Criterion, Volume 43, 2025—Loyola Marymount University's Literary Journal

CRĪT ERION

Copyright © 2025 Loyola Marymount University

Crīterion , 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, Crīterion seeks contributions representative of undergraduate and graduate writing. Submissions are preferably between five and fifteen double-spaced pages, with no more than two submissions per student. No material may be reproduced in any form, except by the author, without written consent from the editor(s).

thanks to Dr.

and ash good.

Special

K.J. Peters, Maria Jackson,

Cover image by Mia Stein. Interior images by Daniela Aguilar, Josh Withers, Karolina Grabowska, Mark Neal, Matt Hardy, Cottonbro Studios, Athena, Lilartsy, Steve & Mia Stein. Images sourced from Pexels .com

CRĪT ERION

A LITERARY JOURNAL

CO-EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

Taylor Crowell

Eriana Muñoz

EDITORIAL TEAM

Karma Chamseddine

Lleyden Collins

Sadie Nanson

Callie Salazar

Molly Talbot

Christianne Tubola

ADVISING PROFESSOR

Michelle Bitting

DESIGN & TYPESETTING

ash good

VOLUME 43 | 2025

LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY

Editors’ Note 7

TAYLOR CROWELL & ERIANA MUÑOZ

Too Cold for Warmth: The Self-Destructive 8 Harm of Capitalist Ideologies in “To Build a Fire”

MOLLY TALBOT

Jewish Masculinity in Singer’s Gimpel the Fool 14

Beware the Predator: Storytelling as a 19 Mechanism for Reinforcing Cultural Fears and Reimagining Female Possibility

SADIE NANSON

The Othello Figure: Racial Otherness and 26 Postcolonial Relations in Shakespeare’s

Othello and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

YASMINE V. NAHDI

Meditation, Darwinism, and the Self in Melville’s 33 Moby Dick and Chopin’s The Awakening

KARMA CHAMSEDDINE

SABATINO STACCHI

CRĪT ERION

Dear Reader,

WELCOME TO THE 2025 EDITION OF LOYOLA MARYMOUNT UNIVERSITY’S CRĪT ERION, a literary journal dedicated to the publishing of exemplary student literary criticism. The nine essays selected for this edition survey various topics that are geographically and thematically diverse. Through careful analysis of texts abundant in nuanced insights on gender and racial identity, the sweeping impact of otherness, poetry, self-actualization, capitalism, and climate change, this collection offers meaningful critical expansion on worldly, significant texts.

In spirit with the resilience, hope, inclusivity, and critical thought our talented authors bring forth in their essays, we would like to begin with a land acknowledgement, acknowledging our privilege as settlers on this stolen Tongva land—a practice in bearing witness and attempting to honor past wrongs, creating a space for future progress.

Many individuals worked together to produce this edition. We would like to congratulate and thank our writers for their wonderful contributions, and our editorial team for their hard work and diligence in publishing this edition.

We also want to thank our amazing faculty advisor, Dr. Michelle Bitting, for her unrelenting support in organizing this edition, and our graphic designer ash good, who has helped with the covers and formatting of CRĪTERION over the past five years.

Lastly, we want to thank the English Department as a whole, including Dr. KJ Peters for providing the opportunity to publish CRĪTERION, and Maria Jackson, for her many means of support.

We sincerely hope you enjoy this collection as much as we enjoyed curating it. Thank you and happy reading!

Taylor Crowell & Eriana Muñoz

CO-EDITORS-IN-CHIEF

Too Cold for Warmth: The Self-Destructive Harm of Capitalist Ideologies in “To Build a Fire”

MOLLY TALBOT

AFTER A SMALL GROUP of miners struck an unexpectedly abundant pocket of gold, the exploitative forces of capitalist industry and ideology rushed into a new region of North America—the Klondike. Thousands of aspirational miners traveled northward from the United States and Canada in the period from 1897 to 1898 (Morse 4). A mass of 100,000 people trekked to Alaska and the Yukon over dangerous trails, including the Chilkoot Pass and White Pass Trail, in hopes of finding gold and making a fortune for themselves (“Klondike Gold Rush”). These miners not only brought with them their packs filled with necessities, but an eagerness to advance their positions in the American capitalist scheme. In order

to achieve this success, they mobilized with selfish motives to exploit the environment. This movement, along with many other capitalist industries, skewed human perception of the environment as a sphere separate from humans that exists solely for human interest. The hubris of human exceptionalism that emerges from this separation urges a domination of the environment—but not without consequence.

Jack London’s short story, “To Build a Fire” (1908), tells a journey of a man not far from Chilkoot Pass in distance, and even closer in his narrative resemblance to the experiences of Klondike miners. Although the protagonist is a logger rather than a miner, his job in a comparably extractive industry positions him as an

MOLLY TALBOT is a Senior from Gunnison, Colorado, studying English and Philosophy with a minor in Dance. She is a Knott Fellow and an editor for Criterion and LA Miscellany.

Throughout her education, she has devoted much of her time to the analysis and creation of stories as both a critic and a creative writer. Intertwined with her studies in philosophy, Talbot believes literature is an illumination of moral complexity rooted in the reality of life. She is drawn to stories with complex ethical themes, and she most greatly enjoys reading literary fiction. This essay was written for Dr. Robin Miskolcze’s class, “American Realism.”

exploitative force within the vast natural landscape of the Yukon. The unnamed protagonist in Jack London’s story symbolizes the capitalist and colonial presence which the Klondike Gold Rush imposed upon Yukon land during the late 19th century. Evidenced in his narrow-sightedness and attitude of human exceptionalism, the protagonist illustrates the self-destructive harms of capitalist ideology that propagate from severed connections with the land and the invalidation of traditional land knowledge.

The migration of Americans to Alaska and the Yukon during the Klondike Gold Rush advanced capitalist ideology into these northern regions. Capitalist ideology includes the behaviors and beliefs produced by the free market system. This ideology informs the way that participants view the world, themselves, and their relation to their surroundings. A key characteristic of capitalist ideology is its short-sightedness. Capitalism is unable to properly judge its means of action because of its narrow focus on the end achievement. This is seen in the gold rush through the singular goal of gaining wealth without due consideration of the industry’s impact on the local environment and people. The drive to obtain gold was sufficiently myopic and domineering to project its avarice as a desire held not only by the entire United States but also the world. The movement was a mass rush “not about individual miners’ desires and dreams, but about the whole nation’s—indeed the world’s—shared dreams of success, wealth, and liberation through gold” (Morse 7). The scope of the industry’s desires swallowed up concern for anything other than the economic and social gain they believed gold would bring.

The thoughts of the protagonist in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” reflect a narrow-mindedness emblematic of this capitalist perspective of desires. His myopic perception is distracted by the ends with little to no concern about the means. Throughout his journey, the man looks forward to joining up with “the boys” who are at his final destination. He fantasizes about the fire and the supper that would greet him, and “he smile[s] agreeably to himself as he [thinks] of those biscuits, each cut open and sopped in bacon grease, and each enclosing a generous slice of fried bacon” (London 2). This insight into the man’s motivation for the dangerous journey elucidates his alignment with capitalist ideology. His drive towards indulgence, presented in the bacon grease and “generous slice of bacon,” illustrates his desires of satisfaction and enjoyment of material goods. These materialistic motivations run parallel to the drives of the gold industry. The industry sought more than mere financial security, and more than mere satiation of hunger; it encouraged the self-indulgent accumulation of wealth as a measure of success.

Furthermore, the man’s narrow-sightedness is not only evident in his motivation, but also in his ignorance of the repercussions caused by his means to that end. As the cold begins to overcome him, he observes that the frozen parts of his body are extending to other areas. Yet, “he tried to keep this thought down, to forget it, to think of something else,” because he does not want the realization of how his dangerous journey imperils his health to cause him to panic (London 10). The suppression of his thoughts illustrates his willful

neglect to consider the full consequences of his actions. He would take a fresh chew of tobacco “once [he was] clear of the danger” to focus on the freezing amber droplets of tobacco-infused saliva that lengthened his beard (London 4). Rather than admit to the dangers of his choice to venture into the cold, he fights these thoughts and seeks to distract himself. These distractions position his thought process in alignment with capitalist ideology because of his stubborn focus on the final desired outcome rather than a full accountability over the consequences of his actions.

The willful ignorance of the man’s own poor judgment exemplifies the capitalist ideological consequence of human exceptionalism. Human exceptionalism views humans to be separate from and superior to all other beings. Due to the unique capabilities of humans, all problems may be solved by human ingenuity and will alone. Although the temperature is colder than fifty degrees below zero when the old man advises the protagonist not to go out alone, his human exceptionalism propels him nonetheless, “armed only with his whiteness, his maleness, and his humanness” (Barnard 45). This hubris led to irreversible mistakes, including the extinguishing of his fire during the most critical window of survival. Instead of building the fire in the open, he constructed it under a spruce tree because “it had been easier to pull the twigs from the brush and drop them directly on the fire” (London 7). Twig by twig, the stability of the snow-laden tree collapsed and an avalanche of snow extinguished the fire. The peril was plain and irrevocable; “it was his own fault or, rather, his mistake” (London 6). The man reached for ease rather than security,

a preference characteristic of capitalist industry, and he pays for this mistake with his life.

Many of the miners in the gold rush equipped themselves with a deluded sense of human exceptionalism for their dangerous journeys. They often felt assured by their resolve to make something of themselves—a motivation unique to humans—which informed the level of preparedness the miners deemed appropriate for their treks to find gold. They frequently traveled through steep snow and mud with little gear and supplies to aid them on the incredibly challenging and dangerous trails. Many who attempted to pass over the Chilkoot trail failed, and those who succeeded found it “almost indescribable in its intensity” (Morse 4). Yet, the fact that around 100,000 aspirational miners trekked either the Chilkoot Pass or similar trails suggests that along with their extra clothes and dry food, they packed a self-assured, human exceptionalist drive with them to push through the obstacles on their journeys.

Similar to the journeys recounted in the testimonies of miners, the protagonist of “To Build a Fire” depends on a deluded sense of human exceptionalism to cope with the dangerous gap between his level of preparedness and the extreme environment. The man is a foreigner to the environment, but this foreignness does not modify his understanding of his own limitations. He proceeds without appropriate caution in an environment to which he is not adapted. In the beginning of the story, London identifies the man as “a newcomer in the land, a chechaquo, and this was his first winter,” (London 2). “Chechaquo” is a variation of the term “cheechako,” which is a term used by the

Chinook tribe to identify people as newcomers or tenderfoots (“Cheechako”). This term was especially used for those unaccustomed to the hardships of living close to the land. Identifying the man this way illustrates his foreignness to the environment and reveals his lack of expertise about the land and how to navigate it.

The extent of the man’s foreignness becomes apparent in contrast to the instinctual land knowledge of his animal companion. London further reveals the man’s unfamiliarity with the environment by comparing him to the dog: “This man did not know cold. Possibly all the generations of his ancestry had been ignorant of cold, of real cold…But the dog knew; all its ancestry knew, and it had inherited the knowledge” (London 5). This comparison highlights the importance of innate ability to cope with the environment through years of adaptation and immersion in the landscape over generations of ancestry. Despite a lack of intellectual and bodily knowledge of the environment, the man continues, contrary to the dog’s instinctual resistance. Symbolic of human exceptionalism, he defers to his own human will over the expertise of the dog, a power innate in the animal from centuries of navigating the land.

The exploitative selfishness of the man is highlighted by his willingness to objectify the dog as a means to cope with his foolish decisions. The extreme cold calls to his mind the story of a man trapped in a blizzard who sought shelter in the warm carcass of a steer. This inspires the man with the idea to “kill the dog and bury his hands in the warm body until the numbness [goes] out of them” (London 8). He would sooner kill the dog and use it as

an object for warmth than heed its original protests to his journey. As soon as the man is struck by this solution, he calls for the dog with a “strange note of fear” in his voice. The dog’s ears sense this subtle shift in tone and detect the danger lurking in the man’s intentions. The man had lost his strength to pursue the dog, and the dog’s instincts do not permit it to approach the man. The combined fortune of the man’s declining health and the animal’s self-protection ensures the dog’s survival. This instance contrasts the differing failure and success of self-preservation between them. Even the capitalist tactic of objectification could not offer the man relief, and the dog remains alive and well as a witness to the man’s self-induced demise.

This contrast between rightful instinct and deluded self-importance gestures toward the silenced knowledge possessed by those most familiar with the land. There is no direct mention of indigenous peoples in the story but, given the context and reference to “chechaquo,” the history of native peoples and their relation to the environment influences the meaning of this story. The migration of miners “transformed both the landscape of the gold creeks and the lives and livelihoods of Alaska and Yukon Native peoples” (Morse 8). This forced conversion demonstrates the historic coercion of the land and its people to conform to the will of capitalism. The man demonstrates this twisted influence by aiming to disprove, rather than listen to, the wisdom offered to him by an old-timer. After overcoming the first major obstacle in his journey, the man remarks against the old-timer’s advice, quipping, “Those old-timers were rather womanish…

Any man who was a man could travel alone,” (London 6). Using manliness as a measure of validity, the man invalidates the old-timer’s warning by describing him as womanish. He remarks on the ease with which a ‘true man,’ like himself, could overcome such obstacles. Further, the misogynistic nature of his rebuff underscores the conflation between femininity and weakness, another toxic trait of capitalist ideology. This invalidation seeks to undermine and consequently erase the old-timer’s expertise of the land. The man’s attitude toward this wisdom alludes to the greater scheme of colonialism in the gold rush, specifically in its systematic invalidation of native knowledge of the land.

The consequences of the man’s capitalist ideology, demonstrated through his narrow focus and human exceptionalist attitude, compound over the course of the journey. As he pushes further into these thoughts and behaviors, his environment pulls farther away from him. Towards the end of the story, the man experiences a disconnect from his body as the force of nature overpowers him. Unable to feel, he has to use sight in order to verify whether he is standing, “for the absence of sensation in his feet left him unrelated to the earth” (London 9). This separation from his physical being, his only means of positioning himself in the environment, arises as a consequence of his neglect to realize the dominant power of nature over man. The word “unrelated” signals not only a severance of a literal physical sense between him and the earth, but of a conceptual relationship between them. Not only is this sense of unrelatedness due to his inability to feel, but it indicates a gap so wide between him and the

environment that he cannot hope for any aid from the earth to save him.

The man relents with his self-delusions only at the final point of imminent death, and he admits that the old man’s advice was not only advantageous, but necessary for his survival. As he lays dying in the snow, the man remembers the warning the old-timer gave him before embarking. He confesses, “You were right, old hoss; you were right” (London 10). This final utterance before his death underscores the harm and senselessness of human exceptionalist attitudes in extreme and foreign natural environments. His death marks him as a symbol of “the unsustainability of the colonial-capitalist project… and [the] human exceptionalist idea of ‘man’ that has always underpinned and enabled it,” (Barnard 56). This symbolism warns against navigating our environments with the narrow-sightedness and human exceptionalism personified by the protagonist and manifested by capitalist enterprises. Not only are these perspectives harmful, but they inevitably result in destruction. They merely distract from one’s own faults and unstable advancements until these delusions unravel in the confrontation of nature’s will, after the opportunity for redemption has passed.

The man is not singular in his tragedy; his experience illustrates the dangers of capitalist ideology and all within its domain of influence. The broader applicability of the man’s experience is supported by London’s choice to leave the protagonist unnamed. Without a name, this story is not limited to this particular character, but it is emblematic of a harmful way of being which capitalism has normalized.

In a capitalist-structured society, our relationship with the land is deeply severed from the way that we navigate our lives. Even as we begin to realize the impact of anthropogenic climate change, our first reaction is to distract ourselves with entertainment or aspirational technological innovations. We still believe in our ability to escape the consequences of nature as if it does not shape our very being; we still prefer self-delusion to reality and accountability.

Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” makes it obvious that the man’s narrow-sightedness and human exceptionalism are harmful ways to view the world, and can be perilous for anyone oblivious to these harms. Yet, this was not made clear to the man until the turning point had passed, and he no longer possessed the endurance or the capabilities to save himself. From this present point in our story, two possible pathways lie ahead: we continue to delude ourselves by denying our human limitations until they inevitably overcome us; or we exercise humility, take accountability for our actions, and heed the reconstruction of our lives to those wiser than us. The actions we choose determine the path we take. Let’s choose to build a fire. «

WORKS CITED

Barnard, John Levi. “Colonization to Climate Change: American Literature and a Planet on Fire.” The Oxford Handbook of Twentieth-Century American Literature, Oxford University Press, 20 Oct 2022. “Klondike Gold Rush.” National Park Service, 16 Dec 2021, goldrush.htm. Accessed 22 April 2023.

London, Jack. “To Build a Fire.” Newsela, 10 Feb 2020, https://tea4avcastro tea state tx us/thl/ENG3 W6 L5 to -build-a-fire pdf. Accessed 16 Feb 2025.

Morse, Kathryn. “Introduction: On the Chilkoot.” The Nature of Gold: An Environmental History of the Klondike Gold Rush, University of Washington Press, 2003, pp. 3-15.

“What does a “Cheechako” mean.” Valeria & Valise, 2019, https://www valerievalise com/guides/alaska /glossary/cheechako/. Accessed 22 April 2023.

Jewish Masculinity in Singer’s Gimpel the Fool

SABATINO STACCHI

ONE COULD BE FORGIVEN for perceiving most male Jews in popular media to be cut from the same cloth. They are universally stereotyped as meek, unassertive, intellectual but unassuming and “there are rarely, if ever, representations of Jewish males on popular television that stray far from the […] stereotype” (Rubin 325). Daniel Ian Rubin specifically harkens to The Big Bang Theory as emblematic of this identity, writing of one of the show’s protagonists, “Howard [Wolowitz] demonstrates his lack of masculinity repeatedly throughout the series, so much so that it would take another article just to provide all the examples” (328). The author emphasizes that the common portrayal of Jewish men in media is both easily definable as well as detectable across time periods and mediums. There exist, however, outliers in Jewish media that serve to

complicate understanding of the Jewish male archetype. One such example can be found in the work of Isaac Bashevis Singer. In Singer’s short story Gimpel the Fool, the main character Gimpel fits into neither the framework of hegemonic masculinity nor the structure of Jewish masculinity but rather finds a sense of belonging with the aspects of Judaism that are untethered from any gender identity.

Gimpel is incongruous with the complex of hegemonic masculinity, as demonstrated by his aversion to aggression and feeble spirit.

R.W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt define hegemonic masculinity “as the pattern of practice (i.e., things done, not just a set of role expectations or an identity) that [allows] men’s dominance over women to continue” (Connell 832). He further emphasizes that it is not hegemonic because it is practiced by

Oregon native SABATINO STACCHI is a freshman History major at Loyola Marymount University. He likes to read fiction and non-fiction, with an eye toward analyzing how characters are shaped by their social environment. Stacchi also enjoys thrifting, drinking sparkling water, and going for walks. This essay was written for Dr. Molly Youngkin’s course “Introduction to Fiction.”

most men, but rather because it is the societal expectation of men. Under this conception, analysis of a character’s allegiance to hegemonic masculinity confers insight on their level of connection to their gender and society. In the case of Gimpel, his lack of fealty to the masculine ideal is demonstrated throughout the story. His inner monologue especially illustrates his unwillingness to act in a manner that would be considered stereotypically masculine. When Gimpel makes his introduction to the reader, he recounts a litany of instances during which he was teased by tormentors who sought to take advantage of his intellectual deficiencies. The reader comes away from these descriptions feeling pity for Gimpel, as all the situations are one-sided, and he never describes any response or retaliation. The reason for this is that Gimpel, by his own admission is “really not a slugger by nature” (Singer 745). With this shortcoming, Gimpel fails to meet one of the primary characteristics of hegemonic masculinity: assertiveness. An unwillingness to stand up for himself already displaces him outside of the realm of hegemonic masculinity, which is characterized in part by a “doctrine of physicality” (Martel 351).

Later, Gimpel develops a relationship with a woman named Elka, the daughter of the town’s rabbi. They wed, and at the ceremony Gimpel sees “two strapping young men carrying a crib” (Singer 747). By this point in the story, Singer has established that Gimpel is not the epitome of physical prowess, and this shortcoming is only furthered by juxtaposing him with “strapping young men.” Additionally, the role of these bucks as harbingers of a presumable pregnancy—one that Gimpel

was unaware of—suggests that Elka may have been unfaithful to him. In the hegemonic framework of masculinity, a man’s infidelity is presented as a sign of sexual prowess and liberation. However, when a man is situated in a relationship in which his female partner is seen to be disloyal, he is perceived as weak, labelled a cuckold and subsequently emasculated. Although this is an event in Gimpel’s life and not a personality trait, it still follows with the trend of motifs that make it difficult to categorize Gimpel as traditionally masculine.

This theme continues as Gimpel adapts to married life and describes his relationship with Elka. He notes that he is frequently physically disempowered by her, recalling instances in which she “gave [him] bloody wounds” (Singer 749). Gimpel further elaborates on the physical aspect of the relationship by mentioning that the baby also took advantage of him: “…this little brother of hers, the bastard, was growing bigger. He’d put lumps on me, and when I wanted to hit back she’d open her mouth and curse so powerfully I saw a green haze floating before my eyes” (Singer 749). Taken together, Gimpel’s narrative of the relationship suggests a dynamic that would not be considered typically masculine. Miriam Eve Mora argues that “through performative manhood acts, men claim their masculinity and attempt to access the male hegemon” (8). Men acting within the male hegemon are expected to demonstrate this through actions within the home, specifically asserting their dominance over the other individuals in the family unit. Overpowered by both Elka and a child who may not be his own, Gimpel is clearly not adhering to this dynamic. Gimpel’s unwillingness to advocate for himself,

aversion to physical conflict and inability to command his family all demonstrate that he cannot be classified within the hegemonic masculine ideal.

However, Gimpel’s characterization is further complicated by the reality that he is similarly contradictory to the ideals of Jewish masculinity. Elise Martel differentiates Jewish masculinity from hegemonic masculinity by clarifying that “the manhood concept for Jews emphasizes non-physical attributes” (351). More specifically, Mora describes Jewish masculinity as “outside the American hegemonic ideal” (3) and defines it as “one that eschews violence and values intellect” (2). Although Jewish masculinity is characteristically distinct from hegemonic masculinity, Gimpel cannot be easily placed into this category. He demonstrates imbecilic thinking at several points in the story and earns his nickname in the shtetl for his shortsightedness. In recounting the numerous pranks and jokes that were pulled on him, Gimpel recalls that in all these situations, “I like a golem believed everyone” (Singer 746). His use of the Hebrew word golem is particularly telling, for a footnote tells the reader that it means an unthinking, amorphous mass. In this situation, Gimpel is self-aware of his gullibility, likening it to that of an unliving vessel that can be commandeered and directed with ease. Word of this characteristic gets around Gimpel’s town, and “when the pranksters and leg-pullers found that I was easy to fool, every one of them tried his luck with me” (Singer 746). That Gimpel is so moronic and senseless already disqualifies him from being considered as a truly masculine Jew. However, the reality that the entire town

thinks of him this way and that it is accepted as a fact only renders him further ineligible for this status.

Mora emphasizes external perception as an important part of Jewish masculinity in their description of the “moral character [Anglo-Saxons] assumed to be so inherent to the Jewish race” (37). As the reader learns later in the story, Gimpel’s facile tendencies not only impact local impressions of his intelligence, but also beliefs about what he can accomplish. For instance, after learning of Elka’s pregnancy, Gimpel decides to hold a banquet in celebration of the impending birth. The local rabbi announces this event as the synagogue, to which “the whole House of Prayer rang with laughter” (Singer 748). There is no clear shot at Gimpel’s intelligence in this passage, but provincial perceptions of his poor intellect seem to prevail whenever he is even brought up in conversation. Gimpel exists in a unique limbo, neither physically dominant nor intellectually endowed, which precludes a clear sorting into a school of masculinity. He avoids the concept altogether and instead favors the aspects of Judaism that are not marked by specific gender roles.

In navigating a masculine world without a masculine identity to fit into, Gimpel finds his bearings in the Jewish faith and discovers hope for a sense of belonging in the afterlife. He carves the element of Jewish masculinity out from Judaism, finding a gender-neutral space where faith replaces any emphasis on social expectations. Gender neutrality, Dragseth writes, “is a theory that claims that biological sex does not inevitably determine social, psychological and intellectual characteristics” (2). After being on the receiving end of torment

from his peers, Gimpel turns to faith to find hope for a less tormented future:

I went to the rabbi to get some advice. He said, “It is written, better to be a fool all your days than for one hour to be evil. You are not a fool. They are the fools. For he who causes his neighbor to feel shame loses Paradise himself” (Singer 746).

In the entire story, the rabbi is the only character who does not approach Gimpel from an adversarial position. Particularly, through this mention of the afterlife, the rabbi is instructing Gimpel to keep the events of his life in perspective and persevere through his difficult, untethered life. Gimpel appears to take this conversation to heart and uses faith as a guiding principle for the remainder of the story. When he informs the rabbi of his suspicions of Elka’s infidelity, the rabbi instructs him to leave her and Gimpel does so. When the rabbi reverses this position after finding an obscure philosophical text that favors their continued marriage, Gimpel again reverses course. This could be evidence of Gimpel’s gullibility and willingness to do whatever he is told, but it exhibits a level of trust in religious authority that transcends insecurities about his credibility of anyone else in his life.

At the end of the book, it also becomes apparent that religion is a unique question that forces Gimpel to make decisions independently, rather than following the whims of others. After his wife admits that she was disloyal to him, he looks to punish the town by urinating in the bread that he sells to local villagers. Just before doing this, he has a

realization: “I sensed that everything hung in the balance. A false step now and I’d lose Eternal Life” (Singer 754). At this moment, Gimpel demonstrates a transcendent level of thinking inspired by a belief in the afterlife. Feeling excluded and downtrodden in the world of the living, Gimpel’s hope is transfixed on the afterlife and its promise to uphold egalitarian ideals that human society has shunned. His moral compass in not guided by any normative gender expectation, but rather the teachings enumerated in the Jewish worldview. At the conclusion of the story, Gimpel further paints his picture of the afterlife and its promise for him: “whatever may be there, it will be real, without complication, without ridicule, without deception. God be praised: there even Gimpel cannot be deceived” (Singer 755). Once again, Gimpel creates a stark contrast between human society—with its hard, unforgiving expectations—and that which is “real” and tangible. The afterlife is not a place of deception, but it is also not a place of rigid expectation. God is to be lauded for the existence of such a place, for Gimpel has discovered religion as his means of escaping a world in which he is incongruent. Over the course of the story, Gimpel learns to drop his hope of finding a place to fit in secular, masculine society and instead maintains faith as the credo by which he lives.

The choice of Singer to place Gimpel outside the bounds of both hegemonic masculinity and Jewish masculinity appear to be deliberate. In an interview with Harold Flender of the Paris Review, Singer recalls that “the Yiddish writer was really not brought up with the idea of heroes” (755). In saying this, he straightforwardly discounts the possibility of

hegemonic masculinity making its way into works by Jewish authors because it is an alien concept. Surprisingly, though, he goes on to say that he tries to avoid the tropes most associated with Jewish masculinity in his writings:

I don’t think I write in the tradition of the Yiddish writers’ “little man” because their little man is actually a victim —a man who is a victim of anti-Semitism, the economic situation, and so on. My characters, though they are not big men […] still they are not little (Signer 755-56).

Singer classifies the hegemonic masculine ideal as that of the “big” man and the Jewish masculine ideal as that of the “little man” but clarifies that his characters are intentionally designed to fit neither (756).

When shown in media, male Jews all tend to embody alike characteristics that place them firmly within the Jewish masculine ethos. Singer attempts to break the stranglehold of the singular Jewish masculine identity by creating characters such Gimpel, who transcend the boundaries of gender and instead find their identities in higher realities. «

WORKS CITED

Connell, R. W., and James W. Messerschmidt.

“Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept.”

Gender and Society, vol. 19, no. 6, 2005, pp. 829–59.

JSTOR, http://www jstor org /stable/27640853

Accessed 31 Jan. 2025.

Dragseth, Jennifer Hockenbery. “Gender Neutrality.”

Thinking Woman: A Philosophical Approach to the Quandary of Gender, 1st ed., The Lutterworth

Press, 2015, pp. 37–76. JSTOR, https://doi.org /10 2307/j ctt1ffjnj6 7. Accessed 8 Dec. 2024.

Martel, Elise. “From Mensch to Macho? The Social Construction of a Jewish Masculinity.” Men and Masculinities, vol. 3, no. 4, Apr. 2001, pp. 347–369. Sage Journals, journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs /10 1177/1097184X01003004001

Mora, Miriam Eve. Carrying a Big Schtick: Jewish Acculturation and Masculinity in the Twentieth Century. Wayne State University Press, 2024.

Rubin, Daniel Ian. “The Stereotypical Portrayal of Jewish Masculinity on The Big Bang Theory.” The Journal of Popular Culture, vol. 54, no. 2, Apr. 2021, pp. 322–340. Wiley Online Library, onlinelibrary wiley com/doi/full/10 1111/jpcu 13006

Singer, Isaac Bashevis. “Gimpel the Fool.” The Art of the Short Story, edited by Dana Gioia and R.S. Gwynn, 1st ed., Longman, 2006, pp. 745–756.

Beware the Predator: Storytelling as a Mechanism for Reinforcing Cultural Fears and Reimagining Female Possibility

SADIE NANSON

From this story one learns that children, Especially young girls, Pretty, well-bred, and genteel, Are wrong to listen to just anyone, And it’s not at all strange, If a wolf ends up eating them. I say a wolf, but not all wolves Are exactly the same, Some are perfectly charming, Not loud, brutal, or angry, But tame, pleasant, and gentle, Following young ladies Right into their homes, into their chambers, But watch out if you haven’t learned that tame wolves Are the most dangerous of them all (Perrault 17–18).

THE TALE OF Little Red Riding Hood has evoked fear of the stranger and the wilderness

in the minds of young girls since Charles Perrault first penned the story in 1697. In her rendition of the classic tale, Angela Carter reimagines the possibility of agency and self-liberation for the female protagonist through and despite the use of storytelling that reinforces cultural fears. The beginning of Carter’s work utilizes the second person to generate a framing narrative for the rest of the story, placing the reader in the midst of rural folkloric traditions. These traditions underscore the inherently violent nature of the predator, the unwritten rules of gender and spatial politics, the profiles of heroes and villains, and the confines of female self-saviorism.

SADIE NANSON from Portland, Oregon is a junior English and Women’s and Gender Studies double major at Loyola Marymount University. She enjoys historical fiction and romance novels with empowering female protagonists, and she believes that authentic storytelling is necessary for enacting meaningful social change. When she’s not reading, Nanson enjoys basking in the sun at the beach or treasure-hunting in antique stores, and her true passion lies in advocating for education equity. This essay was written for Professor Alexandra Neel’s “Honors Literary Analysis” course.

The familiarity of the second person conjures the voice of an older maternal figure, omniscient and trustworthy, trained in the ways of the world. This voice defines the harsh realities of society without critiquing why those harsh realities exist in the first place or inviting the listener to do so. In Angela Carter’s “The Company of Wolves,” the use of second-person framing narratives underscores the power of storytelling in reinforcing social fears while enabling the protagonist’s possibilities for liberation and autonomy.

The first anecdote the narrator presents to readers reveals the nature of wolves, painting them as inherently violent beings without the ability to control themselves. This portrait of the wolf mirrors modern social narratives that excuse male sexual violence by characterizing men as aggressive sexual beings lacking restraint over their natural urges. The narrator first highlights the biological appetites of wolves, commenting, “The wolf is carnivore incarnate and he’s as cunning as he is ferocious; once he’s had a taste of flesh nothing else will do” (Carter 141). In the phrase “as cunning as he is ferocious,” Carter reflects Perrault’s initial warning to readers to “watch out if you haven’t learned that tame wolves / Are the most dangerous of them all” (18). The wolf’s “cunning” nature enables him to manipulate his victims, and his ferocity makes him an inherently violent and bloodthirsty creature. The phrase “carnivore incarnate” blurs the lines between devourment and sexual acts, the ambivalence connoting an irresistible sexual hunger, satiable by any means. Furthermore, the narrator elaborates that “the wolf is worst because he cannot listen to reason”, making

him particularly deadly as his natural urges overpower his ability to compromise or act with mercy (Carter 142). His biology blinds him to anything but his appetite, distinguishing him from among the other creatures of the forest as a feral and unforgiving predator.

Despite the wolves’ rampant violence, the storyteller excuses their behavior: “The beasts would love to be less beastly if only they knew how and never cease to mourn their own condition” (Carter 143). In this dismissal of the wolves’ brutality as tragic but inevitably natural, the narrator fails to hold them accountable for the devastation and destruction they wreak upon the village, rather, instructing readers, namely women, to guard themselves against these dangers preemptively. Moreover, the wolves “mourn their own condition,” garnering sympathy for the wolf, whom the narrator depicts as the real victim, a misunderstood prisoner to his own nature. This pattern of excusing violence parallels ‘boys will be boys’ narratives in rape culture. A study by Karen Weiss observes the ways in which even survivors of sexual violence excuse the violence of perpetrators: “Offenders’ sexually coercive behavior is blamed on the natural and presumably uncontrollable biological urges of young men” (Weiss 822). The “biological urges” Weiss describes reflect a larger cultural narrative regarding the nature of men, characterizing them as aggressive with rampant sexual compulsions beyond their control; this idea, however, proves a mere myth and a socially constructed “cultural belief” (822). Apart from enabling this behavior, these narratives also deter survivors from reporting instances of abuse and assault and invalidate their experiences, resulting in victim-blaming.

If sexual assault and harassment are “seen as merely boys’ play or unintended behavior from persons who have little control over what they are doing, then victims will be less inclined to report these situations to authorities” (Weiss 823). This characterization of men makes sexual violence permissible and instills fear in women that they too will be “responsible for igniting men’s sexual desires,” limiting feminine sexual and personal agency (Weiss 822).

The second-person framing narratives also define public areas as masculine and threatening to female safety, confining women to private spaces. The narrator implicitly condemns those who fail to heed the warnings of the dangers of the woods, critiquing readers as “[they] go through the woods unwisely late” (Carter 141). The accusatory nature of this statement implies that readers know better than to stray outside of their designated spheres into “the teeming perils of the night and the forest,” yet they compromise their safety regardless (Carter 142). Identifying the night as “perilous,” this narrative also confines readers to the day, disempowering them from venturing past the limits of the light. The storyteller further emphasizes that “you are always in danger in the forest,” firmly designating the forest as a forbidden region (Carter 142). This distinction paints the reader as a vulnerable target of violence, doomed to victimhood simply for daring to explore.

Should listeners dare to trespass into this forbidden territory, they should “step between the gateposts of the forest with the greatest trepidation and infinite precautions, for if you stray from the path for one instant, the wolves will eat you” (Carter 142). The limits

of the forest, defined as “gateposts,” indicate a barring of the zone, protecting wanderers from the dangers within yet hindering their freedom to travel. The narrator emphasizes the need for the listener to enter the forest only with “the greatest trepidation and infinite precautions,” guarded and defensive, assuming the worst (Carter 142). In this sense, the environment itself becomes the enemy, the forest alive. Even inanimate beings antagonize the reader, allied with the creatures of the forest to facilitate a wandering traveler’s downfall.

The narrator uses storytelling to emphasize how the physically vulnerable cannot move safely through a world not designed for them, wielding fearmongering to confine women to private rather than public spaces. However, as the narrator notes, “the wolves have ways of arriving at your own hearthside. We try and try but sometimes we cannot keep them out… there was once a woman bitten in her own kitchen as she was straining the macaroni” (Carter 142). In reality, no space is truly safe, even the confines of one’s own home, so readers should always stay on edge. Even the woman dutifully completing a domestic task falls victim to the wolf despite her compliance with social regulations. Modern storytelling replicates this same fear of public spaces for women. A study by Ariagor Manuel Almanza Avendaño et al. examines the factors that contribute to female insecurity in public spaces, revealing that “women are socialized to fear crime. They receive messages about their physical vulnerability, the threat of sexual violence and the risks of victimization in public spaces” (2). Cultural narratives regarding the dangers of the outside world

inhibit female mobility and constrain their perceived possibilities, repressing women in an “invisible prison” (Almanza Avendaño et al. 2) and making their situation no better than the women’s in Carter’s 1979 tale. When women learn to view themselves as inevitable victims, they limit their desires and restrict themselves to perceived safe spaces. This socialization that Almanza Avendaño et al. refers to, though comprised of mere stories, manifests in tangible consequences for women who identify themselves as targets of danger. The narrator’s emphasis on violence by wolves mirrors the “fear of aggressions perpetrated by men” that Almanza Alvendaño et al. describe: both personifying physical threats to female bodies and characterizing the environment itself as perilous (2).

Carter’s framing narratives also characterize two types of subversive women, a hero, and a damsel: one a social outcast and the other a passive victim. The narrator first introduces a female protagonist in her anecdote about the witch who “turned a wedding party into wolves because the groom had settled on another girl” (Carter 143). The witch asserts her dominance over the wolves, as “she used to order them to visit her, at night, from spite, and they would sit and howl around her cottage for her, serenading her with their misery” (Carter 143). The witch revels in the melancholy of the wolves, having dominated both human men and the fearsome creatures of the forest. Her enjoyment of their suffering and spite in the face of the wolf’s intimidating presence asserts her mastery over them and her own self-saviorism. Self-saviorism in this context refers to the protagonist’s ability to act as the hero of

her own story and the level of agency that her character can access. However, the reasoning behind her curse, that “the groom had settled on another girl,” paints her as irrational, petty, and hyper-emotional, wielding the pitfalls of hegemonic femininity against her and invalidating her attempt at obtaining power and agency (Carter 143).

The second type of woman, whose husband became a wolf on their wedding night, remarries and fulfills her reproductive and domestic duties just as society demands she must: “the sensible girl dried her eyes and found herself another husband… She gave him a pair of bonny babies, and all went right as a trivet” (Carter 144). When the first husband returns to find her remarried, the woman falls victim to the wolf’s violence despite her compliance with socially dictated gender roles. Her first husband cries out in rage over her remarriage, exclaiming, “‘I wish I were a wolf again to teach this whore a lesson!’... [The woman then] wept and her second husband beat her” (Carter 144). Unlike the witch, this woman holds no power, supernatural or otherwise, to save herself, and the men frame her as a “whore” despite never having consummated her first marriage. In contrast with the quintessential conventions of fairy tales, this “good girl” who submits to social obligations is not rewarded for her obedience. The male characters’ ownership over her and control of her fate underscores her archetype as a helpless damsel in distress.

Although the witch does deliver herself from the threat of the wolves with the use of supernatural powers, her status as an inhuman entity isolates her from the rest of the village,

feared as another monster of the forest: “of all the teeming perils of the night and forest… witches that fatten their captives in cages for cannibal tables” (Carter 142). Ultimately, society ostracizes the witch for taking control of her fate, characterizing her as a monster and a cannibal. The self-determination of the witch proves monstrous, but the passivity and subjection of the wife also proves fruitless and fails to save her from victimhood. Thus, both female characters are damned, regardless of how they act, simply by virtue of their womanhood.

Furthermore, these stories condemn the sexuality of both women, as the anticipation of the wife on her first wedding night and the witch’s desire for the soon-to-be-wedded groom both deviate from the lack of pleasure women should experience in sexual encounters. Per sexual social norms, although a woman should never deny her husband sex, she should not wait for it excitedly as the wife does: “The bed was made with new sheets and the bride lay down in it…she drew the coverlet up to her chin and she lay there. And she waited and she waited and then she waited again—surely he’d been gone a long time?” (Carter 143). The young bride, eagerly awaiting her first sexual encounter, expresses a cloaked desire for her new husband as she awaits his arrival in the marriage bed. Her response to his death when he returns as a werewolf indicates not merely a “feminine display of hysterics,” but a mourning for a lost love: “He was just as he had been, years ago, when he ran away from his marriage bed, so that she wept” (Carter 144). In characterizing his behavior as having “run away,” the narrator hints at an anxiety or sense of inadequacy in the first husband whose wife eagerly

anticipated his return, signaling a reversal of traditional gender roles on their wedding night. Similarly, the witch’s desire for the groom who “settled on another girl” implicates the witch in a love affair (Carter 143). Without overtly articulating the presence of desire, these narratives condemn deviant female sexuality. The story even encourages female readers to fear desire, noting that although the werewolf possesses a man’s torso, “his legs and genitals are a wolf’s” (Carter 145). This detail erases female intrigue of male sexual organs, instead inspiring disgust, and aversion toward men’s “monstrous” genitalia. Failing to disseminate genuine sexual knowledge, these folktales instead perpetuate ignorance, stifling female desire and erotic agency. Similarly, the narrator warns that “if you spy a naked man among the pines, you must run as if the Devil were after you” (Carter 145). In framing feminine sexuality as evil, the narrator instills terror in readers rather than normalizing their sexual urges. Although the opening clause of this sentence may intrigue a reader, the second clause produces only fear. In this storytelling, mythology persists even in the realm of biology, dissuading women from pursuing sexual desire and eliminating their sensuality.

The use of the second person emphasizes women’s complicity in imparting these myths of femininity to younger generations; as literary critic Jie Wu notes, “By putting the werewolf lore in the character-narrator’s mouth, Carter ironically highlights the practice of using folklore and legend in shaping specifically the role of women in the perpetuation of these patriarchal systems of signification” (Wu 63). Although patriarchal

standards of femininity formed the archetypes of the witch and the damsel to confine women to passivity under threat of ostracization, older maternal figures maintain cycles of oppression through storytelling. Female narrators’ forewarnings of the nature of wolves, men, and the world prove merely stories despite the tangible consequences of their impacts. Wu affirms that the use of framing narratives in Carter’s work exposes the falsehoods lurking in folklore: “The second-person narration involves the real reader within the textual world by not only breaking the frame of narration and violating the boundaries of narrative levels, but also laying bare the fictionality of storytelling” (62). According to Wu, the intimacy of the second person in addressing readers while simultaneously drawing them in as characters in the story highlights the fragility of stories despite the power and influence they hold. While stories can sustain rigid gender roles, exonerate perpetrators of violence, and repress a young girl’s curiosity, they remain malleable, and their words do not necessarily reflect the true nature of the world or the world as it will always be.

Despite, and perhaps in spite of cultural narratives’ attempt to limit her agency by evoking fear, Carter’s protagonist harnesses her own witchcraft and turns the tables on the stories that surrounded her upbringing:

The girl burst out laughing; she knew she was nobody’s meat… She laughed at [the wolf] full in the face, she ripped off his shirt for him and flung it into the fire, in the fiery wake of her own discarded clothing. The flames danced like dead

souls on Walpurgisnacht and the old bones under the bed set up a terrible clattering, but she did not pay them heed (Carter 151).

In laughing at the wolf, the girl also laughs at the stories that presume her victimhood, conquering the narratives that dictate her fate based on her youth, naïvety, and virginity. She refuses to accept her doomed fate, instead dominating and conquering the wolf herself. Her use of witchcraft in flinging the wolf’s clothes into the fire reclaims the stories of her youth, instead controlling the encounter and daring to trespass into male territories: the forest, the realm of sexual assertion and demonstration of desire, and the role of hero. Her expression of sexual agency denounces the socially constructed value of her virginity and conquers the mythologies that attempt to erase female desire. The protagonist’s self-saviorism despite the narratives that permeated her upbringing reveal that stories often depict the world as it is, but they can also articulate how it could be. Confining gender roles in storytelling frame the possible as impossible and reinforce how women move about the world, informing how they see their places in it. If women believe their opportunities are limited to the stories that dominate their cultures, this mindset will inhibit them from achieving anything beyond what power systems expect of them. Carter’s use of framing narratives and their effects on the protagonist reveal the power and significance of feminist folklore in enabling and promoting the advancement of women, giving them a chance to be the heroes of their own stories. «

WORKS CITED

Almanza Avendaño, Ariagor Manuel, et al. “From harassment to disappearance: Young women’s feelings of insecurity in public spaces.” PLOS ONE, vol. 17, no. 9, 7 Sept. 2022, pp. 1–29, p.e0272933. Gale Academic OneFile, link gale com/apps/doc/A7 16438750/AONE?u=loym48904&sid=bookmark -AONE&xid=46cecd39. Accessed 23 Apr. 2024.

Carter, Angela. The Company of Wolves. The Bloody Chamber, deluxe edition, Penguin Random House, 1979, pp. 141–152.

Perrault, Charles. “Little Red Riding Hood.” The Classic Fairy Tales, translated by Maria Tatar, Second Norton Critical Edition, W.W. Norton & Company, 1697, pp. 16–18.

Weiss, Karen G. ““Boys Will Be Boys” and Other Gendered Accounts: An Exploration of Victims’ Excuses and Justifications for Unwanted Sexual Contact and Coercion.” Violence Against Women, vol. 15, no. 7, 3 Apr. 2009, pp. 810–834. Sage Journals, journals sagepub com/doi/10 1177/10778 01209333611.

Wu, Jie. “Carter’s Feminist Revision of Fairytale: The Narrative Strategies of “The Company of Wolves.”” Fudan Journal of the Humanities and Social Sciences, vol. 10, 19 Jan. 2017, pp. 53–67, link.sprin ger com/article/10 1007/s40647-016-0162-7#citeas

The Othello Figure: Racial Otherness and Postcolonial Relations in Shakespeare’s Othello and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen

YASMINE V. NAHDI

FROM THE EARLY modern period to the contemporary present, Shakespeare’s play Othello has not only sparked various points of debate on racial otherness and postcolonialism in literature, but has continuously stayed relevant for centuries. Othello as a character has proven to be a figure of much intrigue and nuance in scholarship, suggesting that his lingering presence in various realms of literature and criticism constitutes him as an archetype that has inspired centuries of work since the play’s arrival. In his depiction as a racialized other, Othello is an applicable lens for racialized people in literature regardless of ethnicity

or racial group, paving the way for a unique lens for analysis in critical race and postcolonial studies. In Citizen, Claudia Rankine similarly explores the effects of racialization and racial othering on the self. Through her work, Rankine explores high-profile instances of racial othering, specifically the 2006 World Cup controversy surrounding French-Algerian soccer player Zinedine Zidane. Rankine illustrates Zinedine Zidane as an Othello-like figure in his initial acceptance into a Eurocentric society due to his athletic contributions and subsequent expulsion once his behavior fails to align with Eurocentric ideals. Upon

YASMINE V. NAHDI is a first-year graduate student in English Literature, and an English Teaching Fellow at Loyola Marymount University. Her academic interests include postcolonialism in Middle Eastern and North African literature, contemporary literature, and Shakespeare studies. She was born and raised in Los Angeles, California. This paper was written for Dr. Julia Lee’s class titled “Critical Methodology” in the fall of 2024.

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examining Rankine’s depiction of how Zidane was racialized in this controversy through a postcolonial lens, comparisons are drawn between his situation and the racialization of Othello in Shakespeare’s Othello.

Though Othello has long been understood as a racialized figure within the play, one of the more intriguing mysteries about Othello is his ethnic origins, an ambiguous facet of his character that is never explicitly said throughout the play. Many scholars have presumed that Othello hails from Africa, with theories ranging from countries in North to West Africa.

Due to being described as a “Moor,” many theorists have presumed that Othello’s treatment in Venice aligns with Orientalist ideals, specifically because of the lack of a concrete definition of his country of origin. Filiz Barin argues that Othello’s racial “otherness” defines him to be a Turk due to the prevalence of the Ottoman Empire in the early modern period (4). Barin delves into the rich history of the Ottoman Empire and its relationship with England, which he believes is evidence for influencing Shakespeare to have Othello’s background be that of Turkish descent. He mentions that the language Shakespeare employs is reminiscent of racist language used to describe Turks, leading him to conclude that Othello himself was meant to be a Turk.

Similarly, Ferial J. Ghazoul also argues that Othello is of a certain cultural group, though instead of a Turk, she claims him to be Arab. Ghazoul draws from historical context and details how the language utilized in different Arabic translations of Othello suggests that Othello was an Arab. Along with many other Shakespearean plays, Othello has

resonated with Arab audiences through both performance and the influx of translations in the Arab world, suggesting that the reasoning for this cultural resonance is that Othello himself has ethnic and cultural similarities with Arab people. Ghazoul states: “...the intellectuals of the subjugated Arab nation wanted to demonstrate their cultural standing by asserting that their heritage was no less than the legacy of colonizers” (10). To further assert the richness of Arab intellectualism and literature, Ghazoul brings in different poems and stories in the Arab tradition that closely align with Othello’s narrative, suggesting that Shakespeare could have drawn inspiration from older Arabic stories when writing his play

Ghazoul touches on criticism put forth by Edward Said articulating that although Othello might have been Arab, the focus is put on how the Arab “other” functions within European society (10). Though both Barin and Ghazoul make commendable arguments, the mystery around Othello’s origins is more proactively understood as intentionally ambiguous due to the tension between Europe and much of the Eastern world. Despite differing opinions on Othello’s origins, a consistent conjecture among scholars is that Othello comes from a country where Europe has been a colonial force, complicating his loyalty to the Venetians and further establishing him as a racial other in Venetian society. To contextualize the climate in which Shakespeare was writing, Emily C. Bartels argues that race relations between Europeans and Africans cannot be understood solely through postcolonial frameworks—instead, the primary focus shifts to the European desire for profit in the 1600s.

Bartels claims that in trade, the “Moors” had economic dominance over the Europeans because they owned the goods that the Europeans desired (16). She maintains that Othello had more societal agency due to his high rank in the Venetian military and society at large. While Bartels offers ample historical context, her argument fails to explain the connection between the racially charged comments made about Othello’s “Moor” identity throughout the play and his inability to truly assimilate into Venetian society as a result.

Though racialized language is prevalent within the play, Othello himself rarely acknowledges his racialization and status as a racial other in Venetian society. Throughout the play, Othello refers sparingly to his racialization in Venice, only ever acknowledging his “Blackness” after Iago’s calculated manipulation in a conversation about Desdemona’s presumed infidelity, saying: “Haply, for I am black / And have not those soft parts of conversation” (Shakespeare III.III.304-305). Though he presents an awareness of his consequent racialization due to being “black,” Othello fails to fully recognize his Blackness as an identity marker of racial otherness. This lack of acceptance allows Blackness to be used against him by his Venetian peers, as notably seen in the moment when Iago’s wife Emilia finds out Othello has killed Desdemona. Overcome by hatred for him, she tells Othello: “O, the more angel she, and you the blacker devil!” (Shakespeare V.II.161). Here, Blackness is framed as an inverse to not only whiteness but righteousness. The ambiguity around Othello’s origins denotes that Othello’s status as a racial other is principally defined through

his darker skin color, shaping the criminality of his actions to be intrinsically tied to his physical Blackness.

In Othello, the subject of selfhood is examined through the effects of external European perceptions on the self. Despite the prevalence of racialization, the play probes this by having Othello’s definition of self be deeply embedded in his status in Venetian society and completely separate from his racial identity. As Bartels states, his high rank within Venetian society solidifies him as a citizen of Venice, thus suggesting that this acceptance is the primary feature of Othello’s definition of selfhood. This results in Othello lacking subjectivity separate from Venice because of his deliberate ignorance of his racial otherness (Comensoli 3). The first act of a faltering sense of self-importance linked to a recognition of his racial otherness occurs when he first learns about Desdemona’s alleged adultery from Iago, immediately believing that his ethnic disconnect from Venice is to blame for her dissatisfaction in their marriage (Caciedo 6). To Othello, his Blackness is then framed as the pivotal factor of Desdemona’s desire to be unfaithful to him and instead wanting Cassio, who characterizes the ideals of Venetian society through his beauty, charm, and genetic European whiteness.

This realization is further exhibited through his decision to kill Desdemona, which he performs as an act of restoration for his pride, believing that doing so will allow him to maintain his honor and free Desdemona from the burden of infidelity. In Act V, Scene II, he is only able to understand the gravity of his

actions when Emilia insults his pride and calls him a “fool” (Cantor 20), calling back to his unwavering desire to uphold the honor granted to him by Venetian society. In his famous final monologue before he stabs himself, Othello recalls one of his military pursuits, saying:

Where a malignant and a turbanned Turk Beat a Venetian and traduced the state, I took by th’ throat the circumcisèd dog, And smote him, thus (Shakespeare V.II.414-7).

At this moment, his language allows him to become the Turk in question, doing unto himself what he had done to the Turk and therefore actualizing his racial otherness. Through the use of “turbanned” and “dog,” the Turk is established as not only a racial other but an antagonistic threat to Venetian society. In a defeatist manner, Othello accepts both classifications, shedding his “performance of cultural whiteness” (Smith 14) and becoming the object of his deepest fear throughout the entirety of the play—an ostracized, racialized being unfit to be a true Venetian. Othello’s penultimate demise is then understood to be caused by his inability to attain selfhood free from his racial oppressor, simultaneously suffering from deceit and colonialist ridicule. He conflates his military fortitude with his perceived barbarism as a racial other, succumbing to darkness in the name of heroism.

Similarly to Othello, Claudia Rankine’s Citizen (2014) explores racialization primarily through the detriments of Eurocentrism as demonstrated through her examination of Zinedine Zidane. Zidane’s controversial

headbutt of Italian player Marco Materazzi at the 2006 World Cup is depicted through image stills of the match interwoven with various quotes ranging from Zidane himself to Shakespeare and Frantz Fanon. At thirty-four years old, Zidane came out of retirement to play for France, leading the country to the top of the World Cup leaderboard with his efforts (Tepper 2010). During the final game against Italy, a heated exchange between him and Materazzi led to Zidane headbutting Materazzi in the chest, resulting in Zidane receiving a red card and later retiring once more. Following Zidane’s headbutt, Western media promptly turned on Zidane. The French public immediately viewed the incident as an aggressive move on Zidane’s part, a result of his pent-up anger and belligerence as an Arab player. Zidane was instantly reduced to his ethnic heritage, suggesting that his actions were a direct result of his ethnicity as an Algerian rather than his anger being defined as an imperfect yet human response.

Rankine further reflects the binary between whiteness and racial otherness by inserting gray text on each page that reads “BLACK-BLANC-BEUR” (111–5), with blanc and beur respectively meaning white and a European-born Arab from the Maghreb region. Beur is also derived from Berber, a word used to describe indigenous Amazigh people in North Africa. The Oxford English Dictionary records its emergence in the seventeenth century, likely derived from the Arabic word barbar and thus correlated with barbarism, a term long associated with Arab and North African people (“Berber,” n2, OED). Using French words that clearly demonstrate racist intent

behind the Zidane outrage suggests that like Othello, Zidane’s racial status directly defines his character and status within French society. The fraught relationship between Zidane and France is similar to Othello’s with Venice, functioning as a mirroring of the tension between North African countries such as Algeria, Morocco, and Tunisia, and colonial European countries such as France, Italy, and Spain.

In the case of France and Algeria, Alf Andrew Heggoy argues that for centuries, cross-cultural assimilation for both Algerians and the French was nearly impossible due to the violence of the French occupation and the inherent desire to rebel by the Algerians (3). Despite the distinct cultural divide between the French and the Algerians, the French had a desire to assimilate the Algerians into French culture as a colonial ploy to civilize those considered racial others. In doing so, France became the dominant force over the Algerians throughout the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—Algeria heavily resisted, leading the country to restore its independence by way of the Algerian Revolution in the second half of the twentieth century. In reference to this tension, Rankine includes a quote by Frantz Fanon on Algerian freedom fighters: “Clearly, the Algerians who, in view of the intensity of the repression and the frenzied character of the oppression, thought they could answer the blows received without any serious problem of conscience” (113). As seen through the controversy surrounding Zidane, the relations between the French and Algerians suggest that Eurocentric perspectives frame anti-colonialist sentiments as not only rebellious but fundamentally aggressive and combative in

nature. Through this framework, Rankine then suggests that Zidane is viewed by the French as a personification of a stereotypical “barbaric” Algerian defying colonial French power, opposing the ideals of a Frenchman and thus unworthy of assimilation into French society.

Beyond Zidane sharing qualities of racialization with Othello, their situations unfold in a similar narrative arc, leading them to both become racialized as a result of instigation from their white peers. Like Othello, Zidane is solely praised by his peers when his actions directly benefit the European space he inhabits and consequently becomes ostracized when this is challenged. Othello’s eventual murder of his wife Desdemona is a result of Iago’s purposeful manipulation, influencing Othello to believe that Desdemona is unfaithful in their marriage. Zidane claimed that he headbutted Materazzi because he had made an offensive remark about Zidane’s sister to him during the match. In both circumstances, Zidane and Othello are consequently racialized for their behavior, and their racial and ethnic identities are immediately established as the root of their actions. To illustrate this shift, Rankine includes a line from a French transcription of the match, which comes from an account of lip readers responding to the transcript of the World Cup: “Big Algerian shit, dirty terrorist, n*****” (114). The use of “big” and “terrorist” in Zidane’s case is revelatory of the deep-rooted fears that the French have against Maghrebi individuals, reinforcing the fear and the cultural inadequacy of racial others in French society. The insertion of a racial slur further reaffirms this Eurocentric dominance—Zidane is ultimately posed as a threat to the French,

representative of their deep-rooted, colonial suspicions of the racially inferior.

When called a racial slur, Zidane is similarly framed to represent racial otherness as a distinct opposition to whiteness. Though he is arguably not as racially identifiable as Othello due to his lighter skin, Zidane’s actions are defined as barbaric, characterizing him as the ultimate version of what Eurocentrism rejects—Blackness. Interestingly, the singular line that Rankine takes from Othello when writing about Zidane is from the moment when Othello and Iago discuss Brabantio’s knowledge of Othello and Desdemona’s relationship. Othello says: “Let him do his spite: My services which I have done… Shall out-tongue his complaints” (126). Though this particular moment reflects Othello’s determination in his position as a worthy suitor for Desdemona, his language is reflective of the pride he feels due to his military successes, reveling in the sense of importance he feels within Venetian society despite being a racial other. However, when applied to Zidane’s case, this quote serves as an idealized representation of how the French public should have reacted to Zidane’s actions. Rankine epitomizes this through an excerpt of a quote that Zidane said about the racist remarks that ensued against him after the World Cup: “Every day I think about where I came from and I am still proud to be who I am…” (112). In stating his pride for his ethnic heritage, Zidane diverts from Othello’s conceptualization of personhood, simultaneously countering the racialization of his Algerian identity and refusing to allow external Eurocentric perceptions to interfere with his definition of selfhood.

Though poignant on its own, Rankine’s inclusion only offers a fragment of Zidane’s full quote. In its entirety, it reads: “Every day I think about where I came from and I am still proud to be who I am… first, a Kabyle from La Castellane, then an Algerian from Marseille, and then a Frenchman” (Zidane 2006). Zidane’s acknowledgment of his cultural identities separate from his athletic accomplishments demonstrates his ability to form personhood despite being a racial other in French society. In framing his response hierarchically, Zidane emphasizes the cultural diversity of his existence. By beginning with an emphasis on his indigenous Kabyle (a Berber/Amazigh ethnic group residing in Algeria) and Algerian heritage, Zidane asserts the significance of his ethnic cultures in the formation of his selfhood. Rather than outright refuting or attempting to fully adopt his French nationality, he acknowledges it, further upholding the multitudes of his existence. Zidane’s deliberate choice to embrace his French nationalism last could also be understood as an act of defiance in the postcolonial Algerian spirit, concurrently representative of the forced assimilation of Algerians into French society and critical of the racial inferiority conflated with Arabs and North Africans by Eurocentrism.

Through exploring the effects of racialization on selfhood and acceptance in colonial Eurocentric spaces, both Shakespeare’s Othello and Claudia Rankine’s Citizen draw close comparisons to one another in their respective narratives of Othello and Zinedine Zidane. As notably seen through Rankine’s examination of Zidane, Othello’s legacy as a victim of racialization recurs beyond the early

modern period, impacting the spheres of critical race and postcolonial studies well into the twenty-first century. By following a similar narrative framework as Othello, Zidane’s initial recognition and resultant ejection from French societal spheres can then be understood as instituting him as an Othello-like figure. Though he subsequently diverts from Othello’s fate in choosing to firmly defend his Kabyle and Algerian heritage, the extent of racialization in Eurocentric spaces is demonstrated to not only ostracize racial others but also target their formations of selfhood in the process. The drive to instill Eurocentrism and inherent whiteness among marginalized people can then be seen as an extension of the colonial effort to assert dominance over those deemed racially inferior, allowing the impact of Othello to live on beyond the literary world. «

WORKS CITED

Barin, Filiz. “Othello: Turks as ‘the Other’ in the Early Modern Period.” The Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association, vol. 43, no. 2, 2010, pp. 37–58. JSTOR, http://www jstor org /stable/419 60526. Accessed 2 Dec. 2024.

Bartels, Emily C. “Othello and Africa: Postcolonialism Reconsidered.” The William and Mary Quarterly, vol. 54, no. 1, 1997, pp. 45–64. JSTOR, https://doi org /10 2307/2953312. Accessed 1 Dec. 2024.

“Berber, N. (2) & Adj.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford UP, September 2024, https://doi org /10 10 93/OED/4023081231

Cacicedo, Alberto. “Othello, Stranger in a Strange Land.” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 18, no. 1, 2016, pp. 7–27. JSTOR, https://doi org /10 5325/in telitestud.18.1.0007. Accessed 1 Dec. 2024.

Cantor, Paul A. “Othello: The Erring Barbarian among the Supersubtle Venetians.” Southwest Review, vol. 75, no. 3, 1990, pp. 296–319. JSTOR, http://www jst or org /stable/43470186. Accessed 11 Dec. 2024.

Comensoli, Viviana. “Identifying Othello: Race and the Colonial (Non)Subject.” Early Theatre, vol. 7, no. 2, 2004, pp. 90–96. JSTOR, http://www jstor org /sta ble/43502092. Accessed 30 Nov. 2024.

Ghazoul, Ferial J. “The Arabization of Othello.” Comparative Literature, vol. 50, no. 1, 1998, pp. 1–31.

JSTOR, https://doi org /10 2307/1771217. Accessed 2 Dec. 2024.

Heggoy, Alf Andrew. “Education in French Algeria: An Essay on Cultural Conflict.” Comparative Education Review, vol. 17, no. 2, 1973, pp. 180–97.

JSTOR, http://www jstor org /stable/1186812 Accessed 2 Dec. 2024.

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Rankine, Claudia. Citizen: An American Lyric. Graywolf Press, 2014.

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Smith, Ian. “Barbarian Errors: Performing Race in Early Modern England.” Shakespeare Quarterly, vol. 49, no. 2, 1998, pp. 168–86. JSTOR, https://doi org /10 2307/2902299. Accessed 12 Dec. 2024.

Tepper, Anderson. “On Zidane, Aging, and the World Cup.” Vanity Fair, 11 May 2010, https://www vanity fair com/news/2010/05/on-zidane -aging-and-the -world- cup?srsltid=AfmBOoon8oT10ZXpaAAlD9 DA9gPbe2l9VK4cvkQx b9crq07MoFDWFDw

Meditation, Darwinism, and the Self in Melville’s MobyDick and Chopin’s

TheAwakening

MOBY DICK and The Awakening both emphasize the power of a natural force that is as mundane as it is magical: the water. Due to their desire to meditate and muse, Ishmael and Edna’s journeys in both novels are irrevocably tied to the water, for better or for worse. More often than human beings would believe, the most significant and helpful recourse to remain in touch with themselves and the world is to stop and think—to meditate. However, it can be difficult or against one’s force of habit to do so, especially when it seems so far removed from the environment of the land—let alone the fast-paced nature of a city like New Orleans or Manhattan, where Edna was before Grand Isle and where Ishmael was

before the Pequod. When it comes to the sea, though, as Melville puts it, “as everyone knows, meditation and water are wedded for ever” (Melville 17). But why is that, and where does it come from? How do meditative, musing, and arguably passive characters like Ishmael and Edna’s relationship with the sea differ from their foils and counterparts, such as Ahab and Adele? Moreover, does this relationship with the water ultimately benefit Ishmael and Edna by awakening and transforming them, or does it drive them into madness and irreality? Considering this through the lens of Darwinism and self-actualization, perhaps this meditative transformation, regardless of whether it is more beneficial or harmful, is inevitable.

KARMA CHAMSEDDINE is a sophomore Screenwriting major and English minor at Loyola Marymount University. Raised in Lebanon and London, she is passionate about storytelling in all its forms. In terms of essay writing, she especially enjoys comparative analyses. This paper was written for an English seminar course titled “Reading the Ocean,” taught by Dr. Robin Miskolcze.

KARMA CHAMSEDDINE

Meditation is defined in the Oxford English Dictionary as “the action or practice of profound spiritual or religious reflection or contemplation” (“Meditation,” OED). Originating in the 13th century, it is derived from Old French and Latin. The meaning of meditation itself has always remained relatively similar or the same, an imprecise vehicle to discuss general profound thought and musing that may refer to religious and cultural traditions, but not necessarily. The “med” part of meditation is a common root of many Latin words, including “mederi,” which means heal. This suggests a root connection between the concept of meditation and the concept of healing, perhaps pointing to why humans often feel motivated to meditate in the first place. Without the ability to reflect and contemplate the world, life altering events, and one’s feelings, it becomes unfathomable to heal from what has happened to us and what holds us back.

In Melville’s Moby Dick and Chopin’s The Awakening, Ishmael and Edna are both musing and retrospective protagonists who wish to escape from their lives and into another world, namely one that is tied to or exists within the water. For Ishmael, this means fully being at sea in the Pequod, abandoning his life on land completely. For Edna, it is her summer in Grand Isle, where she is constantly by the sea and drawn to it, despite her initial fear of swimming. Since there seems to be a connection in both characters’ meditative nature and their willingness to seek the water, what exactly is that connection, and the connection between water and healing? Also, both novels portray water as equally perilous, as it allows for an escapism which, in Edna’s case, leads to destruction and

demise. Considering the tumultuous journeys both protagonists undergo, are meditation and water as capable of being as harmful as they are of healing, and what might this suggest about human nature?

In order to understand Melville and Chopin’s portrayals of humans and nature through Moby Dick and The Awakening, it is important to consider Darwin’s ideas on such matters. While Darwin’s work was released after Moby Dick, both authors’ novels are often compared to or analyzed through the perspective of Darwinism. The main aspects of Darwinian thought include natural selection and the competitive struggle to exist and thrive, given that nature is an indifferent, savage force that makes each individual seem insignificant in comparison. Such themes are important to the progression of Edna and Ishmael’s characters, in terms of their meditative qualities which determine their fate.

At the beginning of the novel, Ishmael’s desire to board the Pequod and hunt a whale as someone who has never done so before, may be interpreted as a human’s desire to feel bigger than he really is: a “man’s will to violate the natural garden” (Bender 28). By conquering the whale, a creature that in large part represents the state of the world prior to humans, Ishmael’s desire to feel purposeful and infinite is reinforced. However, as the novel goes on, it is in fact Ahab who takes on this role as the conquistador who wishes to violate Darwin’s natural order, and it is Ishmael who becomes an increasingly passive, meditative character who survives the ocean’s indifferent brutal nature while Ahab does not. It becomes clear that the novel Moby Dick does not center

around a traditional pursuit of knowledge, rather the idea “that meditation and water are wedded in a monistic universe. [...] As a quest for knowledge, Moby Dick ends where, from Melville’s point of view, any such voyage of mind must end: where it begins, in his belief that we can never ‘grasp’ the mystery of life” (Bender 32). Therefore, Ishmael and Melville (depending on who is narrating in a chapter) are progressively humbled by the ocean, as Pip was when he fell overboard. However, this understanding of the world causes Pip to go mad, suggesting how fully grasping the extent of nature’s indifference impacts human beings, who are naturally inclined to control and act against forces that cannot be stopped, such as death and change.

Also, Ishmael’s journey from a courageous protagonist to an introspective, passive one is a progression that is both induced and rewarded by the sea. As Ishmael subtly accepts his place in nature as a human, his “passiveness is his essential quality as the ultimate ‘water-gazer’ [and] his survival [...] is an expression of Melville’s confidence that in meditation he might achieve the ideal state of ocean-receptiveness” (Bender 33). As Bender points out, Ishmael being the Pequod’s sole survivor highlights the importance of his character’s meditative worldview as a water gazer, similarly to Edna. When Ishmael introduces himself to the reader, he seems the epitome of an active, forceful voice, first telling us to call him Ishmael. As the novel progresses, not only are some chapters in third person, but the ones still in first person seem increasingly passive, and center less around Ishmael’s internal story and are more externally focused.

Like the historical figure Ishmael who is exiled from his family, it seems that the supposed hero in Moby Dick, Ishmael, is exiled from his own story. His journey from a protagonist who wants to disrupt his life to a dwindling character in the background who seems to be spiritually taken or mesmerised by nature and musing is ultimately what saves him in the end. He internalizes Darwinian notions of the lack of control humans have over their lives and the world. Hence, his reluctance to uphold the role of the story’s hero represents an increasing lack of desire to use his free will and act, instead he accepts his powerlessness by submitting to nature’s order and determination. Similarly, Darwinian thought in The Awakening leads Edna to realize the patriarchal society she was born into is a limiting factor she has no control over, leading her to intentionally drown in the sea, as she gives up on a reconciliation between external limiting social factors and her internal desires and ambitions as a woman. Kate Chopin’s thoughts on Darwin were complex, since she disagreed with his “views on women, even as she revered him” (Bender 186). His belief that women were in some ways inferior to men reflects the patriarchal values of Edna’s world, which cannot be escaped in Grand Isle, in painting, or with the man she loves. Her summer of meditation and contemplation, a literal awakening to identity and her desires, leads her to realize how unsatisfied she is with her life—namely her marriage and imposed role as a mother. Similarly to Moby Dick, this emphasizes the tensions between human desire to disrupt and control the determinism of nature and society. However, Ishmael is able

to assuage this tension, while Edna cannot, instead resorting to attaining freedom in the one way she feels she can: suicide in the sea. In both novels, the ocean represents the grand scheme of life, which according to Darwin, equates humans to powerless specs of dust. Ishmael and Edna’s meditative characteristics as water gazers cause them to realize this, and while Ishmael grapples with it and survives, Edna realizes how much it limits her as a woman, to the point of never being able to attain all that she needs to be happy.

Ahab and Adele, on the other hand, act as foils to Ishmael and Edna’s meditative characteristics with their opposing social and moral ideologies. First, Captain Ahab is a conquistador who never makes peace with his lost leg and never lets go of his revenge quest to hunt the whale. As reflected in his constant outbursts, he wishes “Death to Moby Dick! God hunt us all, if we do not hunt Moby Dick to his death!” (Melville 135), highlighting his willingness to descend into mutually assured destruction. His grievance of the loss of his leg is a symbol for human fragility, and the whale responsible for this loss is a symbol of nature’s indifference. It is almost as comical as it is depressing how angry he is towards the creature of the whale, who reflects the vastness of nature and the sea, everchanging and indifferent towards everything, including Ahab. His constant lack of self-knowledge and awareness leads to his demise. Unlike Ishmael, the concept of nature’s indifference regardless of an individual’s will is not a tension he is able to reconcile, and he dies in the quest to control nature and change an outcome that he has no jurisdiction over. Nature is capable of

giving everything to humans and it is capable of taking away everything as well.

His arrogance and blindness of grief and anger cause him to reject meditation, rather exercising will, force, and a facade of dominance over nature to the extent of not realizing the lack of sanity in his actions. While Ahab, like Ishmael, is susceptible to human inclination towards the water, Ishmael begins to contemplate and meditate this inclination, perceiving it—and therefore nature—as infinitely bigger than himself. Conversely, Ahab resents this inclination, his desires rooted in destruction, vengeance, and a hyperfocus on temporary bodily abilities. The novel’s allusions to Plato, who had opposite views of the body and soul, foreshadow Ahab’s punishment. For example, Ishmael says, “we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death [...] we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water” (Melville 42). The latter part of this quote refers to the cave in Plato’s republic, as pointed out in a footnote on the page. The idea of the body being the prison of the soul, or at least a limiting factor, is a recurring notion in Plato’s works, and emphasizes the importance of meditation to Ishmael’s survival at the end. While Darwinism suggests nature’s unpredictability, the idea of the soul is what can provide meaning, but Ahab is not in tune with himself emotionally or spiritually because he is not meditative nor passive enough to be.

This lack of spiritual awareness similarly holds back Adele from Edna’s level of meditativeness. Adele’s lack of meditative characteristics reflects her unwillingness to acknowledge aspects of her life she feels unfulfilled by. While she may seem like the perfect

wife and mother on the surface, it is because by not meditating, she is able to live in ignorance and fulfill her allocated role in society. As Edna’s role as a wife and mother begin to fall apart, Adele advises her to “Think of the children. Edna. Oh think of the children! Remember them!” (Chopin 111), emphasizing that Adele’s priorities always lie in what is societally imposed—for a woman to always think of the children—rather than to think of herself, which is what Edna spends most of the summer doing. Not only does Edna claim she would not give herself up for her children, a point of conflict between the two, but she also detaches herself from the concept of mindless action. Adele seems to immerse herself in this mindlessness, possibly because she fears meditation leading her to realize her dissatisfaction in life.

Edna, opposite Adele, feels that “all sense of reality had gone out of her life; she had abandoned herself to Fate, and awaited the consequences with indifference” (Chopin 105). This increasingly reckless behaviour from Edna reflects the existential crisis she finds herself in, one rooted in Darwinian ideas such as nature and societal indifference, in this case towards women. Unlike Adele, Edna has begun to “realize her position in the universe as a human being, and to recognize her relations as an individual to the world within and about her” (Chopin 16). Hence, Edna’s meditative characteristics, like Ishmael, cause her to contemplate her true place in the world, as she realizes her responsibilities are as empty as they are imposed, and she is as small as she is free. This also reflects in her increasing inclination to the sea, which is “seductive [...]

inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation” (Chopin 16). Inward contemplation and solitude exemplify the concept of meditation, which while that awakens Edna, it resultantly kills her, as she realizes the extent of her unhappiness.

However, Adele never reaches this point as she is the perfect wife and mother on the surface because she refuses to unabashedly meditate on her life. Her ignorance and refusal to awaken enables Adele to fulfill her roles in society. This is suggested when, in response to Edna’s refusal to give up the essential—herself— up for her children, Adele responds, “I don’t know what you could call the essential, or what you mean by the unessential” (Chopin 49). Her inability to understand what Edna means suggests she is not in touch with or aware of what is important to her, as her reluctance to meditate reflects a reluctance to awaken as Edna does. This ignorance surrounding her identity and ambitions means she does not physically lose her life as Edna did, however it does not seem there was emotionally and spiritually a life to lose, considering her roles were already determined for her by nature and society. Ultimately, meditation serves as a vehicle for self-actualization—both on the Pequod and in Grand Isle. Edna’s character thus suggests that the perilousness of meditation and human inclination to water is rooted in the consequences of self-actualization, where her realization of how unfulfilling her life is and how unattainable her wishes are leads her to self-destruct. In this way, Adele’s lack of awareness protects her from Edna’s self-destructive spiral. However, in Moby Dick,

Ishmael’s self-actualization, which is rooted in decentering himself, leads to his survival on the Pequod, rather than the conquistador Captain Ahab. Ishmael’s ability to meditate and be passive is rewarded by nature, as he embraces his role in the society. Edna, contrastingly, resists her role in the world, leading to her decision not to adapt to unjust determinism, but to escape it. Both meditative water gazers, however, represent the tensions between human ambition or freedom with nature’s indifferent vastness, grappling with a sense of lost purpose, identity, and fate. Therefore, the connection between water and meditation is rooted in such Darwinian tensions, as contemplating one’s place in the grand scheme of nature is as perilous and daunting as it is necessary and humbling. It is only by grappling with such tensions that one can begin to understand themself—for better or for worse. «

WORKS CITED

Bender, Bert. “Kate Chopin’s Quarrel with Darwin before ‘The Awakening.’” Journal of American Studies, vol. 26, no. 2, 1992, pp. 185–204. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org /stable/27555645. Accessed 11 Dec. 2024.

Bender, Bert, and Tony Angell. “Meditation and the Life-Waters.” Sea-Brothers: The Tradition of American Sea Fiction from Moby-Dick to the Present, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1988, pp. 19–39. JSTOR, http://www jstor org /stable/j ctt 18fsd5c 7. Accessed 11 Dec. 2024.

Chopin, Kate. The Awakening (Norton Critical Editions). 3rd ed., W. W. Norton & Company, 2017. “Meditation.” Oxford English Dictionary, Oxford University Press, September 2024,

https://doi.org /10.1093/OED/3591064581. Accessed 11 Dec. 2025.

Melville, Herman, and Hershel Parker. Moby-Dick: An Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. W.W. Norton & Company, 2018.

Unlocking Hidden Being Through Aristotle’s Metaphor

LOUIS YANUCCI

ARISTOTLE SEEMS to be generally unconcerned with the question of the value of art and poetry. From what little he provides in the Poetics and elsewhere his conception of art’s value appears to merely bring about pleasure in the viewer. That is to say that the metric for good art should be whether or not the viewer takes pleasure in it. Thus, the same follows for poetry. The goal of a good poem is to have the reader take pleasure in reading the poem. Yet it would seem problematic to reduce the value of poetry to mere pleasure. Undoubtedly, art is meant to bring pleasure to its viewers. Aristotle is generally reluctant to ground a thing’s value in pleasure. No one would deny that a good friendship brings pleasure to both friends. However, when pleasure becomes the basis of friendships,

those friendships are short-lived, volatile, and merely instrumental. For Aristotle, complete friendships, where either friend cares about the other’s good for her own sake, are always good and much more stable.

If one wishes to have a meaningful relationship with art, then that relationship should not be grounded on pleasure alone. If the main purpose of art is to bring the viewer pleasure, then one’s relationship to art is similarly volatile and instrumental. Consequently, the sustaining insights of good art are lost in the wake of a quick, pleasure-centric understanding. Instead, it seems that there is something intrinsically good about art and therefore poetry. If poetry is intrinsically valuable, then the aim of good poetry must be something other than mere pleasure in the reader.

Greater Boston native LOUIS YANUCCI is a Philosophy major with an English minor. Foremost a lover of poetry, Yanucci has a broad interest in poets ranging from Frederich Holderlin to Chen Chen. The intersection between beauty and truth has always been a focus for him. Outside of philosophy, he loves writing poetry, drumming, and the East Coast. This essay was written for Dr. Garcia Romero’s “Metaphysics” class.

The focus of this paper is to show that, given an attentive reading of Aristotle’s views on metaphor and definition, an ontological relevance emerges from good poetry which establishes its value beyond mere pleasure. First, poetry will be investigated in its uniqueness to establish a direction for investigation. Then, metaphor will be examined using Ezra Pound’s quintessential example “In a Station of the Metro” to gain an understanding of the central mechanic of a good poem. Finally, further evidence will be provided from Aristotle’s Metaphysics and De Anima to cement the validity of poetry’s expression of essence through metaphor as necessary to fully understand the essence of a thing.

What separates poetry from other forms of writing is its ability to articulate the unarticulatable, or as Aristotle puts it, “to give names to nameless things,” (Rhetoric 142). Naming the nameless is something that seems intuitively impossible. Yet, it seems that, if nothing else, such difficult naming is the work of the poet, just as the artist gives life to static moments. However, it is not by means of magic that poets summon something unspeakable with language. As Aristotle points out, it is the appropriate employment of metaphor that allows the poet to say the unsayable (Rhetoric 142).

Further, for Aristotle, it is by virtue of a metaphor’s fittingness, or its ability to “fairly correspond to the thing signified,” that it successfully conjures a description for what seems to be indescribable (Rhetoric 141). That is to say, a metaphor used appropriately, or in the best manner, takes up this difficult task. Therefore, metaphor asserts itself at the forefront of

any investigation into the implications of the unsayable being said.

An investigation of metaphor itself thus becomes necessary to grasp the implications of saying what cannot be said. It has already been established that metaphor plays a fundamental role in poetry. It has also already been established that a metaphor’s fittingness displays a correspondence or likeness between two things to make what is unsayable sayable. Therefore, when Aristotle says “the reason why men enjoy seeing a likeness is, that in contemplating it they find themselves learning…” it becomes clear that the enjoyment of the reader does not simply come from the poet’s crafty, ornamental language (Poetics 1148b15). Instead, the metaphor furthers the learning of the reader so that some new knowledge is gained through reading the poem.

Now, the question arises of what new knowledge has been gained, especially considering that the nature of metaphor is to relay a likeness. It appears most likely that the reader has gained new insight into the object of the metaphor. To make this process clearer, Ezra Pound offers an exemplary two-line poem “In a Station of the Metro:” “The apparition of these faces in the crowd: / Petals on a wet, black bough” (lines 1–2).

In comparing the appearance of faces to wet petals on a tree’s bough, one learns something different about what faces are. Yet, an explanation of this sort does not get at what makes the brief metaphor of “In a Station of the Metro” so profound. Instead, it seems that the reader learns something about the experience of seeing faces and of seeing petals on a bough. In the synthesis of the two something

entirely new is apprehended so that the reader is taken into a unique experience. Something unsayable, the experience that Pound wishes to convey, becomes intelligible through the metaphor that he presents.

The question remains: what is this new thing the reader has learned? The reader has indeed apprehended someone else’s experience as something gained. However, the mere gain of another’s perspective is not in itself something unsayable. Pound could have used pure prose to convey his experience through which it could have easily been apprehended. Rather, as will later become more concrete, the reader apprehends something essential about what it means to see both faces and flower petals in their synthesis. In other words, what is essential to perceiving either has been grasped and is now understood differently by the reader who has understood Pound’s metaphor.

Although the poet may not object, philosophically it may seem lofty to claim that through mere metaphor poetry becomes ontologically relevant. To make the connection more apparent it is necessary to return to what is essential to metaphor itself. Aristotle defines metaphor in Poetics as “the application of an alien name by transference either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or by analogy…” (Poetics 1457b7-9). When he uses the term genus here, he means a broader class occupied by the subordinate species.

Aristotle gives examples of each kind of metaphor. The example of a genus-to-species metaphor he gives is “Here stands the ship,” wherein the genus “lying at anchor” has been

replaced by the broader kind of thing that it is, standing. The example of a species-to-genus metaphor he gives is “Truly ten thousand good deeds has Ulysses wrought,” wherein the species ten-thousand replaces the genus of “a large number.” An example of a species-to-species metaphor is “Drawing the life with bronze” and “Severing the enduring bronze,” wherein severing and drawing are interchanged as two words under the genus “to take something away.” Metaphor from analogy breaks away from the genus-species formula by relating its objects as follows: A is to be B as C is to D, A is C (Poetics 1457b10-16).

Pound utilizes a metaphor by analogy where some parts of the aforementioned structure are implicit. To make the relationship more clear the poem could be rephrased less poetically from “The apparition of these faces in the crowd; / Petals on a wet, black bough,” to “As the petals are to a wet, black bough, / so the faces are to the crowd.” Here, the reader fills in the final move: “The petals are the faces in the crowd,” or the inverse, “the faces are on a wet, black bough.” In Pound’s case, the species “face” under the genus human quality is transferred with the species “petal” under the genus part of a plant. What makes the poem so incredible is Pound’s ability to make the metaphor of analogy without explicitly doing so, which, as has been demonstrated, would obstruct the poetics of the poem.

In this respect, Pound can do what the other kinds of metaphors that Aristotle gives cannot. Pound’s transference is distinct from a genus to species, species to genus, or species to species. In these cases,

the transference is of two things related directly to each other either by sharing a genus or having a genus-species relationship. In Pound’s poem, “In a Station of the Metro,” the two things whose meaning is being transferred by analogy do not share a genus nor a genus-species relationship. The reader takes enjoyment from the poem, firstly, because it demonstrates Pound’s “eye for resemblances” which Aristotle takes to be “the mark of genius” (Poetics 1059a9). That is, connecting two things that do not share any kind of direct relationship. The eye of resemblance to achieve connection in the concise and potent way that Pound does must certainly be the one that Aristotle takes to be the mark of genius. Thus, the reader delights in such a crafty display as one would any other display of excellence.

However, as noted before, the reader also takes enjoyment from the poem because she learns something from it. Especially in the case of Pound’s poem, something is learned about what is essential to both flowers and faces. The reader does not understand a mere relationship between two directly connecting things but makes a connection between two seemingly unconnected images. In other words, a normally inarticulate connection occurs wherein the two unrelated species are each transferred to a different genus. Aristotle notes the capacity for this phenomenon, “To cast forth seed-corn is called ‘sowing;’ but to cast forth its flame, as said of the sun, has no special name. This nameless act, however, stands in just the same relation to its object, sunlight, as sowing to seed corn. Hence the expression, ‘sowing around a god-created flame’” (Poetics

1457b24-30). The poet draws out a connection to make what is otherwise unsayable, sayable. The sayability of a thing, however, gets at something deeper than merely assigning symbols to what was previously unassigned.

The switching of the species under a different genus becomes all the more striking when one looks to Aristotle’s formulation of essence and definition in Book Zeta of Metaphysics. By essence Aristotle means what a thing is itself. What is essential to a thing is what the thing must have for it to be the thing that it is. For instance, what is essence of a human can be expressed as rational animals.

In Chapter 12, Aristotle investigates the unity of definitions like rational animal. For Aristotle, a definition consists of a genus and the differentiae, or “the formula which contains the differentiae…” (Metaphysics 1038a29-30). Further, “differentiae make the species,” (Metaphysics 1038a7). That is to say that the differentiae are the unique traits that mark different species. Therefore, in the definition of a thing, there are two defining features, the genus, and the species. For humans, the differentiae would be rationality which distinguishes them from among their genus of animals. Aristotle introduces another kind of causal definition in Posterior Analytics, but for the sake of simplicity that will not be mentioned here.

Aristotle argues in Chapter 4 of Book Zeta that “‘definition’, like ‘what a thing is’... means substance and a ‘this,’” ( Metaphysics 1030a18-19). In other words, a definition is getting at what a thing is or its substance. Later in the chapter, he states, “But it does not matter in which of the two ways one likes

to describe the facts; this is evident, that definition and essence in the primary and simple sense belong to substances” ( Metaphysics 1030b3-5). Thus, it becomes clear that a thing’s essence, or its whatness, is directly tied to a thing’s definition. For Aristotle, a thing’s definition is how one can express the essence of a thing through language.

It should start to become clear that the transference of a species to a different genus that happens in metaphor has a direct relationship to a thing’s essence. Indirectly, as this is the only way the unsayable can be spoken, the poet, in switching the species to a different genus has changed what would be the usual formula of the thing’s definition. However, because the genus-species relationship is so fundamental to the expression of essence it is not merely the formula that has changed but the expression of the essence of that thing too. As the Hunter College Professor and linguist Samuel Levin puts it “The genus/species relationship involved in the metaphoric function… reflects fundamentally…an ontological classification” (Levin 12).

It might seem right to say in grasping a different formulation of the expression of a thing’s essence, each thing has been taken out of its respective contexts and the reader is forced to directly confront what the thing is and return it to an intelligible context. It would seem right to say then that the metaphor is only necessary insofar as it redirects one toward the definition again. In that sense, metaphor becomes unnecessary if nothing more than a helpful tool when one becomes oblivious to the definition of a thing. However, this process does not go far enough

to explain the profundity of poetry. Metaphor is not merely a superficial change of a thing’s formulation so one must reorder the pieces to find its essence again. The expression of a thing’s essence is grasped as something separate from the expression that arises from the definition formula. But how can one be sure that a different expression of essence affords a new insight separate from a definition’s expression?

As has been made clear, definition is central to essence for Aristotle. However, to say that definition is simply the essence of a thing would be to misunderstand both what Aristotle means and his philosophical process. Instead, Aristotle uses definition to mark with certainty what he means by essence and what things have it. In his investigation of essence, he concludes that “Nothing, then, which is not a species of a genus will have an essence” (Metaphysics 1030a10-12). If nothing that is not a species of a genus can have an essence, then it becomes easiest to talk about essence by using definition which explicitly outlines both. In that sense, a definition is not simply the essence of a thing, but the most pedagogically rich and easily understood way to talk about essence. The role of definition in relation to essence is made clearer by Aristotle when he says, “The formula, therefore, in which the term itself is not present but its meaning is expressed, this is the formula of the essence of each thing” ( Metaphysics 1029b19-20). Here, “express” is of extreme significance since, as Aristotle says, the term itself is never present. For a definition to express is for it to convey as intelligible an understanding of “what [a thing] is said to be in virtue

of itself” as language allows ( Metaphysics 1029b14). Again, “definition is the formula of the essence” ( Metaphysics 1031a12). A definition can only formulate what the essence of a thing is. In that sense, it must always be indirect. That leaves open the possibility that there is another tool of language (i.e., metaphor) that can express what a thing is in of itself or its essence.

It seems quite clear that metaphor does not create a proper formula in the strict sense, and therefore is not a definition (Metaphysics 1031a6-7). Of course, this is true. Metaphor and definition are not the same tools of language and do different things, although both deal explicitly with species and genera for Aristotle. When expressing essence through definition only a properly formulated definition can express it. Similarly, essence can only be expressed in an appropriate metaphor. If a metaphor is appropriate, that is to say, if it can be intuitively understood, then the essence it expresses must be actual insofar as it must have actuality for it to be intelligible.

For Aristotle, to grasp a thing, i.e., the expression of a thing’s essence, it must be actual because for the mind to grasp something the thing it grasps must share the mind’s actuality. As Aristotle puts in De Anima, “Mind is itself thinkable in exactly the same way as its objects are. For in the case of objects which involve no matter, what thinks and what is thought are identical,”(De Anima III.4.430a5-7). By objects that have no matter, Aristotle means forms of things or a thing’s definition. Therefore, for the mind to grasp the expression of a thing’s essence it requires that the thing must also be actual.

If that were not the case, then there would be nothing to think about. That is why Aristotle states that thinking is like perceiving insofar as thinking must be “a process in which the soul is acted upon by what is capable of being thought…” (De Anima III.492a15). Therefore, the process of thinking cannot be one-sided. For anything to be thought the mind must act on it and the object of thinking must act on the mind. In acting the object of thought must be an actuality, otherwise it could not act.

As has thus been determined, the expression of a thing’s essence that metaphor gives must be actual. Since the metaphor is a different formulation from the definition the expressions cannot be the same. Given that each expression must be a separate actuality it must also be the case that each is giving a different insight into what the essence of a thing is.

However, there is a further relevant distinction between actualities and movements that will clarify the role of metaphors as necessary in understanding a thing’s essence. The immaterial apprehension of a thing is an actuality since the grasp is immediate. Aristotle gives the example that “it is the same thing that at the same time has seen and is seeing, or is thinking and has thought” and so it can be called an actuality (Metaphysics 1048b33-34). In other words, to grasp a thing immediately would be what Aristotle considers an actuality. Grasping an appropriate metaphor comes immediately. Further, the act of understanding is a continuous one. Once you understand something you continuously understand similarly to seeing. Therefore, understanding the expression of essence is an actuality for Aristotle.

Unlike the immediacy that comes with grasping expression in metaphor or definition, an essence cannot be grasped immediately by its successful expression through definition or metaphor. Instead, it is something for which multiple parts i.e., metaphor and definition must be acquired so that it can be understood. In other words, an essence requires a process of learning to grasp. That would make grasping essence a movement instead of an actuality since “it is not true that at the same time we are learning and have learnt” (Metaphysics 1048b24-25). Thus, to actualize one’s understanding as a movement and understand a thing’s essence fully, one must grasp each aspect of the thing. Otherwise, one does not have complete knowledge, and their understanding remains merely potential.

This brings out a significant epistemic concern regarding essence. Since it has been claimed that definition does not give us the full essence it must be made clear what is required to know a thing’s essence for Aristotle. If definition seems to be exhaustive, then metaphor loses its ontological necessity. Metaphor would become nothing more than what University of Scranton professor and Aristotle scholar Christopher Hauser calls “in itself accidents” (Hauser 3). Hauser defines in itself accidents as necessary features that are non-essential to a thing. In Essence, Definition, and Scientific Inquiry in Aristotle, Hauser gives the example that “necessarily, human beings are capable of finding things funny (an in itself accident of human beings) because, necessarily, human beings have a rational soul (the basic essence, or part of the basic essence, of a human being) and the capacity to find things funny is a

capacity which follows from and is explained by something’s having a rational soul” (Hauser 11).

Definition for Aristotle is what gives the most basic account that explains the characteristics of a thing and thus what is essential. If definitions were exhaustive, it seems metaphors would merely express a necessary non-essential feature that can be explained by the essential features.

Hauser maintains an Explanationist

Interpretation perspective and argues that the key insight from such a perspective is that “one can identify what a kind’s essence is by identifying what feature(s) of the kind explain why it has the in itself accidents that it does” (Hauser 12). In other words, for a feature of a thing to be essential to that thing, it must somehow causally explain the necessary but non-essential features that thing has. If some necessary feature of a thing cannot be explained causally by some more necessary feature, then it must be itself essential.

What is essential to a thing must explain its non-essential necessary features. However, the strict formula of definition that Aristotle gives, a species and a genus, cannot account for all the essential aspects of things. Therefore, other things must also be able to express the aspects of essence that cannot be accounted for species-genus definition. For instance, Hauser notes that “one should consider whether the kind has a cause other than itself, for if it does, then the cause is to be included in the essence which explains why it has the in itself accidents that it does” (Hauser 12). Aristotle’s species-genus definition cannot explain the thing’s cause. He introduces causal definition in the Posterior Analytics, however, that

definition is also limited by the salient casual features (Charles 245-7). Even Aristotle’s casual definition cannot account for each of the four causes of a thing (material, efficient, formal, and final). As Yale philosophy professor David Charles puts it, “The relevant type of causation is constrained by demands which flow from the theory of definition” (Charles 247). For instance, the casual definition might have to explain the efficient causation of a thing, that is what brought it into existence, but not the final causation of a thing, that is the end that a thing is direct toward. Both of these causes, however, could explain necessary features of a thing making them equally relevant to its essence.

It must be the case, then, that one must learn the other ways that essence is expressed to have a full understanding of it. One could argue that an account of the thing outside of the strict structure of Aristotle’s definition could include such an account without resorting to the insight of metaphor. Yet, the process of investigation, or learning, through which one comes to an understanding of the fullest account requires the investigation of poetry for the most robust understanding insofar as poetry provides an actual expression of a thing’s essence.

Although it must be true that the expression of essence that metaphor gives is actual and necessary, it may seem puzzling what metaphor can add to the definition. Since the expressed essence is actual and each part of the expression of essence is required for full knowledge, metaphor must add something. To re-emphasize, what is significant about metaphor is that it says the

unsayable. For Aristotle, it does so by making connections to things that otherwise do not seem to be connected. Through metaphor, the essence’s expression is linked to some aspect of another thing to show a quality about the thing that otherwise would not be intelligible. In the case of expressing a thing’s essence, metaphor must contribute to the causal account of the necessary non-essential characteristics of a thing.

To make it clear that metaphor has the explanatory capabilities required of it, it is necessary to revisit the example of the faces in the metro and the petals on the bough. To reiterate, the species face under the genus human quality is transferred with the species petal under the genus part of a plant. In that transfer, a connection is made between the faces and the petals, and a new expression of essence is given. The essence’s expression is so fundamental it is indemonstrable and cannot be exactly re-articulated through prose. To try is to shove the unsayable into the unequipped rigidity of analytic language. For the sake of the argument, an attempt must still be made to extract the insights.

Since a well-crafted metaphor relies on the connection between the two things being transferred, that is what should be examined. For both objects of the metaphor, there is a more obvious element and a more obscure element that can only be realized through the mechanic of the metaphor. For the crowd what is obvious is the inherent chaos that comes with a large group of people. For the petals what is obvious is the quintessential beauty of a delicate part of a flower laying gently on the branch of a tree. Each obvious

component in the metaphor is the obscure component within its pair and therefore the insight that is expressed.

For faces then, there must be something about them that is delicate which explains the necessary but not essential effect that can be viewed in crowds. The same must also be true for the petals. There must be something essentially chaotic about them to explain the necessary, but not essential effect that Pound alludes to in their being on the tree bough. Again, these essential features are beyond definition and are difficult to articulate. There is potential to draw out these particular instances and make them more concrete. However, it is their nature to elude sayability, which is why they rely on metaphor necessarily for their being expressed. As is the case, then, an appeal to intuition must be made. Intuitively, these essential features feel right. It would be absurd for them not to since the metaphor is appropriate and therefore intelligible. These intuitions are not baseless either. They are supported in the entirety of the work that has been done to establish their validity in this paper. Paradoxically, it is within the unsayability of these expressions of essence that they gain their significance. In going beyond the confines of the definition formula they achieve something otherwise impossible.

In that sense, one could make the argument that metaphor goes beyond definition in connecting beyond the bounds of the species’ genus. However, it seems most likely that for metaphor to be grasped, one must already have some understanding of a thing’s definition. Levin argues the opposite. Instead, he thinks that although the relationship between

species and genus is a priori ontologically, we still require some experience to discover them (Levin 5). If Levin is right, it is the case that metaphor can be more significant to the understanding of essence than definition. For Levin, metaphor is taking up a disclosive role insofar as it reveals, or expresses, something to be learned about a thing ontologically.

Another plausible argument for metaphor’s ontological priority is that it can capture far more of the thing’s essence than a definition can. In other words, the combinations of comparison for a thing in metaphor are much more extensive, and therefore more exhaustive in getting one closer to actualizing an understanding of a thing’s essence. For instance, faces can be compared to petals on a tree bough, but also drops of light bleeding through a lace curtain, or blades of long grass blowing on an ocean dune. There are as many insights from metaphors as there are insightful comparisons.

The argument of this paper, however, is not to show that metaphor is more, or most significant in discerning essence. Instead, it is to confirm its ontological relevance. So, though it is entirely possible to argue that it has priority over definition, metaphor is at least necessary for actualizing one’s understanding of a thing’s essence. By furthering an understanding of Aristotle’s structure of metaphor in conversation with Metaphysics and De Anima, poetry is shown to have more at stake than mere pleasure. By answering the epistemological questions that arose, and by borrowing from Hauser’s and Levin’s analyses, it is sufficiently clear that metaphor expresses essence with ontological necessity. That is to say, the feat

of the comparison that poetry achieves is not flamboyance. Instead, the genius required is invaluable in saying the unsayable, as it is required for a true understanding of the world around us. «

WORKS CITED

Aristotle. De Anima. Translated by J.A. Smith, Oxford Clarendon Press, 1931.

Aristotle. Metaphysics. Translated by W.D. Ross, Princeton University Press, 1985.

Aristotle. Poetics. Translated by Ingram Bywater, Princeton University Press, 1985.

Aristotle. Posterior Analytics. Translated by Jonathan Barnes, 2nd ed., Clarendon Press, 2002.

Aristotle. Rhetoric. Translated by W. Rhys Roberts, Dover Publications, 2004.

Charles, David. Aristotle on Meaning and Essence Oxford University Press, 2002.

Hauser, Christopher. ESSENCE, DEFINITION, AND SCIENTIFIC INQUIRY IN ARISTOTLE. Rutgers University Press, 2020.

Hauser, Christopher “Aristotle’s Explanationist Epistemology of Essence.” Metaphysics, vol. 2, no. 1, 2019, p. 26–39.

Kirby, John T. “Aristotle on Metaphor.” The American Journal of Philology, vol. 118, no. 4, 1997, pp. 517–54. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org /stable/1562051. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.

Levin, Samuel R. “Aristotle’s Theory of Metaphor.” Philosophy & Rhetoric, vol. 15, no. 1, 1982, pp. 24–46. JSTOR, http://www jstor org /stable/4023 7305. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.

Swiggers, Pierre. “Cognitive Aspects of Aristotle’s Theory of Metaphor.” Glotta, vol. 62, no. 1/2, 1984, pp. 40–45. JSTOR, http://www jstor org /stable/40 266648. Accessed 4 Dec. 2024.

A Princely Beast and a Beastly Prince: Contrasting Shrek and Lord Farquaad in Shrek Through the Lens of the “Beauty and the Beast” Tale Type

CALLIE SALAZAR

THE “BEAUTY and the Beast” tale type, first made popular by Jeanne-Marie Leprince de Beaumont, is often described as a “tale as old as time” due to its persistence in mainstream media for hundreds of years. The story of a man cursed to take an unintelligent and ugly form until he finds a woman who will love him for his kindness alone has proven versatile, with a plethora of storytellers adapting this tale type over the years. One such adaptation is Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson’s 2001 animated film Shrek. At first glance, the film may not seem particularly noteworthy to the scholarly community. It appears to be just another

generic (albeit incredibly commercially successful) children’s movie, riddled with lowbrow humor and pop culture references. However, beneath these layers lies a fractured fairytale that pays homage to “Beauty and the Beast” while turning some of its conventions inside out. In the film, the titular ogre Shrek lives a solitary life in his swamp until he rescues and gets to know Princess Fiona. Their relationship is founded on a mutual respect for each other and an enjoyment of one another’s company.

On the other hand, the film’s antagonist, Lord Farquaad, is obsessed with order, even going as far as removing ‘imperfect’ fairytale creatures

CALLIE SALAZAR is a sophomore English major and Psychology minor from Redondo Beach, California. She is a lifelong lover of animated movies and firmly believes that these stories are worth discussing, especially in an academic setting. She also loves tracing the connections between different stories, hence why she eagerly wrote about the ties between the “Beauty and the Beast” fairytale and Shrek in Dr. Alexandra Neel’s “Disciplinary Research” class.

from their homes to create a so-called perfect world for himself. He treats Fiona similar to how he treats the fairytale creatures and his subjects: like an object. He only values her as a way to the throne (as it is established that marrying a princess will make him a king) and wants nothing to do with her when he learns that she is cursed to transform into an ogre at night. Despite key differences in their worldview, actions, and relationships with others, Shrek is frequently branded a beast because of his appearance, while Farquaad insists on labeling those who are different from him as beasts despite his own beastly actions.

Shrek has attracted some scholarly attention in recent years, but the pre-existing literature inadequately explains the nature of beastliness in the film. The scholarship surrounding Shrek either interprets Fiona’s transformation through a strictly feminist lens (Maria Takolander and David McCooey), views Shrek and Fiona’s relationship as an emblem of commodity culture (Lewis Roberts), or centers heavily on the film as a disability narrative (Jordan Fyfe and Katie Ellis). These analyses focus minimally on the differences between Shrek and Farquaad, particularly regarding their views of their world and their relationships with Fiona, and although Takolander and McCooey do reference the film’s similarities to the “Beauty and the Beast” tale type, they do so from a restrictive feminist viewpoint. Overall, the feminist and disability-centered analyses that are most prevalent in the literature surrounding Shrek uses a narrow scope that creates a limited understanding of the film’s message regarding the nature of beastliness. As exemplified by the contrast between Shrek

and Farquaad in regard to their relationships with those around them and Fiona, the film Shrek both retells the “Beauty and the Beast” tale type and subverts many of its tropes, suggesting that the real beasts are not those who are perceived as dangerous or ugly but those who treat others like objects.

One major difference between Shrek and Farquaad is the way they view and are viewed by other people and creatures, with Shrek initially seeing people as hostile toward him because of his appearance and Farquaad seeing those around him as tools to use in the construction of his perfect world. Shrek believes that the world will always see him as an ugly and dangerous creature despite his solitary existence in a swamp. This is exemplified through the film’s opening sequence, in which shots of Shrek doing ogre-like versions of ordinary tasks such as taking a shower, cleaning his home, and eating dinner are juxtaposed with shots of villagers lighting torches and grabbing pitchforks, preparing to attack Shrek (Shrek 01:33–03:30). Even though he is engaging in simple domestic tasks and is not endangering others in doing so, people view him as a beastly threat merely because of the stereotype that those who look like Shrek are violent and dangerous freaks. While the invaders are strategizing on how best to attack Shrek, one admits that he fears what Shrek could do to them, suggesting that he may grind their bones to make his bread. Shrek, who has been listening to their conversation the whole time, responds that giants grind bones to make bread, while ogres, among other things, squeeze the jelly from people’s eyes (Shrek 03:40–04:04). While

doing so, Shrek explicitly refers to ogres as “they,” not “I.” According to the stereotypes the villagers formed about Shrek based solely on his appearance, he will brutally harm them. However, Shrek has no intention of doing such things and only wants to scare the villagers so they will leave him in peace. Others see him as a violent beast, but through his choice of language, he separates himself from the stereotypes of ogres and from the beastly identity forced onto him. Despite this conscious separation, however, Shrek reveals that he is acutely aware of others’ perceptions of him, and that their cruelty hurts more than he lets on: “People take one look at me and go, ‘AAH! Help! Run! A big stupid ugly ogre!’ They judge me before they even know me. That’s why I’m better off alone” (Shrek 47:36–47:50). The way others see Shrek and the stereotypical judgements they make as a result have a profound effect on how Shrek sees himself, motivating him to live a solitary (and lonely) life despite his actions being far from beastly.

In contrast to Shrek, Farquaad views others as either tools or obstacles that can either aid or hinder him in the construction of his perfect world. In Farquaad’s pursuit of perfection, he attempts to torture information out of the Gingerbread Man regarding the location of other fairytale creatures. When the Gingerbread Man calls him a monster for doing so, he responds with disgust, saying, “I’m not the monster here, you are. You and the rest of that fairytale trash poisoning my perfect world” (Shrek 16:45–16:52). The irony in this statement is that Farquaad utters it after he mocks and tortures a living being, and that he plans to use the information obtained via torture to forcibly

remove other living beings from their homes. Evidently, Farquaad views monstrousness as something determined by one’s appearance, a divergence from the norm he works so hard to establish, rather than something determined by one’s actions. When Shrek and Donkey arrive at Farquaad’s domain, they (along with the audience) are given a glimpse into what Farquaad’s perfect society may look like. Duloc is filled with even rows of identical white and blue houses, none of which deviate from the norm in any way (Shrek 21:13–21:25). This suggests that Farquaad’s utopia is a place where everything conforms to his established desires, a place void of anything different or unusual. Shrek and Donkey later locate an information booth proclaiming that Duloc, in its cleanliness and sterility, in its order and rules, is “a perfect place” (Shrek 21:44–22:12). A series of rules are then listed, implying that Duloc’s perfection hinges on the obedience of its citizens and visitors to these rules. This makes the subjects and visitors of Duloc cogs in Farquaad’s machine, building blocks in the construction of his ideal society. This is further emphasized through Farquaad’s use of cue cards to prompt desired behaviors in his subjects. One such use is calling for applause immediately following Farquaad’s proclamation that “[s]ome of [Farquaad’s subjects] may die” while attempting to save Fiona from her dragon-guarded tower, “but it’s a sacrifice [Farquaad is] willing to make” (Shrek 23:07–23:10). This willingness to sacrifice the lives of his subjects to achieve his goal of becoming king further underscores the way Farquaad views those around him: as items he can utilize to move closer to his idea of perfection, regardless of the damage these

‘items’ may sustain in the process. Overall, Shrek’s understanding that others will see him as a beast merely because of his appearance contrasted with Farquaad’s denial that he is a beast despite his cruel and objectifying treatment of others, underscores how beasts are not those who are judged for their appearance but those who view others as obstacles or tools with no regard for their feelings or safety.

Another significant difference between Shrek and Farquaad is their relationship with Fiona: where Shrek’s relationship with Fiona is characterized by a mutual enjoyment of each other’s company, Farquaad only saw her as a means of getting to the throne, and by association, one step closer to the perfection he desires. Shrek views Fiona as a companion and friend once he looks past her being a princess and she looks past him being an unconventional savior. This is conveyed through scenes of Shrek and Fiona trekking back to Duloc while enjoying each other’s company. Their interactions are characterized by playful teasing, natural dialogue, and laughter from both parties, and it is established that both characters feel free to be themselves around the other person. Fiona, for example, feels comfortable engaging in behaviors that would not be considered proper for a princess, such as loudly belching after a good meal (Shrek 51:01). She does not feel pressure to hide an improper, imperfect side of herself while around Shrek, conveying her genuine connection with him. Shrek, meanwhile, feels comfortable inviting Fiona to his swamp so she can sample his cooking, which she expresses interest in (Shrek 58:28–58:36). Fiona judging Shrek based on his personality rather than his appearance and determining that he is not a

beast allows Shrek to forge a genuine connection with her and move away from his lonely lifestyle. Shrek and Fiona’s mutual interest in one another and their genuine interactions emphasize how they come to view each other as cherished companions.

In contrast, Farquaad views Fiona as his perfect queen, a path to the throne, and the key to his perfect world. When Farquaad decides to marry Fiona, he declares that she is “perfect” even though all he knows of her is her appearance and a few sentences describing her personality (Shrek 19:47). He then announces that upon marrying Fiona, “Duloc will finally have the perfect king” (Shrek 20:01–20:03). As seen through his statements, Farquaad values Fiona both for appearance, which matches his definition of a perfect queen, and her role in helping him create a perfect world. Farquaad’s opinion of Fiona is further revealed through Fiona’s wedding dress. Farquaad has the dress created for her before he meets her, meaning it is based solely on how he envisions his perfect queen. The dress is white with pastel pink accents, but neither of these colors are present anywhere on Fiona’s outfit (Shrek 48:40). Rather, Fiona wears a bright green gown with gold and red accents. The disconnect between the gown of Farquaad’s perfect queen and the gown chosen by Fiona emphasizes how Farquaad prioritizes his vision for his bride, a vision created before he’s even spoken to her, over who Fiona actually is, and how she has no value to him outside of her supposed perfection. Farquaad’s desire shifts when Fiona transforms into an ogre after the sun sets on their wedding day. He is revolted by his bride’s appearance, referring to her as “it” and “that

thing” (Shrek 1:18:08–1:18:17). This use of language emphasizes how Farquaad immediately dehumanizes Fiona upon discovering that she is no ‘perfect queen.’ If she’s not perfect, she is unworthy of being referred to as a person and is instead just like the fairytale creatures he views as stains on his perfect world. Once Fiona stops being a tool, she becomes an obstacle he plans to deal with by putting her out of sight, as Farquaad then vows to lock Fiona in the same tower Shrek just rescued her from for the rest of her days (1:18:41–1:18:46). Evidently, Farquaad sees Fiona as an object he can put away when she is no longer useful to him, not a person to love as an equal.

Despite not wanting to be married to Fiona after she stops matching his definition of perfection, Farquaad claims their marriage is binding, making him a king. He only wants the rewards that come from being married to Fiona, such as becoming king or being the husband of a perfect queen. It is fitting, then, that Farquaad’s final words are those he has lived by: “I will have order! I will have perfection!” He bellows “I will have” one more time before being cut off by the dragon that eats him (Shrek 1:18:48–1:18:55). Farquaad’s final words were characterized by both a drive to achieve perfection at any cost and by the act of having. This demonstrates his belief that one has an object, and they can do what they please with the objects they have. In this sense, Farquaad believes he has his subjects, the fairytale creatures, and even Fiona, and he can ultimately use them to help him build his perfect world or remove them from his line of sight whenever he wants, because to him, they are his objects. Farquaad’s objectifying view of

Fiona and others, especially when contrasted with Shrek’s holistic view of Fiona, underscores how the beastly one is not a so-called ugly and monstrous ogre but a man who treats others like tools that he aspires to control.

Shrek functions as a retelling of the “Beauty and the Beast” tale type while simultaneously subverting many of its tropes, which allows the film to assert its stance on the true definition of beastliness. In the original fairytale, the Beast states that because of his frightening appearance and lack of intelligence, he “know[s] very well that [he is] nothing but a beast” (de Beaumont 45). This suggests that the original fairytale defines beastliness as unintelligence and ugliness. Similarly, while she is an ogre, Fiona refers to herself as an “ugly beast,” implying that she too correlates beastliness with ugliness. The difference between these two portrayals of beastliness is that the Beast stops being considered a beast after he transforms into a handsome prince, affirming the idea that beastliness is firmly linked to appearance, while Fiona remains an ogre at the film’s end but no longer sees herself as a beast, severing the tie between beastliness and appearance. This difference suggests that in Shrek, it is not one’s appearance that determines whether or not one is a beast. Additionally, both “Beauty and the Beast” and Shrek emphasize the importance of kindness, but the relationship between kindness and beastliness differs in each tale. De Beaumont suggests that the Beast’s kindness transcends intelligence and appearance in terms of importance, emphasizing both the value of the Beast’s kind nature and Beauty’s ability to see it. In doing so, however, de Beaumont implies that kindness

can cancel out or overrule beastliness, not that beastliness is caused by a lack of kindness. In contrast, at one point in the film, Farquaad is referred to by the Gingerbread Man as a ‘monster’ for his cruelty toward fairytale creatures. Despite his intelligence and non-beastly appearance, his actions indicate that Farquaad is the real beast due to his lack of kindness toward others, firmly cementing the film’s stance that beastliness is caused by cruel actions, not overruled by kindness despite ugliness. Another major similarity between “Beauty and the Beast” and Shrek is the origin of the Beast and Fiona’s appearances. The Beast was “condemned” by an “evil fairy” to remain hideous and witless until he found a woman willing to overlook these qualities in favor of his kind heart, suggesting that de Beaumont’s tale views beastliness as the product of a curse (49). Similarly, Fiona’s transformation is also caused by a curse, but hers placed upon her as a child. However, Fiona remains an ogre when the spell is broken with the power of true love, while in the original fairytale, the curse’s breaking results in the transformation of the Beast into a handsome human prince. Fiona expresses confusion regarding her new form, saying, “I’m supposed to be beautiful” (Shrek 1:20:39–1:20:40). To this, Shrek responds, “[b]ut you are beautiful” (Shrek 1:20:43–1:20:45). Here, a form often viewed as beastly is the product of a happily-ever-after: of true love. It is caused by the lifting of a curse rather than the casting of one. What was once referred to as beastly is reframed as beauty, as made evident by Shrek’s response, and this further solidifies the film’s message that beastliness is not tied to appearance. Overall, Shrek and “Beauty and the Beast”

have many similarities, but it is through their differences that Shrek conveys its message: that beastliness is determined by unkind actions rather than unattractive appearances.

One of the many merits of Shrek as a film is that it, like ogres and onions, has layers. Peel back the fart jokes, the pop culture references, and the cultural phenomenon this movie has become, and one will find both a retelling and a subversion of the “Beauty and the Beast” tale type. Peel back that layer to find a redefinition of what it means to be a beast. Where the original fairytale described beasts as those who were unintelligent and ugly, Shrek labels beasts as those who disregard the feelings and needs of others, and those who treat other living beings like objects to use when needed, and to put away when no longer wanted. This layered motif extends to Shrek and Farquaad as well. If one peels away the layer of Shrek’s unconventional appearance, they find a kindhearted individual capable of making genuine and mutual connections with others. They discover the heart of a prince under an appearance associated with beastliness. With Farquaad, if viewers peel back his princely veneer, they will discover a beastly and unkind heart that is so dedicated to the vision of a perfect world that the lives of those caught in the crossfire are devalued and diminished.

The tale of a beastly prince and princely beast emphasizes that beastliness is not caused by appearance but by personality and actions. The film also calls upon viewers to look closer at the way they treat others to see if their actions align with Shrek’s, cherishing genuine connection, or with Farquaad’s, using others like tools or bypassing them like obstacles.

Shrek illuminates the importance of not judging others before they have a chance to be truly known as people—not based on their outward appearance but based on their character and their actions, which truly determines whether or not one deserves to be called a beast. «

WORKS CITED

Carter, Angela. “The Tiger’s Bride.” The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Maria Tatar, W.W. Norton and Company, 2017, pp. 58–74. de Beaumont, Jeanne-Marie Leprince. “Beauty and the Beast.” Translated by Maria Tatar. The Classic Fairy Tales, edited by Maria Tatar, W.W. Norton and Company, 2017, pp. 39–50.

Fyfe, Jordan, and Katie Ellis. “Subverting the Monster.”

M/C Journal, vol. 24, no. 5, Oct. 2021, doi:10 5204 /mcj 2828

Roberts, Lewis. “‘Happier Than Ever to Be Exactly What He Was:’ Reflections on Shrek, Fion and the Magic Mirrors of Commodity Culture.” Children’s Literature in Education, vol. 45, no. 1, Feb. 2013, pp. 1–16, doi:10 1007/s10583-013-9197-4

Shrek. Directed by Andrew Adamson and Vicky Jenson, Dreamworks Pictures, 2001.

Takolander, Maria, and David McCooey. “‘You Can’t Say No to the Beauty and the Beast’: Shrek and Ideology.” Papers: Explorations into Children’s Literature, vol. 15, no. 1, Jan. 2005, pp. 5–14, doi:10 21153/pecl2005vol15no1art1255

Mother of Rhetoric: Walker, Kogawa, and Yamanaka’s Maternal Body Imagery as Reclamation

ASHELYN WAGNER

ANN YAMANAKA’S “Name Me Is” are powerful narratives detailing the complexities of female relationships and the difficulties of commanding one’s autonomy through femininity. While Walker depicts transformative moments from her childhood, her mother’s life, and those of her ancestors, Kogawa’s autobiographical-inspired novel follows Naomi Nakane’s traumatic experiences in internment camps during World War II and the consequences of her mother’s disappearance. Additionally, Yamanaka illustrates adolescent Lucy’s journey toward gaining agency over her name and body as a Hawaiian local. Each author employs vivid body imagery—specifically that of the maternal body—when writing about their paths

toward freedom and uninhibited expression for themselves and their maternal figures. All three authors challenge the saint-like, delicate imagery that canonically surrounds the maternal body, instead, providing raw, uncomfortable, and vulnerable illustrations. In Walker’s essay, Kogawa’s novel, and Yamanaka’s poem, body imagery subverts expectations of traditional maternal femininity to evoke a visceral reaction and express defiance. Moreover, the depiction of the maternal body in each text is specific to the discrimination that each character faces as a woman of color—Walker is a Black woman, Kogawa’s Naomi is Japanese-Canadian, and Yamanaka’s Lucy is Asian American Pacific Islander (AAPI). Ultimately, each work is a text

ASHELYN WAGNER is a graduate student in the English M.A. Literature program from Portland, Oregon. She’s also an English Teaching Fellow who teaches Rhetorical Arts for first-year LMU students and a graduate writing tutor! She enjoys reading and writing about eco-literature, eco-feminism, and eco-rhetoric. Outside of the classroom, Wagner loves immersing herself in nature, trying new restaurants, and spending time with friends, family, and her dog. This essay was written for Dr. Ching’s class, “Asian American Rhetoric: Interdisciplinary Approaches.”

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of reclamation, in which this imagery serves as a means of regaining agency over one’s body by confronting the white patriarchal societies in which they are oppressed.

The human body is a center for expression and, therefore, reimagining these texts expands meaning. Even the body as an entity that takes up space—that is space—contributes to one’s understanding of and relationship with the wider world, especially considering that one’s body is intertwined with society, history, and culture. Rhetorician and professor Kelly Moreland explains how the body is also inherently tied to history and culture, stating:

“When considering the body as space, we might think of this notion as a historical-cultural embodiment. Such a lens suggests that rhetorical bodies carry traces of historical and cultural notions of ‘the body,’ of embodiment” (Moreland 409–410).

Walker, Kogawa, and Yamanaka are all women of color (WOC)—their bodies are marginalized, objectified, and politicized endlessly by white patriarchal standards, expectations, and law, thereby, demonstrating the magnitude and long-lasting effects of systemic racism on maternal bodies of color. Their bodies perform as rhetorical agents—inscribing meaning and having meaning inscribed upon them—whether or not they intend to. Rhetoric of the physical body, especially those that are marginalized, creates meaning based on one’s cultural and sociopolitical background and experiences.

The body in literature also holds immense rhetorical capacity, as one’s body often holds symbolic meaning and has the power to incite change and evoke an emotional reaction from the reader. The maternal body is perhaps the

most striking example of the rhetorical power of body imagery:

When writers enlist mother-imagery, they appeal to the emotional force carried by the “mother;” in assuming the mantle of the Madonna, they cast out the spectacle of the Magdalen. The natural—that is, biological— link predicated by the mother-daughter bond reifies the attractiveness and power of the image (Labbe 6).

In literature across genres and disciplines, maternal figures are deified, made a spectacle of, and relegated to images of nourishment and nurture, which often snuffs out the capacity for individual desire and expression for maternal characters. Walker’s, Kogawa’s, and Yamanaka’s works challenge the stereotypes associated with maternal imagery while simultaneously transforming the maternal body into a site of creative freedom, expression, and defiance against the societal forces that aim to control their bodies and those of other women of color, forcing readers to reshape their perceptions of the maternal body and inspect their own potential biases.

In “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” Walker employs graphic body imagery of the Black maternal figure, shifting parts of the body that are dictated as private by white patriarchal ideologies into the public. In effect, Walker exposes the racist histories and experiences of Black women through a visual recounting that challenges dominant historical narratives. Walker references Jean Toomer’s account of Black women in the post-Reconstruction South, revealing how during his travels, “they became

more than ‘sexual objects,’ more even than mere women: they became ‘Saints’” (Walker 401) as well as “exquisite butterflies trapped in an evil honey” (402). Through quotation marks, Walker condemns Toomer’s depiction of Black women while exploring the common tropes of the time placed upon them by men. While it appears as though Toomer attempts to portray Black women as more than the sexual objects they were deemed to be by men for centuries, by placing both “sexual objects” as well as Toomer’s word choice of “Saints” in quotations, Walker expresses how these two characterizations run parallel to one another, arguing that Toomer’s deification of Black women is equally as harmful and only a means of expressing his own creative liberties rather than liberating Black women from stereotyped and single-faceted characters altogether. The same is true for his metaphorical comparison of Black women and “exquisite butterflies,” which paints Black women as fragile, weak, and untouchable creatures rather than whole, individual people. In contrast, Walker brings to attention the sexual abuse of her female ancestors and connects this trauma to motherhood with phrases such as “their work-worn sexually abused bodies” (402) and “her body broken and forced to bear children” (403). Violently charged diction such as “work-worn,” “abused,” “broken,” and “forced” is not only in direct juxtaposition to Toomer’s account but evokes gruesome, unsettling imagery in the mind of the reader. In effect, all readers, especially those who are white males, are forced to picture the horror that Black women had and continue to endure as Walker pushed their sexual trauma—a topic that is often hidden,

ignored, or considered a private matter—to the forefront of her narrative.

Walker’s body imagery is brutal and aggressive, discouraging readers from looking to ignorant tropes like Toomer’s and instead confronting the accurate histories. Like the autobiographical essay itself, Walker’s body imagery is exceptionally personal, even though she voices the countless stories of the abuse Black women face while claiming their stories as a part of her own identity and embodiment. According to author Lois Tyson, the focus on identity in writing by African American women is embodied in multiple recurring themes, including “the importance of Black women’s community for psychological survival…which includes relationships among grandmothers, mothers, and daughters” (Tyson 341). In calling attention to the sexual abuse of her ancestors through maternal imagery, Walker draws upon body imagery and rhetoric, not as a means of personal expression, but one that is historical and communal, tying her own identity to that of her female lineage. Moreover, by emphasizing how the personal must be made public through body imagery, she expresses a message of the defiance and strength of women of color that readers cannot ignore.

In Obasan, Kogawa, too, transforms traditional images of the maternal body, namely that of Mother Nature, into a monstrous creature in order to provide a visual description of the effects of sexual abuse and Canada’s attempt to control the bodies of Japanese and Japanese Canadians during internment. Throughout much of the novel, Naomi characterizes her relationship with her mother through nature, often evoking the image of Mother Nature with

phrases such as “a young branch attached by right of flesh and blood” and “Where she is rooted, I am rooted” (Kogawa 77). However, in one passage during which Naomi suffers a traumatic assault at the hands of her neighbor Mr. Gower, this image of her and her mother’s bodies shifts drastically, as she states, “I become other—a parasite on her body, no longer of her mind” (77). While images and references to Mother Nature often symbolize birth, nourishment, and the sustainment of life, here, Naomi describes her body as “parasit[ic]” to her mother, a word that conjures images of horrific flesh-eating, blood-sucking creatures. In effect, this image of her mother, once surrounded with benevolence and bounty like a tree, becomes one of decay and destruction, underscored by phrases such as “vines that strangle” and “digs a furrow under the bark of her skin” (77). Because of Mr. Gower’s abuse toward Naomi, Naomi’s body and that of her mother are depicted as irrevocably damaged and diseased, creating a disturbing image of the maternal body just as Walker does. Natural imagery as a rhetorical device often aids readers in visualizing and engaging with scenes on a familiar and sensory level. Therefore, by alluding to Mother Nature—a universal image— and then transforming it into one of violence and death, Kogawa tarnishes a figure that all readers recognize. Moreover, as Mother Nature is representative of her own mother in the scene, Naomi effectively tarnishes her image as well, depicting her mother as being ravaged by parasites, too. In effect, she fiercely illustrates the effects of abuse, in this case, that of a white man against a young Japanese Canadian girl, in a way that readers cannot ignore or pretend to

misunderstand. Moreover, the natural maternal imagery, in combination with the graphic content of the scenes, also brings light to the abuse faced by both Japanese Canadian and Japanese American women in internment camps as “women, who were already relegated to traditional Japanese gender roles, were even more vulnerable to sexual harassment, violence, and even murder in the camps. Women were discouraged from speaking out, and when they did, they were not taken seriously by the authorities” (Cheng). Through the vulnerability of the scene at hand, Kogawa not only brings to light the sexual assault Japanese Canadian women were subjected to but also gives a voice back to those forced into silence.

Scenes of abuse and destruction of the maternal body also translate into Japanese internment in a larger context, as Aunt Emily reveals in one of her letters that Japanese Canadian men and women were forcefully separated to “prevent further propagation of the species” (Kogawa 116). As with Naomi’s body and her mother’s, the bodies of interned Japanese and Japanese Canadian women are characterized by nature, as “propagation” typically refers to the breeding of plants or animals. This nature-related diction extends the metaphor of abuse and violation of maternal bodies to address the pain and loss of the Japanese Canadian community during World War II at the hands of the Canadian government, a primarily white-male body. Like the traumatic, personal nature of the novel’s content, Kogawa’s brutal, grisly body image of Naomi and her mother, characterized through natural imagery, serves as a tool to publicize the oppression of Japanese Canadian women. Therefore, Kogawa

refuses to allow the Canadian government to hide the accurate histories any longer.

In “Name Me Is,” Yamanaka employs female body imagery characterized by stereotypes used to justify the hypersexualization of and violence against Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women as a means of empowerment rather than victimization, in turn. This rhetorical strategy exposes the exploitation of AAPI women, reclaiming ownership over the AAPI female body and character as one that is beyond definition and control. The dehumanization and sexual assault inflicted upon Asian American and Pacific Islander women is a critical issue that transcends histories, types of media, and mediums. Much of this violence toward the AAPI community in the United States stems from immigration exclusion laws and racist immigration enforcement policies, which have led to harmful stereotypes as “AAPI women are continuously fetishized, exoticized, and objectified through hyper-sexualization” (Pillai 2). Moreover, this discrimination remains prevalent today, with films and literature perpetuating hypersexualized stereotypes while Asian American and Pacific Islander women and girls remain targets of hate crimes and sexual violence. While Lucy’s ethnicity is not specified, the poem’s setting and Hawaii Creole suggest that she is likely any one or combination of the pan-ethnic groups that settled or intermixed in Hawaii during the plantation era, including Asian immigrants, meaning Lucy can be categorized as Asian American. Moreover, although Lucy is only a young girl, much of the imagery surrounding her body is highly sexualized, which paints her in a light akin to the

maternal figures in Walker and Kogawa’s works. This is because, in male-dominated cultures around the world of the past and present, the sexual maturity of a woman is the moment at which she is subjugated to both marriage and motherhood. Therefore, despite the fact that Lucy herself is not a mother, the emphasis that the poem places on her reaching sexual maturity aligns her with motherhood and possessing a maternal body.

Lucy’s body imagery is sexualized in Yamanaka’s poem as a means of connection to selfhood and identity, taking the harmful stereotype of AAPI women as overtly sexual beings and transforming it to function as a sense of agency. In effect, Yamanaka also calls attention to the eroticization of Asian American and Pacific Islander bodies. Describing the moment Willy Joe burns her name into her back, Lucy states,

...I feel him burn me long, and my body squeeze first, then release the color gray… gray waves out of my eyes, in and out with the sweet smell of skin burning (Yamanaka 138).

Lucy’s encounter with Willy Joe is heavily sexual as the phrase “burning [her] long” evokes images of a sexual encounter while describing her body as “squeez[ing],” “releas[ing] the color gray,” and feeling “gray waves” “in and out” expresses the sensations of sexual pleasure. These descriptions serve to reinforce the idea that Lucy has reached sexual maturity, and, therefore, possesses a maternal body. In turn, Yamanaka surrounds Lucy’s body with

intimate imagery despite the fact that Willy Joe is consensually branding her. Yamanaka plays into the eroticization of AAPI women, drawing attention to the fact that across media, “Asian women are depicted as the objects of sexual desire but rarely as the subjects or agents of that desire” (Hu 334). Although Lucy is only an adolescent, her body is surrounded by sexual imagery without any indication of hesitation or conflict. Yamanaka focuses only on the physical sensations as though this depiction of Lucy’s body is commonplace, leaving the reader to accept this characterization without thought. Ultimately, the casual nature of Lucy’s sexualized body calls attention to the exploitation and exoticization of AAPI women and girls at the hands of media and the white patriarchal systems of the United States.

At the same time, maternal body imagery in each work also serves as the center of freedom in multiple capacities, encouraging Black, Asian, and Pacific Islander women to find spaces and mediums of freedom and self-expression. In “In Search of Our Mother’s Garden,” Walker also shifts images of the body commonly seen as public into the private to create space and advocate for Black women to find their creative spirit and liberty. Speaking on the necessity of depicting accurate, individualized Black female characters, Tyson writes,

[T]he representations of African American women generally were restricted to minor or stereotyped characters. As a result, Black women writers have been concerned, throughout their literary history, to portray Black women as real people with all the complexity and depth (Tyson 340).

Walker illustrates this divide between the male portrayal of Black women in literature and that of Black women themselves through her description of her mother as she gardens. She states:

She is radiant, almost to the point of being invisible—except as Creator: hand and eye… Ordering the universe in the image of her personal conception of Beauty…Her face, as she prepares the Art that is her gift, is a legacy of respect she leaves to me (Walker 408).

While body imagery associated with sexual assault is transformed from a private story into one that is unavoidably public, when referring to parts of her mother’s body that are typically perceived as public, such as her “hand[s],” “eye[s],” and “face,” Walker describes them as being almost “invisible,” placing these parts of her mother into the private. These are meant to be concealed and nourished. Moreover, these images of her mother’s body are connected to the divine, as they refer to her mother as “Creator” and one who “Order[s] the universe.” However, her mother’s godly or saint-like imagery is not tied to her body or a male-created characterization based on purity and fragility as they are in Toomer’s depiction. Instead, Walker’s spiritual illustration of her mother is grounded in her mother’s passions and creative expression. In capitalizing both “Creator” and “Art,” Walker further links the idea of the holiness and godliness of Black women to creativity and personal expression. This image is strengthened by the body parts connected to

work as well as the concept of creation becoming private and sacred. Therefore, Walker takes the stereotyped body imagery created by Toomer and transforms it into a message of creation and individuality that represents her mother as a whole and unique woman. Walker’s autobiographical work focuses on exposing the oppression of Black women and encouraging women of color to find their creative voices. In effect, she uses the same body imagery of the maternal Black woman to create a visual account that matches the form of her writing, strengthening her ability to reach female readers and resonate with them through words and imagery.

Similarly, in Obasan, womb imagery shifts from a space for childbirth into a means of empowerment through speech, ultimately advocating for the liberation of Japanese-Canadian women and their bodies. Kogawa’s novel begins with a poetic epigraph, in which she writes, “Beneath the grass the speaking dreams and beneath the dreams is a sensate sea. The speech that frees comes forth from that amniotic deep” (Kogawa). Through the phrases “sensate sea” and “that amniotic deep,” Kogawa strongly alludes to the womb as “amniotic,” referring to the fluid that surrounds a baby during pregnancy, cushioned and protected much like one floating in salt water or the ocean. Once again, Kogawa connects the maternal body to nature, in this case, referring to the womb and the sea. However, when combined with the word “sensate,” the “sea” becomes animated, as though it is a living organism able to feel and experience, just like a fetus in the womb. In turn, the “sensate sea” becomes a parallel

image to the “amniotic deep,” fostering a tone of security and strength since the sea is typically portrayed as an all-powerful natural force. This powerful imagery surrounding the maternal body does not adhere to patriarchal stereotyping in which the womb is linked only to childbirth. Instead, through parallel imagery with the ocean, the womb, which is often a symbol of the feminine body and spirit, acts as a beacon of strength, independence, and freedom like the natural force it is compared to, challenging the ideals set to keep women within their expected roles and characteristics. However, Kogawa takes this illustration of power a step further, as it is not a child that comes forth from the “amniotic deep” but instead “the speech that frees,” underlining this part of the female body as a space and creator of liberation for women rather than one that keeps them restrained within a domestic role. Like Walker, Kogawa takes a part of the female body—one’s reproductive anatomy—that a male-dominated society tries to keep private and hidden and turns it into an image of advocacy and change. Kogawa’s version of the womb is one that “frees” women and allows them to share their histories, just as she does in recounting stories of Japanese-Canadian incarceration during WWII. The maternal body imagery as a space of free speech and storytelling serves as a visual accompaniment to the novel itself as it centers around historically accurate accounts of Japanese internment in Canada. In addition, maternal body imagery centers on the histories and relationships of Japanese and Japanese-Canadian women, whose stories are often even further neglected and yet are

central to their survival during internment. As author Pamela Sugiman states:

Nisei women experienced internment within the context of family relationships as daughters, sisters, and, in a minority of cases, wives and mothers. Family relationships understandably were, and continue to be, important for the transmission of feelings, thoughts, and reflections on the war years (Sugiman 117).

Therefore, as she does with the imagery of herself and her mother, Kogawa employs womb imagery as a means of expelling patriarchal standards and oppression. She pushes this imagery to the literal forefront of her novel while uniting and empowering female readers of all backgrounds by turning it into a symbol for expression.

Similar to Walker and Kogawa’s works, “Name Me Is” uses sexualized body imagery as the moment of connection between Lucy and her sense of self. In effect, Lucy reclaims her name and identity as a local young woman in Hawaii. Following the branding, Lucy expresses her reaction. She states: “With my own fingers, / feel my name on my back /…I IS. / Ain’t nobody / tell me / otherwise” (Yamanaka 140). First, through the repetition of personal pronouns—“my own” and “my” between “name” and “back”—Yamanaka emphasizes how Lucy now feels ownership over herself following this encounter. She takes possession of her identity (her name) and her physical body (her fingers and back), demonstrating that she is not a passive observer of her experiences and maintains control over her identity.

Lucy then continues with the statement “I IS” written in all capitals to demonstrate the ferocity and strength of her sense of self to the point that she will not let anyone tell her otherwise. Furthermore, as “I IS” begins the poem’s final stanza, Yamanaka ensures that the final image the reader takes away is not how they perceive Lucy but how she sees herself. Moreover, Lucy does not provide a visual description in this stanza; she concludes with “IS,” a state-of-being verb. In effect, this image is not based on physicality but on nature or essence, which she now has agency over. Finally, these stanzas, and the entire poem, are written in Hawai’i Creole. The poem’s language, then, verbally reflects Lucy’s connection to her body and sense of self. In turn, Lucy’s body imagery not only critiques the hypersexualization of AAPI women but also serves as the rhetorical vehicle through which she commands agency and identity.

The works of Walker, Kogawa, and Yamanaka speak to the specific forms of oppression women in their communities of the past (and present) face while they redefine the meaning and rhetorical power of WOC bodies. For Alice Walker, body imagery redefines the “purpose” of the Black female body, eradicating stereotypes perpetuated by men such as Jean Toomer and demonstrating the wholeness and uniqueness of Black women like her mother as artists and creators. By weaving in body imagery that is equally intimate and subverting parts of the body that are considered private versus public, Walker provides visual elements that force readers to look, figuratively and literally, at the histories of Black women while creating a visual representation

of space where these women can foster their creative spirits. For Joy Kogawa, maternal body imagery is the conduit for Japanese-Canadian women to reclaim control over their bodies and those of their ancestors who suffered internment during World War II. The depiction of maternal body imagery in Obasan is specific to the oppression Japanese and Japanese-Canadian women faced during internment; the destruction of the Mother Nature figure that represents Naomi’s mother speaks to the fact that Japanese Canadians were viewed as subhuman and treated as such. This connection between Japanese-Canadian internment and body imagery continues through Kogawa’s transformation of the womb as the bearer of free speech and expression. In transforming the womb into a conduit of speech rather than a vehicle for childbearing, she redefines what the maternal body is relegated to, rejecting patriarchal expectations, and using it to tell the ignored or forgotten stories of her community. Finally, Yamanaka’s body imagery reframes the harmful stereotype that Asian American and Pacific Islander women are hypersexual beings, using this narrative as a source of connection to the self and drawing attention to the objectification of AAPI bodies. Through Lucy, Yamanaka brings to light the exoticization of AAPI women and girls, forcing readers to reflect on their own biases—even those that are unconscious—and bring to light the prominent issue of sexual abuse committed against WOC. At the same time, Lucy reclaims this harmful stereotype, and body imagery functions as a means of self-exploration, self-embodiment, and feeling comfortable with her femininity. Although

Yamanaka published Saturday Night at the Pahala Theatre in 1993, these issues of racism and misogyny by which AAPI peoples are disproportionately affected are still just as prominent.

At the same time, the message of transformation expressed in these works invites new pathways of thinking not only in the field of social justice but also in the classroom of young scholars. These pieces model traditional, stereotyped tropes of WOC found in canonized literature primarily written by white men and read in English classrooms across the United States. However, Walker, Kogawa, and Yamanaka reimagine maternal imagery through a regenerative lens of reclamation. If implemented as standard works in English education, these literary works can model for students how to reimagine oppressive tropes for feminist, multicultural, and postcolonial purposes, fostering critical thinking and forging connection to their own lives and experiences. Therefore, while addressing issues in literature may be a start, change must occur on the systemic level, starting with the educational sphere, where students can learn from and celebrate WOC authors while supporting WOC as a whole and their communities.

Alice Walker, Joy Kogawa, and Lois-Ann Yamanaka break down and transform characterizations of Black, Asian, and Pacific Islander women perpetuated by a white patriarchal society through captivating maternal body imagery. While Walker’s autobiographical essays, Kogawa’s novel, and Yamanaka’s poem are personal in their own right, by weaving in imagery that is equally intimate—that of the maternal body—each author provides visual

elements that push readers to acknowledge the oppression WOC face and reclaim their respective histories. Each author challenges patriarchal systems of oppression; however, their writing targets a female one, specifically women of color, which is showcased by imagery and content that breaks away from protecting the white-male perspective. As Julia Lee writes in Biting the Hand, “I had to relearn how to write. For most of my life, I’ve written for an imagined reader who is by default, white and elitist and old” (Lee 176). Dismissing the regulations set by men regarding a woman’s body and how it should be written about, these three authors provide powerful recounts of maternal bodies while also creating a visual representation of space where these women can foster their creative spirit. Ultimately, Walker’s, Kogawa’s, and Yamanaka’s body imagery provide a vivid illustration that articulates the necessity of expression—artistically, verbally, and physically—and their work undoubtedly encourages women of all backgrounds to do the same. «

WORKS CITED

Cheng, Judy. “Japanese American Women in the Internment Camps—Breaking the Chains.”

Breaking the Chains, 14 Feb. 2022, www.breaking thechainsmag org /japanese -american-women-in -the -internment- camps/ Kogawa, Joy. Obasan. Penguin, 2016.

Labbe, Jacqueline M. “The Romance of Motherhood: Generation and the Literary Text.” Romanticism on the Net, no. 26, May 2003, doi:10 7202/0056 98ar.

Lee, Julia. Biting the Hand: Growing Up Asian in Black and White America. Henry Holt and Company, 2023.

Moreland, Kelly A. “Toward a Rhetoric of Body as Space.” Peitho Journal, vol. 21, no. 2, 2019. Coalition of Feminist Scholars in the History of Rhetoric and Composition.

Pillai, Drishti. “The Rising Tide of Violence and Discrimination Against Asian American and Pacific Islander Women and Girls.” Stop AAPI Hate, https://stopaapihate org /wp - content/uploads/20 21/05/Stop -AAPI-Hate NAPAWF Whitepaper pdf. Accessed 23 Apr. 2024.

Sugiman, Pamela. “‘Days You Remember:’ Japanese Canadian Women and the Violence of Internment.” Sisters or Strangers?, University of Toronto Press, 2016, pp. 566–83, http://dx doi org /10 3138/978144 2625938-031

Tyson, Lois. Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide. Routledge, 2012.

Wadhia, Shoba Sivaprasad, and Margaret Hu. “Decitizenizing Asian Pacific American Women.” PennState Law, vol. 93, 2022.

Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Prose Open Road Media, 2011.

Yamanaka, Lois-Ann. Saturday Night at the Pahala Theater. Bamboo Ridge Press, 1993.

Afro-Diasporic Mutiny in Charles Johnson’s The Middle Passage and in Modern America

JADAN VINES

UNTIL TWO YEARS AGO, my answer to the horrifying question, Where is your family from?, was Mississippi and Arkansas. There aren’t many cultures around the world that have a communal lack of knowledge about their ancestry, yet the vast physical and cultural distance between Black Americans with historical roots in slavery and the places from which their ancestors were stolen, forever occupies the subconscious. In Charles Johnson’s 1990 novel, Middle Passage, freed slave Rutherford Calhoun closes that physical and cultural distance when he sails aboard The Republic alongside a white captain and crew tasked with illegally transporting African slaves

to American shores. While on this journey, Rutherford engages in a number of physical and mental mutinies that force him to question his alliance to Whiteness and Africanness. By analyzing the etymology and implications of the term mutiny in Johnson’s novel and in the context of modern America, this paper will seek to discover how a lack of cultural, physical, and ancestral proximity to genealogical origination may predetermine alliance to Whiteness.

MUTINY

When one thinks of the word “mutiny” in a modern context, it is often relegated to a violent, sea-based event that is reminiscent

JADAN VINES is a second-year graduate student at Loyola Marymount University pursuing her M.A. in English with an emphasis in Creative Writing. Hailing from Chicago, Vines has always felt a connection to stories of African diaspora, neurodivergence, and womanhood. Outside of the literary sphere, Vines enjoys analog photography, performing in plays and musicals, and binging animal documentaries. This essay was written for Dr. Robin Miskolcze’s course, “Reading the Ocean.”

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of the Pirates of the Caribbean films. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, however, the noun “mutiny” dates to 1567. The analysis of the term in this essay will be of its verb form which didn’t officially occur (according to the OED) until 1584. The currently relevant definition asserts that the act of mutiny is “to revolt against constituted authority; to refuse to obey the orders of a superior, esp. In the armed forces” (OED 1.a.). However, the “obsolete” definition that affirms the word means “to contend or strive with; to quarrel” (OED 2.) is still relevant in an analysis of Middle Passage as this specific meaning of the word was used between 1597 and 1616, when the Transatlantic Slave Trade was legally ongoing. The Oxford Dictionary’s definitions of “mutiny” are helpful when dissecting the physical mutinies that take place in the novel as there are clear physical and mental intentions to revolt against numerous tangible and archetypal structures within the novel.

When considering the specificity of slave rebellions and mutinies aboard slave ships during the legal transport of Africans across the sea, there are more culturally complex definitions of “mutiny” to be considered. In 1944, African American author, Lorenzo Greene, published the article, Mutiny on the Slave Ships, where he detailed the occurrence of insurrections aboard slave ships and the conditions that lead to retaliatory violence, describing the numerous methods of “mutiny” available to slaves. Greene asserts that slaves, “Driven to desperation by their wretchedness…seized every opportunity to escape enslavement or to end their suffering” (348). In his analysis of mutiny, slaves would physically fight with bars

of iron, their chains, and their fists. Some opted for a less aggressive form of rebellion—slaves refused to eat until they were forced by having their teeth broken or lips burned with hot coals and many infamously committed suicide by jumping from the deck of ships and into the shark-infested sea (Greene 348). This enslaved African rendering of the word “mutiny” shifts the understanding of the word from a strictly physical, violent, and authority-based form of rebellion into one that opens the door to considering “mutiny” a type of self-determined action of soul preservation.

The cultural and historical implications of the term “mutiny” in an oceanic, and more specifically, oceanic slave trade context allows for texts like Middle Passage to be dissected in a way that stretches modern understanding of what it means and looks like, historically, and contemporarily, to rebel against an imposed authority.

MUTINY IN MIDDLE PASSAGE

In Johnson’s novel, there are a number of physical and mental mutinies that take place aboard The Republic. Rutherford Calhoun introduces himself as a newly freed slave living in New Orleans who has taken up the occupation of being a thief and morally gray drifter. When the woman who desires a relationship with Calhoun and a local mob boss blackmail him into an engagement, he stows away on a ship bound for Africa. Rutherford, lacking cultural understanding and acceptance from both the white crew and African slaves, wrestles with the implications of cultural mutinies against the Western idea of a “respectable Black gentleman,” Captain Falcon, the White crew, and

their archetypal representation of Whiteness, and the Allmuseri Africans and their archetypal representation of ancestral origination. All of these personal mutinies are occurring against the backdrop of very real and very violent uprisings by the white sailors against Falcon and by the Allmuseri against the crew of The Republic.

CAPTAIN FALCON AND SAILORS

In his first conversation with the captain of The Republic, Calhoun embodies the class of Black men believed to garner sympathy from their White counterparts stating, “we all know it anyway: namely, that a crafty Negro, a shrewd black strategist, can work a prospective white employer around, if he’s smart, by playing poor mouth, or greasing his guilt with a hardluck story” (Johnson 29). By pandering to the hardships of his life, Calhoun is actively trying to be pitied by Falcon. His “freedom” from land is contingent on his need for acceptance and compassion from a White man, and Falcon immediately falls into the archetype of a superior White man patronizing the inferior Black man saying, “‘It’s one of the things I learned about Negroes…You don’t think too well, or too often” (31). Before the ship leaves the dock, Calhoun has aligned himself with Whiteness by submitting himself to the stature of “idiotic Negro” that White men of the era held. Calhoun further aligns himself with Whiteness when he accepts a gun from Falcon and, though he is tempted to shoot the captain—even raising the pistol to Falcon’s head when the captain is changing clothes, refrains from doing so. The magnetized rings that Falcon and Calhoun wear to keep

their pistols connected to them are likened to wedding rings (Johnson 58). The soul tie that Calhoun feels to this man who is buying, abusing, and selling Africans is a very transparent reflection of the cultural landscape in which Black Americans were forced to live during and post-slavery. In order to succeed, Black men and women had to serve White employers in conditions adjacent to slavery—killing for them, breeding for them, raising children for them; the list goes on and on. Calhoun, who has lived the majority of his life under the rule of a White slave owner, has found himself a new master in Falcon, being appointed the captain’s spy. And instead of trying to brazenly oppose the conceptions of Black men that Falcon and many of the sailors hold, Calhoun, as an act of self-preservation, aligns himself with Whiteness and what Whiteness claims about Blackness.

The excessive abuse and tyranny of Captain Falcon towards the inhabitants of the ship not only disturbs Calhoun, but the other sailors aboard The Republic. The White sailors, no longer trusting Falcon, decide to stage a mutiny against the captain and enlist Calhoun for his thieving skills. When discussing whether mutinies are warranted aboard the ship, first mate Cringle claims, “Mutiny doesn’t bother me either. God knows, to be a Yank is to be mutinous. The goddamn country was born out of rebellion” (88). Cringle’s perception of mutiny is political and patriotic. Opposing tyrannical rule is why the “American” (British) colonists warred against King George III and it is why Cringle and the sailors planned to war against Falcon. Calhoun, however, is now being grouped in with “Yanks” which he certainly would not be in 1830 as

Blacks wouldn’t be considered American citizens for 30 more years. In this battle between Falcon and the sailors, Calhoun was being compelled to fight for two sides of Whiteness. Moments after declaring his loyalty to the sailors, Calhoun confesses the entire plan to Falcon. Falcon, unphased by the threat against his authority, then asks Calhoun a series of questions that seem to solidify Rutherford’s devotion to Whiteness:

“D’you still plan to help the rebels set me adrift?”

“No.”

“That means you submit , doesn’t it?”

“I guess so.” (Johnson 97).

Calhoun explicitly submits himself to Falcon, and in doing so, submits himself to Whiteness. However, Calhoun’s split loyalties lead him to infiltrate the captain’s cabin under the mutinying sailor’s orders where he begins to feel wrong if he obeyed the first mate and wrong if he aligned himself with Falcon (Johnson 124). While this two-fold mutiny of cultural and physical violence by White men loomed over Calhoun, an active mutiny was occurring on deck between the entirety of the White population on The Republic and the African Allmuseri tribe on their way to be sold into American slavery.

JACKSON CALHOUN AND THE ALLMUSERI

Calhoun’s inability to mutiny against Whiteness is fairly binary. He questions whether or not to side himself with Captain Falcon or the sailors in the oncoming mutiny. However, when it comes to his mutiny against Blackness, there

are two prominent archetypes he is culturally striving against.

In the first pages of the novel, Rutherford Calhoun characterizes himself as a belligerent man who is purposefully living out a lifestyle in opposition to his brother. Calhoun claims the White slave owner he and his brother previously worked for, “wanted [him] to become a Negro preacher, perhaps even a black saint like the South American priest Martín de Porres— or, for that matter, [his] brother Jackson” (Johnson 5). Calhoun, a thief and fairly promiscuous man, didn’t want to be categorized into the “gentleman of color” archetype his brother occupied. He goes so far as to claim his brother was “shackled to subservience” (Johnson 11). And though this judgement is fairly ironic as he very quickly shackles himself to the subservience of Captain Falcon and the White sailors, he is actively trying to mutiny against this archetype of a good, Christian, Black man that could be seen as acceptable to White people.

The Allmuseri, on the other hand, are a representation of Blackness that stems from origination and ancestry. Rutherford, born and raised in a White American system of cultural, social, and political subordination, had very little connection to the people whose skin was similar to his, but had a culture all their own. His mutiny against this illustration of Blackness/Africanness is physical and mental in nature. When Rutherford reaches the shore of the African country where Captain Falcon purchases the Allmuseri slaves, his first observations of his genealogical kin are a mix of Euro-Western/American and personal views. He had been told that the Allmuseri have two brains and no capability of abstraction; but

what he felt was, “the presence of countless others in them, a crowd spun from everything this vast continent had created” (Johnson 62). There was an immediate cultural and physical discord between this Black-American man and the people from the continent from which he descends. Even after the slaves had been on board for a while, Calhoun declared that the Allmuseri can’t be considered Negroes. What he is and what they are, are two completely different representations of “Black.”

Despite his feelings of physical and cultural curiosity as well as pity for the Allmuseri, Calhoun continues to unconsciously mutiny against them and his cultural origination by existing with White privileges onboard The Republic. When describing the conditions the Allmuseri were forced to live in, Rutherford recalls, “the slaves still lay in a foot of salt water in a hold blacker than the belly of Jonah’s whale…Some rested on the laps of others, down there in a scummy darkness foul with defecation, slithering with water snakes” (Johnson 73–4). Calhoun witnessed slaves being branded, paraded naked on the deck, raped, and humiliated day in and out—and he said nothing. Though the abuse made him sick, the lack of proximity to African culture and ancestry not only gave him benefits as a crew member but also quieted him from standing up against the tortures the Allmuseri were being forced to endure. In one of the most devastating and nauseating scenes of the novel, Rutherford is instructed to help Ngonyama, an Allmuseri tribesman he grew close to, throw a dead Allmuseri boy overboard. After detailing the abhorrent conditions of the body, Calhoun observes, “His open eyes were unalive…though

I still found myself poised vertiginously on their edge, falling through these dead holes… as if his spirit had flown and mine was being sucked there in its place” (Johnson 121–22). In this moment of intercultural and metaphysical connection, Calhoun experiences a new understanding of the evil he is helping Falcon and his crew perpetrate against these innocent humans. By intentionally trying to separate himself from the practices, beliefs, and culture of the Allmuseri, Calhoun sought to reprieve himself from the crimes he was committing against his brethren. His lack of understanding of their behaviors and cultures, and lack of proximity to Africa as a continent, isolated him from the Allmuseri.

After weeks upon The Republic, the Africans, taking advantage of the discord between the captain and shipmates, eventually gain the upper hand and mutiny against Falcon and the sailors. The tribesmen take control of the ship and begin questioning whether Calhoun is an ally or threat to their freedom. When bringing Calhoun to the part of the ship where the Allmuseri were holding prisoners, Nhonyama assures him, “No one will hurt you here, Rutherford. These men are your brothers” (130). Another Allmuseri, Diamelo, calls Calhoun a “Yankee,” classifying him as evil as any of the White sailors.

This push and pull of acceptance or rejection by both the White population on board and the African population, reflects the larger theme of what it means to rebel against culturally designated norms and behavior within the novel. Rutherford is both a slaver and a slave. In her essay, The Paradox of Slave Mutiny, which examines the role of slave mutinies in a

number of fictional texts, Helen Lock believes that Charles Johnson “illustrate[s] how when the master/slave, ruler/ruled roles are inverted, each side reveals characteristics of the other, for better and worse, until…there is no discernible distinction. Slaves whose lives have been regulated by violence perpetuate that violence when in command” (59). Falcon and the White sailors go from a position of master/ruler to a position of slave/ruled—the Allmuseri do the opposite. In these now culturally and socially switched positions, Calhoun’s position as a Black American remains the same. He still must choose whether to align himself with the drive for revenge of the Allmuseri or with the survival of his White crewmates. He is not fully accepted or tolerated by either group and his capacity to mutiny against either one is like a mutiny of his soul.

RUTHERFORD CALHOUN AS WHITENESS AND AFRICANNESS

Once the Allmuseri officially take over The Republic, Rutherford is in a new position of influence with both the Allmuseri and the White sailors. Though he still has refused to wholly align himself with either, he begins to understand how the interactions between the White sailors and Africans have changed them both. The sailors are living in conditions similar to the slaves before their escape, forced to eat one another and live in sickness. The change for the Allmuseri is also physical, but Johnson highlights the internal shift in the Africans. Rutherford observes, “Ngonyama and maybe all the Africans, I realized, were not wholly Allmmuseri anymore. We had changed them… subtly reshaping their souls” (Johnson 123). By

saying we changed them, Calhoun once again orients himself with the American population that destroys the ethics and culture of Africans. However, as The Republic slips into chaos under Allmuseri control, a seemingly biologic aversion to Whiteness arises in Rutherford. After Calhoun’s encounter with the Allmuseri god where he meets his father and visualizes the kind of Black man he likely would have become had he stayed in New Orleans, he faints and is unconscious for three days. Upon waking, the cook, Squibb, informs Calhoun that the ship ran out of food and he was fed Cringle. Almost immediately, Calhoun gets incredibly ill and almost dies. The ingestion of a White body in his Black body almost kills him. The only peace he receives while slowly dying is from Ngoyanma and the Allmuseri child he had been looking over, Baleka.

Rutherford Calhoun is actively caught between two cultures vying for his identity. What we discover is that Calhoun, like many Black Americans then and now, is a mix of the Whiteness he cannot escape and the Africanness he longs to understand. In his essay, Interrogating Identity: Appropriation and Transformation in Middle Passage, Daniel Scott interrogates both the author of the novel and the main character when he affirms, “For Johnson and for Middle Passage’s protagonist, Rutherford Calhoun, that identity is the precarious “middle” experience of the African-American: offspring of the middle passage, refugee from an uncertain origin, subject to the marginalization of his experience, searcher for meaning” (645). The very venture of Calhoun writing this story of African slaves revolting against White slavers

in a slave ship log is reiterating his lack of ability to fully mutinize against both his White and African counterparts, instead, choosing to combine them.

By the end of the novel, The Republic has sunk with Calhoun, Squibb, and a couple Allmuseri children being the only survivors. The group is picked up by the Juno which was hosting the marriage between Isadora, the woman whose cunning engagement sent Calhoun on this journey, and Papa Zeringue, the mob boss who blackmailed Calhoun into marrying Isadora in exchange for erasing his debts. When Isadora and Papa meet Calhoun again, he is darker, thinner, bald, speaks at a higher register (reflective of the Allmuseri), and has wooden teeth. He wears a wig and walks with a cane. The final descriptions of Calhoun, having been forever changed in The Republic, is almost George Washington-like. And while dressed like George Washington, he uses a dance-fighting maneuver he learned from the Allmuseri to corner Papa Zeringue and rescue Isadora.

When Calhoun began reminiscing about his childhood after coming face to face with the Allmuseri god in the shape of his father, he recalled Riley Calhoun boasting, “‘We was kings once,’ he would say, scrawling with one finger on the dusty porch a cruse map of an African village he remembered vaguely” (Johnson 168). Calhoun’s family seems to be less than a generation removed from their African ancestors, and yet, they matured in a White culture that sought to dominate their bodies and identities. By the end of the novel, Calhoun is a mix of both the father of the United States and the kings of his ancestral home.

MUTINY IN MODERN AMERICA

Analyzing Rutherford Calhoun’s capacity to mutinize against Whiteness in Middle Passage alongside the themes of “cultural dizziness” articulated by Johnson in the novel, opens a door to understanding how modern Black Americans may be able to reconcile their position in a White America with a continent, countries, and cultures they have zero connection to.

When I was eighteen years old, I was fortunate enough to sit in on a journalism panel where journalists from over 20 countries around the world came together to discuss democracy, climate change, political violence, and the global threat against journalism. At the end of the event, the few students lucky enough to be in the room were offered an opportunity to network with the journalists. The only journalist I wound up speaking to was from Zimbabwe. As I approached him, he smiled and extended his hand. He introduced himself to me and I to him, then he asked me a question that caused more trouble than I believe he intended. “Where are you from?” I told him I was from Chicago, but currently in my first year at this college in St. Petersburg, Florida. He shook his head with a smile and said, “No, no. Where are you from?” I assumed he wanted my whole life story, so I clarified, “I was born in Memphis, Tennessee. That’s in the South. But my family moved to Chicago when I turned three.” That was not the answer he was looking for either. His smile faded ever so slightly as he asked another question about my ancestry. “Mm. But where are your parents from?” I was confused. Was he trying to stalk me? Were these cities just strangely named

places he couldn’t comprehend? I obliged. “My mother’s family is from Mississippi and my father’s family is from Arkansas. Those states are pretty close to Florida actually!” Again, not what he was looking for. He then asked me a question that strangely embarrassed me. “Where in Africa are you from?” I stared at him like he was crazy and he stared at me the same way. “Oh. I’m not sure.” Here was a man who looked like an uncle of mine, and me, a girl who probably looked like many of the country he resided in—yet, we had a complete lack of mutual understanding. He didn’t understand how I couldn’t identify the place that granted me this brown hue, and I couldn’t understand how he couldn’t understand the Transatlantic Slave Trade and lack of care that went into documenting where my ancestors came from— whoever they are.

Two years ago, I bought a DNA test to finally ascertain an idea of where my ancestry is rooted. It wasn’t surprising, but after five or six generations of slavery, my DNA reflected origination from three different continents. This revelation is quite difficult to grapple with when considering how modern Black Americans may or may not have the capacity to mutinize against archetypes like Falcon and Whiteness in general. Rutherford’s cultural and biological ancestry was fairly binary. His father could recall their African village of origin, but he had only existed in a White environment where his identity was determined by those with cultural, social, and political authority. Unlike Rutherford, modern Black Americans with historical roots in slavery likely have an amalgamation of ancestry. We are no longer simply mutinying Whiteness to connect to “Africa” alone. In

my case, I would need to mutinize American Whiteness and seek cultural connection to Nigeria, Benin & Togo, England, The Netherlands, Senegal, Ghana, Cornwall, the Yucatán Peninsula, and a plethora of other nations. Our lack of cultural proximity to origination is evident in our development of an “African American/Black” culture that is completely separate from Africa and other places of ancestry. The lack of physical proximity will never be closed for most Black Americans as the majority will never have the ability to trace where exactly they are from, in Africa or otherwise. Most will never cross the vast ocean to visit the places where their ancestors existed once upon a time. Our varying biologic proximity to Africanness has now been expanded to include White, Indigenous, Asian, and other genealogies.

Corina Crisu articulates this in her article, ‘A Cultural Mongrel’: Transatlantic Connections in Charles Johnson’s Middle Passage, where she states:

Rutherford Calhoun, is the perfect illustration of a polytropic individual: a porous, versatile, and itinerant nature, always ready to change masks and to adapt by adopting ideas…At a textual level, Rutherford’s existential travels are reflected by his mongrelized fiction, which points to the dislocation of the homogeneous spatial and temporal dimensions of a single culture (266–67).

Rutherford had no “home” in either homogeneous culture, represented by Falcon/the sailors and the Allmuseri, so he was forced to create

his own. Unlike Rutherford, however, Black Americans of today are mongrels who have been able to generate their own culture outside the structure of slavery.

Mutinying the cultural system of Whiteness looks different in a contemporary context. A collective Black identity, created out of and detached from the White system, has been forged—distinct from those represented by the Allmuseri and Rutherford in the novel. Organizations like Diving with a Purpose are a great example of a modern take on Rutherford’s mutinies. People from minoritized groups are offered the opportunity to learn to scuba dive and study elements under the surface of the ocean, including sunken slave ships. They are able to find a connection to African ancestors that wasn’t available to African Americans before. By bridging that physical and cultural gap, modern Black Americans are able to better align themselves with origination.

The journey Rutherford Calhoun embarks on not only makes him question what kind of Black man he wants to be in a White social construct, it also forces him to reconcile the parts of his identity that are separated by hundreds of years of cultural abuse and conflict. And though the mental and physical mutinies Calhoun is exposed to aboard The Republic are very different than what twenty-first century Black Americans face, his declaration of identifying himself as both the product of his environment and the product of his ancestry is something that still deeply resonates.

MUTINY IN BLUE HUMANITIES

Oceanic scholarship, both literary and otherwise, has widened its breadth, especially as it

relates to human narratives. In Steve Mentz’ essay, A poetics of planetary water: The blue humanities after John Gillis, he claims that, “The aims of watery criticism, to adapt a phrase, include both describing the complex workings of water in our environment and also imagining ways to change our relationships to it” (138). Many novels use the ocean as a framework, setting, and catalyst for telling nuanced stories, but the field of blue humanities has a significant gap when it comes to Black mutiny in the ocean. Jonathan Howard, in his powerful article, Swim your ground: Towards a black and blue humanities, writes about aqueous genealogy stating, “Beyond the universal oceanic genesis in which we all share, history has caused the African Diaspora to double back and begin again. How to forget humanity’s blue ancestry when you are created by and in the dramatic reminder of Middle Passage, what Frank Wilderson… dubbed the ‘dawning of blackness’” (311). The biological and historical connection diasporic Blacks around the world have to the ocean is rooted in the sea. Howard writes about the estimated 1,818,681 Africans who jumped from slave ships in mutiny—depriving poachers of their paychecks, depriving plantation owners of free labor, and freeing themselves from a lifetime of torture and pain. Howard ponders how much the sea level may have risen with an additional two million bodies laying on the ocean floor (311).

The word mutiny is relevant in blue humanities in obvious ways when it comes to mutinies on battle and pirate ships when studying the history of human behavior on the water, but the word has an incredibly salient interpretation when aligning it with the treachery of

the Transatlantic Slave Trade. The very act of transporting Africans across the sea created the modern understanding of “Black” people. Our modern cultural foundation is rooted in the sea, and in mutiny «

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“These Divers Search For Slave Shipwrecks and Discover Their Ancestors | National Geographic.” YouTube, YouTube, 18 Aug. 2019, www youtube com/watch?v=d6M8WSTkEns