a then-progressive look into the disparaging living conditions of New York City’s urban poor. With a heavy focus placed on struggling immigrant populations, Riis sought to tear down the romantic notions that had come to be associated with poverty amongst the upper classes, intent on exposing the true, and frightening face of poverty. He proclaimed that he wanted to “tear down the Mulberry Bend and let in the light,” oftentimes equating physical darkness with moral darkness (22). Riis hoped that by uncovering the disturbing depths to which the tenement blocks had fallen, he would, through both sympathy and fear, spark a social-reform movement amongst the middle-class, whom he believed to be the savior of modern American society. In his depictions of New York City’s struggling immigrant populations and the urban poor, Riis is both sympathetic and pejorative. He is undoubtedly derogatory in his observations of immigrant cultures, though the overtone of the book is ultimately sympathetic, as he portrays their ‘depraved’ lifestyles as the result of a larger evil: the tenements and their greedy landlords. It was Riis’s unique blend of sympathy and disapproving judgment that allowed his novel to reach such heights of recognition, an amalgamation evident in his account of tenement conditions, urban youth, and the detrimental forces of alcohol and crime.

From the start of his novel, Riis makes clear that the antagonist in his

catalog of urban poverty is the tenement. After briefly summarizing the birth of the tenement housing system, Riis illustrates how what once was a godsend to the struggling workers in need of affordable housing had come to become the cause of their struggle. The city grew, immigration boomed, and all too soon the “necessities of the poor became the opportunity of their wealthier neighbors” (63). As rooms were broken down into “mean little cubby-holes,” and rents surged at an unprecedented rate, the tenements were born (66). Throughout his novel Riis frequently reveals, in both photographs and written account, the horrors of the tenements. From the tiny, shabby rooms with little to no ventilation or light to the terrible tales of their unhappy inhabitants, Riis effectively conveys the dread to be found there. To Riis, tenement housing is a place where “all the influences make for evil,” describing them as the “hot-beds of the epidemics that carry death to rich and poor alike” and “the nurseries of pauperism and crime that fill our jails and police courts” (60). By making clear the correlation between the tenements and rising epidemics, Riis renders the housing system a plague on the city, instilling in his audience fear of impending pandemic. More than that, his descriptions of the tenements and their inhabitants possess a kind of disease-like quality in themselves, as if to assert that life in the tenements is sure to cause both physical and moral malady. He engenders this notion by staking the claim that the tenements, “above all, […] touch the family life with deadly moral contagion” (60). By attributing the vile conditions of the urban poor to the contagious atmosphere of the tenements, Riis softens the blow of his pejorative perspective – ultimately laying blame on the circumstances of the people, as opposed to the people themselves. By directing his discontent toward the tenements and their ‘greedy’ proprietors, Riis cultivates a consensus of sympathy for tenement inhabitants. He portrays the struggling immigrants and urban poor as victims of a broken system, “held captive by poverty”(73) and eventually sinking “to the level of their surroundings” (69). Riis’s tone is sympathetic, albeit condescending, as he ascribes the squalid lives of the urban poor as an inevitable response to being “held down by the hand that of all should labor to raise him” (185).

Having clearly established tenement housing as the breeding ground

for squalor, Riis turns his attention to the problem of urban youth. Despite often fluctuating between sympathy and disapproval, Riis’s compassion is most evident in his descriptions of children. He seizes the reader’s sympathy by exposing the rising enormity of infant deaths due to “suffocation in the foul air of […] unventilated apartment[s]” (65), posturing tenements as the perpetrator whose “dark bedroom kill[s]” (91). As if that weren’t disheartening enough, he then ‘brings’ the reader into the dark hall of the tenement, claiming that one “might stumble over the children pitching pennies […] Not that it would hurt them; kicks and cuffs are their daily diet.

They have little else” (89). Riis portrays the children as having nothing but their pain, painting quite a saddening scene for anyone with even a drop of human compassion. By exposing the sheer number of children growing up in poverty, and the discouraging direction in which they head, Riis unveils the cause of concern for ‘tomorrow’. As such, he instills in the reader a dichotomy of emotion; empathy, for the child that suffers, and fear, for what that child might grow to become. He sees tenements as ground zero for moral contagion, and so it is no surprise that Riis feels both concern and compassion for “the boy [who] stands condemned by his own to low and ill-paid drudgery […] with no steady hand to guide him” (185). In his chapter “The Problem of the Children,” Riis’s empathy is epitomized: What is done in the end is to let [the child] take chances – with the chances all against him. The result is the rough young savage, familiar from the street. Rough as he is, if any one doub that this child of common clay have in him the instinct of beauty, of love for the ideal of which his life has no embodiment, let him put the matter to the test. (185) In the face of a growing population of impoverished children that still hold the promise of youth, Riis calls his readers to action, urging them through both parts compassion and concern. He dares his readers to take a chance. From this emerges, once again, Riis’s then-progressive perspective that atmosphere is the determinant of character, and not genetics. Rooted in his

hope for a better America arises Riis’s strong sense of sympathy for the human condition, as he sees in each ‘young savage’ the promise of beauty, love, and the American ideal.

The range of Riis’s emotions toward the city’s struggling immigrants and urban poor are espoused in his discussions of ‘trampdom’. The ‘tramps’ – those vagrants and homeless who Riis perceives to have fallen into incurable squalor and beggary – are pictured as addicts of idleness and agents of delinquency. Portrayed as the final stop on the metaphorical poverty train, Riis brackets alcoholism and crime as vital components of ‘trampdom’. If for Riis the home is the heart of America’s moral compass, then the tramp is its antithesis: the frightful outcome of American homelessness – the daunting darkness lurking at the bottom of the (literal) barrel. In a tag-along raid of a beer-dive in the Bend, Riis recounts “a foul and ragged host of men and women, [… and] in the center of the group a sallow, wrinkled hag, evidently the ruler of the feast, deal[ing] out the hideous stuff” (110). Riis does not labor to subdue his scorn, and yet even in contempt his sympathy emerges, as he refers to the saloon as the poor man’s “refuge from every trouble” (93). Denoting the saloon as “the devil’s church [that] fosters crime and shields the criminals,” Riis likens the drinking establishments with the tenement houses, posing them as another agent of immorality and crime (206). Despite his professed disdain for delinquency, Riis reveals his sympathy for the ‘corrupt’ lot as he once again lifts the blame from their burdened shoulders, disparaging in their stead those who profit from their misdeeds and those who’ve stood idyll by. Leviatin adeptly observes that “the landlord is the devil in Riis’s moral drama, and the tenement is the hell that landlords have created” (161). Riis believed that the evil bred by ‘the other half’ is “a just punishment upon the community that gave it no other choice” (60). While undoubtedly disapproving, Riis does not blame the tramps for their lowly lives; in a sense, he postures them to be pitied, pardoned, and – finally – feared. Effective ingredients for social reform, Riis’s balance of compassion and contempt instill in the reader an abundance of sympathy with just enough apprehension for “the dangerous anarchy inherent in urban poverty” (22).

Though Riis’s portrayals of his subjects are certainly pejorative and his stories sensationalized, his sympathy for their struggle is palpable. While his observations of immigrant cultures are almost entirely rooted in stereotype, no doubt reinforcing them in the mind of the reader, his harsh perspective may have actually advanced the interests of his subjects, as middle-class audiences were likely more amenable to an author who shared popular stereotypes of the time. By casting tenements and saloons as the perpetrators of evil, Riis portrays the urban poor as victims of a failing system, falling farther and farther into moral darkness as the dark corners of the tenements engulfed them whole. Despite portraying the urban poor as a group to be feared, Riis repetitively redirects blame to the city’s systems built on greed. At his most compassionate, Riis is commiserative in his concern for the city’s youth. It is in his understanding of struggle that his sympathy shines through, and in his love for American ideals that the critic within him emerges. By tracing the trials of the tenement inhabitants to their current depravity, Jacob Riis effectively motivates his middle class audience; a douse of empathy and a dab of fear make effective ingredients for social reform.

Works Cited Riis, Jacob A., and David Leviatin. How the Other Half Lives: Studies among the Tenements of New York. Boston: Bedford of St. Martin’s, 1996. Print.

Mat Levitt is a sophomore English major from Studio City, CA. His interest in reading and writing about poetry started in High School but it peaked when he took Sarah Maclay’s “Language of Poetry” course, the same course of which he wrote this essay for. He aspires to keep writing literary criticism as well short fiction and prose poetry. This essay helped to set off his love for American poets and his current favorites are Charles Reznikoff and William Carlos Williams.

When he is not reading or writing, he is usually found surfing or skateboarding.

The memories of childhood undergo a process of sifting, filtering, and suppressing through our later experiences, where reality can be clouded and replaced by pure imagery and emotion, ripe for poetry. Lynn Emanuel and Susan Mitchell are two contemporary poets that explore vulnerable moments of childhood with an emphasis on tragedy and family. Emanuel’s “When Father Decided He Did Not Love Her Anymore” and Mitchell’s “Havana Birth” are two examples which, for me, exemplify a sense of youth with a presumptuously jaded touch, seeking to make sense of the wild beauty of their pasts. These are childhood memory poems but are left without a trace of naivete.

Lynn Emanuel’s selected poems in New American Poets share a central theme addressing the pain of her childhood, two parts curiosity and one part empathy. “When Father Decided He Did Not Love Her Anymore” is a love letter to her tortured past self. The self of her adolescence manages to find beauty in undeniably painful moments. The poem contains a number of memories recollecting images of her father’s lovers as they emerge in and out of his life. She is either giving lucid depictions to fading memories or looking to put a spin on tragedy, avoiding a “woe was me” notion. Anyone in her shoes would resent the tenuous flux of freewheeling strangers and the negligence of a parent out looking for love. However, she is able to reclaim these memories for herself with youthful strength as a form of art, “like a bolt

of silk / In a tailor’s arms” (Emanuel 26-27). The title forces you to make a tally of the author’s relationship to the subjects. Is the “Her” of the play her mother? Who is this “model”? Is “Ramona” her mother, or her father’s new lover who has put an end to Emanuel’s parents’ love? These questions arise because Emanuel is mimicking the confusion of childhood. It is hard to say whether the complexities of love are more foreign to a child or if the child is actually more capable, by being given the superpower of lust immunity.

Perhaps the family could have avoided spiraling into unrest had the Father not fed his daughter “Absinthe through a sugar cube” or exposed her to strange, naked women (18). The father is negligent, but giving his daughter great subject material for a poetic reflection. The ol’ whiskey in the baby bottle, for example, is usually a symptom of the “dead-beat dad”, but happy childhood memories seldom create moving verse.

Upon further reading, I notice that the young Emanuel’s voice shifts.

She is not sulking about divorce but finding peculiar beauty in the likes of her father’s subjects that scamper around the house like liberated, feral cats. It is easy to expect a childhood memory poem of this title to be filled with resentment but the poet now appears sympathetic towards “That brilliant, farfetched woman / Who drank coffee in our garden” (15-16). This woman is given more attention than the father. One then considers why she is farfetched. Is the very nature of her being foreign, or her demeanor/appearance? Her hem “rustle[s] on the floor / Like sand against tin” (9-10). This metaphor itself is farfetched. It is beautiful but unlikely and somewhat unsettling. It seems as though the narrator longs for this woman more than her family. Perhaps the wild woman could take her away from “all of this” or she is merely piquing the interest of a young child confused and just now learning the seductive power some hold over her father.

The poem is symptomatic of a childhood memory. It uses clear imagery that is clouded by time but probably maintains truth and feeling over accuracy. It tells a story but holds back at times in its directness. The most poignant stringing of words comes earlier and she recalls loving the “dangers of memory” (4). This is a bold poem because it sheds light on some moments that point to abuse but she is undeniably accepting of it. There

may be scars, but the narrator emerges unscathed and probably stronger because of them. The poem utilizes a single 35-line stanza and the lines themselves are fairly concise. It opens up a statement in prose-like language and then elaborates on its feeling in colorful verse. The model is introduced and then her essence is captured. The father is mentioned and pieces of language are dispersed throughout which allude to his negligence. Ramona is discussed and then her image is created and maintained up until the closing lines: Not even the moon could find / Her study in Paris / Where the doors opened to the river” (33-35). Now the meaning of the poem is ultimately revealed because I am aware of the nature of the poet’s subjects.

This is less a reflection on abuse and much more about human nature. The “absinthe”, the women, and the “one bare bulb” that projects dimly across the house are all symbols of a kind of wild freedom which shuts itself off from the inherently restrictive nature of responsibility. It is composed of language just as wild as the moments that spawned it.

Susan Mitchell’s “Havana Birth,” like Emanuel’s poem, is a childhood memory poem but it varies considerably in subject matter, structure, language, imagery, and message. It is similar to the last poem in its use of imagery to express the lucid past but it is harder to penetrate. It is a stretched out version of the last, breaking up the wild imagery into various stanzas. This enables Mitchell to utilize nuances stylistically. Metaphors, like yarn, trap her; a young Mitchell uses images of her mother throughout; the Havana setting takes on a life of its own, and we are given a new theme of music. The title suggests an actual birth. I already have an image in my head: sweaty mother under a hot Cuban sky, mess of afterbirth, and newborn kicking and screaming. Perhaps this memory would be too distant to be rendered with justice. Instead, we have a different kind of birth, or possibly a rebirth.

Instead, we have the birth of a poet and the birth of an artist. It is difficult to descend from the womb with these kinds of sketches-- the warm, liquid hum, the catharsis of it’s completion. This is because we have the birth of a woman who becomes a poet. Here is the outline of a birth unlike any other: ocean and sky, smoke, yarn, prostitutes, and machetes. It is fitting that the poem would call out to her mother, the creator. She fits in questions that will then

allude to a new birth: “What / does she know of how I got trapped in my life?”

(24-25). Her mother birthed her, but the pains of childbearing are merely concentrated, while the birth of an observant poet comes from a slow burn.

Like in Emanuel’s poem, Mitchell creates this world where the child is thrown into a wild, beautiful setting forced to grow up fast and make meaning out of grit. Emanuel is given confusing love dynamics and Mitchell is given the chaos of the city. She proclaims that the “world is wily, and doesn’t want to be held for long” (45-46). Life is hard and life needs to be hard for one to gain any meaning out of art or poetry. This is a world that ever eludes our grasp.

Mitchell’s third stanza opens: “I’m about to be born in a park in Havana” (13). Her sentience appears to have long predated this poem so we must identify this birth. Havana gives Mitchell poetry. “The air is chocolate...

The grass is drinkable...Sugarcane came naturally sweet.” (16-17, 18-19, 36) The city and park is breathing and living. It is truly giving life to the young poet who is doing the reflection. She faces her birth already with maturity, noting the prostitute that “dreamed / the world was a peach and flicked / open a knife” (49-51). This maturity reminds me of the young woman in Emanuel’s poem watching the degenerative acts of those around her with unusual affection.

“Havana Birth” is not about the birth itself as much as the events in the park leading up to the birth. The second to last stanza remarks, “I was about to be born, I was about to have / my hair combed into the new music / everyone was singing” (55-57). Now the rite of passage is revealed. The song is the most perplexing element of the poem. I am led to understand that this is the song of poetry. It is not the song of the seasoned poet him/herself but, rather, the song of hidden poetry. The song of the working class. The song of the dressmaker and the butcher, the little girl, and her mother. It is the song of observation and imagery and in this poetic birth, the narrator is honing her chops. “The dressmaker sang it, her mouth / filled with pins. The butcher sang it and wiped / blood on his apron.” (57-59). Mitchell’s poem comes from this music.The Havana urban jungle made a woman out of her. The butcher is, unbeknownst to him, writing poetry in his blood through

another body (Mitchell’s). This is how we come to the mother’s song: “Mother sang it and thought her body / was leaving her body.” (59-60). We practice daily the song of life, the song of poetry, of adulthood, of blood, art, and pain.

It is within us and transcends the body. This allows a child to become a poet because her ideas and images may go beyond age and stature. We are born and born again in different ways throughout our lives. It would have benefitted the young female artists of both of these poems to spend some time together.

The two voices in “When Father Decided He Did Not Love Her Anymore” and “Havana Birth” are very similar in their delivery and message: I am now mature, I am becoming a poet, and I am using this potentially damaging world around me to benefit my art. I believe that the moment that the “Father Decided He Did Not Love Her Anymore” was the moment of Emanuel’s own birth as an artist, the moment when she learned to sing her own song. The elusive Ramona must have sung this song in her study in Paris. The song of memory is sung by all of those evoking feelings for a poem of this style. We sing loudest what is memorable, what is revealed to us most clearly, and we are forced to improvise.

Works Cited Emanuel, Lynn. “When Father Decided He Did Not Love Her Anymore.” Myers, Jack Elliott, and Roger Weingarten. New American Poets. Boston: David R. Godine, 2005. 77. Print.

Mitchell, Susan. “Havana Birth.” Myers, Jack Elliott, and Roger Weingarten.

New American Poets. Boston: David R. Godine, 2005. 252-253. Print.

André is an English and Psychology double major, looking to find a career hopefully somewhere in Entertainment Law and within that ridiculously wild industry. He had quite the difficult time deciding between a few options presented to him by professor Sarah Maclay for the final paper of her Language of Poetry course. The decision was made, however, after Maclay’s good friend, Jeanette Marie Clough, author of the collection Flourish was invited in to speak of her process as a writer and to read a few selections from the set. Her airy yet full presentations made his mind up for him, as an in person reading held far more than any of the other available final paper option texts could ever offer as far as a deeper understanding was concerned.

It is more often than not that I find when viewing an entire work or collection of “things,” not just necessarily poetry, who’s contents are meant to be coupled together and geared towards a particular message, that that intention is often insufficiently met or missing altogether. It is, in my opinion, a task resembling that of finding your mystic land in some wardrobe, in that you cannot simply find the wonder merely by searching for it, rather, you must fall upon it by chance. This “wandering-esque” feeling is an honest conclusion that I settled upon after completing author Jeannette Marie Clough’s “Flourish,” a collection of personal poems compiled into one lump sum of feeling and emotion. Examining three specific works, Water, Shape and Cold, Clough cleverly weaves together poems that challenge her audience to think outside the frame of the content, and which are accompanied by a throng of poetic devices such as direct speech to the reader and structural aesthetic on the page, producing a set of very distinct yet similar pieces.

To begin, in Shape, Clough incorporates humor in her starting stanza, as if a punch line thrown to open a show, bluntly telling the reader “this is an abstract poem. Do not look for hidden meaning, / narrative, or significant line breaks.” When asked about this specific technique, and the direction with the audience, I was surprised to find out that humor was actually not intentional, but rather, it served as happy accident/element coinciding with

the true message, to which Clough described as direction “for reflection on part of the reader.” Noted in her appraisal of the poem, critic Megan Mericle of the Cider Press Review labeled the smooth and ironic combination of light satire and intuitive consideration “refreshing to read and adding to their depth.” This is the first indication in the piece regarding interaction and going beyond the print on the page.

Humor and thought are both again seen in Clough’s fifth stanza, where she utilizes direct speech to the reader with a statement/question mixture reading “my intention this morning was to write something normal. What was your intention, and did it work out for you?” This particular speech does not simply bring the reader into the “conversation,” but also implores him or her to engage in “self-reflective” action on a specific aspect of their lives, or their aspirations for that individual day. The effect this had on me personally, and undoubtedly several others, was a snowball motion of brief critiques of my daily lifestyle to eventually larger-than-life bucket list items. Such an outcome of knowing that the effect produced is unknown is also expected when the author writes such lines with the intention of “playing with the notion of abstract art and abstract poetry as / opposed to representation or narrative.”

This same product is also present in the lines “I am partial to the smell of ink. Sniff this page. Rub your cheek against it. / Press your ear to a passage and listen,” or “the shape of space is two ducks swimming,” where not only humor is once again interwoven but also used hand in hand with additional reader-required thinking. Clough describes this union as not simply two physical ducks in a pond, but instead, as “the writer and the reader… swimming around naively in their given element” together.

In the poem Water, we see another blending of elements, though in a more concise and to the point fashion. In this piece, Clough unknowingly deceives the reader to form conclusions based around the aesthetic of the text printed on the page. In other words, one is naturally drawn to seek meaning in the poem in relation to the title, which in this case, “water,” suggests tones and specifics individual to something fluid. Regarding physical structure, the sentences are short, to the point, and finely cut, and while the content within these lines may still be about water itself, the

construction of the phrases lack the flow and sort of motion one would expect to find.

This suggests some intended purpose or signaling from Clough to the reader, something that might not appear at first glance that should be thought upon. I personally related it to the line, “cut it and find out,” refereeing to the act of actually cutting the water, and in turn, the lines of the poem. Surprised once again, though, I was taken aback to find that this was not the intention of Clough at all, in that when asked about her motives and envisioned themes by means of this tactic, she simply replied that “[she] was having short thoughts. Hence the short lines.” Though not intended, this particular scenario is yet another example of how the work effects the reader and tempts them to press on with and draw their own conclusions from the material.

A second device that Water exemplifies is abstract language. Clough goes beyond limiting water to the physical and natural state to which her audience is familiar and begs them to come up with their own versions of what she is describing. For example, in her sixth stanza, the line “its taste is the sixth letter of an unknown alphabet ” asks the reader to imagine this letter might taste like. Even if the reader skims over the phrase, for a brief moment of subconscious thought, they are prompted to take a second to consider or even salivate to this imaginary and unknown sensation. Much like as if I were to ask someone to not think of a blue elephant, whether they wish to or not, that elephant will still appear in their minds. Clough utilizes this same device with her “dictionary of abstractions.”

Yet another interesting example of abstraction exists in her fifth line of the poem, reading, “the shape of water is transition.” This is particularly compounded for a number of reasons, the first relating once again to structure, in that while the line is short and to the point, such as the rest of the poem (which again goes against the “flow” of water), it also speaks of what water should do, contradicting itself. Secondly, the poem references “shape.”

While there may have been “no symbolic intent” here, the fact that “Shape was written after Water” opens to the doors yet again to a possibly connection and opportunity to think beyond the two individual poems and

connect them thematically. For instance, upon noticing the shared term, I viewed both water and shape as ideas of possible self-evaluation, while also jamming the two simply because water is able to take the “shape” of three different forms. This link, and the many others that exist, maintain a harmonious conversion of each.

In Cold, we see arguably the most content in regards to number of elements used and their relations to the previous two poems. Once again, Clough uses the aesthetic of page construction to her advantage. However, as opposed to Water, in cold the line breaks and sentence lengths seem to lend a helping hand in the direction of a “cooler” tone.

This particular poem also most geniusly directly intertwines themes from the previous poems, where the opening stanza immediately wraps all three into a cluster of thought provoking imagery and spectacle. In the lines, “Alone it has no shape. / When water rests, cold may take up the shape of ice” Clough brings to light ideas that were all previously and freshly engrained in the readers heads, as Cold was the last to be written of the three. The first sentence, regarding shape, draws attention once again to the layout and sentence formation on the paper. Appropriate to the title, the poem, like Water, is broken up into sentences brief and honestly “cold.” In the second line, all three pieces are tied in one sentence, where each element affects the other, with cold acting on resting water to take a new shape. For me personally, this brought up a flood of recognition that was a subtly overwhelming as such collaboration is one that up until that point in the collection was never attempted.

Clough brings space in again too, conjoining it to Shape, or more specifically the line regarding space taking the shape of two ducks swimming. When I inquired about any possibly relation, this time reaching out on a limb not necessarily for an actual tie but rather insight on her writing style, I was not surprised to be (yet again) surprised once more.

Clough replied that “in Cold, the water is frozen; in Shape the water is fluid. In water it is just water. When things are cold, they may slow down and change.

The opposite is also true: when things are warm they may speed up and change. Some things are not affected by heat or cold, as far as we know.”

In a mental jaw-drop, this response paved the way for a newly found respect for the collection I already possessed. Even though I know that such a descriptive author’s insight is never available to the reader, the fact that it exists behind the curtain (unless of course you are able to understand Clough’s personal web of thought), is alone enough to stand as the most thought provoking and intuitive thinking experience in the entire book. It upholds a construction of thematic layering that is so discrete that to come to such a conclusion, or one like it, would mark a level of extreme critical contemplation.

And last but certainly not least, Clough brings in another “line of the senses,” making use of abstraction yet again. In what she described as “an experiment with abstraction, she lassoes an imaginary flavoring to a word when she states that “the taste of cold is brittle.” Aside from whatever taste the reader forms in his or her mouths, if the line is looked into further, the audience may also connect the content of this line to Clough’s personal intentions, which she describes as “the inclusion of the opposite in everything, and what we as humans may have created by mixing the things themselves.” As in the same situation as the opening two stanzas to this poem previously examined, such a conclusion would signal deep “thinking outside the box” of the audience.

Stepping back, the three individual poems of Shape, Water and Cold are able to stand on their own ground in regards to content, as wells firmly hold as a unit when grouped. Beginning with the smaller devices and working up, multiple forms of poetic devices are used to draw the reader to the theme and tone of the piece. In Shape, Clough made use of the structural aesthetic of the text on the page to form a look that seemed to purposefully lack visual intention while in actuality possessing it. This poem also confidently operated a system of direct speech to the reader, which alone stood as a notable and inclusive gesture (especially when the author asks her audience to sniff her pages), but also, however, incorporated humor as an additional element of hook and character.

In Water, structure is carried on in way of contradiction to the flow and coursing motion of what we know the liquid water to be, a contemplation

puzzle for its own amusement. And, like humor to structure in Shape, Water employs the maze that is abstract language and the wide range of effects it could have on the reader. This is also the first installment of sensory language that too motions for considerative thinking.

And with a bold finish, Cold serves as the star of the tree, hovering above as an umbrella linking similar and contradicting elements of all three examined poems. While this poem did include smaller literary tools, such as sensory information and abstract language, it also cleverly united the three using the title/theme of Water in its three natural states of gas, solid and liquid. This decision, though truly intentional or not (seeing as Clough in this collection took pride in shocking me with each reveal, stands upright as the key bond to giving the reader the chance to think for themselves. As a whole, the three not only offer the opportunity for an audience to examine Clough, but also themselves along the way.

Works Cited Clough, Jeanette Marie, ed. Flourish. Huntington Beach, 2013. Print.

Clough, Jeanette Marie. Personal interview. 24 Nov. 2014 Mericle, Megan. “Review. Flourish by Jeanette Clough Reviewed by Megan Mericle.” Cider Press Review: A Journal of Contemporary Poetry. n.p., 17 Nov. 2014. Web. 10 Mar. 2014.