The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism, Volume 9

The Madison Journal of Literary Criticism

1

Fall 2020 Volume 9

2

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

Cover Photo: “Lay it Out,� Natasha Smozynski, University of Wisconsin-Stout

3

Editor’s Note

The ninth issue of the Madison Journal of Literary Criticism is unique, not because of its content, which continues to represent the very best of undergraduate literary criticism, but because of the circumstances under which it was created. Despite the stress, production delays and deprivation of campus resources that the COVID-19 pandemic caused, we managed to compile a journal that attests to the enduring value of literary criticism during a time when many are turning to literature for a sense of comfort and--this issue’s theme--human connections amidst the radical contraction of public spaces.

There are many contributors who made this possible. We want to acknowledge the dozens of art submissions we received on this issue’s theme and the brilliant artists whose work was ultimately chosen--we hope you will find their varied expressions of human connections, during a time that too often feels bereft of them, as moving as we did. Publishing this issue would not have been possible without our amazing crew of editors, some returning and some new, who were invaluable participants in all the Zoom meetings and Google Docs that replaced our in-person meetings this semester. We would also like to recognize our faculty advisor, Dr. Allewaert, for her continuous support. Finally, we want to thank the incredibly talented undergraduate scholars represented in this issue, whose patience made the hurdles we faced during production far more surmountable and whose brilliance is what makes this journal worth publishing in the first place.

The MJLC remains committed, above all else, to undergraduates—it is composed of undergraduate writing and artwork, compiled by an undergraduate editorial board, and published to provide a platform for exceptional undergraduate literary scholarship, that it might be read and appreciated by a wide range of students and faculty alike. As the COVID-19 pandemic forces us to reconsider what we value in our institutions, academic or otherwise, we think the scholarship showcased here is compelling evidence that undergraduate literary criticism is worth encouraging and disseminating during a time when critical thinking and reading skills are more important than ever. We hope you find it as engaging and delightful as we did.

Best regards, Madeline Peterson and Matthew Eriole Editors-in-Chief, MJLC

4

2020-2021 Staff Editors-in-Chief: Madeline Peterson & Matthew Eriole Managing Editor: Andrew Ida Layout Manager: Ellie Johnson Associate Editors: Dorothy Palmer, Shelby Behnke, Eleanor Sand, Will McKinley

2019-2020 Staff Editor-in-Chief: Emma Crowley Managing Editor: Madeline Peterson Associate Editors: Andrew Ida, Shelby Behnke, Eli Knapp, Alyssa Wing Faculty Advisor: Dr. Monique Allewaert

5

Contents ART

Cover Art: “Lay it Out” by Natasha Smozynski “Falling in and out of Reality” by Delaney Shin 6 “In my Room” by Madison Golden 14 “Untitled” by Madison Golden 24 “Untitled” by Qinlei Zhang

34

“ConSoul” by Sara Mitchell

42

“Untitled” by Qinlei Zhang 50 “Alone Together” by Eliza Cooper

60

“Untitled” by Qinlei Zhang

72

“Embrace” by Sara Mitchell

83

ESSAYS “Care in the Wake of Jazz” by Benjamin Papsun

7

“Performing Understandings: The Prioress’ Tale, Orientalism, and Austinian Performative Utterances” by Ryan Carroll 15 “The Last Man: A Critical Analysis of Plagues Creating Community” by Katie Lacayo “Coding Victorian Homosexuality in Literary Style” by Benjamin Papsun

25

35

“Resurrection of the Windigo: Pauline Puyat’s Mythic Monstrosity in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks”

by Samantha Watson 43 “Joyce, the Straight Old Josser: An Analysis of James Joyce’s Proximate-Homosexual Subtexts”

by David Phillips 50 “Britain as Savior in The Wreck of the Golden Mary” by Richard Hall

61

“Shocks of the Past: Attending to Childhood Trauma in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse” by Patricia Jewell 73

Falling In and Out of Reality

“Falling In and Out of Reality,” Delaney Shin, University of Wisconsin-Stout

7

Care in the Wake of Jazz Benjamin Papsun, Vassar College I was looking for more than the violence of the slave ship, the migrant and refugee ship, the container ship, and the medical ship. I saw that leaf in her hair, and with it I performed my own annotation that might open this image out into a life, however precarious, that was always there.

That leaf is stuck in her still neat braids. And I think: Somebody braided her hair before that earthquake hit. (Sharpe 120) The wake, as theorized by Christina Sharpe in her cultural and critical study In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, is the set of conditions that create the framework for living while black.

The wake is the afterlife of slavery; it is a “position of deep hurt and deep knowledge” (Sharpe 27), and to live in it is “to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding” (Sharpe 14). The wake is a violent realization of structures of oppression and of ideologies of white supremacy, enacted both subtly and overtly.

Sharpe explores the various manifestations of the wake—through the histories of slave ships and the transmutation of black bodies into measurable property within their holds, through the disproportionate effects of natural disasters on black communities and refugees, and through the militaristic state attack on black people via incarceration and legally-sanctioned murder. These conditions are the reality of black life, yet they are themselves insufficient to define and describe it. A resolution is in order then, which bridges the wake itself and the ability for blackness to be meaningful. As Sharpe herself asked the audience at an October 2018 talk at Vassar College: “How are we to practice care? How are we to undo these violent relations?” There must be something we can do to carve a space for the personal into a context laden with violence.

There is something we can do, argues Sharpe, something she terms “wake work.” Wake work is the action by which the wake is disrupted, which allows us to “imagine new ways to live in the wake of slavery” (Sharpe 18). The particular mode of wake work that I would like to draw attention to is that of “care.” Sharpe describes a photograph of a young Haitian girl lying on a stretcher, injured by the catastrophic 2010 earthquake that struck her home, who has a piece of tape stuck to her forehead labeled “SHIP” (indicating to disaster responders that she is to be put on a ship to receive aid). This marking of “ship,” to Sharpe, recalls the history of the marking of

black bodies for travel by slave ship, and seems ineluctable from the conditions which resulted in the effect the earthquake had on the Haitian people, and from innumerable other cases of state actors creating violence under the guise of “care.” Sharpe writes: “I marked the violence … in the name of care of the placement of that taped word on her forehead, and then I kept looking because that could not be all there was to see or say. I had to take care” (Sharpe 120).

The care that Sharpe is looking for exists beyond and outside of institutional constructs, outside of actors like the police and the military, who do work in the name of “care” that too often manifests as violence against black men, women, and children. This kind of care is essential to living in the wake, to countering the “violence of abstraction” (to borrow a term which Sharpe borrows from Saidiya Hartman) with the personal and the material. The care that Sharpe finds within the photograph of the Haitian girl is in the fact that somebody had braided her hair before the earthquake hit (see the opening paragraph of this essay). Perhaps, then, a basic domestic responsibility is all it takes to create a space for the personal within the wake. I would like to center domestic responsibilities as a spatial and temporal location at which wake work (in the form of care) is done. Beyond all the structures of oppression that confine experience, there is a certain level of materiality that defines the substance of quotidian life and the care that takes place within it.

Toni Morrison’s Jazz revels in the quotidian and the material, and creates an excellent

lens for the theoretical concepts that Sharpe offers and which I hope to expand upon. Basic performances of domestic habits and care (care here generally meaning an act of empathy or emotional upkeep) are often the main driving force in characters’ lives in Jazz, the glue that holds their lives together even when the wake threatens to tear them apart. We know from the onset that the events of the novel, in particular the murder of Dorcas, take place within the personal and outside of the institutional: “There was never anyone to prosecute [Joe] because nobody actually saw him do it, and the dead girl’s aunt didn’t want to throw money to helpless lawyers or laughing cops when she knew the expense wouldn’t improve anything” (Morrison 4).

Events like Dorcas’s death will not be understood or resolved by institutional actors like lawyers and police; they will be understood through the ways they impact characters in their roles as

8

members of a community.

There is another oblique reference to the violence of institutions when Alice (Dorcas’s aunt) reflects on the motives that drove a group of disgruntled black veterans to riot in East St. Louis, Illinois, killing so many whites that “the paper would not print the number” (Morrison 57). The soldiers “came home to white violence more intense than when they enlisted and, unlike the battles they fought in Europe, stateside fighting was pitiless and totally without honor” (Morrison 57). This is the wake of war; the battle for black soldiers does not end when they leave the battlefield, rather, a new one begins. When their bodies are not authorized for violence by the state, their self-defense is seen as riotous incivility. These points are not central to the text, but they are important for orienting the discussion of care in Jazz. As Sharpe describes, there is a critical distinction to be made between the care that she calls for as response to “quotidian atrocity” and the “care” of “state-imposed regimes of surveillance” (Sharpe 20). These regimes are recognized in Jazz, but they exist on a plane separate from the intimacy and overall sense of daily life which brings the plot into being.

So where, then, is the care in Jazz? We already see hints of care even in something as mundane as the layout of Violet and Joe’s house. Morrison describes their home: “Violet and Joe have arranged their furnishings in a way that might not remind anybody of the rooms in Modern Homemaker but it suits the habits of the body, the way a person walks from one room to another without bumping into anything, and what he wants to do when he sits down” (Morrison 12). The city home that has housed Joe and Violet’s marriage for twenty years is anchored in physical comfort, a reflection of the crystallized daily habits and expectations the two share. Violet’s job as a hairdresser means that she is constantly connected to her community, constantly providing a literal form of care to those who live around her. It is well-established that Violet cannot imagine being without a pressing errand or task (Morrison 15), and that she has no desire for rest, although she finds the idea “attractive” (Morrison 16). Violet feels a compulsion towards domestic labor because “the space that need not be filled with anything other than the drift of [her] own thoughts … would knock [her] down” (Morrison 16).

This feeling of obligation comes from the tension between the wake (which is at least in part expressed via Violet’s “cracks,” or her moments of emotional paralysis) and the reassurance

9

of material habits. These are habits that are necessary on a pragmatic level for Violet to survive and to continue in her usual way of life, and so the habits themselves become life-sustaining on an emotional level as well. The fact of their necessity may reflect something more sinister—might Violet’s race and class structure her way of life so that she feels labor is her only emotional outlet?—, but Violet’s domestic rituals ultimately do more to stabilize her life than almost anything else can. Habits become the things that help one sleep all the way through the night, like the reassuring touch of a familiar body in bed next you— “[a]nd rituals help too: door locking, tidying up, cleaning teeth, arranging hair, but they are preliminaries to the truly necessary things” (Morrison 27-28). What these “truly necessary things” are is not specified, but whatever they may be—love, meaning, happiness, fulfillment—they cannot be achieved before a requisite amount of material care is taken.

In scenes where Violet meets to spend time with Alice, the role of care via the domestic and the material is also centered. The relationship between the two is complicated beyond classification: Alice, the prudish, strait-laced aunt whose young niece was killed by Violet’s husband, and Violet, the aging, demon-haunted wife whose life was ruined by Alice’s niece, both united in the wake of Violet’s violent urge to slice Dorcas’s corpse at her own funeral. The bond between them lies not only in their shared loneliness nor in their intertwined pasts, but also in Alice’s proclivity to repair Violet’s clothing. Their conversations threaten to burst at the seams with emotional gravity, and yet their interactions, like Violet’s daily routines, are rooted in material habit. When a conversation between Violet and Alice about what Dorcas might have grown up to be reaches a tense climax, the only security left for Alice to cling to is (literally) in the material: “They looked away from each other then. The silence went on and on until Alice Manfred said, ‘Give me that coat. I can’t look at that lining another minute’” (Morrison 111).

The subtext here is pregnant—domestic responsibility to another person can provide care beyond the repair that words can afford. This resonates with Sharpe’s proposal of care “as a way to feel and to feel for and with, a way to tend to the living and the dying” (Sharpe 139). Alice here is providing the same kind of care that Violet routinely provides Joe when she washes his tear-soaked handkerchiefs (“...it tired everybody out waiting to see what else Violet would do besides try to kill a dead girl and keep her husband in tidy handkerchiefs” (Morrison 118). The

10

fabric of clothing becomes the fabric of intimacy, of interpersonal care.

We see this kind of care from Joe’s perspective as well during his narrative monologue, when he describes the scene of the apartment where he saw Dorcas for the second time. “The women gathered around and I showed them what I had while they laughed and did the things women do: flicked lint off my jacket, pressed me on the shoulder to make me sit down. It’s a way they have of mending you, fixing what they think needs repair” (Morrison 122), Joe remembers. This domestic “mending” is light-hearted, flirtatious, and ultimately expresses that these women care, in some way, for Joe. Joe also reflects on his role as one who provides care to his community: “I sell trust. I make things easy. That’s the best way. Never push. Like at the Windemere when I wait tables. I’m there but only if you need me” (Morrison 122). For both Joe and Violet, their roles as providers of care bring them closer to their communities, and give their lives some degree of meaning within the wake of black city life.

The analysis of care in Joe and Violet’s lives does not end here. The kind of care that Joe seeks is further complicated by his relationship to Dorcas. Dorcas to him is a sweet, a candy, a commodity, a relic which demands conservation by whatever means possible. He attempts, though unsuccessfully, to find care for himself within the memory of her, by searing her into his mind “[s]o that neither she nor the alive love of her will fade or scab over the way it had with Violet” (Morrison 29). Joe wrongheadedly believes that the act of killing Dorcas will preserve her. He misplaces his care by succumbing to the same measures of violence that care is meant to resist. However, Morrison’s characters are meant to be complicated, and the murder of Dorcas reflects not only Joe’s failure to control his impulses, but also the failure of time to preserve experience. Joe was not only trying to kill Dorcas—he was trying to kill time, the greatest threat to the freshness of young love.

Dorcas, although she is not alive for most of Jazz, is the common thread that runs through the events and the characters of the novel. She exists outside of linear time, for time is dissolved within the wake, and “the past that is not past appears, always, to rupture the present” (Sharpe 9).

Alongside materiality, time is another key aspect to care, and when care is practiced properly, time loses its ability to control experience. It is through the performance of care in the material, the domestic, and the romantic (in Joe’s case) that time becomes destructured and restructured.

11

The flexibility of time is also echoed metatextually, through the temporal improvisations of Jazz and the ahistorical braiding of narratives in In the Wake. The reader does not experience time in Jazz as it might be measured by a clock, they experience time with the hypnotic push and pull of a jazz trio. But this subjectivity would not have a danceable rhythm without the reliable pulse of domesticity and material care. I am reminded of a passage from Richard Wright’s short story “Long Black Song,” when a white clock salesman is amazed to find out that Sarah, a rural black matriarch, lives without a clock. “‘Haven’t you got a clock?’

‘Naw.’ ‘But how do you keep time?’

‘We get erlong widout time.’

‘But how do you know when to get up in the morning?’

‘We jus git up, thas all.’ …‘Well, this beats everything! I don’t see how in the world anybody can live without time.’

‘We jus don need no time, Mistah.’” (Wright 131) The measurement of time is one more “regime of surveillance,” of transfiguring life into a metric. Therefore, the destructuring and restructuring of time is a vital element of wake work.

Sarah does not live her life in metric time because she has created her own structure of time, one based (like Violet and Joe’s house) on the needs of the body. Time is rebuilt to suit the domestic habits of her, her husband, and her child. The way that Morrison drifts through time, uses it as a medium for the expression of black life and the care that occurs within it, is itself an exercise of wake work. The reclaiming of time via domestic work and material needs is a rebellion against the wake and the way it attempts to define and confine experience. Care disrupts the wake, allowing for the creation of a space for the personal in spite of the abstract institutions that make it seem impossible to attain. Beyond the impositions of time and state legitimization lies the sphere of the personal—and this is where the music of Jazz can be played.

12

13 Works Cited Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Duke University Press, 2016.

———. “Black. Still. Life.” 9 October 2018. Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY. Lecture.

Morrison, Toni. Jazz. New York: Knopf, 1992.

Wright, Richard. Uncle Tom’s Children. HarperCollins, 2008.

14

“In My Room,” Madison Golden, University of Wisconsin-Madison

15

Performing Understandings: The Prioress’ Tale, Orientalism, and Austinian Performative Utterances Ryan Carroll, The George Washington University Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Prioress’ Tale, one of the most intriguing and ambivalent entries in The Canterbury Tales, is a rich work that offers insight into the simultaneous power and conflict inherent to speech. In this paper, I will endeavor to study this speech conflict through the lens of J.L. Austin’s “Performative Utterances” and Edward Said’s Orientalism, studying the way in which language manifests as a potent force in the poem, with utterances themselves altering both material and psychic conditions. Using Austin’s Speech Act Theory and Said’s theory of Orientalism in a pragmatic linguistic analysis of the text, the entirety of The Prioress’ Tale1 can be viewed as a series of speech acts, all of which produce powerful forces of utterance that, through rhetoric, enact ideologies into reality.

Considered this way, we may find that both the text and metatext of The Prioress’ Tale are comprised of a number of speech acts, which, beyond making simple descriptive proclamations, perform rhetorical positions into concrete realities—even, at times, doing so unintentionally. Within the story, the character of Christian boy, in performing a song, unintentionally asserts an ideological affront against the city’s Jewish community, while Satan’s manipulative description of the boy’s song functions to assert another ideology that turns the Jewish crowd against the boy. Metatextually, Chaucer’s narrator utters the story in such a way as to rhetorically separate the Prioress from himself, implying a kind of irony to the tale and its problematic Orientalist rhetoric— while simultaneously, the very utterance of The Prioress’ Tale also edifies a problematic conception of the East, regardless of any ironic intent. Thus, The Prioress’ Tale, Orientalism, and “Performative Utterances” all work to shed light on one another. With Austin’s framework in mind, The Prioress’ Tale can serve to expand the idea of performative utterances, emphasizing that speech acts contain a rhetorical power of utterance (a concept that Austin indirectly posited) that can often occur inadvertently, but that nonetheless performs certain understandings of the world into existence, consequently producing tangible consequences—often, in such a way that may 1

Periodically, I will abbreviate The Prioress’ Tale as Tale.

16 be divorced from any real intention.

Before going further, it is critical to establish the precise nature of Austin’s and Said’s rhetoric. Said’s

Orientalism investigates the phenomenon in which Western authors conceive of the East (“Orient”) as a sort of alien Other, thereby defining the West as a superior “civilized” power. The pattern of Orientalism, Said explains, largely manifests on the surface of a text, building its most basic ideas around the assumption of the East as an exotic and uncivilized domain separate from the West. Indeed, he specifies that Western authors, when engaging in Orientalist rhetoric, strategically locate themselves in relation to the East, creating narratives that alienate, exoticize, and deprive agency from the East in order to ultimately reinforce a hierarchical dynamic of control over it. In assessing the power of Orientalist rhetoric, furthermore, Said argues that Orientalism’s power extends beyond simple theory or propaganda, and that “the Orient is an idea that has a history and a tradition of thought, imagery, and vocabulary that have given it reality and presence in and for the West…[the West and East] support and to an extent reflect each other” (Said 1869). Thus, Orientalist rhetoric does not simply describe the Western imaginings of the East, but rather brings into being a certain version of the East, resulting in real consequences.

Austin’s “Performative Utterances,” in a similar fashion, examines the way in which speech extends

beyond simply describing reality and instead works to perform certain understandings of reality. Many of these utterances, called speech acts, work to enact specific social functions; the utterances of “I now pronounce you husband and husband” or “I sentence you to twenty years in prison,” for example, performatively reify a marriage or a judicial sentence. Other speech acts, however, are subtler in their effect, appearing as descriptive statements but actually serving to perform a rhetorical position that perceives the world in a certain manner; indeed, Austin says, “when we state something or describe something or report something, we do perform an act which is every bit as much an act as an act of ordering or warning.” (Austin 1299). Even when purporting to state the fact of an event or description, an utterance works to implicitly influence the thoughts and actions of those who receive it, conveying a description of “truth” that is itself grounded in a certain understanding of that truth; Austin labels this power as the “force of utterance.” Ultimately, however, Austin does not fully articulate the nature of a force of utterance, simply suggesting that utterances are frequently rhetorical and often fall outside a simple true-false dichotomy. Subsequently, he offers that it is necessary to explore performative utterances further. In the same way, Austin does not delve deeply into the intentionality behind speech acts, mentioning that some performative utterances may effect “felicitous” and “infelicitous” consequences, but leaving unclear the

17 question of whether these utterances necessarily require intentionality. It is in this space of ambiguity that The Prioress’ Tale and Orientalism may offer valuable insight into Austin’s theory, providing powerful examples of the way in which utterances act not simply to describe fact but to assert, intentionally or unintentionally certain understandings of the world.

Within The Prioress’ Tale, the power of performative speech is rather explicit. The central figure of the tale is a young Christian boy in a city cohabited by Jews and Christians, who becomes captivated by and constantly sings a song in praise of the Virgin Mary—leading to his murder in the city’s Jewish ghetto. Immediately clear in the story is that an utterance as simple and straightforward as a song carries a performative force of utterance, and that this force is carried regardless of intention. Indeed, the boy is referred to three separate times as being “innocent,” and the narrator notes that “The swetnesse his herte perced so / Of Cristes mooder that, to hire to preye, / He kan nat stynte of syngyng by the weye” (Chaucer 555-557)—he sings not out of malintent, but rather because he is enraptured with the song and believes in the Christian understanding of the world that it reflects. Regardless of his intention, however, the boy’s utterance of the song still produces tangible consequences: its assertion of Christian truth is taken as a religious affront against the Jewish community, and the boy is subsequently murdered for it. In this way, one can see that the song is more than a simple song, more than a descriptive utterance of Christian faith. Rather, it is an utterance that performs a Christian understanding of the world—an understanding that poses an existential attack against the city’s Jews.

The Tale further explores the power of utterance through the figure of Satan, who is able to use a seemingly descriptive utterance to propound a particular understanding of the world, which in turn produces real consequences. Soon after the boy begins singing the song on the way home from school, Satan appears to the inhabitants of the Jewish ghetto: [Satan] Up swal, and seide, “O Hebrayk peple, allas!

Is this to yow a thyng that is honest, That swich a boy shal walken as hym lest In youre despit, and synge of swich sentence, Which is agayn youre lawes reverence?”

Fro thennes forth the Jues han conspired This innocent out of this world to chace. (Chaucer 560-566) In this moment, Satan does not issue a simple performative utterances, such as an explicit command or request,

18 to kill the boy. Rather, through the “simple” act of description—loaded with language implying a certain understanding of the world—he is able to rhetorically assert his conception of morality and shape the thoughts of the Jewish listeners, leading them to murder the boy. Consequently, we may find that Satan’s utterance carries power in its very performance; profoundly, the seemingly basic act of description has propounded a particular conception of the world and thus instigated real action. Here, we may recall Austin’s assertion that few, if any, utterances actually describe real truth or falsehood, instead propounding (and reifying) a particular conception of the world in the act of speech. In this case, Satan’s descriptive utterance has instead proposed and created a version of the world, which, in turn, produces material consequences—namely, the death of the young boy.

Further, in the events following the boy’s death, the Tale affirms the power of utterance to perform certain conceptions of the world. After the murder, the boy’s mother frantically searches for him in the Jewish quarter, and, after discovering his body, begins to weep—whereupon God intercedes and allows the boy to sing: O grete God, that parfournest thy laude By mouth of innocentz, lo, heere thy myght! […]

Ther he with throte ykorven lay upright, He Alma redemptoris gan to synge So loude that al the place gan to rynge.

[Subsequently, the city’s Christian assemble to witness the miracle, prompting the magistrate to arrest and execute the Jews aware of the murder] (Chaucer 607-608, 611-613) In the poem’s own words, God Himself uses the boy as a conduit to “parfournest [His] laude”, perform the ideological power of Christianity; the very utterance of the song explicitly reifies the Christian understanding of the world, which consequently produces tangible effects. As with Satan’s manipulation of the Jewish citizens, the boy’s miraculous utterance does not explicitly demand any justice, nor does it make any proclamation. Rather, in performing its Christian ideology through speech, the utterance takes on a rhetorical power that prompts its auditors to (in the internal logic of the story) avenge the boy’s death. Thus, the events of the entire Tale work to offer a distinct way in which Austin’s power of utterance can be conceived. As Satan’s deception and the boy’s miraculous song indicate, even simple songs and descriptions each carry within them a certain performative power that enacts their respective understandings of the world and works to persuade others of these understandings. Furthermore, in examining the disparity between the innocuous intentions of the boy’s singing and its visceral effect on its Jewish listeners, it is clear that intention can be incidental to performative powers of utter-

19 ance—that utterances perform understandings of truth regardless of what the utterer means by them.

Beyond the events within The Prioress’ Tale itself, the story’s metatextual framing further speaks to the

nuanced power of performative utterance—and to its ramifications for Said’s Orientalism. Crucially, the events of The Canterbury Tales are not narrated by an omniscient voice but are rather reported by a human Narrator (who this paper will refer to as the Chaucer-Narrator), who describes other characters sharing their own stories.

Thus, the very fabric of The Prioress’ Prologue and Tale can be seen as two overlapping utterances: that of the Chaucer-Narrator narrating the frame story, and that of the Prioress voicing her own tale. This tension is sharply clear when viewed through the lens of the text’s proto-Orientalist depiction of the East. In particular, the Prioress’ utterance of her story, and the othering rhetoric that she employs in describing the East, functions to fulfill Said’s vision of Orientalist texts performing the false Orient into existence. On the other hand, the intrusion of the Chaucer-Narrator’s narratorial voice into the Tale also works as a powerful descriptive utterance, one that performs an understanding of the Prioress that undermines her problematic rhetoric.

Though not central to the plot of the Tale, the descriptive utterances that the Prioress employs in estab-

lishing the story subtly work to perform a kind of early Orientalist ideology through the text. In the opening lines of the text, the Prioress’ narration immediately works to set the Tale not in the familiar West but in the alien, vaguely hostile East: Ther was in Asye, in a greet citee, Amonges Cristene folk a Jewerye, Sustened by a lord of that contree For foule usure and lucre of vileynye, Hateful to Crist and to his compaignye; (Chaucer 488-494) Here, the Prioress strategically locates herself as an entity separate from the nonspecific-but-malignant East— while simultaneously implying, through the very fact of her utterance, that she has the authority to rhetorically identify the East itself. In this way, her rhetoric can be seen as distinctly Orientalist in its nature, beginning to build “images, themes, and motifs [of the East] that circulate in [her] text—all of which add up to…ways of addressing the reader, containing the Orient, and…representing it or speaking in its behalf” (Said 1881). Further, the Prioress’ othering description of the East functions, as Said argues, to constitute a false version of the Orient for Western consumption—performing the Orient into existence through her utterance. Her utterance of her Orientalist story works to reify the hierarchical Western understanding of the East, contributing to the tangible

20 treatment of the “Orient” by the West. Consequently, it is clear that, much as the utterances of the Christian boy and Satan performed certain understandings and wrought certain consequences within the Tale, the oration that forms the tale also carries significant power of utterance, enacting the dynamic of Orientalism itself into existence. This occurrence can work to expand the understanding of Austin’s power of utterance to include performances not just of tangible realities, but also of purely conceptual ones—as both of these realities are deeply influential on tangible events.

Simultaneously, the orating voice of the Chaucer-Narrator supplies a performative utterance of its own,

one which can be read as delegitimizing the narrative authority (and, one would imagine, the power of utterance) of the Prioress. In his reported utterance of The Prioress’ Tale, the Chaucer-Narrator strives to separate his narratorial utterances from those of the Prioress herself, doing so more strongly than in any of the other stories in The Canterbury Tales. In the opening of The Prioress’ Prologue, Chaucer explicitly distinguishes the Prioress’ narration from that of his own narrator: O Lord, oure Lord, thy name how merveillous Is in this large worlde y-sprad—quod she— Forn night only thy laude precious Parfourned is by me of dignitee, (Chaucer 453-456) Here, unique to all of The Canterbury Tales, the Chaucer-Narrator uses the phrase “quod she” to indicate that the utterance of the story originated from the Prioress—an insert that should be unnecessary, given that The Prioress’ Prologue, as with the other prologues, are uttered by only one speaker. Yet, the Chaucer-Narrator’s insertion persists, introducing a doubt into the Prioress’ narration and separating his narrative from himself.

Indeed, he even positions “quod she” as the first part of a rhyme, not only emphasizing the phrase’s importance but also solidifying the phrase as an irreplaceable component of the poem’s rhythm. As a result, this utterance by the Chaucer-Narrator is able to perform an understanding of the Prioress that acts counter to the Prioress’ own narrative, offering the chance, if his power of utterance is strong enough, to reconsider the entire poem. In this way, the Chaucer-Narrator’s utterance may function to metatextually characterize the poem, casting it not as an Orientalist text but as a purposefully, ironically problematic one. Moreover, Chaucer makes an additional effort to separate his voice from the Prioress’ in the body of the Tale: O martir sounded to virginitee, Now maystou singen, folwinge evere in oon

21 The whyte Lamb celestial—quod she— (Chaucer 579-581) Again, despite the fact that the Prioress would be the only character speaking in this tale, the Chaucer-Narrator intrudes midway through the tale to call attention to the reported nature of the Prioress’ utterance, separating it from his own narrative authority. Thus, the utterance, beyond simply describing the events of the frame story, may be seen as actively performing some subtext of The Prioress’ Tale, manifesting (if the reader considers the power of utterance strong enough) an understanding of the Prioress’ unreliability. This interplay between utterances reflects another crucial lens through which Austin’s power of utterance might be understood: Speech acts manifest understandings of each other, with even basic descriptions, such as Chaucer’s description of the Prioress’ utterance, being able to undermine or reinforce an utterance’s power to convey a certain understanding of truth as the Truth.

Of course, the ability of one performative utterance to undermine another depends on whether it has

considerable power of utterance. Viewed through the lens of Said’s Orientalism, it is clear that, despite the Chaucer-Narrator’s apparent delegitimization of the Prioress’ utterance, the Orientalist ideology and effect of her utterance still remain. Although the Chaucer-Narrator’s intrusion into the Prioress’ oration can be interpreted as a strike against her credibility, the fact remains that this intrusion is subtle, available only through a deep stylistic analysis of the Chaucer-Narrator’s utterance. The Prioress’ utterance, on the other hand, lingers on the surface of the text, performing the Orient into existence regardless of any irony; this Orientalism exists plainly on the surface, and, as Said himself says, “[Orientalist analysis] does not entail analysis of what lies hidden in the Orientalist text, but analysis rather of the text’s surface, its exteriority to what it describes…Orientalism is premised on exteriority” (Said 1882). Thus, even despite the Chaucer-Narrator performing the unreliability of the Prioress’, the fact remains that the Prioress’ very utterance is a strong Orientalist statement that endures in the text. Poignantly, much as the Christian boy performed, through song, an understanding of the world that led to his death despite his pure intentions, the Prioress’ utterance performs an Orientalist conception of the world that lingers, regardless of any ironic intention of Chaucer or the Chaucer-Narrator. Clearly, then, the intention behind an utterance is inconsequential if it is not able to alter the power of the utterance’s performance.

Ultimately, The Prioress’ Tale offers the opportunity to examine and expand the phenomenon that Austin describes in “Performative Utterances,” and to reckon this phenomenon with that of Said’s Orientalism. Clearly, both the textual and metatextual utterances within the Tale serve to indicate that, as Austin began to theorize, speech acts do contain a power of utterance, not just enacting simple proclamations but also performing into

22 existence certain understandings of the world. Indeed, analyzing the Tale can work to develop from certain gaps in Austin’s theory, advancing his understanding of the power of utterance and emphasizing performative utterances may emerge in the absence of intention, thereby leading to complex felicitous and infelicitous consequences. Further, viewed in light of the Tale and Orientalism specifically, several elements of powers of utterance become clear. First, even descriptive statements contain rhetorically loaded language, and may perform understandings of the world that produce real consequences (as evidenced by the utterances within the text of the boy, Satan, and God-through-the-boy). Second, speech acts may subtly perform conceptual paradigms, such as Orientalism (as evidenced by the Prioress’ oration of Orientalist rhetoric). Third, speech acts may work to perform certain conceptions of and exercise certain influence over one another (evidenced by the Chaucer-Narrator’s narrative intrusion into the Tale). Finally, intentionality does not, by any means, determine the power of utterance (as evidenced by the lingering effect of the Prioress’ Orientalism). In considering Austin’s “Performative Utterance” further, it is critical to examine the many valences that speech acts may take on, with the ultimate consideration that practically all statements, no matter how “descriptive” they may appear, still function to perform a certain understanding of the world and still strive to make listeners subscribe to this understanding.

23 Works Cited Austin, John L. “Performative Utterances.� From Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism Second Edition, ed.

Vincent B. Leitch, W.W. Norton, 2010, pp. 1289-301

Chaucer, Geoffrey. The Canterbury Tales: Fifteen Tales and the General Prologue: Authoritative Text, Sources and Backgrounds, Criticism. Eds. V. A. Kolve and Glending Olson, W.W. Norton, 2005.

Said, Edward. Excerpt from Orientalism. Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism Second Edition. ed. Vincent B. Leitch, W.W. Norton, 2010, pp. 1866-88.

24

“Untitled,� Madison Golden, University of Wisconsin-Madison

25

The Last Man: A Critical Analysis of Plagues Creating Community

Katie Lacayo, Whitworth University

As the plague begins to form and spread in Mary Shelley’s The Last Man, the private sectors of life are

interrupted. The public sphere is the only area in which people are allowed to live, and the reliance upon mankind becomes far greater than individual interest. Because of disease, a physical, uncontrolled contamination of the body, the community is forced to reconcile with internal affairs toward the entire community. Shelley suggests through her passages that security, which is found in an unchanging community, is disrupted by conflict.

This conflict reveals the mistrust of those perceived as the other, as well as the self-protection that is natural within internal or societal controversy. Through a shift in the paradigm—the emergence of the plague—Shelley then changes the motivation of her characters by depicting the vulnerability that individuals must entrust to others in order to survive and live well and wholly in the novel, despite the heightened conflict that the plague brings. The Last Man ultimately demonstrates vulnerability within human community and how disease breaks apart the social constructs of privacy, individuality, and strength to reveal a much more human view of the other.

Throughout the narrative, the reader is confronted with interpersonal conflicts that seem, at first glance,

to detract from the novel. The beginning of the novel especially focuses on multiple love triangles, squares, and polygons, and the plague does not enter the lives of the characters until the second half of the book. While it may at first appear that Shelley is obsessed with the relational problems of her characters, sparked by Romanticism, the author makes a smart and careful choice to include these relationships and dwell in them. Through these relationships, the reader is able to understand the private sphere of each individual’s life and the preexisting desire for individuality and self-preservation.

Shelley’s characters, Perdita and Raymond, reveal their selfish ideologies through an argument in the

26 early pages of the novel. Through this scene, Shelley exposes the tendency of Perdita and Raymond to devalue human relationships and carry an over-appreciation for their individual selves in what could later be perceived as a small, insignificant conflict. Raymond assists Evadne, a woman his wife would perceive as a threat, in her misfortunes. Readers could analyze his actions as emotional adultery or just as human kindness, but Perdita discovers his secret and immediately shifts into defensiveness. The subsequent drama separates the two into opposing sides, with Raymond simply concluding, “You have loved me; I adored you. But all human sentiments come to an end. Let our affection expire” (Shelley 98). Raymond’s brash reaction reveals a high level of drama, to the point where it reads as unrealistic. Yet Shelley purposefully places the relational crisis here to expose a reality: Raymond considers interpersonal resolution as second to personal preservation.

To a reader, Raymond’s overreaction asks for a deeper explanation of the conflict, and Shelley intention-

ally focuses on his pitiful romanticism to reveal a greater issue. Theoretician Herbert Blau notes how if “all the world [is] a stage,” then it follows that there must be an “essential distrust of appearances,” not just in drama, as theorist Wagner-Lawlor argues, but also in the drama and politics of the individuals’ lives. Shelley utilizes drama to drive home the point that Raymond and Perdita cannot place themselves in the other’s point of view, and this tendency to mistrust is essential to understanding the conflict within The Last Man. When even minor interpersonal disagreements, including lies, secrets, and insecurities, arise, Shelley’s characters choose to distrust the other and rely on only themselves. Perdita responds to Raymond by asking, “Are we not already parted? Does not a stream, boundless as ocean, deep as vacuum, yawn between us?” (Shelley 98). Before the idea of a plague has even drifted onto the pages, Shelley intentionally depicts the human tendency to separate, divide, and individualize when faced with conflict.

Shelley continues to demonstrate this individuality through her characters’ dependence on self, weighing

personal preservation over the greater good. As the plague arrives in London, Ryland, the Lord-Protector, begins to fear it with a “dastard fear expressed in every gesture” (Shelley 193). In a joking manner, Adrian tells Ryland that to avoid the plague, he “must quit the world” (193), and it is later discovered that Ryland does indeed flee from his responsibilities of protecting the greater good to preserve his own life and safety. Nadja Durbach, a theorist on inoculation, describes this idea through the lens of vaccination history. Although pro-vaccinationists argued that it should be “mandatory to protect not only each individual but the nation as a whole against this deadly contagious disease,” many disagreed, claiming that their individual privacy required protection (Durbach 8). A crucial scholar for understanding the outbreak narrative, Priscilla Wald, notes how this desire to protect

27 the self manifests within communities, relating how the “plague ravaged the social order as much as it did the individual bodies” (Wald 11). Individuals do not take a group responsibility in the beginning of the disease, but instead take personal responsibility to maintain self. In the initial coming of the plague in the novel, the self remains a singularly prominent concern to the masses.

Additionally, the depiction of the plague brings characters to form greater subsets of individuality.

Verney notes how those in England “fancied that the little channel between our island and the rest of the earth was to preserve us alive among the dead” (Shelley 198). In holding to this idea, Shelley’s characters show how greatly their individualistic notions deceive them. When the plague is but an idea or a disease that affects the other, it is easy to build communities apart from the contagion. Dr. Kari Nixon, a scholar in disease and Victorian literature, describes this dilemma and its results within the greater community. The tendency to preserve the self is shown through an acceptance of community that can only exist through whole security—that is, a system that only includes individuals who are deemed as safe by others inside the community. Nixon describes this as “boundaries,” stressing that the “border between the national subject and the international other” is what plague narratives uncover (Nixon). Even with the community of those living in England, the plague disrupts the perceived safety, and Ryland’s reaction demonstrates that unceasing need for individuality.

The notion of disease continues to cause community members to push away from each other, especially

disowning individuals who are regarded as unsafe. Inoculation sparked a debate between private body and public security that is reflected quite intensely in the folds of The Last Man, where disease extracts this reaction to isolate the self in order to protect against others; self-preservation of the body, then, encourages wide exclusion of those infected. The plague even reveals a distrust and desire to separate from others deemed “contagious.”

Verney notes how his “beloved friends were alarmed – nay, they expressed their alarm so anxiously, that I dared not pronounce the word plague…lest they should construe my perturbed looks into a symptom” (Shelley 192).

In saying this, Verney notes how the safety and security of having beloved friends is, at first, offset by the anxiety around the plague. If his actions are deemed plague-like, Verney suggests that he would be rejected from his community.

Shelley negotiates this idea of the other in society throughout the novel. The plague is originally per-

ceived with suspicion, as a mark of death, uncleanliness, and distinction. Verney portrays this when he notices the reactions of people who have seen him mingle with the diseased.

It behoved [sic] me well to reflect what I should do on this hither side of disease and danger. According

28 to the vulgar superstition, my dress, my person, the air I breathed, bore in it the mortal danger to myself and others. Should I return to the Castle, to my wife and children, with this taint upon me? (Shelley 207) The disease is considered a “taint,” something that carries a negative imprint on the individual. This perception of disease gives a sense that Verney is not entirely in control of his personal self when it comes to disease. By being around the plague, the people deem him as contaminated, even without the physical outward symptoms.

Durbach notes that “who controlled the body was a highly charged political issue” (6), and this is true not just for governments but for governing bodies of communities as well. It is clear that the political view of the other creates a common and communal sensitivity to danger, as well as a response to avoid such danger at all costs.

This sensitivity towards disease results in the exposure of the distrust humanity already has for the other.

Wald writes about this separation caused by mentally and socially dividing the independent self and the other by explaining how “the routes traveled by communicable disease light up the social interactions—the spaces and encounters” (Wald 9). When disease surrounds a community, suddenly people are hyper-aware of the relationships affecting their individual selves. Again, the self-awareness involved is strange but consistent; the mark of disease immediately reveals a sense of otherness. Shelley describes this in the scene where Verney apparently attains his immunity after an encounter with the first depicted “negro half-clad.” Despite Verney generally helping the community grow together, this scene depicts his immediate reaction to shy from what is considered other—whether it be a result of the plague or the half-clad’s race. Verney explains that “with mixed horror and impatience I strove to disengage myself, and fell on the sufferer…his face was close to mine, and his breath, death-laden, entered my vitals” (Shelley 268). Here, Shelley depicts a gross interaction between clean and unclean, deathly and healthy. This scene describes the power and danger of contagion as Verney pulls away, but the disease clings regardless.

In this encounter, Shelley uncovers an initial lack of empathy for the other in Verney, which matures in Ryland to inspire separation from society. The key here is to see that this division is sparked by an instant selfish reaction when disease hits but is later mended through relationships solidified in the following pages. Durbach describes the division in Bodily Matters, writing about how vaccination (or inoculation) “provoked fear and suspicion throughout the world” (Durbach 4). Considered a form of disease, the idea of inoculation was greatly rejected within British society because of its threat to the individual’s private body. In the same way, characters pose predictable responses in The Last Man, such as Ryland’s seclusion from humanity or Verney’s repulsion of the half-clad. However, Shelley uses these reactions to expose the need for empathy, especially during the

29 plague. Theorist Lauren Cameron explains how plagues draw out “the importance of…empathizing with the suffering,” rather than asserting divisions that may be immediately desired (Cameron). If individuality gives the illusion of safety, the resulting lack of empathy toward the other should create further separation for the better.

Yet when Verney interacts with the diseased, he attains immunity and is given a reward.

Despite the concrete security in individuality that Shelley forms within the novel, Ryland’s inability to

survive alone and Verney’s reward of immunity shows a lack of sustainability in self-reliance. Shelley begins to create a paradox, implicating Ryland’s demise to the reader and explaining how he dies quickly and utterly alone. His desire for self-preservation is somehow ineffective in the construct of the plague. Verney ponders “in what uncontaminated seclusion could I save my beloved treasures,” which relates a genuine concern over this difficulty of rejecting others and maintaining self (Shelley 194). As the plague conflict increases, the reaction of humanity is to individualize, but the nature of the plague brings people into a peculiar need for community; the private is forced to intersect into a public closeness. Although the entrance of the plague “threaten[s] to rob the individual and national body of selfhood,” (Nixon) Ryland’s decision to cut himself completely out of the community results in the loss of what he holds most dear: his own life. Shelley begins to contradict the sustainability of relying only on the self; Ryland’s inability to live, despite his self-preservation, reveals that individuality within the plague cannot protect the self.

If the plague could be considered an increase in conflict, it follows that this tension would create further

separation and reliance on self. As suggested, conflict of any magnitude generates human selfishness within Shelley’s novel. Should not the plague bring greater division between individuals within the community? While small conflict does bring out this natural tendency, the apocalyptic environment forces a reprioritization within the community. Shelley uses the plague to flip the expectation that readers have for the characters, showing how this new vulnerability allows people like Adrian and Verney to see themselves as the other. Verney describes the weight of the plague as the “destroyer of man,” explaining how “with one mighty sweep of its potent weapon, all caution, all care, all prudence were leveled low” (Shelley 219). Through this description, Shelley begins to show how the plague destroys not only civilization, but also what humanity holds to be true and important.

Through a loss of caution, care, and prudence, individuals are forced into a reality outside of their presuppositions of individuality. Priorities shift because of the effect the plague has on humanity’s standards.

Wald discusses this shift in selflessness, which Shelley draws out in the relationship of Idris and Verney,

claiming that “the plague forces them [individuals] to assume responsibility for their actions, as they illustrate

30 the relationship between the group and an anomalous individual” (Wald 11). Wald’s theory about human necessity—humans needing other humans—is developed through the idea of how plagues reveal this need. Instead of clinging to their private selves, individuals are forced to shift into a perspective that accepts the other.

In previous pages, Verney is on his deathbed, but he miraculously recovers and continues his travels with his sickly wife, Idris. The following scene demonstrates how intense interpersonal conflict—a near death experience—now brings individuals together, instead of apart. Idris talks of how she “will never leave” the company of her community. Instead, she addresses “the simple manners of our little tribe, and the patriarchal brotherhood of love, which would survive the ruins of the populous nations which had lately existed” (Shelley 276). Though hopeful, these comments depict how Idris is outwardly focused, not inwardly consumed in her own self-preservation from her illness. This admission of reliance on human connectivity is just one example of a mindset change that Shelley’s characters begin to undergo. They are learning to cling to others, instead of protecting their own private selves.

Through the plague narrative, Shelley continually uses characters to urge communities to form, not sepa-

rate. “The insistence on the primacy of human sympathy” comes out of the power of disease, and characters begin to see that in conflict, humans must come together to survive and live fully (Wagner-Lawler). Adrian is the prime example of this realization of human necessity, crying a plea for the community to “bind up the wounds of the fallen – let not one die” (Shelley 241). While individuality may have been a priority before disease struck, the fear of the plague ultimately fades and the result is a soft sympathy for humanity that is crucial to the themes within The Last Man. Once the plague overcomes humanity’s natural desires for self-preservation, characters’ perceptions and judgments of humanity change significantly. Shelley’s characters are no longer aiming to protect just themselves; they are intent on considering those formerly perceived as the other. Not only this, but they have become the other.

The idea of otherness and personal preservation becomes unhelpful as the plague progresses. As seen

in the novel, Verney eventually stands as the last man and longs for human contact, visiting the great works and sights of humanity and searching for other living souls. He asks how he can continue living “without love, without sympathy, without communion with any,” as if he finally realizes that this human connection is all that matters. Wald describes how “stories of disease emergence in all their incarnations are so powerful because they are as dynamic as the populations and communities that they affect” (Wald 28). It is important to see that Wald is pointing towards the interconnectedness of the human condition—that one cannot change without affecting

31 the other. To agree upon this notion is to agree that human necessity is more than just the want for love or communion but a greater string that ties us together. When just one person is killed by the plague, it creates a ripple effect of hurt, rejection, and insecurity, culminating in the collapse of humanity. The human condition must change because, while living in a world of individuality, the reality is that each individual makes up the whole.

Shelley uses the resulting paradox to show how the selfishness and desire for independent stability is a

pre-existing condition that must shift in the aftermath of the plague. As demonstrated by the prolonged character development at the beginning of the novel, individuality is something that is established early and remains.

The thing that breaks down this possessiveness over self is the plague; Wald notes how the “disease emergence dramatizes the dilemma that inspires the most basic human narratives: the necessity and danger of human contact” (Wald 2). While it is clear that the danger of humanity elicits a deep, pre-existing fear of the other, the final chapters depict a society trying to find and appreciate humanity. Through this collapse of basic human community—setting apart the normalization of independence or selfishness—the characters in The Last Man begin to see their need for human contact. Verney describes this remaining group as individuals “principally dear to us,” and the loss of the many as not scary or fearful but a “gush of grief” and a “passionate but fruitless clinging to the priceless few that remained” (Shelley 330). In this account, Shelley demonstrates how human necessity has become the singular priority in the minds of her characters.

The breakdown of the self and the realization of the other give insight into how humans function with-

in and without a community. The vulnerability of ourselves to disease creates a unique understanding that we, as humans, cannot help but trust others and live in community. Verney comments on this fact early on, as if prophesying the coming need for the breakdown of boundaries. “Thus, losing our identity, that of which we are chiefly conscious,” he claims, “we glory in the continuity of our species, and learn to regard death without terror” (Shelley 184). While this view may discount the security of our individual selves, it reclaims humanity as something only significant within community. Shelley invites readers to explore their own distrust in humanity not only by setting the characters in a realm of conflict, but through presenting the most difficult conflict of all—mass death to humanity—Shelley presents readers with the fundamental understanding of what it is to live. It is clear that the individual is vulnerable when alone but strong when trusting a greater community. To share life through experiencing community is to live fully within the human experience. Although The Last Man demonstrates the natural proclivity of humans to protect the self, especially when conflict challenges a selfish preexisting desire, the plague draws out a unique and important reliance on the perceived other. Through under-

32 standing and becoming the other, communities can accept their personal vulnerability through the discovery of communal strength.

33

Works Cited

Cameron, Lauren. “Mary Shelley’s Malthusian Objections in The Last Man.” Nineteenth

Century Literature, vol. 67, iss. 2, 2012.

Durbach, Nadja. Bodily Matters: The Anti-Vaccination Movement in England. Duke

University Press, 2005.

Nixon, Kari. “Keep Bleeding: Hemorrhagic Sores, Trade, and the Necessity of Leaky

Boundaries in Defoe’s Journal of the Plague Year.” Journal for Early Modern

Cultural Studies, vol. 14, iss. 2, 2014. ProQuest.

Shelley, Mary. The Last Man. Wordsworth Editions Limited, 2004.

Wagner-Lawlor, Jennifer A. “Performing history, performing humanity in Mary Shelley’s

The Last Man.” Studies in English Literature, vol. 42, iss. 4, 2002. ProQuest.

Wald, Priscilla. Contagious: Cultures, Carriers, and the Outbreak Narrative. Duke

University Press, pgs. 1-28, 2008.

34

“Untitled,� Qinlei Zhang, University of Wisconsin-Madison

35

Coding Victorian Homosexuality in Literary Style Benjamin Papsun, Vassar College Before the open expression of homosexuality was socially acceptable, artists interested in representing themes of non-hegemonic romance had to disguise them by adopting various stylistic lenses. One tool that these artists had at their disposal in the Victorian era was the ability to capitalize on the popular trend of appropriating the thematic and stylistic devices of older artistic schools for the modern day. Prominent social and literary critics such as Matthew Arnold and Walter Pater advocated a return to the Hellenic ideal of “spontaneity of consciousness” (Arnold 128), and the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood asserted the importance of capturing nature via mimesis as Renaissance artists had done in the 15th century prior to Raphael (“[seeing] the object as in itself it really is” (Arnold 29)). 2Adopting styles existing outside of the contemporary vocabulary offered artists a liminal space where exotic sensualities could exist, and which allowed them (to some extent) to deflect the suspicions and provocations of moral panic that would result from such works.2 Two literary works which exemplify this subversive adoption of previous genres are Christina Rossetti’s 1862 poem “Goblin Market” and Oscar Wilde’s 1890 novel T ​ he Picture of Dorian Gray​. In both works, the author creates a representation of homosexuality in the guise of reverence towards a particular era of art and the values espoused by it—for Rossetti, the genre is Gothic; for Wilde, Hellenic. The effect that both create is a depiction of lecherous behavior which is nonetheless made acceptable because it exists within an accepted genre (and thereby moral) convention. That being said, what makes these two works particularly interesting in their representations of temptation are the subtextual attitudes they seem to have towards their subject matter.

While both establish a dichotomy of purity versus obscenity, they use this dichotomy to subvert moral expectations rather than reinforce them.

In “Goblin Market,” Lizzie represents the Victorian ideal of the “lady.” She is responsible for keeping her sister’s desires in check by warning her of the dangers of the goblin men, thereby ensuring that they can

36 both continue to serve their circumscribed domestic roles. Ostensibly a tale of sisterly love, the poem shows how Laura, the “fallen woman,” succumbs to the temptation of the fruit, and this capitulation brings her sister down with her, only for Laura to be saved in the end by Lizzie’s love for her. When Laura first goes to the goblin market to buy the exotic fruits they sell, she has no money to purchase the fruit, so she pays with a curl of her golden hair—a symbolic sacrifice of her beauty and physical integrity. By acting on her prurient impulses, she degrades herself. So far, so good—this is a standard Victorian morality tale. A key difference between “Goblin Market” and D ​ orian Gray ​is they approach subversion differently within their genre modes: “Goblin Market” subverts heterosexuality from within a traditional moral framework (the parable, or morality tale), whereas D ​ orian Gray ​provides a new framework from without.

The two works still have symbolic elements in common—for instance, light-colored hair as a symbol of innocence in D ​ orian Gray​. Lord Henry remarks to Dorian, “Never marry a woman with straw-coloured hair,” referring to his wife, Lady Henry. When prompted for the reason why, Lord Henry answers: “Because they are so sentimental” (Wilde 47). The golden hair is a symbol of oblivious innocence, of the pure and passionless Victorian woman who knows nothing of the “real,” visceral pleasures which Lord Henry revels in and which Dorian acquires a taste for. Although the golden-haired sisters and Lady Henry are both stand-ins for the innocent Victorian lady figure, there is a key difference in how they are portrayed in context. Laura is degraded when she gives in to her desires and must suffer before she can return to her domestic sphere and become a wife with children of her own (Rossetti 25). Conversely, Lord Henry views his wife as degraded b​ ecause ​she has no knowledge of vice.

This realignment of the ethics of desire in D ​ orian Gray​ stems from its endorsement of hedonism (or “a new Hedonism,” as Lord Henry terms it), which “Goblin Market” is less willing to embrace. Lord Henry wants to upend the puritan values of upper English society and establish a new value system, “a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit, all the perfection of the spirit that is Greek” (Wilde 13).3 Of particular importance to this school of new hedonism is the idea that denying oneself the experience of worldly pleasures is more degrading than succumbing to them (Wilde 126), a reversal of the values presented in “Goblin Market.” It is not difficult to imagine that someone who had spent a lifetime denying his own sexual impulses out of fear of social impropriety might use a similar logic to justify his indulgence in these impulses.

Pleasure is therefore glorified; to gratify one’s desires is, to Lord Henry, the mark of a well-adjusted, dignified individual. Pleasure becomes synonymous with civility—as he says to Dorian, “no civilized man ever regrets a

37 pleasure, and no uncivilized man ever knows what a pleasure is” (Wilde 76). Mentions of civilized men and the “spirit that is Greek” serve to link D ​ orian Gray ​to the ideals of ancient Greece, and to legitimize their seeming radicality. The Hellenic roots of this philosophy do not only exist for the expression of Wilde’s It is not surprising that some of these homages to the passions of the Greeks would raise a few Victorian eyebrows at the time of D ​ orian Gray​’s publication. Wilde’s Greek allusions even extend into his battle with British libel and obscenity law. In the three 1895 trials he was a part of, beginning on the side of the prosecution and ending up as the defendant, Wilde cites the practices of the ancient Greeks as a defense of his own writing and as a cover for interpretations of D ​ orian Gray​ and other works of his as homoerotic works. In W ​ ilde v.

Queensberry​, when called upon to a defend the quote “pleasure is the only thing one should live for,” from his play An Ideal Husband​, Wilde appeals to the Greeks in his response:

WILDE: I think that to realise one’s self through pleasure is finer than to realise one’s self through pain. That is the pagan ideal of man realising himself by happiness as opposed to the later and perhaps grander idea of man realising himself by suffering. I was, on that subject, entirely on the side of the ancients—the Greeks, I will say—the philosophers. (Holland 75)

In ​Regina v. Wilde​, Wilde is cross-examined by prosecutor Charles Gill about the meaning of the poem “Two Loves,” which Wilde admitted had been read to him by author of the poem (and his lover at the time), Lord Alfred Douglas. Gill wants to elicit an admission from Wilde that the poem describes “unnatural love”—in other words, romantic love between men:

GILL: Is it not clear that the love described relates to natural love and unnatural love?

WILDE: No.

GILL: What is the “Love that dare not speak its name”?

WILDE: The “Love that dare not speak its name” in this century is such a great affection of an elder for

a younger man as there was between David and Jonathan, such as Plato made the very basis of

38

his philosophy, and such as in the sonnets of Michelangelo and Shakespeare… It is beautiful, it is

fine, it is the noblest form of affection. There is nothing unnatural about it. (Testimony of Oscar Wilde)

By invoking Plato, Michelangelo, and Shakespeare, Wilde is attempting to disguise a portrayal of

homosexuality through the values of canonical male artistry and philosophy. The same sort of defense is employed, albeit to a different effect, by Victorian poet and cultural historian John Addington Symonds in his essay “A Problem in Modern Ethics,” published in 1896, one of the earliest treatises written advocating for the acceptance of male homosexuality. He writes in Chapter VII: “it is objected that inversed sexuality [homosexuality] is demoralising to the manhood of a nation, that it degrades the dignity of a man, and that it is incapable of moral elevation. Each of these points may be taken separately. They are all of them at once and together contradicted by the history of ancient Greece” (Symonds 109). The key difference between the way Symonds and Wilde use this defense is that Symonds uses ancient Greece as a moral elevation of male homosexuality, while Wilde uses Greek pederastic relationships as an aromantic deflection of the claims made against him.4

Just as Wilde steeps his homosexual representations in Hellenic ideals to make them less apparent, Ros-

setti uses the artistic style of Gothicism to create a distance between the content and the tenor of “Goblin Market.” The same sort of “Desire” that creeps out of its hiding place and into Dorian Gray’s soul infects Laura’s soul as well (Wilde 54). But this desire, which might otherwise offend a Victorian audience, is appropriate for a Gothic tale, despite the wantonly orgasmic scenes it gives rise to. Eminent Victorian art critic John Ruskin’s essay “The Nature of Gothic” provides some insight into how Gothicism operates: “we may expect that the first two elements of good architecture5 should be expressive of some great truths commonly belonging to the whole race and necessary to be understood or felt by them... [these two elements are] the confession of Imperfection, and the confession of Desire of Change” (Ruskin 99). The confession of imperfection and the confession of desire of change both prominently feature in Goblin Market, and in this way Rossetti encapsulates the Gothic character in her work. Laura embodies both traits, because she must accept her own imperfection in desiring the goblin men’s fruit, and she must confess her desire for change, namely a change from her domestic, puritanical life.

In one passage from D ​ orian Gray​, the narrator describes a scene which perfectly characterizes the popular imagining of Gothicism: “phantoms more terrible than reality itself, and instinct with that vivid life that lurks in all grotesques, and that lends to Gothic art its enduring vitality, this art being, one might fancy,

39 especially the art of those whose minds have been troubled with the malady of reverie” (Wilde 126-127). This quote directly echoes Ruskin, who wrote: “It is that strange d​ isquietude​ of the Gothic spirit that is its greatness; that restlessness of the dreaming mind, that wanders hither and thither among the niches, and flickers feverishly around the pinnacles” (Ruskin 99).6 This “malady of reverie” or “restlessness of thedreaming mind” is an affliction present in Laura (“Lizzie with an open heart, / Laura in an absent dream” (Rossetti 17)), and the fantastical setting she occupies disguises the sexual undertones of its manifestation. Without the establishment of a Gothic atmosphere, Lizzie’s plea to Laura to “Hug me, kiss me, suck my juices / Squeezed from goblin fruit for you…

Eat me, drink me, love me; / Laura, make much of me” (Rossetti 23) would be more obviously erotic. But within a Gothic convention, which makes use of excessive desire and grotesquery as genre tropes, the homoerotic imagery is less suspect.

An interesting difference between the way D ​ orian Gray ​and “Goblin Market” depict homosexuality is that D ​ orian Gray ​goes so far as to show homosexuality as at least partially natural, or “scientific,” rather than acquired. Although both works show characters who are influenced and seduced by other characters (Lord Henry and the goblins, respectively), Rossetti illustrates Laura’s surrender to temptation as an explicitly immoral act. Once Laura falls from grace, only her sister’s purity can redeem her. The overt message of “Goblin Market” (discounting the tantalizing imagery) seems to be something along the lines of “anyone can resist temptation if only their character is pure enough.”

Wilde, on the other hand, seems to want to steer his readers away from associating temptation with impurity. In ​Dorian Gray​, the titular character’s surrender has an added psychological dimension which makes it far less clear that the temptation is being shown to the reader as a warning—it reads more like an invitation. The only thing temptation can do to character, Wilde would argue, is enhance it, and any attempts to resist this temptation are hindrances to one’s character. This is apparent in lines like the remark by Lord Henry that “[g]ood resolutions are useless attempts to interfere with scientific laws” (Wilde 97), and the description of the young Parisian in the “poisonous book” Lord Henry gives Dorian as having a deep love for “those renunciations that men have unwisely called virtue, as much as those natural rebellions that wise men still call sin” (Wilde 121). This young Parisian, the only character to appear in the corrupting book Dorian reads, is also described as having a blend of “the romantic and the scientific temperaments” (Wilde 123). This book opens Dorian’s eyes to the world of fully-realized male homosexuality and stokes a passion in him that he had not yet come to recognize. He sees the book as “the story of his own life, written before he had lived

40 it” (Wilde 123), demonstrating that Lord Henry’s influence did not corrupt Dorian, it only awakened the latent ​ natural​ desires within him. The philosophy of new hedonism, based on what Dorian learns, is scientifically justified, and its adoption is not a moral act, as in “Goblin Market,” but an act of necessity. Through his discussions with Lord Henry and his experience with the book Lord Henry gives him, it becomes increasingly clear to Dorian, and to the reader, that submission to temptation is not only a natural achievement, but also a desirable one.

Interestingly, the sexual imagery contained in “Goblin Market” is far more graphic and overtly bacchanalian than anything depicted in D ​ orian Gray​; yet Wilde died in prison (due, in part, to his work), whereas Rossetti’s poem was seen as appropriate reading for children. A possible explanation for this response is that male homosexuality had a place in England’s popular imagination (though a demonized one), whereas female homosexuality did not. This was largely due to the prevalence of clandestine male homoerotic relationships in English public schools and the socially-constructed denial of female sexual autonomy. That being said, many a Victorian reader could have read both T ​ he Picture of Dorian Gray ​and “Goblin Market” without intuiting that either contained anything outside of traditional social norms, which is a testament to the effectiveness of genre as a device to disguise content. Despite the differences in their levels of explicitness and the moral attitudes they adopt towards their subject matter, both works are significant for their portrayals of any kind of homosexuality at a time when the open expression of male homosexuality gauranteed a prison sentence. The subtexts through which Rossetti and Wilde depict homosexuality may be unmistakable to the modern reader, but given their own historical contexts, both works mark significant achievements in queer literary representation. This representation may not have been possible without the revival of the Renaissance and Gothic aesthetics and the fertility of an artistic class hungry for a new, more visceral set of values from which to cultivate their art.

41 Works Cited

Arnold, Matthew. C ​ ulture and Anarchy and Other Writings​. Ed. Stefan Collini, Cambridge University Press, 1993.

Blom, 1971.

Wilde, Oscar. T ​ he Picture of Dorian Gray​. 1890. Penguin, 2003.

Rossetti, Christina. T ​ he Complete Poems of Christina Rossetti​. Ed. R. W. Crump, vol. 1, Louisiana State University Press, 1979.

Holland, Merlin. T ​ he Real Trial of Oscar Wilde​.Harper Collins, 2003. “Testimony of Oscar Wilde.” Ed. Douglas O. Linder, F ​ amous Trials​, University of Missouri-Kansas School of Law, ​www.famous-trials.com/wilde/342-wildetestimony​.

Symonds, John Addington. A ​ Problem in Modern Ethics; Being an Inquiry into the Phenomenon of Sexual Inversion, Addressed Especially to Medical Psychologists and Jurists​.1896. B.

Ruskin, John. ​Unto This Last and Other Writings​. Ed. Clive Wilmer, Penguin Books, 1997.

42

“ConSoul,” Sara Mitchell, University of Wisconsin-Madison

43

Resurrection of the Windigo: Pauline Puyat’s Mythic Monstrosity in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks Samantha Watson, College of Charleston

Ojibwe lore and legend serve a complex, multifaceted purpose in Louise Erdrich’s Tracks, a novel that

adapts and reinterprets traditional folkloric entities in order to convey meaning to a contemporary audience. The figure of the windigo, in particular, is one such being that simultaneously enriches and complicates Erdrich’s narrative. Described as a starving, wintry cannibal of gargantuan stature, the windigo is a creature present in the mythos of many Algonquian-speaking indigenous peoples, including but not limited to the Ojibwe. Windigo lore is incorporated at various points in the novel to embody concepts of loss, grief, and death, but specifically through the character of Pauline—one of the novel’s dual-narrators—Erdrich resurrects the windigo as a monstrous subject who cannibalizes her own people and culture. Pauline’s peripheral existence, in accordance with her trauma-induced psychosis and predatory voyeurism akin to that of an owl, equate her to the windigo’s mythic monstrosity.

Erdrich depicts the windigo condition as a liminal state of being precipitated by the overlapping of the

realm of the dead into the realm of the living—as a result, the affected individual possesses or ingests the spirits of the dead, effectively allowing the individual to inhabit both realms simultaneously. This idea is exhibited when Nanapush and Fleur go “half windigo” after the bodies of the deceased Pillagers are buried but their spirits linger behind (Erdrich 5). Nanapush recounts his and Fleur’s deterioration into the windigo state: “Their names grew within us, swelled to the brink of our lips, forced our eyes open in the middle of the night. [...]

Within us, like ice shards, their names bobbed and shifted” (6). Additionally, he remarks that they “needed no food” and that others who had succumbed to the same condition “could not swallow another bite of food because the names of their dead anchored their tongues” (6). Nanapush and Fleur—starving and stuck somewhere between alive and dead—symbolically consume the dead, demonstrating the way Erdrich characterizes the windigo as a marginal being that exists within the meeting of two realms.

This combined duality within one being is what links Pauline to the windigo figure. Because of her

44 mixed heritage and attempt to move from one cultural sphere to another, Pauline shares the transgressive liminality Erdrich attributes to the windigo. Although Pauline’s abandonment of her native culture effectively renders her monstrous, she is not unequivocally condemned, and her cultural ambivalence instead belies a greater monster: the devourment of native culture by white hegemony. Pauline expresses her wish to move away from her Ojibwe heritage when she admits, “I wanted to be like my mother, who showed her half-white. I wanted to be like my grandfather, pure Canadian” (14). Her father warns her against this longing however, declaring, “‘You’ll fade out there’ [...] ‘You won’t be an Indian once you return’” (14). Other scholars note this threat of fundamental change within oneself, as Kari J. Winter illustrates when she writes, “By rejecting the web of family ties and Ojibwa narratives that she was born into, Pauline renders herself incomprehensible (‘mad’) and, indeed, she becomes someone else” (48). This ambiguous warning suggests a threat of transformation, that Pauline will become something perverse and other, perhaps warning of her eventual conversion to the windigo. Winter examines Pauline’s relationship with food, emphasizing the literal and figurative starvation she inflicts upon herself in her pursuit of assimilation to white hegemonic society. Although not directly addressed by Winter, Pauline’s resemblance to the windigo is ultimately furthered by her findings. For instance, Winter contends that Pauline’s decision to become a Catholic nun transforms her into a “maniacal embodiment of Christian asceticism” who “mortifies her own flesh by self-starvation and other forms of self-torture” which results in her abandonment of her Ojibwe heritage (47). The windigo is a desperate being defined and created by hunger, hence Pauline’s insatiable desire to become white paired with her severe self-discipline and self-deprivation of food creates an eerie resemblance between the two. Pauline’s biracial status not only allows her to be a singular coalescence of two cultural domains, but also empowers her to transgress from one boundary to another, ultimately aligning her with Erdrich’s particular interpretation of the windigo figure.

As a survivor of deep-seated emotional trauma, much of Pauline’s destructive maliciousness towards her

own culture may be explained by mental illness or an attempt to cope rather than any supernatural force like the windigo. However, the notion of windigo psychosis, as explained by James B. Waldram, offers yet another interpretation in which windigo mythology is linked to psychiatric disorder. Waldram describes multiple approaches to understanding windigo psychosis, the first being an Algonquian-specific mental disorder “characterized by an individual’s belief that he or she was turning into the cannibal monster” (192). He cites an observation from ethnologist Seymour Parker who details the initial symptoms as “‘feelings of morbid depression, nausea, and distaste for most ordinary foods, and sometimes periods of semi-stupor’” (193). These symptoms resonate with

45 Erdrich’s depiction of the windigo condition, particularly with Nanapush and Fleur’s ordeal—Nanapush actually implies mental illness when he remarks upon their becoming half-windigo, calling it “the invisible sickness” (Erdrich 6). While this phrase may be interpreted as an allusion to tuberculosis—the disease that decimated Ojibwe populations in the early twentieth century—the emphasis on its invisibility more strongly suggests the historical silence surrounding mental illness and its validity as a treatable bodily ailment. Furthermore, Pauline exhibits some of these same symptoms and seems self-aware of her own growing monstrousness. For instance, fueled by her guilt and warped sense of Christian penitence, she continually starves herself, expressing how her “stomach never filled” yet she “grew strong” suggesting a metamorphosis into the starving monster of legend (136).

Cognizant of her own passivity and paralysis during Fleur’s rape, Pauline is haunted by her own failure

to intervene—ashamed of her inaction, she effectively condemns herself to monstrosity. This self-destruction is indicative of windigo psychosis, and Pauline certainly seems to incriminate herself. She experiences nightmares featuring Fleur’s rapists who she says “walked nightlong through my dreams, looking for whom to blame.

Pauline!” (62). Additionally, when recounting the night of Fleur’s rape, she refers to herself as “the shadow that could have saved her [Fleur],” effectively admitting her own inability to act.

While Fleur’s rape commences Pauline’s odious descent into monsterhood, Mary Pepewas’ death al-

lows for Pauline to reconcile and come to terms with her monstrousness. She declares, “I knew I was different. I had the merciful scavenger’s heart. I became devious and holy, dangerously meek and mild” (69). This self-comparison to a scavenger—an animal that feeds off the dead—connotes a sense of self-loathing that often accompanies mental illness, as well as the perverse hunger of the windigo. However, despite her likeness to one suffering from windigo psychosis, Pauline experiences a lucid dream following Mary’s death in which she perceives herself as inhabiting the body of a winged creature, implying a literal transformation into a monster rather than a symbolic one. Thus, the mental anguish Pauline undergoes, as well as her subsequent derangement may be interpreted as a literal transformation into the windigo figure or, rather, as a case of windigo psychosis in which a mentally-ill Pauline deludes herself into believing she’s become a cannibalistic monster. The ambiguity surrounding both interpretations implies that both are plausible, which only emphasizes Pauline’s refusal to be categorized or contained. Regardless, both of these approaches accentuate Pauline’s likeness to the windigo, and suggests she has either literally or metaphorically become a macabre reflection of her trauma.

46

Waldram details a second interpretation in which windigo psychosis can be understood as a “culturally

localized expression of a universal condition, depression” (194). This idea of the windigo as a folkloric representation of depression emphasizes certain aspects of the creature’s lore—specifically regarding possession or incorporating one body into another. For example, disassociation is a common symptom experienced by those suffering from depression and is defined primarily by a severance or disconnect from one’s own identity and reality, causing a detachment from both. Thus, if one assumes Pauline to be suffering from a mental illness resembling that of depression, it follows to interpret Pauline’s incorporation of other characters’ bodies and realities into her own as the result of severe dissociative episodes in which she becomes a metaphorical windigo, cannibalizing the will and autonomy of others to replace the absence of her own. The nightmares that plague Pauline following Fleur’s rape demonstrate the way Pauline possesses another. She describes, “Every night I was witness when the men slapped Fleur’s mouth, beat her, entered and rode her. I felt all. My shrieks poured from her mouth and my blood from her wounds” (Erdrich 66). Pauline’s nightmares entail a merging of Fleur’s body into hers, as if Fleur’s experience has been ingested and absorbed by Pauline. This figurative devouring of another’s reality happens again when Pauline seems to supernaturally influence Sophie, compelling her into having a sexual encounter with Eli. She explains, “I turned my thoughts on the girl and entered her and made her do what she could never have dreamed of herself. I stood her in the broken straws and she stepped over Eli, one leg on either side of his chest” (83). The phrase “entered her” in particular conveys the sense of placing one’s flesh within another’s, evoking windigo-associated ideas of bodily consumption. Pauline herself acknowledges her consuming and consolidation of bodies when she remarks upon the strangers around her, “I was their own fate [...] they knew that these bodies they tended and preened, got drunk, pleasured and refused, fed as often as they could and relieved, these bodies to which they were devoted, all in good time came to me” (75). Therefore, Pauline’s disassociation from her own reality—perhaps the result of trauma-induced mental illness—allows for and encourages her incorporation of others. Their experiences, their wills, and ultimately their bodies become hers to ingest and devour in cannibalistic fashion.

Among Algonquian indigenous peoples, the owl and the windigo share an intrinsic association with one

another not just from a cultural or folkloric standpoint, but also through an etymological one. Robert A. Brightman explains that the word windigo has two Proto-Algonquian forms that “each possess reflexes meaning ‘owl’ in some languages and ‘cannibal monster’ in others” (340). He elaborates further, nothing that in the Ojibwe and Cree languages, the word refers to ‘cannibal monster’ whereas in the Fox, Kickapoo, and Miami-Illinois

47 languages, the word literally translates to ‘owl’ (341). This etymological evidence certainly suggests a conjunction between the owl and windigo, and while it doesn’t explain precisely why the conflation of the two exists, it does allow for the possibility of further associations. Brightman theorizes about the possible reasoning behind the owl and the windigo’s seemingly irrelevant connection, contending that “there exists also a potential metaphoric resemblance between perceptions of the impassive staring behavior of owls and the glistening eyes and staring of windigo symptomatology” (341). Characteristics pertaining to the windigo’s ever-watchful gaze can be observed in the folkloric tradition of Algonquian peoples. For instance, an account from Reverend Joseph E. Guinard—a Christian missionary who lived in the vicinity of the Algonquian-speaking Atikamekw peoples— provides a translated description of the windigo’s physicality. He writes that windigos “are solitary, aggressive cannibals, naked but impervious to cold, with black skin covered by resin-glued sand. They have no lips, large crooked teeth, hissing breath, and big bloodshot eyes, something like owls’ eyes” (Halpin 113). Therefore, the basis of the correlation seems to lie upon this voyeuristic quality of a creature who peers out from the shadows at its victims.

Erdrich capitalizes upon this association between the owl and the windigo, utilizing careful wording

and imagery pertaining to birds and the act of staring in order to equate Pauline to an owl-like monstrosity—in doing so, Pauline’s affinity with the windigo is deepened. The dreamlike trance Pauline experiences after witnessing Mary Pepewas’ demise depicts Pauline as inhabiting the body of a monstrous bird, as evident when she describes “my wings raked the air, and I rose in three powerful beats and saw what lay below” and “I knew that after I circled, studied, saw all, I touched down on my favorite branch and tucked my head beneath the shelter of my wing” (Erdrich 68). Pauline ultimately becomes inseparable from this illusory bird, referring to the wings as “my wings,” and from her looming position in the sky, she “circled, studied, saw all,” which implies a raptorial gaze. This concept of predatory staring is furthered when she says, “I alone, watching, filled with breath, knew death as a form of grace” (68). Additionally, this suggestion of Pauline as a conjurer of death aligns her with Kokoko the owl, a figure from Ojibwe mythology who “floated off a branch like smoke and called” to Pauline in the moments just before Mary Pepewas’ death (67) This then implicates Kokoko—and in extension Pauline—to be a herald of death. Pauline’s unsettling penchant for staring and her affinity with death doesn’t go unnoticed by the other characters in the novel. Nanapush imparts his wariness of her, stating, “the still look in Pauline’s eyes made me wonder, so like a scavenger, a bird that lands only for its purpose” (189). Furthermore, Pauline proves herself to be a vulturous voyeur, not only serving as a passive witness to Fleur’s rape, but she

48 also stares out from the trees, exerting her unnatural influence, looking on as Sophie and Eli copulate. Consequently, Pauline is likened to an owl whose hungry, peering stare parallels that of the windigo’s.

In assimilating herself to white hegemonic culture, Pauline effectively becomes an extension of the very

institutions that committed cultural genocide, systematically eradicating native people’s identity and autonomy.

Thus, it follows that Pauline is a metaphorical windigo, turning on her own native Ojibwe culture and cannibalizing it. Pauline seems to comprehend her own capacity for spreading destruction, remarking, “I handled the dead until the cold feel of their skin was a comfort, until I no longer bothered to bathe [...] but touched others with the same hands, passed death on” (69). Like the diseased and starved creature she resembles, Pauline transmits a contagion of death—one is reminded of the fitting moniker Nanapush uses to refer to going windigo as the so called “invisible sickness.” Pauline actually admits her own otherness, declaring, “I was nothing human, nothing victorious, nothing like myself” (204). Essentially, her humanity has been replaced by the cannibalistic urges of the windigo. In fact, the pinnacle of her monstrous transformation arrives when she christens herself as Sister Leopolda, marking her full assimilation into white Christendom. She recounts, “I asked for the grace to accept, to leave Pauline behind, to remember that my name, any name, was no more than a crumbling skin.

Leopolda . I tried out the unfamiliar syllables. They fit. They cracked in my ears like a fist through ice” (205).

Her comparison of names to that of “a crumbling skin” recalls her windigo-like ability to step into the reality— or skin—of others, while the suggestion of ice echoes the windigo’s folkloric ties to winter and numbing cold.

Therefore, Pauline has figuratively transformed, embodying the mythic monstrosity of the windigo as a participatory agent in her own culture’s eradication.

The windigo remains a haunting figure of ravenous self-destruction both in Ojibwe mythology as well as

in Erdrich’s folklore-inspired fiction. The windigo and in extension—Pauline—exists as a warning, an example of the deformed monstrosity loss leaves behind in its wake. Whether it’s the loss of loved ones, one’s identity, or one’s culture, Pauline as windigo transgresses her own monstrosity, instead exposing the inhuman cruelties of cultural genocide and the societal forces that enact it.

49 Works Cited Brightman, Robert A. “The Windigo in the Material World.” Ethnohistory , vol. 35, no. 4, 1988, pp. 337-379.

Erdrich, Louise. Tracks . Harper Perennial, 1988.

Halpin, Marjorie, and Michael M. Ames. “The Witiko: Algonkian Knowledge and Whiteman Knowledge.” Manlike Monsters on Trial: Early Records and Modern Evidence , UBC Press, 1980, pp. 76-96.

Waldram, James B. Revenge of the Windigo: The Construction of the Mind and Mental Health of North American Aboriginal Peoples. University of Toronto Press, 2004.

Winter, Kari J. “The Politics and Erotics of Food in Louise Erdrich.” Studies in American Indian Literatures, ser. 2, vol. 12, no. 4, 2000, pp. 44-64.

50

“Untitled,� Qinlei Zhang, University of Wisconsin-Madison

51

Joyce, the Straight Old Josser: An Analysis of James Joyce’s Proximate-Homosexual Subtexts David Phillips, The University of Notre Dame

Using radically sexual imagery, James Joyce often detailed images that were beyond his time. In fact, a

number of relationships that he describes have only recently garnered well-defined terminologies. This is especially true for proximate-homosexual subtexts, which are present in the literature of James Joyce but cannot be described by currently accepted academic terminology. In fact, by utilizing aspects of the human experience that were rarely recognized or acknowledged, James Joyce promoted a pre-academic spectrum of sexuality. This spectrum has pulsed underneath the surface of global literature for centuries, featuring sexualities that range from homoromantic, to homoerotic, to nearly homosexual. By comparing Joyce with his important Irish literary predecessor, Oscar Wilde, one can identify essential commentary on homoromantic aspects of male-male friendship in The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man and Ulysses. Yet, as other scholars have asserted, Joyce rarely, if ever, writes explicitly about the homosexual experience. Despite the progressive stance that Joyce takes regarding homoromantic relationships, his writing suffers from a disheartening representation of homoerotic and homosexual coding.

First, it is important to note that homosexual themes in literature have been widely recognized for millennia, and Joyce did not invent these ideas. In Plato’s Symposium, homosexual relationships are recognized and accepted: But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them...And when one of them meets with his other half, the actual half of himself, whether he be a lover of youth or a lover of another sort, the pair are lost in an amazement of love and friendship and intimacy, and one will not be out of the other’s sight. (Plato par.

192 A) More than 2,200 years after Symposium was written, Oscar Wilde published The Picture of Dorian Gray. Both Symposium and the literature of Oscar Wilde demonstrate the general timelessness of ‘homosociality.’ Homo-

52 sociality “summarizes a way of life... that isolated men and women into separate spheres,” especially in societies that expressed outward “homophobia of many homosocial formations” (“Homoeroticism…”). Evidence of this homophobia can be found in the fact that Oscar Wilde was put on trial and persecuted for his description of homosocialization in The Picture of Dorian Gray. The social structures that Wilde described were by no means inventive or false. Scholars point out that in Victorian Society, “hand-holding (was) common among earlier male friends,” which is chronicled by “vintage photographs consistently” (“Homoeroticism…”). Surely, then, Oscar Wilde was not inventive or obscene in describing homoromantic relationships.

But what are homoromantic relationships? This paper has utilized and will continue to utilize both pre-academic terms such as homoromantic and academic terms such as homoerotic. The term ‘homoromantic’ is pre-academic in the sense that it has not yet emerged in the scholarly community. Moreover, I contend that it is pre-academic because as scholars come to understand homo- and heteromanticism, it will enter scholarship and produce new forms of literary criticism which have been overlooked by previously incomplete understandings of queer literary theory. Such terminology is important to provide a descriptive spectrum which analyzes a number of literary relationships that approach, but do not become, homosexual in the writings of James Joyce (and other authors). ‘Homoromantic’ refers to relationships in which individuals are attracted “to the same sex in a romantic way, but not necessarily in a sexual way” (“Homoromantic”). An example of this would be a deep longing that surpasses friendship between two men or two women. In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Basil describes his relationship with Dorian: I know he likes me. Of course I flatter him dreadfully. I find a strange pleasure in saying things to him that I know I shall be sorry for having said. As a rule, he is charming to me, and we sit in the studio and talk of a thousand things. (Wilde 53) Their relationship is “quite a romance, a romance of art one might call it,” but there is no sexual dimension to it.

Even in the history of the Catholic Church, there are similar, well-documented relationships. The deep friendship between St. Francis of Assisi and St. Clare might be characterized as heteroromantic, as the two sought the deep companionship and intimacy of partners, without the sexual aspect of such a union (Cantalamessa). However, the best description of such a union can be found in the writings of Symposium: These are the people who pass their whole lives together; yet they could not explain what they desire of one another. For the intense yearning which each of them has towards the other does not appear to be the desire of lover’s intercourse, but of something else which the soul of either evidently desires and cannot

53 tell. (Plato par. 192D) It is worth noting that the term ‘homoromanticism’ is gaining prevalence in the LGBTQ+ community because it addresses a gap between platonic friendship and homoerotic relationships.

Stepping beyond ‘homoromantic,’ the term homoerotic “refers to same-sex desire” which is often unacknowledged, and entirely unacted upon. In the Bible, David and Jonathan demonstrate a timeless homoerotic relationship. The book of Samuel describes an oft-referred to homoerotic tension between the two friends: As soon as he had finished speaking to Saul, the soul of Jonathan was knit to the soul of David, and Jonathan loved him as his own soul. And Saul took him that day and would not let him return to his father’s house. Then Jonathan made a covenant with David, because he loved him as his own soul. And Jonathan stripped himself of the robe that was on him and gave it to David, and his armor, and even his sword and his bow and his belt (1 Samuel 18).

Likewise, In 2 Samuel 1:26, David mourns Jonathan’s death, stating “your love to me was extraordinary, surpassing the love of women.” This clearly indicates a relationship that is not fully sexual yet surpasses friendship or even longing because it has clear physical dimensions. ‘Homoromantic’ and ‘homoerotic’ are part of a spectrum of proximate-homosexual identities, as evidenced by the previously given examples. Engaging outside literature and ancient examples such as this are important to indicate that simply because terminology isn’t widely accepted in academia, this does not mean that it is not an authentic and accurate representation of the human experience. The full, intimate desire of two same-sex individuals may not fully manifest due to social restraints, misplaced shame, or other reasons, and hence their relationship would approach, but would not become, homosexual in nature.

Returning to the writings of James Joyce, one can utilize the same spectrum of sexuality which I have identified to decode a number of scenes in his literature. Joyce details homoromantic and homoerotic relationships; yet the distinctive manner in which he describes each relationship is vital to understanding Joyce’s intentions and biases.

Homosocialization is ubiquitous in nearly every single one of Joyce’s writings. In “A Little Cloud,” Little Chandler and Gallaher interact exclusively with each other and a male bartender, with Gallaher refusing an invitation to meet Chandler’s wife (Dubliners 32). Likewise, in “Grace,” Mr. Kernan is prompted by three of his friends (all men) to attend “a retreat...Father Purdon is giving...for business men” (Dubliners 70). Even the schools which individuals attend in Dubliners are single gender, with instructors who are priests (7). The same

54 educational dynamic can be found in A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man, in which “the wide playgrounds were swarming with boys” (2).

Stepping into these homosocial environments reveals a few important homoromantic relationships.

Joyce primarily characterizes homoromanticism as a youthful male-male manifestation. In Ulysses, Joyce tells the story of a group of young intellectuals. From the first page, this homosocial all-male group evokes homoromantic interactions. Buck Mulligan, wearing an “ungirdled” dressing gown states, “Introibo ad altare Dei” (Ulysses 3). Readers of the text will likely realize that the unspoken response to this is “Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.” The Latin verse and response translate to “I shall go into the altar of God, the God who gives joy to my youth.” The homoromantic aspects of this scene take the form of a scantily-clad man, making an offering (a bowl of shaving cream) to his friend. His words are clearly uttered mockingly, yet they indicate that Stephen Dedalus “gives joy” to Buck Mulligan’s “youth.” Along this vein, Mulligan calls his friends “O dearly beloved,” another distorted religious reference. Taken on their surface, these scenes may be interpreted as simply comical or heretical. Yet this interpretation fails to account for a specific symbol which Joyce coded into the text: Hellenism. When discussing each other’s names, “Buck Mulligan’s gay voice went on,” stating, “it has a Hellenic ring, hasn’t it?” (Ulysses 4). In ascribing a Hellenistic nature to an essential part of the character’s identity, Joyce builds upon previous coding to give the scene a clearly homoromantic nature. In the past, scholars have recognized “the phenomenon of Hellenism as a homoerotic code during the Victorian time” (Muriqi 7).

Wilde was one of the first authors to code Hellenism in this way, and considering Joyce’s understated use of it in this scene, readers can ascribe meaning to it without overstating the symbol to be fully indicative of homoeroticism. It is clear that the two male friends do not want anything more than the intimacy of a special, artistic bond which surpasses friendship.

Progressing along the sexual spectrum, Joyce characterizes homoeroticism as applicable to relatively older characters. In A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus approaches his rector because his glasses break. The interaction between the rector –– an older person with significant authority –– and Stephen has clear homoerotic elements. As “the rector held his hand across the side of the desk,” Stephen “felt a cool moist palm” (55). This strange touching between a younger boy and an older man is clearly intended to stem from the rector’s nature as a celibate Roman Catholic priest. The privacy in which the two interact is not intended as a safeguard, but as a window through which Joyce ascribes perverseness to a priest’s interaction with the young boy. Notably, the priest is advanced in years compared to the previously analyzed homoromantical-

55 ly-coded characters.

Likewise, in Dubliners, Joyce describes another coded homoerotic encounter between two young schoolboys and an older male. In “An Encounter,” the first hint at such coding takes the form of the color green.

The green carnation is widely recognized as a queer dog-whistle for closeted homosexuals. Oscar Wilde “intended the green carnation to be a badge of homosexuality that would be recognised only by those in the know” (Ellevsen). In Wilde’s literature, and we can assume later Irish literature such as that of Joyce, the color green may be symbolic of this secret ‘badge.’ In “An Encounter,” when the young narrator “came back and examined the foreign sailors to see had any of them green eyes,” there is an initial, unexplained longing (Dubliners 9).

The meaning of this longing –– this searching for green eyes –– becomes clearer as the boy chews “one of those green stems on which girls tell fortunes” (Dubliners 9). The act of chewing such a stem indicates the destruction (i.e. rejection) as well as the adoption of a feminine symbol. When paired with the color green, this indicates a contemplative, almost unconscious rejection of traditional masculinity in favor of a more nuanced identity. Finally, the schoolboys experience “jaded thoughts” (Dubliners 9). The word jaded evokes images of jade, which is a deep green color. Understanding these coded symbols proves vital to interpreting later dialogue in “An Encounter.”

The “queer old josser” who eventually approaches and interacts with the young boys in “An Encounter” is described by proximate-homosexual coding. The man “came along by the bank with his hand on his hip” and wore “a suit of greenish-black” (Dubliners 9). He strikes up a conversation with the two schoolboys, asking “which of (the boys) had the most sweethearts” (Dubliners 9). Mahony, the narrator’s friend, has three sweethearts, but interestingly the narrator has none. This lack of female partnership is emphasized by the josser’s subsequent comments. He smiles and says that “Every boy...has a little sweetheart” (Dubliners 9). This comment serves to alienate and emasculate the narrator, as if not having a sweetheart automatically calls into question the boy’s straightness.

In the subsequent conversation, the “queer old josser” describes how much he likes “looking at a nice young girl.” Despite this heteronormative comment, the narrator notes that “he (the old man) gave...the impression that he was repeating something which he had learned by heart” (Dubliners 10). Thus far in the interaction, it is clear that the “queer old josser” has, in a way, outed the narrator. Furthermore, the older man himself has an uncanny interest in the boy’s heterosexuality and attempts to produce a false heterosexual identity for himself.

The coding in “An Encounter” proceeds to paint an image of near-homosexual desires. The narrator’s

56 friend, Mahony, runs off, leaving the young narrator with the “queer old josser.” At last, the protagonist encounters the green eyes for which he was previously searching. He explains that “[a]s I did so I met the gaze of a pair of bottle-green eyes peering at me from under a twitching forehead” (Dubliners 10). This passage reiterates the importance of green as a coded symbol. The fact that the young narrator finally encounters green eyes in a homoerotically coded character is strong evidence that green as a symbol is referential to Oscar Wilde’s use of the symbol. Furthermore, directly after the boy meets the gaze of the “bottle-green” eyes, the “queer old josser” proceeds to explain “there was nothing in this world he would like so well as” to “give (a boy) ...such a whipping as no boy ever got in this world” (Dubliners 10). There is clearly nothing coincidental about this exchange nor the previously identified symbolism in “An Encounter.”

It is important to note that the previously described homoerotic scenes involve older individuals preying on younger boys. In contrast to the homoromantic scenes, they depict subtle yet inappropriate dialogue and acts.

The obvious absence of healthy homoerotic interactions in Joyce’s literature is disheartening. It appears that Joyce is willing to portray friendship between younger men as healthfully homoromantic, but anything further only manifests in predatory older men. Such a commentary is appalling, especially considering how vital it is for the queer experience to be properly represented in literature. By failing to ever represent a healthy homoerotic encounter, Joyce does a grave disservice to readers.

In the aforementioned novels and short stories, Joyce’s work reveals the spectrum of proximate-homosexual relationships. He primarily did this in an implicit manner, but he does make one explicit reference to homosexuality in the form of an ostensible rejection. In “A Painful Case,” Mr. Duffy writes that “Love between man and man is impossible because there must not be sexual intercourse” (Dubliners 45). Upon a surface reading of this excerpt, one might assert that Joyce is rejecting all homosexuality; however, in this specific case there is actually a dimension of longing to Mr. Duffy’s writing. It is almost as if Mr. Duffy is responding to the structures that have reinforced homosocialization — the same structures which unjustly discriminate against the relationships that result from homosocialization. Mr. Duffy states “there must not be intercourse” (emphasis added), as if an outside entity says so. Importantly, Mr. Duffy writes this in his journal after breaking off a relationship with a woman. He is filtering through his desires, trying to find his identity. Considering the prevalence of the Catholic Church in Dubliners and Irish culture, it becomes obvious that someone else has forced a homophobic perspective on Mr. Duffy, leaving him unfulfilled.

While James Joyce’s writings allude to a number of proximate-homosexual encounters, the encounters

57 become increasingly perverse as they approach full homosexuality. Furthermore, the one explicit reference to homosexuality that Joyce makes does not describe a homosexual encounter at all; rather, it is an explicit rejection of homosexuality, and a reader may not properly interpret the underlying dynamics of the reference. One may find hope in the fact that Joyce rightly describes homoromantic encounters in a more beautiful light. Such encounters have been documented in literature for millennia and are an essential aspect of the human experience, despite an absence of academic terminology. They have pulsed underneath the surface of religious texts and classical mythology, remaining overlooked and underappreciated.

For such a progressive author, it is clear that Joyce misrepresents aspects of the queer experience through acts of omission. Evidence of his bias exists in an essay he wrote concerning Oscar Wilde, in which he refers to Wilde’s sexuality as a “strange problem” (Il Piccolo della Sera). Such a comment, when paired with this essay’s analysis, indicates that Joyce may have been quick to judge that which he did not understand.

With this in mind, it is important to recognize, document, and shine light on Joyce’s sometimes positive, but often disheartening, portrayal of the sexual spectrum. More importantly, though, this analysis works to unravel the unnoticed manners in which straight authors dialogue with the queer experience. The work of “queering” the literary canon has been ongoing for decades now, yet queer readers may still feel marginalized without the correct terminology to describe their experiences. By acknowledging that queer relationships can exist without being overtly homosexual, scholars lend the same nuance to queer subtexts that is readily granted to heterosexual subtexts.

58 References

Cantalamessa, Raniero. “Francis and Clare: In Love, But With Whom?” Zenit.org. 4 Oct. 2007, www.zenit.org/articles/francis-and-clare-in-love-but-with-whom/.

Ellevsen, JD. “Oscar Wilde and the Green Carnation.” WildeTimes.net, 10 Mar. 2015, wildetimes.net/2013/04/11/oscar-wilde-and-the-green-carnation/.

Holy Bible: English Standard Version. Bible Society, 2014.

“Homoeroticism and Homosociality.” Encyclopedia.com. 30 Apr. 2018, www.encyclopedia.com/social-sciences/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and- maps/homoeroticism-and-homosociality.

“Homoromantic.” Urban Dictionary, www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=homoromantic.

Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Penguin Books, 2006.

Joyce, James. Dubliners. Value Classic Reprints, 2017.

Joyce, James, et al. Ulysses. Modern Library, 1992.

Joyce, James. Il Piccolo della Sera. Rutgers University, n.d.

Muriqi, Luljeta. “Homoerotic codes in The Picture of Dorian Gray.” Lund University. Spring 2007.

Norris, David. “The ‘Unhappy Mania’ and Mr. Bloom’s Cigar: Homosexuality in the Works of James Joyce.”

James Joyce Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 3, 1994, pp. 357–373. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25473572.

Plato, et al. Symposium. Hackett Pub. Co., 1989

59 Wilde, Oscar. 1998. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ontario: Broadview Press.

60

“Alone Together,� Eliza Cooper, University of Wisconsin-Madison

61

Britain as Savior in The Wreck of the Golden Mary Richard Hall, Brigham Young University Good stories come from good storytellers. Charles Dickens attempted to assert himself above all other storytellers in his 1856 Christmas edition for Household Words. As Anthea Trodd notes, this story would be “an example of well-led and disciplined writing” amongst his collaborators to create what he thought would be his best collaborative story yet (203). Dickens constructed this Christmas special to impress readers with his ability to gather various writings under his command. To maintain a vision of “clear hierarchy,” Dickens launches his collaborative story into the sea, with his main character being the “captain,” and longtime friend and co-writer Wilkie Collins “the first mate,” and binding together contributing writers (202, 207). This built-in frame was the foundation for the shared tales that create The Wreck of the Golden Mary.

Dickens strategically depicts himself as a Tar, or British seaman, in this Christmas story to achieve

immediate British approval. Trodd recognizes that Dickens most likely chose a “nautical fiction” to frame his hierarchical story because Victorian Britain had such a “strong national dependence on the seaman” (203).

Envisioning himself as a Tar emphasized the fact that Dickens was writing a ship filled with interesting stories. The Wreck’s plot follows an idealistic captain (Dickens), leading emigrants (other writers) in the beautiful Golden Mary , only to crash into an iceberg. While the captain and first mate coddle the survivors, the survivors exchange stories until they are finally rescued. This unfortunate ending to the Golden Mary reflects what Jude Piesse sees as “a deep sense of uneasiness in many mid-Victorian minds about the consequences of mass migration in Great Britain” (38). Indeed, as harsh an ending as a shipwreck in the South Atlantic sounds, a crashing emigrant ship would reflect Dickens’s inherent nationalism, appealing to skeptics of emigration.

While the shipwreck survivors are sharing stories to pass time and maintain optimism, each survi-

vor also expresses their Christian beliefs. Each storyteller embodies a different variation of Christianity. The magnanimous, charitable Captain William Ravender and his first mate John Steadiman, whom Collins claims achieve “courage under Providence”, largely contrast the Scottish apprentice who familiarizes himself with Christian teaching, but also prides himself on what James White says are “of the supernatural kind” (27, 58).

There is a clear distinction between the Christianity displayed by British seamen and emigrants. The storytellers

62 express an instilled Christian thought process; the strength of their Christian faith reflects their national connection. I will use the frame of the collaborative story and two works to articulate how the further a character’s identity departs from Britain, the more obscure and refracted their Christianity becomes. This shows that Victorian Britain inextricably connects national loyalty with Christian faith.

Nationalist and Christian Relevance in The Wreck

That Dickens would simultaneously celebrate the British Tar while disapproving of emigrants may

sound contradictory, but it is understandable after examining his view on transnationalism in the mid-1850’s.

Sean Grass observes in a Household Words piece written only months previous to The Wreck that Dickens displays his “anxiety regarding racial otherness” (9). Grass realizes that Dickens sees Britain as a safe place— leaving Britain tarnishes virtues that he perceives as tethered to the nation. While Grass admits that Dickens “never really disliked the Continent [Europe],” he views other countries as complacent compared to Britain’s impressive conquest of the world, its goal to “consume the other” European nations (3, 11). In The Wreck, D ickens shares with all British Victorians a deep sense of national superiority. For Dickens, there is no way you can maintain virtue and exit his nation.

In The Wreck, three writers, Dickens, Collins, and Fitzgerald, have narrations given by Tars. These characters are the most respected by the crew, and are also the most aware of other nations. Trodd thoroughly emphasizes that “the Tar’s openness, his evident honesty and fidelity, made him an appropriate hero for melodrama” (211). It is apparent in their stories that the writers encapsulated the British portrayal of the Tar, showing their national superiority and wariness of foreign threats. For example, Dickens’s captain, William Ravender, takes great lengths to antagonize the emigrant Mr. Rarx, complaining about the passenger’s “fits” (21). The friction between Ravender and Rarx derives from Rarx’s “ungovernable nature” (19). Here Dickens intentionally uses “ungovernable” to emphasize Rarx’s loss of patriotism and retrograde towards incivility, contrasting with Ravender’s innate sense of communal bonds. The brave, amiable protagonists in The Wreck a re distinctly aware of the country that made them who they are, just as their Victorian setting expects.

The stark difference between the frame story’s plot and the embedded stories can come off as discon-

nected when read linearly. Melisa Klimasezewski opposes Trodd’s argument that Dickens successfully used his hierarchical collaboration by saying that the stories actually failed to be better organized than Dickens’s previ-

63 ous or future attempts. Klimasezewski declares that “readers do not realize how many narrative layers the text has just traversed. Other times, the shift is jarring as readers may pause or reread a paragraph to try to determine exactly who is speaking” (825). To her, the story’s compilation continually describes a world where “discipline and order will always break down,” rebuking Dickens’s narrative superstructure (833). However, what Klimasezewski fails to recognize is that these conflicting narratives appropriately align themselves with British nationalism. The stories Klimasezewski identifies as clashing are actually revealing the clash between nationalists and emigrants.

Other critics note how neither the co-authors nor Dickens are using The Wreck as a disgruntled dialog

between each other, but rather as what the work was originally created for: a Christmas story. Piesse suggests that The Wreck’s Christmastime setting is the perfect conduit to “elucidate the relationship between emigration and nation” during the Victorian era, “specifically through Christmas ‘frame-stories’” (38). While noting that this collaborative story does have reflections to Dickens and his relationships with the contributing authors, Piesse makes the helpful connection between The Wreck and its Victorian readers as not simply another Dickens-led collaborative story, but more specifically a Christmas story. All of the dates in the collaborative story lie “within the dense time zone of Christmas” (52). The Wreck was never intended to be read as interactions between Dickens and his co-authors; its first and foremost purpose was to be a Victorian Christmas story. The Wreck r elies upon Christianity as a cohesive device to bond differing views on emigration within the passengers. Victorian readers could see these survivors having “a community of face-to-face relations supplementing and stabilizing links to an overarching English nation,” through a Christian lens (52).

It is more plausible that a collaborative story fronted by Dickens would collectively make Christianity

a textual focal point. Mary Lenard makes it clear that Dickens had a clear influence on Christian beliefs and practices, even claiming that “many commonly practiced English and American Christmas customs derive from the Victorian, Dickens-influenced, understanding of Christmas” (338-339). The Wreck has many references to Christianity, and Dickens’s vast popularity provides a sound board that consequently refracts the story’s projected ideas. Lenard suggests that in the 1850s Dickens was the most capable writer to advocate Christian morals, stating that “no other writer . . . was able to move his readers to moral action” as he did (339). While the plot does not feature a conversion or apostasy, the crew’s continual submission to Christianity and the Scottish boy’s bizarre references to his belief reveal its identity as a major theme in this (and arguably every) story.

64

While admitting both likes and dislikes for Christianity, Todd Dransfield describes Dickens as a Chris-

tian who uses the religion to establish “a code of conduct and action guiding one’s relationships with others” and “ennoble relationships and work” (499). For Dickens, Christianity embodied the communal spirit he wanted Great Britain to embrace, utilizing his celebrity to spread his beliefs. Dransfield thoroughly analyzes an article Dickens wrote for Household Words o n members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, who at that time were immigrating to the United States. Dickens observes the “irony in England’s best” fleeing the country to practice a religion promoting English ethics (494). On the surface, Dickens’s tersely opposes these emigrants, but he actually values their religious zealotry. Dransfield notices that “larger cultural values” were “conflated with religious discourse,” implying that basing social conduct on religious morals aligned the Victorian-aged Brit into ideal community conduct (492). Christianity was appealing not just to Dickens, but to all Victorian journalism because it successfully gave a moral code to promote civil obedience, personal progression, and universal inclusion. Dickens and his contemporaries praised religious radicalism, as often the Christian sects would promote a “more humane, domestic, and liberal culture” (Dransfield 501). In the search for a better nation, radical Christianity theology strengthened the morals a new Victorian ideal pursued.

Regardless of the four authors being analyzed in this essay—Dickens, Collins, Fitzgerald, and White—they unanimously implicate Christianity as the modal capacity for the shipwreck survivors. Now that the connection between Christianity and nationalism has been clearly identified, we can take a deeper look at three passengers of the Golden Mary and their implied relationship with Great Britain by analyzing their Christian references.

Even with Dickens and Collins co-writing the fame story to characterize the Golden Lucy, their collaborated person correlates with Fitzgerald and White’s individuals in their embedded stories by linking nationalism and Christianity.

Three Passengers of the Golden Mary

The ship’s supercargo, the storyteller concocted by Percy Fitzgerald, offers the most Christian ties to an

embedded story in The Wreck. T he supercargo relays a seaman’s yarn about the dreaded pirate Jan Fagel and his shocking demise. While kidnapping his enemy’s wife and children on Christmas day, Fagel meets his demise by miraculously falling off his own ship, lost forever in a tempest. The Christian undertone seeps so deeply into the story that it becomes an overtone. The supercargo’s antagonist is so dreadfully powerful that the storyteller exclaims “if ever Satan entered into a man in this life, he must have possessed him in that night!” (49). In

65 the supercargo’s story, Christmas night has polarized the righteous and the wicked. The beautiful, pious woman asks God to “find judgments for this man” while Fagel cannot comprehend her religious piety, branding her as a “witch” and “sorceress” (49).

Demonizing this foreign private procures a clear link between nationalism and Christianity with “The

Supercargo.” Several times Fitzgerald describes Fagel as a satanic servant, with the supercargo claiming that “he had sold himself to the Evil One, which I think for myself more than likely, for he cared neither for God nor man” (47). Fitzgerald clearly contrasts the foreign pirate to the British Tar, one who Trodd states was an “instantly recognizable sign of virtue in a mystified world” (211). Fagel’s “devilish” and “wicked” descriptions emphasize his antithetical relationship to the British Tar (48). Additionally, Fitzgerald depicts the story in a Dutch setting. This is notable due to the poor naval history shared by the Dutch and English. These two global maritime powers warred against one another for a combined 15 years between 1652 and 1784. It is easy to caricaturize a sailor associated with a country deeply antagonized in English history. Although Fagel is condemned through what he perceives as a “sorceress’ canting,” it wasn’t until a British cruiser approached and “fired into the English vessel” that he fell off the boat, never to be seen again (49). The woman and child’s Christian deliverance relied upon the British intervention. Once crime was inflicted upon Her Majesty’s Ship the evil captain received holy retribution.

Comparing Fitzgerald’s supercargo to contributor Reverend James White’s story ironically describes

the most bizarre, ambiguous Christianity. His main character, a Scottish apprentice known as Willy Lindsey, recalls the events that led to his sister’s unexpected death. On the night of her birthday, she left the house, promising she would “no matter [well] or ill, dead or alive—in the body or in the spirit—she would aye come back that night” (60). She never returned. The only potential evidence of her whereabouts was “prints o’ feet that answered to [her] size” next to the local lake. With no other explanation, Willy and her family assumed she drowned. However, on his sister’s ensuing birthday, he relays this strange occurrence: “We saw the faint image o’ a bonny pale face—very sad to look on--[with] lang tresses o’ yellow hair hanging straight down the cheeks, as if it was dripping wet, and heard low, plaintive sobs; but nothing that we could understand. My [mother] ran forward, as if to embrace the visitor, and cried “Jean! Jean! O, let me speak to you, my bairn!” But the flame suddenly died away. . . and we saw nothing there.” (61)

66

How does this strange visitation coincide with the Christian ideology Willy professes? It looks like it is

never meant to be explained. Willy’s amoral ghost story eludes to a motivation that is separate from religion— an aimless haunting that primarily commemorates his sister’s passing, but additionally reveals Willy’s ineptitude to express Christian faith. When contextualizing the story with the few Christian references he offers, the story is unresolved. Reflecting upon his old home, Willy remembers “the cheery fire, and the heather bed in the corner, and the round table in the middle, and the picture of Abraham and Isaac on the wall, and my fishing-rod hung aboon the mantelpiece” (62). The warm, matter-of-fact attitude Willy uses when mentioning Abraham and Isaac suggests that Christian traditions belong in his home, but simultaneously, the reference ruptures from the list of familiar family items. The brief referral perplexes the reader, implying that while Willy assumes that he is a home-bred Christian, he is not qualified to be identified as one.

More evidence for Willy’s ambiguous Christianity arises when he cites two other Bible stories his

mother told him as a child: David’s defeat over Goliath and King Saul’s visit with the witch of Endor (59). Most parents would teach their children the bravery of David over the giant Goliath, but few would teach them about the mischievous evil Saul enacts when reaching out to the Witch of Endor. These references do not reveal that his mother had poor choice in Bible stories, but rather it foreshadows the upcoming supernatural occurrence of his sister’s death and haunting. Both stories feature mythical beings, a giant and a magician, who transcend realistic explanation. Steadiman notices that Willy brings with him “a few books, chiefly of the wild and supernatural kind” (58). Willie is foreshadowed to be a mystical and ominous storyteller, one whose belief system is ambiguous and unbelievable for the survivors. Though the biblical reference may at first sound like an appeal to Christian thought, they actually demonstrate Willy’s non-Christian foundation. Willy’s purported Christianity misleads not only the passengers but the reader as well, failing to offer a substantial explanation of the story.

Looking at the piece’s national subtext, we see it resembles Willy’s faulted, ambiguous Christianity.

Willy is first depicted by Captain Ravender, simply describing him as “a Scotch boy, poor little fellow” (Dickens 10). The condescending comments coming from the British Tar, the most powerful character in the story, express the boy’s second-class nature and allowed him into their social circles, mainly to employ entertainment for the passengers. It’s true that he was a poor little fellow, being an apprentice and “nice, delicate, almost feminine-looking boy, of sixteen or seventeen,” and that he was well loved by the crew, especially the sympathetic captain, whose affection Steadiman claims is “as sincere as if [Willy] was one of his own blood” (White

67 58). However, Klimasezewski believes the voyagers’ affection for the Scot is misleading—untrustworthy. Willy unfortunately dies the night he capitulates his ghost story, and Steadiman hides his corpse from the passengers until he can dispose of his body while asleep. Klimasezeswki recognizes this act as “hardly purging cannibalism from the narrative” (97). Klimasezewski is quick to undo the seemingly cordial ties this very distinctly Scottish emigrant had in relation to the majority English crew. The first mate fears the passengers cannibalizing after the Scots’ death, but not after the passing of another beloved youth, a three-year-old named Golden Lucy . Even though Scotland is associated with Great Britain, the Scottish character in The Wreck i s viewed with novelty while alive, and utility while dead. Scotland’s affiliation with Great Britain is represented as poor, sickly, ill, and altogether Great Britain’s fair-weather inducer: an entertaining sideshow at best, and a vestigial appendage at worst.

Far from vestigial is the other youth on the Golden Mary, lovingly known as Golden Lucy. Rather than

being an esoteric character, Golden Lucy lays at the core of both Ravender’s and Steadiman’s narratives. Piesse recognizes that Golden Lucy’s collaborative recounting is the prime example of “synchronous temporality” where passengers bond over repeated chronicling of the darling child (52). The simultaneous recapitulation of Lucy’s characterization reflects a forming union between passengers “allied to an overarching model of English national identity” (52). For the passengers, Lucy is much more than a sweet, innocent child. She is the fulcrum for company morale and community, even attracting the love of Mr. Rarx, a gold-hungry man Ravender recognizes as seemingly unable “to care much for any human creature” (Dickens 10). Lucy personifies British ideologies Dickens and other Victorian writers appreciated. She is the penultimate sign of nationalism.

As well as nationalism, Golden Lucy exudes Christianity’s most appealing attributes, making her the re-

ligious focal point as well as the primarily British epicenter. At age 3, Lucy is the youngest passenger on board and more importantly, the most innocent. Immediately after the shipwreck, the survivors place their morale upon the child, defining their success not by saving themselves, but wholly upon saving the child, “to save her at any cost, or we should all be ruined” (18). Golden Lucy’s mother, the affable Ms. Atherfield, sing “soft, melodious” tunes to lull her beloved child to sleep, simultaneously increasing the survivors’ morale (18). The pastoral, transcendent character eventually dies on the lifeboat, and Captain Ravender eulogizes her by referring to a biblical daughter. He states that Christ “raised the daughter of Jairus the ruler, and she was not dead but slept,” and with those words “buried the Golden Lucy in the grave of the Golden Mary’s” (19). But this is not the end

68 of Golden Lucy. Once Steadiman attains the narrative, he envisions Lucy angelically floating ahead of him, directing and encouraging him until his rescue. It appears that, like the daughter of Jairus, Golden Lucy rises from sleep as a testament to Christian hope. She is an ennobling icon, a light for the survivors to rely on after their voyage dissipates.

After the survivors are delivered, there is a strange interaction between Steadiman and Golden Lucy’s mother in the final section of the story. Years later Steadiman finds himself in New York, when he runs into the fellow survivor. His reunion leaves him with an uncanny discovery: “I had hardly sat down at table, before who should I see opposite but Ms. Atherfield, as bright-eyed and pretty as ever, with a gentleman on her right hand, and on her left—another Golden Lucy! Her hair was a shade or two darker than the hair of my poor little pet of past sad times; but in all other respects the living child reminded me so strongly of the dead, that I quite started at the first sight of her.” (Collins 77)

The scenario juts out of an overall smooth ending. As if she never died, a Golden Lucy materializes

before Steadiman. Contrary to the ghostly manifestations described by characters throughout the story, this manifestation is physical. Steadiman’s captain, Willaim Ravender, repeatedly applauds his first mate as reliable and capable. If the reader deems Steadiman as credible, this implies that Ms. Atherfield really has borne her previous child’s doppelganger. However, it is difficult to accept Steadiman’s vision as realistic; he gives no new name for the seen child, nor does he bother to discover one. Steadiman cares more about the re-existence of Golden Lucy than the current existence of what he is seeing. The reader at this point is forced to declare whether Steadiman hallucinated or the child was inconceivably identical to the first Golden Lucy. I suggest that the second Golden Lucy, like the first Golden Lucy, symbolizes the Christian hope found in nationalism, but with an expatriate twist: the nearly identical second Golden Lucy represents America’s mimicry of its parent nation, Great Britain.

This confusing anecdote at The Wreck’s e nding reveals the Victorian notion that the United States is

a child nation to Great Britain. Robert Lougy analyzes the United States’ relationship with Great Britain as “homesickness,” a longing to connect with their original form (110). He observes that Dickens’ view of America depicts a nineteenth century nation “rejecting the notion of loss or division” and failing to fully embrace the culture they seceded from (110). With their British Golden Lucy deceased, the expatriates need a replacement,

69 which physically forms itself into a double of their first pride and hope. Steadiman’s reborn Golden Lucy is America’s imperfect mimicry of British nationalism, and more fittingly, British Providence.

Though Golden Lucy is Dickens’s creation, she encapsulates the correlation Victorian culture had be-

tween British greatness and Christian morals. With this idea, we can follow a common thread tying the framework stories with its embedded counterparts. Trodd claims that storytelling is “the ultimate mark of civilization,” accrediting the captain’s strength and dexterity to coordinate such civilized storytelling at such a perilous, unscripted moment (205). However, Piesse adds more to the conversation, saying that this organized, civilized effort reflects the “national identity” of communal nationalism (40). While referencing the Christian remarks mentioned throughout the piece, I have been able to identify the corollary between Christianity and nationalism in The Wreck of the Golden Mary. The further the character is separated from “the concreteness of England rather than the relative abstraction of Britain”, the stranger and less coherently Christian they become. The children and lesser powers of the British empire seek and fail to resemble the nation, but it appears that their “mercy of Providence” is not valiant enough to replicate it (Collins 69).

70 Works Cited Collins, Wilkie and Charles Dickens. The Wreck. The Wreck of the Golden Mary: Being the Account of the Loss of the Ship, and Mate’s Account of the Great Deliverance of Her People in an Open Boat at Sea. Household Words, Christmas 1856, pp. 1-77. fadedpage.org . 22 Jun 2018, www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20180640 . .. The Deliverance. The Wreck of the Golden Mary: Being the Account of the Loss of the Ship, and Mate’s Account of the Great Deliverance of Her People in an Open Boat at Sea. Household Words, Christmas 1856, pp.

1-77. fadedpage.org . 22 Jun 2018, www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20180640.

Dransfield, Scott. “Charles Dickens and the Victorian ‘Mormon Moment’”. Religion and the Arts, v ol. 17, 2013, pp. 489-506. EBSCO, web.b.ebscohost.com.erl.lib.byu.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=0&sid=7316fe25-8 cfc-409b-8903-f93979bb44f5%40pdc-v-sessmgr02\.

Fitzgerald, Percy. The Supercargo. The Wreck of the Golden Mary: Being the Account of the Loss of the Ship, and Mate’s Account of the Great Deliverance of Her People in an Open Boat at Sea. Household Words, Christmas 1856, pp. 1-77. fadedpage.org. 22 Jun 2018, www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20180640 .

Klimasezewski, Melisa. “Rebuilding Charles Dickens’s Wreck and Rethinking the Collaborative.” Studies in English Literature, vol. 54, 2014, pp. 815-833. Proquest, search-proquest-com.erl.lib.byu.edu/ docview/1635182796?accountid=4488.

Laugy, Robert E. “Nationalism and Violence: America in Charles Dickens’s Martin Chuzzlewit.” Dickens and the Children of Empire, edited by Wendy S. Jacobsen, Palgrave, 2000, pp. 105-116.

Lenard, Mary. “The Gospel of Amy: BiblicalTeaching and Learning in Charles Dickens’ Little Dorrit.” Journal of Christianity and Literature, vol. 93, no. 2, Spring 2014, pp. 337-355. EBSCO , www.web.a.ebscohost.com. erl.lib.byu.edu/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=11&sid=d523 700f-bd76-4d72-9e5b-5156ca3c2fd5%40sdc-vsessmgr06.

Piesse, Jude. “Emigration and Nation in the Mid-Victorian Christmas Issue.” Victorian Periodicals Review, v ol.

71 6, no. 1, 2013, pp. 37-60. Project MUSE, muse-jhu-edu.erl.lib.byu.edu/article/504933.

Trodd, Anthea. “Collaborating in Open Boats: Dickens, Collins, Franklin, and Bligh.” Journal of Victorian Studies, v ol. 42, no. 2, Winter 2000, pp. 201-225. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/3829245.

White, Rev. James. The Scotch Boy. The Wreck of the Golden Mary: Being the Account of the Loss of the Ship, and Mate’s Account of the Great Deliverance of Her People in an Open Boat at Sea. Household Words, Christmas 1856, pp. 1-77. fadedpage.org. 22 Jun 2018, www.fadedpage.com/showbook.php?pid=20180640.

72

“Untitled,� Qinlei Zhang, University of Wisconsin-Madison

73

Shocks of the Past: Attending to Childhood Trauma in Virginia Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse Patricia Jewell, Smith College In her autobiographical essay, “A Sketch of the Past,” Virginia Woolf reflects on the most vivid memories of her childhood. In the process, she realizes that “many of these exceptional moments brought with them a peculiar horror and a physical collapse; they seemed dominant; [herself] passive” (Woolf 72). Her young, fictional characters frequently experience similar moments of passivity in the face of horror. Traumatic episodes mar childhood memories in Woolf’s memoirs and novels. Woolf scholars acknowledge this pattern in her memoirs, but they tend to steer away from the horror that the fictional children in her novels endure—perhaps because it would be too easy to slip into the trap of imposing Woolf’s personal narratives onto her fiction. For the purposes of my argument, I do read Woolf’s own childhood history alongside her fictional narratives of early trauma, but instead of consigning her fiction to the realm of veiled autobiography, I argue that the parallels in Woolf’s memoirs and her fiction share a fixation on how we act out and work through childhood trauma later on in life.

By putting these moments into words, Woolf demonstrates a rather adult capacity to diminish the shock of childhood trauma through articulation. Instead of romanticizing childhood, Woolf exposes its darker sides with the wisdom of a retrospective narrator. She foregrounds premonitions of death, feelings of fear, and harbingers of inevitable horror among the distractingly wholesome activities of childhood. In my texts of interest, Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse, children repeatedly fall victim to intensely unpleasant emotional experiences. Many of these episodes bear notable resemblances to Woolf’s own childhood memories, but I do not simply want to read Woolf’s biography onto her fiction. To do so would be an injustice to the larger interests of her work. Rather, I draw these connections to illuminate how Woolf reenacts (as much in her fiction as her autobiographical work) the retrospective impulse to make sense of seemingly senseless childhood horror from an adult perspective.

74 Before I begin my analysis, I want to re-emphasize that it can be misleading to insert too much of a writer’s personal life into their fiction (or vice versa). Drawing such connections can be enlightening at times. However, making inferences about a piece’s intentions based on biographical parallels runs the risk of ignoring craft and reducing a writer’s fiction to disguised personal narrative. By making these connections, I do not intend to shed light on what Woolf’s “true” feelings might have been about her youth. Instead, I argue that the resonances between Woolf’s personal and fictional narratives elucidate Woolf’s preoccupation with the permanence of extraordinary childhood experiences in the psyche and why we feel compelled to articulate them.

To illustrate this analytical distinction, I point first to setting in Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse. The characters in these novels spend much of their early lives in coastal locations. Woolf scholars have generally agreed that the writer’s own childhood trips to St. Ives in Cornwall heavily inspired the backdrops in her fiction. While I honor this observation, I will elaborate on it by contending that Woolf’s textual returns to St. Ives (whether fictional or non-fictional) bespeak more than simple nostalgia. In her memoir, “A Sketch of the Past,” Woolf’s most enduring memories of St. Ives range from shame at looking in the household mirror, her alarm upon overhearing that a man named Mr. Valpy had committed suicide, a sense of “hopeless sadness” (Woolf 71) while fighting her brother, Thoby, and finally, “a feeling of desolation...as she saw the clouds darkening over the waves” (Lee 105). Initially these disparate memories appear to share no common ground, but after further exploration Woolf observes that she reacted to all of them with inarticulate horror as a child. For this reason, it seems too simple to dismiss Woolf’s revisitations to St. Ives in her fiction as merely sentimental. In Woolf’s memory, St. Ives also serves as an epicenter for childhood trauma. Its invocation provides a channel by which to articulate the “exceptional moments” that her younger self and fictional children endure. She goes beyond the personal and speaks to the larger impulse to act out and work through visceral childhood trauma via retroactive articulation. Thus, the coastal settings in Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse do not merely gesture to her youth; they also function as entryways through which to return and attend to childhood trauma from an adult perspective.

Woolf adopts an omniscient persona to reflectively narrate childhood trauma in both novels. She can claim benefits like hindsight and language that an adult might wield to master their childhood traumas later on in life from this perspective. We see this narrative advantage at work in the opening scenes of Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse alike; in both, children experience intense emotional shock. These moments explicitly upset Archer and James (the children in question), but they both lack the language to express why. Through the voice of the omniscient narrator, however, Woolf is able to put these disturbances into words. Thus, she guides the

75 reader through the practice of reclaiming power over memories of childhood trauma by giving them language.

In the case of Jacob’s Room, we enter the novel only to find its titular character ironically and worryingly absent. Concern about his whereabouts quickly escalates into a search that his younger brother, Archer, initiates. On the page, Archer’s shouts quite literally expand out into the blank space without any internal elaboration on Archer’s part (see pages 4 and 5). The narrator’s interpretation of Archer’s voice soon follows: “[it] had an extraordinary sadness. Pure from all body, pure from all passion, going out into the world, solitary, unanswered, breaking against rocks—so it sounded” (5). Like the splintered text of the novel, Archer’s hyphenated pronouncement of ‘“Ja-cob!”’ quite literally breaks up his brother’s name as if it were bashing against the rocks on the shore. Fragmentation frequently features in trauma narratives, as does non-linearity, both of which characterize the writing style in Jacob’s Room and Woolf’s writing in general. The omniscient voice that narrates Jacob’s Room, however, sutures these fragments together with the thematic thread of trauma in order to make it legible as a narrative whole.

The omniscient and functionally adult narrator here also takes responsibility for explaining why Archer’s voice embodies “an extraordinary sadness” rather than Archer himself. The speaker attributes it to the horror of the silence that follows and what such silence might imply—that the specter of death haunts Jacob and the novel as a whole. At the novel’s conclusion, this underlying anxiety becomes a reality: Archer’s reverberating refrain returns when one of Jacob’s friends, Bonamy, reenacts the unanswered calls after Jacob has died in the war. Woolf’s choice to bookend the novel in this manner asks us to return to Archer’s experience as a child and read it with a pair of eyes that have now witnessed the war alongside the characters. Thus, across the span of the novel, we move from the position of a child struck dumb by uncontextualized shock to an adult who now has the language to explain that trauma’s impact.

To facilitate the reader’s own experience of this simulated movement through trauma, Woolf often steps into her texts to connect the dots of her younger characters’ psyches where they themselves fail to do so. These seemingly compulsory interjections align with her claim in “A Sketch of the Past” that “as one gets older one has a greater power through reason to provide an explanation; and that this explanation blunts the sledge-hammer force of the blow” (72). This applies more obviously To the Lighthouse since scholars consider it to be Woolf’s most autobiographical work of fiction. In the novel, we can trace numerous moments of childhood terror back to Woolf’s own years. Through the omniscient voice, Woolf exercises her newfound ability to articulate these sensational early memories. While James lacks the language to pinpoint exactly why he is so angry at his

76 father at the beginning of the novel, the narrator can speak on his behalf. Briefly, Woolf transfers us from James’ mind to that of the narrator’s, who reasons that “Mr. Ramsay excited [extremes of emotion] in his children’s breasts by his mere presence” (4). The narrator blames James’ rage on the pleasure Mr. Ramsay appears to take in “disillusioning his son and casting ridicule upon his wife” and “some secret conceit” that he enjoys “at his own accuracy of judgement” (4). Only as James grows older does he attempt to articulate why his father’s behavior awakens such violent sensations in him, an instinct which, as Woolf proposes in “A Sketch of the Past,” becomes more powerful as one ages.

To justify his visceral hatred for his father, James creates an image for his abstract (albeit intense) experience. He envisions the cause as a “fierce sudden black-winged harpy, with its talons and its beak all cold and hard, that struck and struck at you” (184). Even syntactically, the sharp repetition of the stressed “c” and “k” sounds in this sentence forcibly assault the reader. The imagery and consonance in this sentence reproduce the “violent shocks” which Woolf herself endured as a child and remembered for the rest of her life. It also reflects her theory that even if she continues to suffer emotional blows into her adulthood, “it is not, as I thought as a child, simply a blow from an enemy hidden behind the cotton wool of daily life; it is or will become a revelation of some order...and I make it real by putting it into words” (72). Likewise, James seeks “an image to cool and detach and round off his feeling in a concrete shape” (185), or as Woolf might put it, to take away “[the blow’s] power to hurt me” (72). Woolf “detach[es]” James from his inner turmoil by transcribing it into external imagery. Both James and the reader can then more readily access and observe James’ trauma in a tangible and articulable form.

Much could be said about the parallels between Mr. Ramsay’s interactions with his son and Woolf’s own complicated relationship with Leslie Stephen, but I resist this biographical imposition. Regarding one of her other coastal novels, The Waves, Woolf writes ‘“This shall be Childhood; but it must not be my childhood”’ (Lee 25). Her declaration rings true for Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse as well. Details as small as James’ request to journey to the lighthouse echo Adrian Stephen’s own frustrated desire to go to Godrevy lighthouse (an anecdote that the Stephen children published in their family newspaper). Woolf used these personal allusions to write more generally about why certain events strike us as children and stick with us long afterwards.

Particularly in To the Lighthouse, Woolf takes the opportunity to show us that the “exceptional” memories linger long after they have passed. Powerful as she may be, Mrs. Ramsay remains cautious about what she says to her children, inwardly remarking that “children never forget” and therefore, “it was so important what

77 one said, and what one did” (62). When she must break the heart wrenching news to her son that he cannot go to the lighthouse, she laments that “he will remember that all his life” (62). Ultimately, James forgets his mother’s more sensitive response and retains the memory of his father’s much harsher delivery. Years after both parents reject his request, James still recalls his father saying ‘“It will rain… You won’t be able to go to the Lighthouse”’ (186) but not his mother. The tone, approach, and even the language of Mr. Ramsay’s answer certainly lends itself to a shocking effect. Mrs. Ramsay, on the other hand, entertains the possibility of James’ wish for a considerable amount of time, often padding her responses with conditional qualifiers such as ‘“if it’s fine tomorrow”’ (3) and “it may be fine—I expect it will be fine” (4) to leave options open. Meanwhile, Mr. Ramsay frames his reply as if it were already fact. He insists that it “will rain” and that James “won’t be able to go to the Lighthouse.” The infuriating assurance of his answer and its brevity pack a sudden punch for us as much as James. Of moments like these, Woolf writes As a child then, my days, just as they do now, contained a large proportion of...non-being. Week after week passed at St. Ives and nothing made any dint upon me. Then, for no reason that I know about, there was a sudden violent shock; something happened so violently that I have remembered it all my life. (71)

Mr. Ramsay’s answer to James’ entreaty wreaks a similarly violent shock upon his son’s system and it endures in his memory even as his mother’s response, differing only in tone, fades away.

Though Woolf sees these “things one does not remember” as just “as important; perhaps...more important” (69) as their “exceptional” counterparts, she does grant that the latter prove especially valuable to her writing. She even dares to declare that “the shock-receiving capacity is what makes me a writer” (72). Thus, it seems no coincidence that her fiction pulls from her repository of childhood memories. Hermione Lee eloquently expresses this in her comprehensive biography of Woolf: “all her life she gives herself to pleasure by finding the “revelation of some order” through such “moments of being.” So, she masters her memories by structuring them like fictions” (105). By shaping memories and impressions from her early life according to a narrational agenda, Woolf is also able to control the significance they hold for her audience. Avrom Fleishman turns to the symbolic namesake of To the Lighthouse in order to argue this point: Despite or because of her ignorance about lighthouses, Woolf is free to make the Godrevy light of her childhood summers into a dramatic focus of desire and fulfillment, and into a shadowy emblem of reality and its appearances. Such minor distortions of factual detail are less the mark of fantasizing or evasion

78 of the past than they are choices made in the interest of arriving closer to the truth of personal experience. (609)

By these means, she can produce literature which lifts the burden of violent shocks from her consciousness without having to implicate herself as a victim, a useful tactic for processing trauma. In the words of Fleishman, she demonstrates a “dual impulse toward personal memories and toward impersonal generalization” (612).

Biographically inspired anecdotes assist Woolf in unveiling a more universal truth: A framework of violent blows supports the “cotton wool” of “non-being,” of daily life. She accomplishes all of this without directly acknowledging that she draws from her own life to render these exceptional moments in her fiction. In the process, she shifts attention away from how these autobiographical fragments might reflect on her own life and redirects it towards a more general message about being and horror—how they entangle with one another as early as childhood. We only lack the ability to make sense of that relationship as children.

Woolf further intensifies and reworks personal memories to serve a symbolic purpose in Jacob’s Room.

A passage that describes Jacob catching moths and butterflies subtly serves as a roundabout gesture to Jacob’s own inevitable death. Additionally, it draws from Woolf’s own experiences. As a child, Woolf also spent her nights gallivanting with her siblings in search of Lepidoptera. Of all her family rituals, “night-time moth hunting...was one which most haunted her imagination” (Lee 31). For many years afterwards, she still “remembered the smell of seaweed mixed with the smell of camphor from the butterfly boxes,” (32) an unlikely combination which she also mentions in Jacob’s Room.3 She also recalls with equal parts wonder and revulsion capturing a red underwing, the very same specimen which Jacob fails to acquire. For Woolf, bug-hunting evokes “a mixture of intense pleasure, excitement, and some fear and disgust” (Woolf 32). Though Jacob cannot not fully form his own opinion of the experience as a child, the external narrator reports a sense of conflicting beauty and horror similar to what Woolf describes in her own recollections. The text’s description of “blues settl[ing] on little bones lying on the turf...and the painted ladies and the peacocks feast[ing] upon bloody entrails dropped by a hawk” (27) stuns us as much as it does Jacob.

Although this gory image appears to arrive out of nowhere, an attuned close reading proves it to be the severed part of a larger thematic whole characterized by “the omnipresence of sudden violence and senseless horror” (Freeman 68). Abrupt interjections like these, derail the more whimsical depictions of young Jacob 3 “A strong smell of camphor came from the butterfly boxes. Mixed with the smell of camphor was the unmistakable smell of seaweed” (Woolf 26).

79 bug-hunting, appropriately inducing a violent shock in the reader as well. Immediately after charming us with an image of Jacob chasing “pale clouded yellows” (Woolf 25), the narrator circles back to Rebecca, the Flander family’s servant, who “had caught the death’s-head moth in the kitchen” (26). If its name weren’t enough to put the casual reader onto the scent, readers familiar with Lepidopteran lore will recognize this particular specimen for the unusual skull-like marking on its thorax and its cultural significance as a symbol of death. The text’s fixation on death becomes increasingly clear, and other fragments of foreshadowing do not seem quite as disjointed. Against this backdrop of morbid motifs, we recognize a metaphor that likens the sound of a tree falling to a “volley of pistol-shots” (26) as a ghostly foreshadowing of Jacob’s death in the war. Like the narrator’s passing reference to Jacob’s red underwing, one of Woolf’s own childhood experiences inspires this fragment: The glory of the moment was great. Our boldness in coming so far was rewarded, and at the same time it seemed as though we had proved our skill against the hostile and alien force. Now we could go back to bed and to the safe house. And then, standing there with the moth safely in our hands, suddenly a volley of shot rang out, a hollow rattle of sound in the deep silence of the wood which had I know not what of mournful and ominous about it. It waned and spread through the forest: it died away, then another of those deep sighs arose. An enormous silence succeeded. “A tree,” we said at last. A tree had fallen. (248)

Like her fictional manipulation of Godrevy lighthouse, Woolf twists her memory of the tree’s collapse to serve her narrative needs. Even as she disguises her personal stake in the material of her fiction, Woolf “heightens the parallel between inscription and observing oneself: as an exercise in reflecting upon and observing those aspects of her life she cannot forget” (Freeman 74). Freeman notes this in Woolf’s autobiographical writing, but I propose that she practices the same observational and inscriptional processes in her fictional work. The nature of autobiographical writing, like “A Sketch of the Past,” obligates Woolf to acknowledge her own presence in the memories that she recalls. Fiction, on the other hand, permits Woolf to partake in a certain degree of self-disguise, thus diverting attention away from what the writing might or might not say about Woolf’s personal life and towards her larger concerns about the nature of early memories. Memories of her own childhood provide the material for the capitalized and universal “Childhood” that she sets out to illustrate in The Waves, that is, “those aspects of her life she cannot forget.” Through her generalized re-imaginings of childhood, Woolf sets out to interrogate how we process early memories. Why do specific moments become “moments of being,” and how do they connect to become a coherent and expressible whole? Furthermore, why do the connections be-

80 tween these fragments resist interpretation and description in childhood?

To answer that last question, I turn to a rather macabre motif that darkens the pages of both Jacob’s Room and To the Lighthouse. While Archer desperately searches the sandy shore for his younger brother, Jacob stumbles across “a whole skull—perhaps a cow’s skull” (7). The skull seems to strike Jacob, and he latches onto it: “Sobbing, but absent-mindedly, he ran farther and farther away until he held the skull in his arms” (7).

The skull makes a second appearance in To the Lighthouse—nailed to the wall of the Ramsay children’s room.

Mrs. Ramsay observes that “Cam couldn’t go to sleep with it in the room, and James screamed if she touched it” (114). In both novels, children lack the language to vocalize their fear; it simply exists unarticulated. The involuntary and irrational quality of this fear comes through when Woolf describes Jacob “Sobbing, but absent-mindedly” (emphasis mine). Her word choice suggests that no intellectual reasoning prompts Jacob to cry.

As Woolf states in “A Sketch of the Past,” children endure the same horrors that adults experience, but they lack the vocabulary to convey it. By initially refusing to justify her younger characters’ reactions to exceptional moments, Woolf fulfills her tendency “to write not just about childhood but as if a child” (Lee 23). At times, I agree with Lee, but I also complicate her claim by positing that the omniscient narrator present in both novels is an implicitly adult narrator—if not in identity then at least in function. Woolf’s fiction neither entirely lacks an adult voice nor the more mature instinct to structure seemingly random moments of shock into an orderly whole. Though she leaves the reader to do the work, she conveniently compiles all of the fragments into one piece in order to make connections between “moments of being” possible. As early as Jacob’s, James’, and Cam’s childhoods, the external narrator insistently illuminates patterns of fear, horror, and death. Nothing can shelter childhood completely from these realities, and the same goes for adulthood. If we are to believe Woolf’s writing, we do, however, gradually learn to vocalize and structure these violent shocks in order to disentangle them. In doing so, we can render unattended trauma less distressing.

Such moments routinely shattered Woolf’s own childhood, not least her mother’s death when Woolf was thirteen. Woolf became painfully aware of the horrific quality of the world from a young age and later recounted it in her writing. To be sure, she describes moments of rapture, too. In “A Sketch of the Past,” several of the critical memories Woolf describes bring her peace: the rhythmic sound of the waves at St. Ives, a brief respite in her mother’s lap, and a glimpse of a flower to name a few. Nevertheless, the majority strikes her psyche violently in one way or another. These encounters with senseless horror translate into her writing, including her fiction. With fiction in particular, Woolf can evacuate herself from the memory even as she “reenacts the shocks

81 that necessitate the act of writing� (Freeman 69). Outside of the immediate moment, she can better assess why particular childhood memories never leave even after time has passed, and in writing about them, she proves the very act of writing to be a transmission of shocks in and of itself.

By employing the omniscient standpoint in her fiction, Woolf is able to take up the retrospective perspective and reclaim traumas that once made her a victim, instead rising above them to become the victor. By reassembling these moments into a narrative whole, Woolf renders shocks of the past constructive for both herself and the reader. Her written and fictionalized ree nactments of them provide a therapeutic method for acting out, working through, and ultimately healing from early trauma.

82 Works Cited Fleishman, Avrom. “‘To Return to St. Ives’: Woolf’s Autobiographical Writings.” ELH, vol. 48, no. 3, 1981, pp.

606–618. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2872916.

Freeman, Barbara Claire. “Moments of Beating: Addiction and Inscription in Virginia Woolf’s ‘A Sketch of the Past.’” Diacritics, vol. 27, no. 3, 1997, pp. 65–76. JSTOR, JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1566334.

Lee, Hermione. “Childhood” Virginia Woolf, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, 95-112. Print.

——. “Houses” Virginia Woolf, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997, 21-50. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. “A Sketch of the Past” Moments of Being, edited by Jeanne Schulkind, New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976, 61-139. Print.

Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room, edited by Kate Flint, New York: Oxford University Press, 2008. Print.

——. To the Lighthouse, edited by Eudora Welty, Orlando: Harcourt Brace and Company, 1981. Print.

83

“Embrace,� Sara Mitchell, University of Wisconsin-Madison