Omnino - Volume 6

Undergraduate Research Journal Volume 6 2015-2016 VALDOSTA STATE UNIVERSITY Faculty Advisor Dr. Anne Greenfield Student Editors Livi Coté Brent Dasher Anna Limoges Nicholas Mathis Ashley Smith Graphic Designer/Student Editor Michael LaGon Cover Art

by SaraBeth Hobbs Front: Bushnell Oaks Back: Days Gone By

Copyright © 2016 by Valdosta State University

The Devastation of German-American Identity in the Early 1900s: Hysterical Racism Resulting from World War I

by Jennifer Allison Prairie Faculty Mentor: Dr. Stephanie Hinnershitz, Department of History

6

The Unity of Competing Protagonists in Manley’s Almyna

by Tiffanie Colvin Faculty Mentor: Dr. Anne Greenfield, Department of English

Flannery O’Connor: A Deconstruction of Good and Evil through Grace

by Noel Carter Faculty Mentor: Dr. Byron Brown, Department of English

22 32

The Way You See Things: The Evolution of Feminism in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” and Their Eyes Were Watching God

by Reagan Bennett Faculty Mentor: Dr. Kendric Coleman, Department of English

40

Class Struggle in Marx’s Political Philosophy

by Jarrod Grammel Faculty Mentor: Dr. Cristobal Serrán-Pagán, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies

50

An Analysis of the General Practices in Prevention of Surgical Soft Skin Infections: A Comparison between the United States and Spain

by Ja’Marrius Thomas Faculty Mentor: Dr. Victoria Russell, Department of Modern and Classical Languages; Ms. Edris Brannen, Department of Modern and Classical Languages

62

Introduction,

by Dr. Anne Greenfield, Faculty Advisor to

OMNINO

The Omnino student editors and I are pleased to present volume 6 of VSU’s undergraduate research journal. We congratulate the six student-authors and their faculty mentors on their hard work, and we applaud them for producing such excellent research and writing. This is a real accomplishment for these students, as it is no easy task to have a paper accepted into the pages of Omnino. In order to submit, students must already have the support of a faculty member who endorses their research. Then, each submission we receive is carefully reviewed and vetted in a double-blind process by two VSU faculty members who have expertise on the paper’s topic. Only when papers are recommended for publication by the two faculty reviewers (and, often, only after further required revisions are completed) are students’ papers published in Omnino. We keep our review process rigorous so that we can showcase the very best undergraduate research coming out of VSU.

Each year, the student editors and I seek new ways to improve Omnino, and this year we did so with renewed energy and creativity. The Omnino student editors designed and built Omnino display stands and placed them at four high-traffic locations on campus; they created and distributed Omnino decals for faculty mentors, faculty reviewers, and student authors; and they generated a database of faculty reviewers and their respective areas of specialization.

Our goal is to continue building and improving the journal’s infrastructure to further encourage strong submissions, to facilitate thorough faculty reviewing, and to broaden distribution so that VSU’s best student research may be delivered into the hands of a wide readership.

We wish to thank, as always, all of the students who submitted their work to Omnino, as well as the faculty who mentored these students and who reviewed submissions. None of this would be possible without you.

Students are encouraged to submit their work by the January 16, 2017 deadline for volume 7. We publish essays from every field of research at VSU, and we invite students to refer to our submission guidelines at https://www.valdosta.edu/colleges/arts-sciences/ english/student-resources/student-publications/ omnino/submit.php.

The Devastation of German-American Identity in the Early 1900s: Hysterical Racism Resulting from World War I Jennifer Allison Prairie

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Stephanie Hinnershitz, Department of History This research shows how the lives of German-Americans were affected in the early 1900s by European propaganda as Great Britain entered into war with Germany, demonstrating the racism this group experienced when the United States entered the war. Theirs was an ethnic group that was accepted without prejudice prior to World War I but found itself the subject of discrimination and outright hysteria due to paranoia and distrust generated by the United States government. Once war broke out in Europe, GermanAmericans worried about family and friends back home, and gathered to hold rallies that generated food, clothing, and financial support to send to loved ones which was confused with support for the German government.

This newfound distrust of German-Americans was amplified by President Wilson declaring all German-Americans to be “alien enemies,� which led to lynching and extreme violence, boycotts of German businesses, and the German language being outlawed. German-Americans were required to register with the government and their movement and financial transactions were monitored; some were placed in internment camps for the duration of the war. They were forced to strip themselves of their ethnic identity in order to prove themselves loyal Americans or else live in fear.

6

O

N APRIL 5, 1918, DISCRIMINATION TURNED INTO outright hysteria when a mob of 300 men and boys lynched 45 year old, German-born, Robert Paul Prager in Illinois. He was accused of speaking negatively toward the United States and President Wilson.1 Prior to World War I, German immigrants easily assimilated in the United States, but when the war began, Germans in America experienced widespread prejudice and discrimination.

The government and many Americans made every effort to suppress German culture and language through propaganda as a response to WWI. Much of the propaganda led to an irrational fear of anything German, and paranoia caused Americans to act in an effort to preserve liberty. Through an analysis of newspaper articles and oral histories, I will show that legal, economic, political, and social factors contributed to a pandemic, anti-German hysteria that swept through America for a brief period during WWI, making German assimilation to American culture unstable.

Assimilation is the measure by which immigrants are judged to be either good Americans or outsiders. Historians, like Oscar Handlin, believe that once people immigrate to the United States they leave their cultural and ethnic identities behind and adopt new identities that make them solely American. This process has always been considered permanent. According to Handlin, the United States is a melting pot by which all citizens, new and old, become patriotic law-abiding contributors to society. Handlin says that because the United States is a country made up of displaced people, newcomers are headed toward assimilation before stepping off the boat because their own displacement gives them something in common with every other person that journeyed to America.2 It was unheard-of that one could assimilate and become American only to lose their newfound identity by situations that were brought about through no fault of their own.

During the nineteenth century, more than five million German immigrants had arrived and were living in the United States. By 1910, close to 9% of the U.S. population had been born in Germany, making Germans the largest ethnic group at that time.3 They were considered hardworking and had achieved success in many different areas. In many communities German was the language most often “The Robert Prager Lynching.” The Robert Prager Lynching. http://web.viu.ca/davies/ h324war/prager.lynching.1918.htm. (accessed September 30, 2015.)

2 See Oscar Handlin, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations That Made the American People, 272. (Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press, 2002).

3 Katja Wustenbecker, “German-Americans during World War I,” In Immigrants Entrepreneurship: German-American Business Biographies, 1720 to the Present, vol. 3, ed.

Giles R. Hoyt. http://www.immigrantentrepreneurship.org/entry.php?rec=214 1

7

Jennifer Allison Prairie spoken in religious, educational, and commercial endeavors. Before the war, they were one of the more respected immigrant groups.

The state of Texas considered German influence important enough to have its first state constitution published not only in English and Spanish, but in German as well. German immigrants living in Texas were also given the right to vote once citizenship was initiated despite naturalization not being completed.4 They were able to assimilate with their language and customs intact. Their language and culture were considered highly advanced.5 Germans were skilled craftsmen, farmers, businessmen, scientists, and other highly regarded professions.6 They were considered industrious and civic-minded and were welcomed in their communities.7 German immigrants are part of Oscar Handlin’s portrayal of America as a huge melting pot in his innovative work The Uprooted, in that they did fit in well once they arrived pre-WWI. However, they did not lose their culture and language as Handlin suggests, but were able to find acceptance in their new homeland because they did possess the whiteness that was required for easy assimilation.8 Around 1905, Germans were not only considered white but “of the pure Saxon type” which classified them racially as suitable to become Americans.9 They were hardworking members of society and productive citizens who were not put in the same category with other ethnic groups that were viewed as dependent and requiring handouts in order to survive. Lacking whiteness signified an inferiority that “other” races possessed. By possessing whiteness, as perceived by other white Americans, one significantly increased one’s life chances on a social and political scale.10 At the outbreak of WWI, immigrants from Europe reacted to the war with sympathy and concern. They were worried about family Mark Sonntag, “Fighting Everything German in Texas, 1917-1919,” Historian 56, no. 4: 655657. http://eds.b.ebscohost.com/eds/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?sid=8c632ec0-93e9-441b-816b1fb6c8af8d8d%40sessionmgr110&vid=1&hid=113. (accessed October 16, 2015.)

5 William Keel, “ German Americans & World War I,” Cobblestone 22, no. 5 (May 2001): 29.

History Reference Center, EBSCOhost (accessed October 16, 2015).

6 Ibid.

7 Taylor Holmes, “Deutschland Unsere Mutter, Columbia Our Bride: German-America in the Progressive Era,” Pursuit: The Journal of Undergraduate Research at the University of Tennessee 4, no. 2: 31. Publisher Provided Full Text Searching File, EBSCOhost (accessed October 16, 2015).

8 Handlin, The Uprooted.

9 See Russell A. Kazal, Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German-American Identity (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2004).

10 Teresa J. Guess, “The Social Construction of Whiteness: Racism by Intent, Racism by Consequence,” Critical Sociology, Volume 32, no. 4, 650. https://www.cwu.edu/diversity/sites/ cts.cwu.edu.diversity/files/documents/constructingwhiteness.pdf. (accessed January 23, 2016).

4

8

The Devastation of German-American Identity and friends back home. Many gathered together and held patriotic meetings and collected war relief funds to send back to their homelands, but because Germans made up such a large percentage of these concerned immigrants, their actions fell under intense public scrutiny and made many in their communities suspicious.

More people had a connection to Great Britain and identified with the English, so English immigrants became leery of the large number of people supporting the enemy. Many Germans rushed to German consulates in the U.S. to return home with the intention of joining their former countrymen in the fight. What many Americans did not realize was that Germans as a whole did not form one homogeneous group. Because Germany was very young as a unified country, Germans made up many different ethnic groups within themselves.

Some were concerned with the war and wanted to help their former countrymen in any way possible while others merely sympathized but identified themselves as Americans and wished to stay out of it altogether. The latter attitude was shared among most Americans and also with President Wilson who declared that the United States would remain neutral in the war.11 German-Americans who were sympathetic to the plight of their homeland were influenced by anti-English propaganda coming out of Germany. There were publications that swayed their opinions towards the superiority of their own nationality and encouraged support for American neutrality. The Fatherland, a German publication, attempted to draw a line between the ethnicity of German-Americans and what it called, “colorless New England Puritanism” and said that they were better Americans than the others because they wanted to protect the United States by staying neutral.12 They were also influenced by family and friends back home. Hugo Munsterberg, a professor at Harvard, was born in Germany but lived in the United States. He found himself greatly influenced by his brothers, who remained in Germany, and by their views on the war. Because Munsterberg had such strong opinions on the war raging in Europe, he took on a leadership role amongst other Germans in the U.S. and went about organizing pro-German forces and encouraged others to take on his views of American neutrality. This made him an early target and caused him to stand out in an area that was home to a large population of people with English ancestry.13 Suspicion and paranoia were beginning to take hold of most non-Germans as they viewed Keel, “German Americans & WWI.” Phyllis Keller, States of Belonging: German-American Intellectuals and the First World War (Cambridge and London, Harvard University Press, 1979.), 147.

13 Ibid., 68-69.

11

12

9

Jennifer Allison Prairie the actions and opinions of their German neighbors; everything they did was becoming closely scrutinized.

Once the U.S. entered the war in April 1917, everything began to change for German immigrants and German-Americans, beginning with executive measures to reclassify the legal status of Germans.

This ethnic group which had been so highly regarded was now being treated with suspicion and aggression. President Wilson’s new declaration that all Germans in the United States were to be considered “alien enemies” placed them in a new category. Suddenly they were not allowed to live close to military bases, port cities, airports, nor the nation’s capital. It became a requirement that all Germans must be registered and fingerprinted; anyone refusing to submit to these requirements was considered a danger to national security and placed in internment camps for the duration of the war.14 Following the reclassification of Germans as alien enemies, the U.S. government turned to economic means to suppress Germans. By October 1917, Congress passed the Trading with the Enemy Act.15 The Act became a federal law that restricted trade with countries that were hostile to the United States. Alien enemies also were heavily scrutinized for their former successes in the U.S. and their private fortunes were considered suspect. German citizens were ordered to disclose all property and assets; business owners were ordered to present business records and customer lists for inspection.

Permits had to be obtained to withdraw or transfer money to and from accounts. President Wilson appointed A. Mitchel Palmer to the position of Alien Property Custodian.16 Palmer had the power to analyze the accounts of Germans and investigate any business or private dealings that he thought suspect. Should he find anything remotely appearing to fall under the Trading with the Enemy Act, he was authorized to confiscate all assets to be held by the United States Treasury.17 An amendment to the Trading with the Enemy Act was enacted in March 1918, which gave Palmer the authority to auction off confiscated property if he thought it came from a pro-German Wustenbecker, “German-Americans during World War I.” “Seizure of Enemy Property During World War,” Congressional Digest 5, no. 12: 33, http:// library.valdosta.edu:2048/login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db =ulh&AN=12498978&site=eds-live&scope=site. (accessed November 3, 2015).

16 Wustenbecker, “German-Americans during World War I.” 17 “Executive Order Prescribing Rules and Regulations Respecting the Exercise of the Powers and Authority and the Performance of the Duties of the Alien Property Custodian Under the “Trading with the Enemy Act” and Prior Executive Orders Pursuant Thereto, and Respecting the Deposit and Investment of Moneys Received by or for the Account of the Alien Property Custodian”, American Journal of International Law, 12 (1918): 278-84. ; Katja Wustenbecker.

“German-Americans during World War I.” 14 15

10

The Devastation of German-American Identity company. He divided enemy alien property into two categories: one he regarded as friendly to the United States and the other as hostile towards the war effort. The former were given their investments and possessions back once the war was over. By the end of the war, Palmer held close to $800 million* in assets.19 Laws giving the government the right to confiscate property and investments were not the only new legislation targeting Germans in the United States; their language was also under attack and social forms of discrimination heightened paranoia among Americans.

Germans had previously assimilated into American life with their language intact; however, after the outbreak of the war, this was no longer the case. President Wilson acknowledged that there were millions of U.S. citizens of German birth who were loyal to America and her war effort but quickly let the country know that any disloyalty would be harshly dealt with. People began to question whether or not one could be loyal to America while speaking the same language as the enemy.20 Anti-German sentiment was beginning to rise. Schools and churches came under attack for using the German language in classrooms or religious services. Newspapers were under attack for printing updates on the war in German. Many of the institutions and business that used the German language for their primary means of communication were vandalized and eventually closed.21 German newspapers were targeted because it was believed they encouraged Germans to hold onto their ethnicity. Many of these publications closed their doors but some, in an effort to stay open, began printing the American government’s propaganda. They would print things like “Buy Liberty Bonds” (see Fig.1) and other pro-American ads. German newspapers that were still in print were no longer considered German newspapers, but American newspapers printed in German.22 The targeting of the German language moved beyond social discrimination when Governor William L. Harding issued the Babel Proclamation in May 1918, using legal measures to reinforce prejudice and hysteria. This proclamation not only barred anyone from speaking German in public, it barred all foreign languages. Harding felt that there was a connection between communication and assimilation. By 18

“Seizure of Enemy Property During World War,” Congressional Digest 5, no. 12: 33.

Wustenbecker, “German-Americans during World War I,” *($800 million was approximately $10.4 billion by todays standards) 20 Stephen J. Frese, “Divided by Common Language: The Babel Proclamation and its Influences in Iowa History,” History Teacher 39, no. 1: 60.

21 Library of Congress: Teachers, “Immigration: German” http://www.loc.gov/teachers/ classroommaterials/presentationsandactivities/presentations/immigration/german8.html (accessed October 16, 2015).

22 Mark Sonntag, “Fighting Everything German in Texas, 1917-1919.”

18 19

11

Jennifer Allison Prairie removing the common link that foreigners had with each other (i.e., their native language), forced assimilation took place and citizens were bonded by patriotism instead.23 He felt uniting people through one common language, English, would prevent further bloodshed and other crises from happening.24 The Babel Proclamation led to quite a few arrests as party line operators eavesdropped on conversations and reported all foreign language calls to the police. Many states across the nation made English the official language but the Babel Proclamation made Harding something of a laughing stock when five Scott County farm wives were arrested for having a party line conversation in German.25 Less than six months later the proclamation was repealed but the damage had been done. Most English speaking citizens didn’t trust anyone speaking German.

German was no longer allowed to be spoken nor taught in schools which turned out to be not only a crippling social factor for Germans but for speakers of other foreign languages as well. Many public universities and libraries canceled subscriptions to German publications. Books and newspapers were burned in public during patriotic demonstrations. In the early part of 1918, restrictions were placed on German being used in schools and 38 out of 48 states had regulations put in place to enforce these restrictions.26 Texas went so far as to enact a law making English the exclusive language of instruction and forbade foreign languages to be taught in any public institution until high school. One county in Texas passed a resolution prohibiting students from speaking any language other than English on school playgrounds.27 Some Texans even argued that parochial schools should be eliminated and everyone should be taught in public schools. Their theory behind this was parochial schools fostered ethnicity thereby not completing a vital function that American public schools did, specifically the Americanization of citizens.28 Many of these restrictions and laws were repealed after the war ended, but the old traditions of teaching German in public institutions never fully recovered.

The social implications of the foreign language ban not only affected parochial schools but caused churches to become closely scrutinized as well. Many German-American congregations found themselves harassed by patriotic organizations as an aftereffect of the Stephen J. Frese, “Divided by Common Language: The Babel Proclamation and its Influences in Iowa History,” 59.

24 Ibid., 62.

25 Ibid., 63.

26 Wustenbecker, “German-Americans during World War I.” 27 Sonntag, “Fighting Everything German in Texas, 1917-1919,” 661.

28 Ibid., 663.

23

12

The Devastation of German-American Identity paranoia caused by the language ban. The majority of them switched to English language services, but there were several groups within the group as a whole that were targeted for a reason apart from the language they spoke. Mennonites, Amish, and Hutterites were among the groups that found themselves at the center of suspicion. These religious groups were opposed to military service. These pacifist groups were viewed as traitors to the U.S. because of their refusal to contribute to the war effort. They suffered beatings and watched as their churches were destroyed. Many had their livestock stolen and sold at market; the proceeds from the sales were used to purchase Liberty Bonds in their names. Most of the German-Americans that fell into these religious groups had no loyalty to Germany, they just wanted to be free to practice their faith and live within its boundaries.29 Once the language of the enemy had been somewhat contained, patriotic organizations began fighting to have towns, streets, businesses, and even foods with names identifying them as something German, renamed to honor America. A town named Berlin, in Iowa, was renamed Lincoln; Schiller Park in Ohio was called Washington Park. Foods like sauerkraut became known as liberty cabbage.31 Representative J.M.C. Smith of Michigan introduced a bill to change the names of all public entities that bore Germanic names to something more patriotic. He called it a “blow to German sentiment.” The New York Times wrote an article referencing the bill and titled the article, “To Strike Germany From Map Of U.S.” These extreme tactics led to not only German names being changed in public spaces but to actual individuals with last names bearing German origins changing the spelling to something more American. Their effort to prove loyalty to the U.S. and avoid much of the violence and animosity directed towards them was becoming extreme.32 Propaganda produced by the American government as well as what was coming out of Europe from the side of the Allies was adding to the anti-German hysteria. Posters portraying Germans as raving mad monsters were posted in post offices, schools, and other public places in an effort to dehumanize the enemy. Germans were given the nickname “Huns” in order to associate them with the barbaric nomadic warriors that wreaked havoc in Europe during the fourth century.33 (see fig. 2) These images struck fear in the minds Wustenbecker, “German-Americans during World War I.” Keel, “German Americans & WWI”.

31 “To Strike Germany from Map of U.S,” The New York Times, June 2, 1918, http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive-free/ pdf?res=9A06E2DA163EE433A25751C0A9609C946996D6CF. . (accessed September 30, 2015) 32 Library of Congress: Teachers, “Immigration: German.”

29

30

13

Jennifer Allison Prairie of Americans causing them to report their neighbors for anything they deemed suspicious activity. This paranoia led to many GermanAmericans being tarred and feathered and the homes of some were painted yellow in order to identify them as not doing their part in the war effort. Local law enforcement turned a blind eye to many of these “patriotic” demonstrations.34 Popular children’s literature was used to draw in even the youngest members of society. Over in Britain, the children’s story, “The House that Jack Built”, was rewritten to say: THIS IS THE HUN THAT DROPPED THE BOMB THAT FELL ON THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT, THIS IS THE GUN THAT KILLED THE HUN THAT DROPPED THE BOMB THAT FELL ON THE HOUSE THAT JACK BUILT…35 Eventually, British propaganda made its way to the United States and fueled the fire for support despite President Wilson’s earlier claim that the U.S. would remain neutral.

The most extreme and socially violent act of anti-German hysteria caused by government induced paranoia was the lynching of Robert Paul Prager on April 5, 1918. Prager, a coal miner, was accused of speaking out against President Wilson and the war effort. It is recorded in several different newspapers of the time that he had been attending a Socialist meeting earlier in the day and was overheard saying something disloyal. The angry mob tracked him down at home and forced him to march up and down the street wrapped in an American flag and waving two smaller American flags. In an attempt to curb any potential violence from taking place, the local police arrested Prager and took him to jail in order to get him away from the mob. Later that evening, the mob gathered at the jail and demanded the release of the prisoner. They took Prager, led him through town with a rope tied around his neck and hanged him from a tree about a half-mile from town. Of the 300 to 400 men and boys that were said to be in the mob that lynched Robert Prager, only twelve were indicted for his murder. On June 18, 1918, a jury of twelve men only took about fifteen minutes to declare the defendants not guilty.36 Oral accounts give a glimpse into the private lives of some German-Americans during the early 1900s as well as how they experienced social forms of prejudice and discrimination during Keel, “German Americans & WWI.” Sonntag, “Fighting Everything German in Texas, 1917-1919,” 669.

35 George Robb, British Culture and the First World War (London: Palgrave McMillian, 2014), 197.

36 “The Robert Prager Lynching: Media Reaction,” https://web.viu.ca/davies/h324war/prager. lynching.1918.htm. (accessed November 6, 2015).

33

34

14

The Devastation of German-American Identity war-time hysteria. Frank Brocke, the son of a German-American farmer who lived in Idaho during the war was interviewed many years later. He said that the hardest part of it was just being German. It was important to be vigilant and careful with your actions so that no one perceived you to be doing something wrong. Brocke recalled his mother and sister talking on the telephone in German and it bothered the English speaking people who eavesdropped on other lines; they would slam the receivers down when they heard German being spoken.37 Another oral history was given by Jennifer Schroer Altman whose grandparents were German-born immigrants who settled in South Georgia. She recalled her father, Walter F. Schroer, Sr., telling her about his mother, Julia Smartschan Schroer, being very ill. They needed to call a doctor but didn’t have a telephone in their home. One of the children went to the neighbor’s house to ask to use the phone but they wouldn’t let them in because they were German. He also told of his father, Fred William Schroer, Sr., having a nervous breakdown during the war years. It was difficult to hear of the situations in Germany while living in his new country.38 Prior to the war, Fred William Schroer, Sr., was legally known as Frederick Wilhelm Schröeder, his name is a perfect example of an attempt to take a German name and make it more American. There is another instance that Walter F. Schroer, Sr. recalled happening when he was about four years old. He had ridden to town with his father in the wagon. An older man walked out of the store where they had parked, looked at him and called him a “little kraut” and then walked off. He said that he had no idea at the time that the man was being unkind but realized it years later when he recalled that day.39 (see fig. 3) Another German-American that experienced prejudice during the war was Theodor Seuss Geisel, better known to the world as Dr. Seuss. He spoke German as his first language and was picked on at school for his German ethnicity. Many of the children’s books he wrote later in life touched on important social issues, possibly a result of the bullying he experienced as a child.40 Immediately following the war, Americans were faced with Prohibition and there was an immediate push to rid the county of alcohol consumption. This was also seen as an anti-German movement. It had a devastating effect on German social life. Many History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web., “‘We Had to Be So Careful’ A German Farmer’s Recollection of Anti-German Sentiment in World War 1.”

38 Jennifer Schroer Altman, Ph.D., “Schroer Oral History,” Interviewer: Allison Prairie, September 18, 2015.

39 Allison Prairie, as told to her by Walter F. Schroer, Sr. sometime prior to his death in 2004.

40 The National WWII Museum- New Orleans, “Dr. Seuss & WWII: Analyzing Political Cartoons,” www.nationalww2museum.org/learn/education (accessed October 16, 2015).

37

15

Jennifer Allison Prairie Germans had beer gardens where they met with their family and friends and enjoyed spending time together41 (see fig. 4). Other families made their livings from breweries and wineries. When Congress passed the Volstead Act in 1919, it ended the livelihoods of many German-Americans. The production, distribution, and sale of alcohol became illegal. Some family businesses closed their doors while others made the best of it by turning wine cellars into other money-making entities like producing mushrooms. Anheuser-Bush converted their breweries into factories that produced soft drinks and non-alcoholic malts.42 Prohibition did affect the way GermanAmericans socialized but instead of shutting out the custom, it only changed where they socialized; instead of meeting in large public gathering spots like beer gardens, they continued meeting on a smaller scale with friends and family at home.

A decade after the war, sociologist Emory S. Bogardus wrote the influential study Immigration and Race Attitudes. In his research he explains feelings white Americans had toward people of other races and backgrounds. Bogardus interviewed many people and there are specific comments on attitudes toward German-Americans. One person told of having German neighbors, and said that they didn’t care for the father in the family because he worked his daughters on the farm while his sons were sent off to universities to study and become educated.43 Another account given by someone was along the same lines. The father was strict and held all the authority in the family. The daughter was afraid of her father and the friend giving the account seemed to think him abusive.44 Someone else mentions reading a book about Germans using poisonous gas during WWI and said that they didn’t have any ill will towards them during the war, but hated them after reading about the gasses.45 While German Jews in the United States are a subgroup of the German population, Bogardus claims that they were very forward in their mannerisms and thought too much of themselves. He says their attempts toward assimilation are not welcomed.46 While speaking of Germans as a whole Bogardus writes:

Herman W. Ronenberg, The Politics of Assimilation: The Effect of Prohibition on the German-Americans, (New York: Carlton Press, Inc., 1975), 160.

42 Petra DeWitt, Degrees of Allegiance: Harassment and Loyalty in Missouri’s GermanAmerican Community during World War I. (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012), 166.

43 Emory S. Bogardus, Immigration and Race Attitudes, (Boston, New York, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, Dallas, London: D.C. Heath and Company, 1928), 62.

44 Ibid., 68.

45 Ibid., 79 46 Ibid., 136.

41

16

The Devastation of German-American Identity One does not hear the German situation talked over anymore. I wonder if people all feel an unforgivable attitude toward them and try to cover it up or whether my animosity is of such an unusual depth that I can’t seem to forgive or forget the stories I heard of the Germans during the war. Since peace has been restored, many of the stories have been discredited, but still my first reaction to the word “Germany� is one of hatred. I will be very much interested to follow this attitude of mine in the next few years to see if it will change.47 Once the war ended there was little done to rebuild the German ethnic identity. Much of the violence and discrimination went away on its own but German language and culture never recovered. The people who had been one of the pinnacles of American society were forced to leave all traces of their ethnicity behind to re-assimilate, this time by force, in order to be accepted once more as patriotic Americans. Several decades later, when World War II began, GermanAmericas experienced harassment once again because of their ethnic background, but it was not as widespread as it had been during WWI and the years immediately following the war.48 German culture and identity never fully reemerged after both World Wars, despite the discrimination that plagued them at that time fading away.

47 48

Ibid., 149-150.

Kazal, Becoming Old Stock, 261.

17

FIGURES FIG. 1

Liberty Bond https://commons.wikimedia. org/wiki/File:Liberty_Bond__1.jpg#/media/File:Liberty_ Bond_-_1.jpg [Public Domain Image] FIG. 2

Liberty Bonds https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/8/8e/%22Beat_back_the_HUN_with_LIBERTY_ BONDS.%22_-_NARA_-_512638.jpg [Public Domain Image] Destroy This Mad Brute https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/ ab/’Destroy_this_mad_brute’_WWI_propaganda_poster_(US_ version).jpg [Public Domain Image] 18

FIG. 3

German immigrant farm family selling produce at a roadside stand.

Left to right- Fred William Schroer, Sr., Walter F. Schroer, Sr. (sitting on crate), Julia S. Schroer, Fred William Schroer, Jr. (boy in overalls), man and girl on right- unknown. [Photograph courtesy of Jennifer S. Altman, Ph.D.] FIG. 4

German beer garden. Š Jeffrey Stanton. http://www.westland.net/coneyisland/articles/images/confeltmansinterior.jpg 19

Jennifer Allison Prairie BIBLIOGRAPHY Altman, Jennifer Schroer Ph.D., “Schroer Oral History.” Interviewer:

Allison Prairie, September18, 2015.

Bogardus, Emory S. Immigration and Race Attitudes. Boston, New

York, Chicago, Atlanta, San Francisco, Dallas, London: D.C.

Heath and Company, 1928.

DeWitt, Petra. Degrees of Allegiance: Harassment and Loyalty in

Missouri’s German-American Community during World War I.

Athens: Ohio University Press, 2012.

“Executive Order Prescribing Rules and Regulations Respecting the

Exercise of the Powers and Authority and the Performance of

the Duties of the Alien Property Custodian Under

the ‘trading with the Enemy Act’ and Prior Executive

Orders Pursuant Thereto, and Respecting the Deposit

and Investment of Moneys Received by or for the Account of

the Alien Property Custodian.” American Journal of

International Law 12 (1918): 278-84.

Frese, Stephen J. “Divided by Common Language: The Babel

Proclamation and its Influences in Iowa History.” History Teacher 39: 60.

Guess, Teresa J. “The Social Construction of Whiteness: Racism by

Intent, Racism by Consequence,” Critical Sociology, Volume

32, Issue 4, 650. https://www.cwu.edu/diversity/sites/cts.

cwu.edu.diversity/files/documents/constructingwhiteness.

pdf. (accessed January 23, 2016).

Handlin, Oscar, The Uprooted: The Epic Story of the Great Migrations

That Made the American People. Philadelphia: University of

Philadelphia Press, 2002.

History Matters: The U.S. Survey Course on the Web. “‘We Had to Be

So Careful’ A German Farmer’s Recollection of Anti-German

Sentiment in World War 1.”

Holmes, Taylor. “Deutschland Unsere Mutter, Columbia Our Bride:

German-America in the Progressive Era.” Pursuit: The Journal

of Undergraduate Research at the University of Tennessee 4; 31.

Kazal, Russell A. Becoming Old Stock: The Paradox of German American Identity. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton

University Press, 2004.

Keel, William. “German Americans and World War I.” Cobblestone 22,

(May 2001): 29.

Keller, Phyllis. States of Belonging: German-American Intellectuals

and the First World War. Cambridge and London, Harvard

University Press, 1979.

20

The Devastation of German-American Identity Robb, George. British Culture and the First World War. London:

Palgrave McMillian 2014.

Ronenberg, Herman W. The Politics of Assimilation: The Effect of

Prohibition on the German-Americans. New York: Carlton

Press, Inc., 1975.

“Seizure of Enemy Property During World War.” Congressional Digest

5, no.

12: 33. http://library.valdosta.edu:2048/ login?url=http://search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct =true&db=ulh&AN=12498978&site=eds-live&scope=site.

(accessed November 3, 2015).

Sonntag, Mark. “Fighting Everything German in Texas, 1917-1919.”

Historian 5: 655-57.

“The Robert Prager Lynching: Media Reaction.” https://web.viu.ca/ davies/h324war/prager.lynching.1918.htm.

“The Robert Prager Lynching.” The Robert Prager Lynching. http:// web.viu.ca/davies/h324war/prager.lynching.1918.htm.

The National WWII Museum- New Orleans, “Dr. Seuss & WWII:

Analyzing Political Cartoons.” www.nationalww2museum. org/learn/education.

Wustenbecker, Katja. “German-Americans during World War I.” In

Immigrants Entrepreneurship:German-American Business

Biographies, 1720 to the Present, vol. 3, edited by Giles

R. Hoyt.

21

The Unity of Competing Protagonists in Manley’s Almyna Tiffanie Colvin

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Anne Greenfield, Department of English This paper analyzes Delarivier Manley’s she-tragedy Almyna in light of the genre conventions of Restoration tragedies and classical Aristotelian tragedies. Restoration tragedy is an unusual literary genre because the heroes and heroines in these plays are neither perfectly innocent nor tragically flawed. Instead, character types vary. In analyzing Almyna, there are two (seemingly) opposing characters: the title character who is innocent of any crime or flaw, and the sultan of Arabia who is tragically flawed. Rather than looking at these characters as protagonist and antagonist, it is better to consider them both as protagonists, because the resolution in the play cannot come unless Almyna succeeds in changing the sultan’s ideology; and adversely, the sultan cannot be an upright ruler if his hateful ideology is not corrected. If Almyna and the sultan of Arabia are both protagonists, then what do they each symbolize, and how do their purposes relate to one another? This paper analyzes the socio-historical context of Almyna in order to determine the significance of these two protagonists. These characters reveal a conflict between fate and sovereignty, and ultimately, the play becomes a dialogue on female influence in Restoration England. The union of Almyna’s intelligence with the sultan’s (eventual) uprightness represents a rare power-structure in which the woman is powerful and accepted in the political realm of society.

22

D

ELARIVIER MANLEY’S SHE-TRAGEDY ALMYNA chronicles the efforts of a young woman, the title character, to save other women from the wrath of a tyrant, the sultan of Arabia. Embittered by his late wife who committed adultery with a slave, he marries a new woman each night and executes her the following day. Almyna decides to marry the sultan as a kind of atonement for the women who have suffered from the sultan’s bitter actions. She eventually manages to change the sultan’s ideology, evinced by the sultan proclaiming that she will live as his empress at the end of the play. Initially, the sultan appears to be Almyna’s antagonist: his belief that all women are adulterous and soulless directly opposes her as the heroine of the play. However, a close reading of the play reveals that the sultan’s logic, while it is flawed, is also temporary. In fact, the sultan adheres quite strongly to the classical Aristotelian model of a tragic hero, and yet, classical tragic elements of the play are, in some ways, thwarted by Almyna, who is completely innocent of any crimes. Almyna’s arguments change the sultan’s mind, and these characters come to represent the dichotomy of fate and sovereignty; yet, even in this dichotomy, their marriage represents a unification, or resolution, of female intelligence and upright authority. Ultimately, the play stands as a discussion of the necessity of female influence in English society.

Almyna was published in 1707, and the play is very loosely based off of the real sultan Caliph Valid Almanzor, and it is adapted from the Antoine Galland’s The Arabian Nights’ Entertainments. The play was one of many she-tragedies, or pathetic plays, that dominated English theaters after the 1680s. The she-tragedy genre is characterized as “deriving its power . . . from its ability to titillate with scenes of suffering innocence,” specifically female innocence (Marsden 181).

She-tragedies commonly involve the rape of the heroine; however, in Almyna, Manley creates a different kind of heroine whose intelligence is emphasized rather than her innocence. Manley was actually one of the few female playwrights who “eschewed female pathos in favor of more heroic or stoic drama . . .” (Marsden 186). Initially, Almyna is not even at risk of suffering from the sultan’s hateful ideology.

The sultan’s brother, Abdalla, was engaged to Almyna, but Almyna ends the engagement after her sister, Zoradia, reveals that she and Abdalla were in a secret relationship before he met Almyna. After she ends her engagement with Abdalla, Almyna introduces to her father, the Grand Vizier, the idea of marrying the sultan; she knowingly puts herself at risk because she is determined “To stop the course of the Sultan’s Barbarity,” and she wants to “Dispel the fears of” the “trembling Mothers, who” have had their daughters unfairly taken from them (3.1.97-98). By ending her engagement with Abdalla and 23

Tiffanie Colvin announcing her intention to marry the sultan, Almyna proves that she is brave and in control of her situation. Almyna’s independence is a rejection of the “suffering female innocence” that is typical for shetragedies (Marsden 181). In a sense, the virgin daughters who suffer from the sultan’s actions mirror the heroines in other she-tragedies of this period who were raped and objectified.

In Manley’s play, the female heroine is a kind of savior, rather than a sufferer. Karen O’Brien writes that between 1690 and 1750, the notion of female identity in England expanded beyond the domestic sphere due to the rises of Queen Mary II and Queen Anne. Women were becoming “legitimate contributors to the economic, political, and historical realms of society, and female writers like Mary Lady Chudleigh, Aphra Behn, Eliza Haywood, and Delariver Manley sparked debate on the woman’s influence in English society through their works” (O’Brien 20). Almyna serves as an early portrayal of women as active, empowered heroines, rather than delicate, objectified ones.

Almyna is assertive, intelligent, and effective in her rhetoric.

Despite Almyna’s autonomy and intelligence, as well as the play’s adherence to the she-tragedy mode, the play also contains elements of heroic tragedy. Almyna, along with other she-tragedies, was not the only Restoration tragedy with such generic peculiarities. In fact, Restoration tragedies are characterized by their diversity. Christopher J. Wheatley writes that even though Restoration dramatists often self-labeled their works “tragedies” on their title pages, these plays could be enormously variable. For instance, “happy endings” were a normality, tragic heroes could even be “entirely innocent of any moral offense,” and “the motivations of characters [could] appear simplistic or profoundly psychotic” (71). Additionally, “the range of characters for possible protagonists include the perfectly virtuous, completely criminal, and classically flawed” (Wheatley 73). Considering the historical and literary context of the play, the unusual generic elements in Almyna may not be so unusual after all.

The question still remains, however, of what the dominant characters, Almyna and the sultan, represent. Almyna certainly embodies a different type of female heroine (she is empowered and intelligent), and her character may suggest that she is an early portrayal of effective female influence in society. However, it remains unclear as to how the sultan complements Almyna’s character. These characters are opposites: Almyna embodies the “perfectly virtuous” protagonist to whom Wheatley refers, while the sultan embodies the “criminally, and classically flawed” protagonist (71). In order to understand fully the function of these characters in relation to each other, they should be analyzed separately. The sultan can be viewed as an almost sympathetic character, as he is not portrayed as an 24

The Unity of Competing Protagonists inherently evil tyrant, but rather a bitter ruler whose ethics were altered after the sultaness committed adultery—one might consider his changing ethics a tragic flaw. By examining the play according to Aristotle’s standards for a classical tragedy, the sultan’s resemblance to the tragic hero makes more sense.

Aristotle judges the quality of a tragedy through six elements: plot, character, thought, diction, melody, and spectacle. The “soul of a tragedy” is the plot itself; tragedy is “an imitation of an action, and of the agents,” or characters, who have “a view to the action” (Aristotle). Tragedy often achieves a level of verisimilitude within the plot and the characters. The tragic plot contains a “unity of action” constituted by an incentive moment, a climax, and a resolution (McManus). The “incentive moment” happens at the beginning of the play when the characters react to the consequences of a specific action (McManus). Almyna certainly begins with an ideal incentive moment. In the first moment of the play, the Grand Vizier has just executed another “helpless” woman by the orders of the sultan (1.1.7). After this execution, the Grand Vizier and Alhador, the Chief of the Dervis, discuss the state of affairs in the palace: the sultan has adopted an ideology that “Womankind / have” no “mortal souls” because the sultaness committed adultery with a slave in the palace (1.1.21). The sultan executed the sultaness after he realized her infidelity, but he then extended his anger to all women by adopting a custom of marrying a virgin and then executing her the day after the wedding. This ideology becomes a focal point of the plot. As well as an incentive moment, a “climax” contributes to the unity of action. This climax is “caused by earlier incidents and itself” causes “the incidents that follow it” (McManus). The climax of Almyna starts in act 3, when the title character offers herself as the sultan’s next wife (and subsequently, the next victim of his anger). Almyna’s selfsacrifice is inspired after she ends her engagement with the sultan’s brother, Abdalla. Approximately seventy lines after Almyna ends her engagement, she asks her father, the Grand Vizier, “to procure . . . / The Honour of [the] mighty Sultan’s Bed” so that she can bring an end to “the Course of such Barbarity” (3.1.92-93, 97). The Grand Vizier is adamant that Almyna’s proposal is a death wish, and that Almyna will not accomplish her goal to change the sultan’s ideology of hate.

Yet, even with her father’s reservations, Almyna is not focused on the possibility of becoming another victim to the sultan, instead she is resolute that she must marry the sultan. Almyna’s seemingly lofty goal causes conflict in the remainder of the play: Abdalla and the sultan are at odds (which culminates in a siege upon the palace at the end of the play), and the Grand Vizier questions his loyalty to the sultan. Initially, Almyna’s marriage to the sultan creates 25

Tiffanie Colvin conflict because it seems imminent that Almyna will be executed, but by the end of the play, the marriage becomes the resolution. For Aristotle, the resolution, or “the end” of a tragedy “should therefore solve or resolve the problem created during the incentive moment” (McManus). In Almyna, the problem is the hateful ideology that the sultan imposes on his female subjects. The solution to the problem of the sultan’s ideology, then, is to combat it with Almyna’s ideology; it is Almyna’s “bravery of Soul,” her strength of character, that moves the sultan to repent his murderous ways (5.2.178). Almyna represents a driven, empowered heroine, and the sultan, whose bitterness led him to victimize and generalize women, is changed because of Almyna’s bravery and intelligence.

Almyna’s plot matches Aristotle’s elements of the tragic plot rather effortlessly, especially if one considers the sultan as a second protagonist alongside Almyna, or even more so as a tragic hero. For Aristotle, the tragic hero “will support” the “plot,” in other words, “personal motivations will be intricately connected parts of the cause-and-effect chain of actions” in the unity of the play (McManus).

Both the sultan and Almyna fit this characterization: the sultan’s personal motivation is his hateful ideology and Almyna’s personal motivation is (what she views as) her calling to marry the sultan, and then subsequently change his ideology. The personal motivations of both characters reveal a significant contrast between the sultan and Almyna as dual protagonists. What truly sets apart a tragic hero from any other hero is the tragic flaw, which is a “‘frailty’” of “‘character’” evoking “pity and fear in the audience”; the tragic flaw also reveals “the inevitability of its consequences” (McManus). The sultan displays a blatant frailty of character when he adopts his misogynistic ideology, which drives him to make irrational decisions in the play (namely, his practice of marrying and murdering innocent, virgin women).

Interestingly, the sultan’s frailty of character is changed by Almyna’s strength of character (5.2.178). The union of the sultan and Almyna represents a union (and strengthening) of character.

The sultan is motivated by a vengeful passion, an ideology which must be corrected with a more reasonable ideology, such as that of Almyna, whose ideology has kept her completely innocent of any crime or tragic flaw. Her virtue and intelligence are consistently exalted throughout the play. For example, when Abdalla asks for the sultan’s permission to marry Almyna, he vouches for the goodness of Almyna’s character, saying that she has a “noble soul” and an “ethereal fire, that sparkles from her breast,” unlike the sultaness whose actions embittered the sultan (1.1.66-67). Almyna’s strength of character is further evidenced in act 3, when Almyna decides that she will marry the sultan so as to change his attitude towards women. Almyna has 26

The Unity of Competing Protagonists risen in the ranks by the end of the play: she goes from the potential princess of Arabia to the “fair Sultana” of Arabia (5.2.185).

Characterizing the sultan as both a second protagonist and as a tragic hero as opposed to an antagonist is important because the function of the sultan’s character affects the overall interpretation of the play. In other words, characterizing the sultan as a tragic hero means that the sultan is essentially a competent ruler with a character flaw that needs to be corrected; but characterizing the sultan as a pure antagonist, or a villain, means that he is innately evil, which would then make him a tyrant. Peace can only be restored if a tyrant is removed from power, because no single flaw or ideology can be addressed; it is the whole person, or the tyrant himself, that is innately evil. The solution in the play is not to remove the sultan from power; the solution is to correct his ideology. Therefore, the sultan is more appropriately classified as a tragic hero (or, a second protagonist) than a villain; and Almyna (female intelligence) is the solution to the sultan’s flawed ideology.

As a tragic hero, the sultan’s tragic flaw must be corrected, and the sultan’s change of heart is foreshadowed multiple times: once, in the very beginning of the play by the chief of the Dervis, Alhador: (If there be truth in Dreams, or rather Visions) This Cruelty, of our great Sultan’s, shall have end.

This means not yet revealed, wait we till time Calls forth the great Occasion to us. (1.1.82-85) In this scene, the Grand Vizier discusses with Abdalla and Alhador his concerns for Almyna’s engagement to Abdalla, saying that he fears the sultan will force Abdalla into following the same disturbing ritual of marrying and executing a new spouse each night. The “means” that will end the sultan’s wrongdoing is embodied in Almyna who, when she discloses her plan to marry the sultan, says to Alhador and her father that the “great Prophet,” Muhammad, “has enlarg’d” her “Soul” for this task, and that she speaks “from him inspir’d” (3.1.7172). Despite the Grand Vizier’s objection to the plan, Alhador fully supports Almyna, believing that her virtue will aid her because of her “Fate” to make a Convert, of” the “mightly Sultan (3.1.123-24). Alhador continually invokes the notion of fate in the play: he consistently reminds the characters, namely the Grand Vizier, that they need to focus on the “fairer Land in View,” that is, there will come a time when the sultan will no longer practice rituals of violence (4.1.10). An element of the supernatural underscores the entirety of the play, often working to foreshadow the fact that the sultan’s vengeful state of mind is short-term.

27

Tiffanie Colvin The role of fate in the play underscores the idea that the sultan is a tragic hero, because Alhador’s speech (or prophecy) to the Grand Vizier in act 1 suggests that the sultan’s ideology is temporary. It is the sultan’s actions that are offensive—and the solution to the sultan’s actions is not to execute him and to replace him with a new ruler, but to correct his error. The change in the sultan’s behavior begins in act 4, where he first experiences guilt for his actions, because of a dream where he is confronted by “the Ghost of those fair Queens, / Whom in the fear of jealousy” he murdered (4.1.34-35). The “dream” or “vision” that Alhador alludes to in act 1 is fulfilled in this passage. Furthermore, the sultan’s dream is inspired by “Almyna’s strange Request” to marry him, which summoned “uncommon thoughts, and wonder” in the sultan (4.1.5-6). Neither the element of the supernatural nor the notion of fate can be ignored in this play, because the notion of fate is directly connected to Almyna, who is the means by which the sultan’s correctness will be restored. When the sultan first meets Almyna, he is enraptured by her beauty, and he is so enchanted by her that he does not want to marry her, knowing that his vow will separate him from her: “thou must ne’er be mine,” for “is there not a Vow between us?”

(4.1.143, 156). Despite his hesitation, Almyna convinces him to marry her through her argumentative skills. When Almyna argues her point with the sultan, he subsequently accepts her marriage proposal, and in a sense, the sultan’s acceptance of Almyna’s proposal symbolizes the (eventual) end of the sultan’s untamed passion, because Almyna’s logic and rhetoric defeated the sultan’s logic and rhetoric. The next day, Almyna is saved just before she is beheaded, and the sultan praises her for her “Merit” and “bravery” (5.2.174, 178).

Almyna and the sultan are complementary symbols to each other.

They represent fate and sovereignty; Almyna represents the notion of fate, while the sultan represents the notion of sovereignty. When they are paired together, these characters create a unified representation of female influence (and intelligence) in society and in politics. Ros Ballaster argues that Manley “used the staged conflict between” the sultan and Almyna in order to discuss “the position of women in occidental and oriental cultures, as well as in order to pursue party ideology” (83). With Ballaster’s argument in mind, Almyna’s function in the play becomes more apparent: the conflict of ideologies between Almyna and the sultan is a conflict of reason and passion. The sultan is ruled by a hateful passion towards women for a majority of the play, and it is only when Almyna reasons with the sultan that he begins to change. In act 4, “Almyna . . . uses philosophy and history” in order to “charm” the sultan (Ballaster 87), saying:

28

The Unity of Competing Protagonists Revenge, and Jealousy, arrests the [Alcoran]: This taught to speak, to put a gloss on Murder.

Oh, horrid Crime! Murder of Innocents.

Cast but thy Eyes around the fair Creation, And say what Beings challenge such perfection. (4.1.194-98) Remembering that Manley “eschewed” the “female pathos” that was typically found in she-tragedies, it is possible that Almyna’s character asserts an ideology of female intelligence (Marsden 186). Almyna offers herself to the sultan as a kind of sacrifice for the women who have suffered from the sultan’s passions. Historically, since most pathetic plays (she-tragedies) were characterized by involuntary female suffering, the unique intelligence and voluntary sacrifice of Manley’s heroine suggests that the play supports a proto-feminist agenda. Almyna does not die at the end of the play, despite the expectation that she would eventually fail in her attempt to change the sultan. Instead, her arguments resound with the sultan, along with her bravery, and the sultan cancels her execution just before she is beheaded. Using her intelligence and argumentative skills, Almyna saves herself and the women in Arabia, and she corrects the sultan’s misguided power. In a sense, the play suggests that female intelligence is both self-preserving for women and it is integral to successful leadership.

Considering the socio-historical context of Almyna, some of the play’s peculiarities (such as its two contrasting protagonists) are actually not so unusual. In fact, the play almost perfectly reflects Aristotle’s principles for a tragic plot. The question that the play poses is what the two protagonists, Almyna and the sultan, represent for society in early eighteenth-century England. The characters represent the conflict of reason and passion, and the solution of fate and sovereignty—therefore, the two characters unify into an overarching theme of divine order. The sultan represents the flawed ideology that women are soulless, and essentially the plot of the play tackles the question of how to change the sultan’s ideology. Almyna is the means for this change. Almyna is unique compared to the usual protagonists in pathetic plays because she is not helpless and voiceless, but empowering and argumentative. Overall, Delarivier Manley’s she-tragedy Almyna represents the validity and necessity of female intelligence in politics.

29

Tiffanie Colvin WORKS CITED Aristotle. Poetics. Eric Eldred and David Widger, 2 May 2009. Project

Gutenberg. N.p. Web. 3 Dec. 2015.

Ballaster, Ros. Fabulous Orients: Fictions of the East in England 1662 1785. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Print.

Manley, Delarivier. Almyna: or, The Arabian Vow. A Tragedy. Ed. Anne

Greenfield. ENGL 4130 & ENGL 6000. Valdosta State

University: LAD Custom Publishing, Inc., 2015. 268-327. Print.

Marsden, Jean I. “Spectacle, Horror, and Pathos.” The Cambridge

Companion to English Restoration Theatre. Ed. Deborah

Payne Fisk. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.

174-90. Print.

McManus, Barbara F. “Outline of Aristotle’s Theory of Tragedy in the Poetics.” CLS 267: Greek Tragedy. New York: The College

of New Rochelle, 1999. N.p. Web. 30 Nov. 2015.

O’Brien, Karen. “Woman’s Place.” The History of British Women’s

Writing 1690-1750. Vol 4. Ed. Ros Ballaster. New York: Palgrave

MacMillan, 2010. 19-39. Print.

Orr, Bridget. Empire on the English Stage 1660-1714. New York:

Cambridge University Press, 2007. Print.

Owen, Susan J. “Drama and Political Crisis.” The Cambridge Companion

to English Restoration Theatre. Ed. Deborah Payne Fisk.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 158-73. Print.

Wheatley, Christopher J. “Tragedy.” The Cambridge Companion to

English Restoration Theatre. Ed. Deborah Payne Fisk.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. 70-85. Print.

30

31

Flannery O’Connor: A Deconstruction of Good and Evil through Grace Noel Carter

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Byron Brown, Department of English In this paper I examine two of Flannery O’Connor’s short stories: “A Good Man is Hard to Find” and “The Lame Shall Enter First.” Using a liberal humanist approach, I analyze how O’Connor deconstructs—in correlation with Jacque Derrida’s theory on deconstruction—the idea of good and evil through the concept of grace/redemption. This paper incorporates primary sources (her letters and speeches), secondary scholarship, reference materials, and theory.

Ultimately, this paper communicates the importance of the rhetorical effect that O’Connor’s works have on a traditional Southern audience.

A

CCORDING TO A LIBERAL HUMANIST PERSPECTIVE, “The purpose of literature is essentially the enhancement of life and the propagation of humane values” (Barry 18). This “enhancement of life” and propagation of humane values” can find no greater source than an author’s own individual reality. Author Flannery O’Conner’s reality has been shaped by her devotion to the Catholic faith. She even agrees with this idea in her essay “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction,” in which she writes “the realism of each novelist will depend on his view of the ultimate reaches of reality” (O’Connor 815). Many of her essays and speeches address Catholic ideas. One such theme is the idea of grace as redemption.

In Catholicism, grace is considered a supernatural gift of God for human redemption. In the same essay, O’Conner writes, “if the writer believes that our life is and will remain essentially mysterious…. He will be interested in characters who are forced out to meet evil and grace” (816). O’Connor says that if writers, like herself, believe in the mysticism of life and the world that Christianity presents, then these themes (grace and redemption) will naturally become evident in their 32

writing. These ideas are exemplified in many of O’Connor’s own short stories. In a letter to John Hawkes in December of 1959, O’Connor writes, “I am interested in the indication of Grace, the moment when you know grace has been offered and accepted” (1119). This interest is made apparent in many of her stories when characters undergo a moment in which they experience grace and are either redeemed or damned. But, while her reality as a Catholic novelist enables her to express her preoccupation with grace and redemption, this same reality reveals another common theme of deconstruction between her stories.

According to Peter Barry, an important aspect of liberal humanism is that “It doesn’t require any elaborate process of placing it within a context” (17). He excludes the examination of any socio-political influences from this critical approach—for instance, the context of a particular social background or political situation that may have influenced a writer’s work (17). Nevertheless, in order to understand the deconstructive theme that runs throughout O’Connor’s work, it is important to understand the type of audience that would have read her short stories and the impact it would have had on them.

O’Connor belongs to a long history of Southern Gothic literature.

Most Gothic literature is preoccupied with the concept of good versus evil, and as a Catholic novelist, O’Connor’s work primarily focuses on the forces of good and evil, as experienced through her preoccupation with grace. Being a Southern writer, the majority of her original audience consisted of Protestant Christians who held traditional Protestant values. These values include a separation between all that is good and all that is evil, making them binaries to each other. According to Ross C. Murfin, “Derrida … argues that we tend to think and express our thoughts in terms of opposites….

In other words, they contain one term that our culture views as being superior and one term viewed as negative or inferior” (539). In O’Connor’s Protestant South, good is privileged over evil, and there is a denial that good exists within evil. Therefore, O’Connor, in her short stories, succeeds in deconstructing the hierarchy between good and evil and exposes evil as intertwined with good through the depiction of her characters and the reception of grace. This deconstruction forces O’Connor’s audience to reflect on their own perceptions of what is good and evil.

In the Protestant South, the idea of good is tied to the concept of normality. Many of the main characters within O’Connor’s short stories appear to be normal. For example, the grandmother from “A Good Man is Hard to Find” has the appearance of a traditional middle-class Christian woman; at least, she appears to be a good Christian woman. This facade of normality is maintained throughout 33

Noel Carter the narrative. After the crash of her family’s car, she is even described as having “her hat still pinned to her head” (O’Connor 145). Similarly, Shepard from “The Lame Shall Enter First” represents a normal middle-class working father who wants what is best for his son. While Shepard is openly atheistic, he represents someone who is secularly good: he is a city council member, lives in a suburban neighborhood, and even coaches a little league team. Most importantly to Shepard, he works at a reformatory as a counselor, “receiving nothing for it but the satisfaction of knowing he was helping boys no one else cared about” (O’Connor 596-97).

However, while these characters’ appearances suggest normality, their actions contradict the idea of goodness. The grandmother throughout “A Good Man is Hard to Find” leads a bourgeois lifestyle.

O’ Connor writes in one scene, “‘Oh look at the cute little pickaninny!’ she said and pointed to a Negro child standing in the door of a shack.

‘Wouldn’t that make a picture now’” (O’Connor 139). This leads to the assumption that the grandmother is actually racist. In a later scene, the grandmother has a conversation with a man named Red Sammy Butts about how people were better in her time, revealing a sense of superiority and validating her bourgeoisie standing (O’Connor 139). These exchanges depict the grandmother as condescending and as someone who lives under a false sense of respectability and superiority. Similarly, Shepard is a doppelganger to the grandmother in that he also leads a false lifestyle. He is obsessed with redeeming/ helping the adolescent Rufus Johnson. But this preoccupation is revealed to not be an act of goodness but an act of selfishness in that Shepard really only cares about how these acts will positively reflect on him. Rufus even calls Shepard out on this when he yells, “He thinks he’s God” (O’Connor 630). O’Connor even wrote in a letter to Cecil Dawkins in September of 1962, “The story is about a man who thought he was good and thought he was doing good when he wasn’t” (O’Connor 1174). While neither the grandmother’s nor Shepard’s actions can be considered pure evil, they do reveal that these characters are far from good. Both of these characters need redemption, and this need destabilizes the boundary between good and evil.

In opposition to this, the Protestant Southern idea of evil is associated with abnormality or the grotesque. O’Connor is famous for incorporating grotesque characters into her writing. She writes in “The Fiction Writer and His Country” that “writers who see by the light of their Christian faith will have … the sharpest eyes for the grotesque, for the perverse, and for the unacceptable” (805). As a Catholic, O’Connor believes everyone guilty of sin, and this perception allows her to depict and include grotesque characters in her stories.

34

Good and Evil through Grace The Misfit from “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is no exception. When he first enters the story, before the Grandmother realizes he is the Misfit, he is described as “an older man than the other two. His hair was just beginning to gray and he wore silver rimmed spectacles that gave him a scholarly look. He had a long creased face and didn’t have on any shirt or undershirt. He had on blue jeans that were too tight for him and was holding a black hat and a gun” (O’ Connor 146).

While this description of his physical appearance does not make the Misfit look grotesque, there is something very off-putting about it that lets the reader know this man is not here to help the family.

In the ensuing exchange between the grandmother and the Misfit, he discusses the many things he has done in his life. From being “a gospel singer for a while” to being “in the armed service” the list starts out normal but degenerates into the grotesque (O’Connor 149). He reveals that he had “‘been an undertaker…. been in a tornado, seen a man burnt alive once…. I even seen a woman flogged’” (O’Connor 149).

These grotesque events reveal the Misfit’s psyche, and his grotesque actions in the climax of the story parallel this: He kills everyone in the family, including two children and an infant. O’Connor even describes how the Misfit wears the father’s, Bailey’s, shirt after he has just been murdered by the Misfit’s companions.

Like the Misfit, Rufus from “The Lame Shall Enter First” is perceived as being grotesque in both appearance and action. Rufus is described as having “a monstrous club foot to his knee” (O’Connor 599). Being from a poor family, Rufus leads an abnormal life that includes eating out of trash cans and wearing clothes that are either falling apart or do not fit, which gives him an uncanny appearance.

For example, O’Connor writes in regards to his shoe: The foot was in a heavy black battered shoe with a sole four or five inches thick. The leather parted from it in one place and the end of an empty sock protruded like a grey tongue from a severed head….His mischief was compensation for his foot…. The black deformed mass swelled before his eyes. (O’Connor 600) In the beginning of the short story, Shepard reveals “he had been reading over the boy’s record—senseless destruction, windows smashed, city trash boxes set afire, tires slashed” (O’Connor 599).

This destruction of property is carried out by Rufus throughout the narrative, and reveals a grotesquery in action as well as appearance.

Also certain exchanges between Rufus and other characters on his preoccupation with religion provide an unsettling rhetorical effect.

For example, in his first meeting with Sheppard, Rufus states, “Satan, He has me in his power” (O’Connor 600). And in a later scene O’Connor 35

Noel Carter writes, “The boy raised the Bible and tore out a page with his teeth and began grinding it in his mouth, his eyes burning” (628). To a Southern Protestant reader, this scene would seem especially grotesque if not sacrilegious. The assumption of O’Connor’s original, typical Southern reader is that these characters’ grotesque appearances and actions represent them as being evil rather than simply depicting the grotesquery that is common to Southern Gothic fiction.

The presentation of these characters is written as what O’Connor calls “grotesque heroes,” and she describes them as seeming “to carry an invisible burden and to fix us with eyes that remind us that we all bear some heavy responsibility whose nature we have forgotten” (860).

For the main characters, the grandmother and Shepard, acceptance or rejection of grace is the burden that O’Connor references. In her essay “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South,” O’Conner states, “I think it is safe to say that while the South is hardly ChristCentered, it is most certainly Christ-haunted,” and admits “there seems to be a preoccupation with Christ-figures in our fiction” (861).

It is imperative to understand that these “grotesque heroes” are not representatives of Christ. Many have argued that characters—such as the Misfit—are indeed prophets of God. For example, Arthur Bethea argues, “The Misfit can be touched by the divine as well as by evil and thus could serve as God’s prophet” (147). In a letter written to a Dr. T.R. Spivey, O’Connor recounts how she was once asked at a reading whether or not “the Misfit represents Christ” (1098). However, according to most Catholic traditions, Jesus is the incarnate son of God and the redeemer of mankind. God is also considered to be the Supreme Good in Catholicism, so Jesus being God incarnate would also be considered the Supreme Good. As was evidenced, these characters are not purely good, so they cannot be representatives of Christ. O’Connor even states in the same letter to Dr. T.R. Spivey, in regards to the Misfit, “‘He does not’” (1098). These “grotesque heroes” merely carry out Christ-like functions in that they are agents of grace.

This ability of characters who are normally perceived as evil to serve as beacons of grace (through their redemptions) further destabilizes the binary between good and evil.

In “A Good Man is Hard to Find” the dissolution of this binary is the story’s main conflict in that the grandmother must either accept or deny the grace that the Misfit provides. In a letter written to Andrew Lytle in February of 1960, O’Connor writes, “There is a moment of grace in most of the stories, or a moment where it is offered, and is usually rejected. Like when the Grandmother recognizes the Misfit as one of her own children and reaches out to touch him. It’s the moment of grace for her anyway” (1121). Also, O’ Connor writes in “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South” that “grace cuts with 36

Good and Evil through Grace the sword Christ said he came to bring” (O’Connor 864). The Misfit is this sword, and he enters the story at a point when the Grandmother has been stripped of her sense of superiority; at this point she can be redeemed. She finally attains this redemption when she looks at the Misfit and exclaims, “Why you’re one of my babies! You’re one of my own children” (O’Connor 152). In this final exchange the Misfit carries out his Christ-like function and becomes a “grotesque hero” because he has elicited the grandmother’s redemption. Rhetorically, this transition from a grotesque character to a “grotesque hero” conflicts with a Southern audience’s perception on abnormality equating to evil. His disheveling appearance and the way he talks lends itself to the grotesque, leading to the assumption that the Misfit is bad or evil.

However, because he serves as the grandmother’s agent of grace, the audience has to reevaluate their preconceived assumptions that the grotesque equates to evil.

Similarly, Laura L. Behling argues, in regards to Rufus, “The disabled are, in fact, necessary in order to expose imperfection and inhumanity” (88). This analysis is true in regards to the need for Shepard’s redemption. Like in “A Good Man is Hard to Find,” the acceptance of grace is the main conflict of “The Lame Shall Enter First,” and this moment of grace is made possible by the story’s grotesque character, Rufus, who sets in motion the events leading to Shepard’s redemption, thus subverting the hierarchy between good and evil. Behling also writes, in regards to O’Connor’s grotesque characters, that “The characters who are not physically whole are, in fact, not the ugliest characters in these texts. They are, rather, necessary for the reader to see the plight of modern humanity … and in Sheppard’s case [inability] to love his own son” (94). This necessity is made apparent at the end of O’Connor’s short story when Shepard finally has his moment of grace in which he realizes “He had ignored his own child to feed his vision of himself” (O’Connor 632). Without Rufus, Shepard would have never ignored his own child, Norton, in favor of trying to save Rufus in order to feed his own ego. Through this realization, like the Misfit, Rufus becomes a “grotesque hero” and reveals to the audience that good exists within evil.

O’Connor was a Catholic novelist whose religious influences can be evidenced in her writing. Her stories, under the guise of grotesquery, contain various religious themes such as grace and redemption and good versus evil. Traditionally, good and evil are binaries to one another where all that is good is distinct from all that is evil; especially to a Southern audience whose culture ties heavily with Christianity. To O’Connor’s original Southern audience, good is associated with being normal whereas evil is viewed as abnormal, and everything normal is privileged over everything abnormal. However, 37

Noel Carter O’Connor’s short stories defy the tradition that depicts good as being superior to evil and distinct from evil. Instead, O’Connor challenges these conventions by including characters who carry out Christlike functions and who are what she calls “grotesque heroes.” These characters, including the Misfit and Rufus Johnson, are agents of grace whose Christ-like functions force the audience to reflect on their own perceptions of what is good and what is evil only to realize that there is no simple boundary between the two.

38

Good and Evil through Grace WORKS CITED Barry, Peter. Beginning Theory. Manchester: Manchester UP,

2009. Print.

Behling, Laura. “The Necessity of Disability in ‘Good Country People’

and ‘The Lame Shall Enter First.’” Flannery O’Connor

Review 4 (2006): 88-98. MLA International Bibliography.

Web. 3 Dec. 2015.

Bethea, Arthur. “O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find.” Explicator

64.4 (2006): 239-42. MLA International Bibliography. Web.

3 Dec. 2015.

Murifn, Ross. “Deconstruction and Dracula.” Case Studies in

Contemporary Criticism (2002): (538-59). Print.

O’ Flannery O’Connor: Collected Works. Ed. Sally Fitzgerald. New

York: Library of America, 1988. Print.

---. “To Andrew Lythe.” 4 February 1960. O’Connor. 1121.

---. “The Catholic Novelist in the Protestant South.” O’Connor.

853-64.

---. “The Fiction Writer and his Country.” O’Connor. 801-06.

---. “A Good Man is Hard to Find.” O’Connor. 137-53.

---. “To John Hawkes.” 26 December 1959. 1118-19.

---. “To Andrew Lythe.” 4 February 1960. 1121.

---. “The Lame Shall Enter First.” O’Connor. 595-632.

---. “Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction.” O’Connor.

813-21 ---. “Dr. T.R. Spivey.” 25 May 1959. O’Connor. 1097-98.

Pohle, Joseph. “Actual Grace.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 6. New

York: Robert Appleton Company. Web. 3 Dec. 2015 Toner, Patrick. “Relation of God to the Universe.” The Catholic Encyclopedia. Vol. 6. New York: Robert Appleton Company.

Web. 3 Dec. 2015.

39

The Way You See Things: The Evolution of Feminism in Zora Neale Hurston’s “Sweat” and Their Eyes Were Watching God Reagan Bennett

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Kendric Coleman, Department of English As a leading proto-feminist author of the Harlem Renaissance, Zora Neale Hurston drew off of her unique upbringing and unmatched appreciation for the African-American woman to create female characters who redefine gender roles and who are rewarded for female autonomy. This article identifies and discusses the feminist aspects of Hurston’s works in order to draw attention to the way feminist pursuits and ideologies contribute to Huston’s plot and character development. By analyzing purely feminist aspects of her works, like oppression over identity and regaining power through freedom of will, Huston’s works can be acknowledged as monumental illustrations of the power of African-American women that still resonates with modern audiences.

D

RAWING INSPIRATION FROM SOUTHERN FOLK TALES as well as small-town “Negro” life, Zora Neale Hurston skyrocketed to fame during the Harlem Renaissance. Yet, the most notable feature of Huston’s works is her use of protofeminism to create in-depth female characters while also exploring the conditions of women who were oppressed by patriarchy. The essence of a feminist novel is described by Roxane Gay as one “where the concerns of women and womanhood are the alpha and the omega of the narrative but it also deals explicitly with stories, with the lives of women” (45). And as Neal A. Lester points out, Hurston’s critique of the struggles of African-American women in particular are intended to “challenge the illusions of patriarchal order” (80).

40

With her works published during the age of First Wave Feminism, the concept of feminism, in Hurston’s time, was in its early stages of development, yet her works clearly define thematic elements that would eventually mold the genre. As reflected in Hurston’s work, she views African-American women as complex, soulful creatures constantly scrutinized by their loved ones, suffering under a barrage of criticism for their misconstrued actions, and underrepresented in literature.

Delia Jones of the short story “Sweat,” published in 1926, and Janie Crawford of Their Eyes Were Watching God, published in 1937, are two examples of prominent Hurston characters who exude the characteristics of modern feminism, including self-reliance and an awareness of gender roles, but they also reflect the evolution of Hurston’s developing feminist ideas. Written several years apart, these characters not only provide insight about the struggles African-American women experienced but they also set up a timeline of Hurston’s own ideology with respect to African-American women.

Opposition to the systematic oppression of women is the foundation of what is now recognized as feminism, and this is strongly highlighted in Hurston’s earlier work “Sweat.” Hurston’s depiction of the oppression of Delia and Janie by their husbands and other family members demonstrates an unjust and unequal distribution of power, where men, in all social and domestic circumstances, are the most powerful. In “Sweat,” Delia Jones, a hardworking housewife, is victimized by her obnoxious and overbearing husband, Sykes, who has beaten her for the entirety of their marriage. As Peter Kerry Powers notes, in his discussion of the influence of masculinity in Hurston’s works, “Men, and the way men behave, tend to be seen as the oppressive forces that women must resist and refuse” (231), an idea reinforced by Delia’s and Sykes’ interactions. Hurston writes: “Delia’s habitual meekness seemed to slip from her shoulders like a blown scarf. She was on her feet; her poor little body, her bare knuckly hands bravely defying the strapping hulk before her” (103). “Habitual meekness,” referring to the feminine role Delia usually assumes, is momentarily forgotten for the sake of self-preservation, an important theme that would be reiterated in Their Eyes Were Watching God. After scaring Delia with a whip resembling a snake, Sykes expresses hatred for the fact that Delia washes clothes for white people, and he exerts brute force against the piles of clothing. Delia can only watch as he steps “roughly upon the whitest pile of things, kicking them helter skelter as he crossed the room” (Hurston 1033).

This physical action, intended to derail Delia from continuing her work, only empowers the woman to continue to defend her livelihood.

Then, in retaliation and self-defense, Delia “seized the iron skillet 41

Reagan Bennett from the stove and struck a defensive pose, which act surprised him greatly, coming from her. It cowed him and he did not strike her as he usually did” (1033). Rebuttal against this physically abusive form of oppression, for Sykes, is new, but Delia’s assurance in herself will ultimately be her key to freedom against him. On the other hand, this kind of brute force is not seen in Janie’s character in Their Eyes Were Watching God. Passive-aggressiveness and patience, traits associated with feminine roles, are Janie’s primary weapons against oppression.

Hurston utilizes a longer process of acceptance and tolerance with Janie instead of the immediate, definitive actions that Delia institutes against her husband. This tactical change demonstrates Hurston’s evolved understanding of the African-American female as a strategic and dynamic character.

In the later work, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie’s life is idyllic until she reaches puberty, when a single kiss sweeps her into a life of marriage and masculine oppression. After her grandmother discovers that Janie shared an innocent kiss with a local boy, the stark realization of womanhood undermines the dreams of happiness and mutual, marital affection Janie craves. Lester argues that at first “Janie … endeavors to appease her grandmother, whose ideas about black women leave Janie no room for independent thought or action” (4). Without her consent, Janie is forcefully thrust into an unequal marriage to aging farmer Logan Killicks, in order to avoid future scandal. Janie’s mother and grandmother before her—who are written about by Hurston with allusions to slavery—allegorize women as political slaves and slaves to patriarchy. Loren Lee attempts to explain this connection by stating: “the agent which controls Janie’s body transitions” (142) from one master to another, just as her mother and grandmother experienced. Whether the controller is the physical presence of male oppression or society’s predictable reinforcement of the patriarchal system, the cycle of female oppression rejuvenates with each female member of Janie’s lineage. Instead of the singular form of oppression experienced by Delia through her husband, Janie passes from one form of oppression to another. Hurston’s later work demonstrates the path that her writing has traveled since the publication of “Sweat” in terms of African-American women’s coping mechanisms to combat oppression.

Strength to overcome an obstacle or to reclaim a woman’s identity is another trademark of First-Wave Feminist literature and this is a powerful tool for Hurston’s female characters, who are at a disadvantage to their male or familial counterparts in the beginning of the works. In “Sweat,” after a potentially dangerous encounter with her abusive husband, Delia tells him, “Mah tub of suds is filled yo’ belly with vittles more times than yo’ hands is filled it. Mah sweat is 42

The Way You See Things done paid for this house and Ah reckon Ah kin keep on sweatin’ in it” (1033). Delia’s hard work reflects the swapped gender roles that allow the couple to maintain a livelihood. When Sykes is stripped of the masculine role of primary provider of the household, it triggers an aggressive response that is channeled into physical violence against Delia, who for so many years has shouldered the burden of her husband’s spending habits by single-handedly providing for them both. The reversal of gender roles embarrasses and emasculates Sykes, and the same turbulent emotions are seen in Janie’s significant others when their roles are threatened. The responses in both works prove to be violent, an event that remains constant for Hurston from 1926 to 1937.

Janie Crawford of Their Eyes Were Watching God faces several obstacles from unsuccessful marriages to the incessant, shadowy judgments of her neighbors. Janie is forced to abide by the demands of her second husband Jody, who believes “Janie’s role is to move according to his direction and to speak according to his script, one that centers him and seeks to publicly silence Janie” (Lester 5). At “the beginning of their marriage, Jody slowly takes Janie’s bodily power” (Lee 144) by keeping firm control of her physical and social interactions in the community, but Janie’s response to this ownership and oppression is distant and even-tempered. In fact, she makes no attempt to restore her sexual satisfaction throughout their marriage. At her second husband’s deathbed, she experiences a dulled revelation: “She was full of pity for the first time in years. Jody had been hard on her and others, but life had mishandled him too” (134). Janie harbors no bitterness from her long marriage with Jody, the mayor and business tycoon of Eatonville, and acknowledges that his bitterness toward her is more than pitiful discontentment. Her strength is shown perhaps too late when her “ultimate defiance” is “when she challenges and insults his manhood before an audience of his male peers” (Lester 5), an action from which he never fully recovers. By disrupting the connection between the influence of community and the power Jody Sparks wields over that community, Janie shows her true strength by continuing her life, for a short time, on her own. The importance of public opinion is unwavering in the two works, demonstrating Hurston’s insistence on the role that community plays in marriage, gender roles, and relationships.

The identity of female protagonists was crucial to the development of feminist literature, and Hurston reiterates the importance of this by highlighting the social environments that shape her characters.

Hurston was fascinated by the connection between her characters’ identities and their societal roles. In fact, as Barbara Christian points out, Hurston “was [so] clearly concerned with the peculiar 43

Reagan Bennett characteristics of the relationship between the black woman and her community that she rarely moved outside it” (60). There is a clear disconnect with society, as observed by Delia’s role in the small town found in “Sweat.” Delia is a subject of debate for her neighbors, who are aware of the domestic violence she endures from Sykes but they do not intervene, insinuating that Delia is outside of their conventional social circle. While watching the approach of Delia’s “rusty buckboard … heaped with baskets of crisp, clean laundry,” one man comments “‘Too much knockin’ will ruin any ‘oman. He done beat huh ‘nough tuh kill three women, let ‘lone change they looks’” (1034). Delia’s appearance has been ravaged by her fifteen years of marriage with Sykes and is a physical representation of the abuse endured. The absence of societal intervention is pivotal to Delia’s struggles but this absence also illustrates Hurston’s position on the self-preservation of African-American women and it shows the way in which the matter evolves through her later work, when the influence of the town directly influences Janie’s life in respect to marriage and perception of social class.

Janie Crawford’s position in the town of Eatonville is a silent and submissive one under the control of Jody, but the townspeople view her with more of a curious reverence than merely as Jody’s property. Even though the townspeople are not divided into clear class distinctions, all are considered beneath Janie and Jody. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie realizes that Jody has placed her on a powerful pedestal without her consent as a result of his position as mayor, and she “soon began to feel the impact of awe and envy against her sensibilities. The wife of the Mayor was not just another woman as she had supposed. She slept with authority and so she was part of it in the town mind” (74). The lack of connection with her community is felt when Janie begins to be alienated because “She couldn’t get but so close to most of them in spirit” (74). The influence of the community is also presented through Jody’s decision to force Janie into wearing a handkerchief on her head to cover her beautiful hair when Walter, a friend of Jody’s, is caught “brushing the back of his hand back and forth across the loose end of her braid ever so lightly so as to enjoy the feel of it without Janie knowing what he was doing” (87). His reaction is firm and lacks physical aggression but insinuates that he is well aware of his wife’s beauty and those that might steal her away because “That night he ordered Janie to tie up her hair around the store. That was all. She was there in the store for him to look at, not those others” (87). Jody and Janie’s marriage is defined by jealousy and the pedestal of patriarchal power. The necessity to bond with community is expressed again after Joe’s death when Janie realizes “She had been getting ready for her great 44

The Way You See Things journey to the horizons in search of people; it was important to all the world that she should find them and they find her” (138). But it is not until years later that Janie is wholeheartedly welcomed into the community of Eatonville as an equal, upon her return without Tea Cake. This eventual acceptance, not mentioned in “Sweat,” implies that rejoining a community is one of many requirements needed for the discovery of the African-American female self within these texts.

The most important part of the emerging genre of feminist literature, especially for African-American literature, was how the female protagonist is able to reestablish her identity without the confines of patriarchal order in order to affirm her personal self-worth at the end. Hurston’s works prove her commitment to an accurate portrayal of African-American women, and for unprecedented depictions of a new kind of freedom and independence from the patriarchy.

Hurston also intertwines the theme of death with her depictions of female independence, using death as the primary vehicle for providing freedom to African-American women from their intense, lifelong struggles under the yoke of patriarchal culture. At the fast approaching death of Sykes in “Sweat,” Delia Jones’ marital bond has disintegrated. She feels “an awful calm” at the realization that Sykes’ inebriated state combined with the escaped rattler creates a paradigm that Delia is not terribly uncomfortable with. When she finally approaches the house after she hears his screams, Sykes notices her for perhaps the first time in years and “a surge of pity too strong to support [bears] her away” (1040) from his swollen body.

Delia does not express sadness for his violent passing; instead, her actions present a weary portrayal of a women no longer burdened by a brutal man. Years of pain, abuse, and wrinkles melt away as she waits under the Chinaberry tree for the last breath of life to escape his cracked lips.

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie Crawford shows little sorrow at the death of Jody, despite the passionate promises made at the beginning of their marriage when he whisks her away from the elderly Logan. In response to his death, “She tore off the kerchief from her head and let down her plentiful hair. The weight, the length, the glory was there” (135). Her hair, a representation of her freedom, identity, and sexuality, is hers again. Janie’s attitude is overwhelmingly positive, and she “[likes] being lonesome for a change” (139). When she chooses to accept Tea Cake’s proposal, she sees the relationship as a chance to experience life as it would have been had she been allowed to pursue love instead of Nanny’s arranged marriage. Tea Cake and Janie engage in several activities that would have been absurd in Eatonville, such as when Tea Cake teaches Janie how to shoot. Janie 45

Reagan Bennett becomes a better shot than him, arousing not jealousy but a warm pride from Tea Cake, who relishes their life together. Not being forced into a gender role, Janie lovingly agrees to cook and uphold household duties while also working alongside Tea Cake in the muck of their community in the Everglades, where Janie is thrilled that she has a community that accepts her. The relationship and “marriage” of the two seems, as Shawn Miller explains, “egalitarian; both Janie and Tea Cake work in the field, both fix supper, both go shooting, both play checkers, and so on” (77), but Tea Cake also exhibits habits of masculine over-compensation, such as beating her and demanding that she no longer financially contribute to the household because he claims it is his responsibility. Janie is in one sense free of the patriarchy and oppression of her lively sexuality, but it is more likely that she finds the new marital arrangement more liberating than the other marriages endured. Hurston writes of Janie’s contentment, saying of her swampy home: “Only here, [Janie] could listen and laugh and even talk some herself if she wanted to” (200), which is all Janie every really desired under the pear tree so many years ago. The climax of internal satisfaction in Janie’s character reflects Hurston’s idea that power, or the respect of opinion, is the ultimate goal of the African-American female amidst her endless struggles with environment, man, and society. Though several years separate the two characters, and the span of their lives created by Hurston vary, the overlying theme of both is that African-American women crave control of their lives and they do not desire to be controlled by the patriarchy, society, or men, all traits which can be associated with the famous author herself.

Dynamic, courageous, and in control, African-American women are a force of nature in Hurston’s works, challenging gender roles and the patriarchy by implementing the emerging feminist ideals of control, identity, and self-worth. In Hurston’s earlier work, “Sweat,” power is relinquished by Delia’s patience in the face of overwhelming adversity by an oppressive husband. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, the insights into the mind of Janie Crawford are unforgettable as she navigates a society that has predestined her life, a strong revelation that is reached by Hurston after experimentation through earlier short stories. Despite a noticeable publication difference, “in both cases [the women] had suffered the oppressions of a narrowlydefined sex role” (Miller 77) and discovered that men should not and could not define the worth of a woman or dictate her role in society.

The modest differences in the text only demonstrate that Hurston’s idea of oppression and how African-American women handled it were mildly affected, resulting in the evolution of Delia’s quicktempered response to Sykes compared to Janie’s malleability with Logan, Jodie, and Tea Cake. This difference in coping and reactions 46

The Way You See Things is the evolution of Hurston’s own African-American female heroine and the presentation of how the character could develop based on social constructs, such as gender roles and the role of community.

Hurston’s legacy as an unforgettable author and creator of fictional women against the oppression of their sex and color has made a lasting impact on modern feminism, gender studies, and AfricanAmerican culture today.

47

WORKS CITED Christian, Barbara. Black Women Novelists: The Development of a

Tradition, 1892-1976. Westport: Greenwood Press, 1980. Print.

Gay, Roxane. “Theses on the Feminist Novel.” Dissent (00123846) 61.4

(2014): 45. Advanced Placement Source. Web. 16 Jan. 2016.

Hurston, Zora Neale. “Sweat.” The Norton Anthology of African American Literature. Ed. Henry Louis Gates. 3rd ed. Vol. 1.

New York: W.W. Norton, 2014. 1032-40. Print.

Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God: A Novel. Urbana:

University of Illinois Press, 1978. Print.

Lee, Loren. “The African-American Female Body as Spectacle in Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Pursuit: The

Journal of Undergraduate Research at the University of Tennessee 6.1 (2015): 141-47. Academic Search Complete. Web.

14 Jan. 2016.

Lester, Neal A. Understanding Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were

Watching God: A Student Casebook to Issues, Sources, and

Historical Documents. Westport: Greenwood Press,

1999. Print.

Miller, Shawn E. “Some Other Way to Try: from Defiance to Creative

Submission in Their Eyes Were Watching God.” Southern

Literary Journal 37.1 (2004): 74-95. Academic Search Complete.

Web. 14 Jan. 2016.

Powers, Peter Kerry. “Gods of Physical Violence, Stopping at Nothing:

Masculinity, Religion, and Art in the Work of Zora Neale Hurston.” Religion and American Culture: A Journal of Interpretation 2002: 229. JSTOR Journals. Web. 16 Jan. 2016.

48

49

Class Struggle in Marx’s Political Philosophy Jarrod Grammel

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Cristobal Serrán-Pagán, Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies As Marx predicted in The Communist Manifesto more than 150 years ago, class struggle continues to permeate the lives of people all over the world.

The exploitation of the proletariat by the bourgeoisie is inevitable in capitalist societies. However, even as Marx accurately described this struggle, his revolution of the proletariat has yet to occur in the U.S., and indeed there doesn’t seem to be convincing evidence to show it’s on the horizon. This paper aims to not only describe the struggle of the proletariat, but it also examines the reasons this revolution has yet to occur. As many scholars have pointed out, the proletariat has been divided and pacified. From Herbert Marcuse to Howard Zinn, Marxist philosophers have grappled with the unrealized revolution, each giving compelling explanations. By using historical context and a post-modernist approach, this paper will combine the critiques of these Marxist philosophers to help give a more comprehensive description of not only the mechanisms of class struggle, but also the ways in which the bourgeoisie has deliberately divided and pacified the revolt of the proletariat.

1) A Historical Perspective on Socialism and Class Struggle in Contemporary America HE TERMS “COMMUNISM” AND “MARXISM” ARE taboo, particularly in the U.S. Americans are still haunted

by McCarthyism and the legacy of the Cold War. But times were different in the 50 years following World War II. The American working and middle classes were experiencing prosperity unlike any other time in our history. Communism was dismissed as “bad,” representing totalitarian and oppressive nations, while American capitalism stood for freedom and prosperity. While it is beyond the scope of this paper to explain the troubling history of imperialism and the mid-twentieth-century façade of prosperity and freedom, most Americans now see the period following WWII up until the

T

50

end of the Cold War as the greatest in history. This era saw average Americans earning enough to afford nice houses in the suburbs, drive good cars, afford health care, go on vacations and still have enough to put away savings toward retirement. This nostalgia is still present in many movies, T.V. shows, and the general attitude of North American citizens.

But something has changed recently. Wages, living standards, and working conditions are dropping, costs of living are going up, and the perfect suburban home with a nice convertible is now a thing of the past. One of the main philosophical points in Karl Marx’s hallmark work, The Communist Manifesto, is that the history of humanity is the history of the working class (the proletariat) versus the owners of the means of production and capital (the bourgeoisie). As a byproduct of this continuing class struggle, Marx believed the inevitable result was an “ideal society [that] has no economic classes, no wages, no money, no private property, and no exploitation” (Moore and Bruder 335). Furthermore, Marx’s hypothesis was that the longer a capitalist system remained in place, the larger the gap between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie would become. This prediction should be of immense interest at this point in U.S. history given the country’s current economic state, in which the top .1 percent of Americans have accumulated an absurd amount of wealth at the expense of the rest of the population.

2) Pacifying the Proletariat Revolt There has recently been a shift in Americans’ attitudes toward class struggle. The Occupy Movement demonstrated that many Americans are becoming aware and frustrated at the growing inequalities, while at the same time another large group of Americans cling to the belief that we are all equal in our opportunities. For all the insight and brilliance of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, their prediction of a revolution of the proletariat has yet to occur, at least in the U.S. The reason is obvious: The bourgeoisie has adapted and learned to deal with revolt and discontentment among the proletariat.

“Society as a whole is splitting up more and more into two great hostile camps, into two great classes directly facing each other: Bourgeoisie and Proletariat” (Marx and Engels 58-59). Society is not split simply into two classes. Although Marx doesn’t specifically state or predict the extent of wealth inequality in the U.S. or any other country, one of his main premises that capitalism is self-defeating is visible in the U.S. today. Marx wrote that the longer a capitalist society remains in place, the smaller and wealthier this top economic class becomes. The main reason Marx gives for this is that workers must sell their labor for less than the cost of whatever they’re producing in 51

Jarrod Grammel order for the owners of production to generate a profit. One possible explanation outside Marx’s work for why the 1 percent has been able to accumulate so much wealth is that the wealthiest individuals in American society have turned to lawmakers to create conditions more favorable to big business, such as lowering corporate tax rates, and creating subsidies and corporate welfare. However, Marx did not predict that this “possessing class” would also get progressively better and more creative at dividing and neutralizing the proletariat, often times doing so using their immense resources.

“Divisions among the oppressed, Hasan said, are gifts to the oppressor” (Hedges). In his piece, “We Kill Our Revolutionaries,” Chris Hedges writes about Siddique Hasan, one of the leaders of the 1993 Ohio prison uprising. Hasan explains that in order to rebel successfully, the oppressed must first understand systems of power and also must unite and stay united. To do this, nonviolence and a commitment to not allowing personal antagonisms—such as race, gender, education level or nationality—and feelings to interfere are essential.

These ingredients for toppling power systems are important elements of social movement theory. Writing on contemporary youth resistance and class struggle, McLaren notes that although social movement theory is filled with “conflicting ontological premises” (158), there remains an essential few elements to this theory: What is shared, of course, is a commitment to green ideology and global responsibility, social and economic justice, non-violence, community-based organising, post-patriarchal principles, a respect for diversity, and horizontal (as opposed to vertical) political organisation. (McLaren 158) However, as is increasingly obvious, the proletariat has yet to unite and use these principles to create the better world that Marx envisions. One reason for this is that the bourgeoisie has been able to divide the oppressed by creating the antagonisms described by Hasan through the monopolization of the media and the indoctrination of our youth. The way the mainstream media covers stories, carefully choosing angles and “experts” to interview, obscures the common plight of the proletariat. In most cases, it’s what the media doesn’t cover that proves to be the most deceitful, especially when it comes to how the military-industrial complex uses its ties to powerful politicians to beat the drums of war, thereby increasing weapons manufacturers’ profits at the expense of the proletariat taxpayers— and jeopardizing proletariat bodies in wars that do not benefit them.

However, on the more inflammatory networks, experts and anchors feed off of these antagonisms, lying outright in many cases (like 52

Marx’s Political Philosophy blaming those in poverty and on welfare for the federal deficit). Marx didn’t foresee this, and instead assumed that the proletariat would remain one homogeneous group that would inevitably unite.

Historian, activist and political scientist Howard Zinn elaborated on this division of the oppressed in his hallmark work, A People’s History of the United States: One percent of the nation owns a third of the wealth. The rest of the wealth is distributed in such a way as to turn those in the 99 percent against one another: small property owners against propertyless, black against white, native-born against foreign-born, intellectuals and professionals against the uneducated and unskilled. These groups have resented one another and warred against one another with such vehemence and violence as to obscure their common position as sharers of leftovers in a very wealthy country. (Zinn 632) One thing that’s important to note is that, although the media plays a large role in dividing the proletariat through misinformation, even the seemingly incorruptible groups are not immune. Zinn wrote about the ways the Central Intelligence Agency used more than 100 American colleges and universities to help spread propaganda during the Cold War (Zinn 556). As many independent journalists have pointed out, today’s propaganda is much more institutionalized.

For instance, journalists at respected media outlets know they need sources from within the government, and they also know publishing stories critical of these officials and their work is not the best way to advance their career. This is one reason there is not more critical reporting on the military-industrial complex or corruption on Wall Street.

Another reason why there aren’t more calls for justice for corporate corruption and bloated military spending is the relatively severe punishments dished out to those who break rank. Eugene Debs, who ran for president five times as a socialist from 1900 to 1920, is one of the most notable of these dissenters. After Debs gave an antiwar speech in 1918 urging people to resist the draft, he was heavily persecuted by the Woodrow Wilson administration and ended up spending more than two years in jail for his remarks (Hedges 65).

In recent years, things have anything but improved. From the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning, who released evidence of war crimes to WikiLeaks, to Edward Snowden, the National Security Administration whistleblower, punishments for those who dissent continues to be severe. Even more evidence of this suppression of ideas can be seen in the oftentimes public humiliation of those who cross the line of acceptable dissent, most frequently at the hands of 53

Jarrod Grammel people claiming to be liberals. One such occasion was during the 2003 Oscars when documentary filmmaker Michael Moore denounced the Iraq War during his acceptance speech (Hedges 40). Moore was booed off the stage and went back to his hotel room to find liberal pundits and news hosts from numerous television channels condemning him for speaking out (Hedges 40).

However, keeping the average working class citizen from dissenting doesn’t typically involve public humiliation or jail time. If working class people refuse to follow the capitalists’ way of life, they risk losing their jobs and therefore their livelihood.

This fear of losing their livelihood is essential to the bourgeoisie maintaining power. Trapping young people with crippling student debt or keeping working class families one paycheck away from foreclosure ensures there is no room for them to revolt. By applying Abraham Maslow’s hierarchy of needs to class struggle, one can understand how forcing the proletariat to focus on meeting their physiological and security needs by keeping them ever so close to losing them, makes it difficult for them to philosophize about a better world, one in which they can achieve self-actualization—not according to the a capitalist’s mentality of wealth and goodness, but by living a meaningful life. However, the ruling elite has safety measures in place. When a tipping point nears: [the ruling elite] make[s] demands for greater democracy essentially undemocratic by enforcing brutal austerity measures, ratcheting up fear, and creating an excremental culture whose political rudder has become a permanent war on terrorism complete with extrajudicial killings. (McLaren 156) Marxist philosopher Herbert Marcuse, in his book OneDimensional Man, also added new ideas about the mechanisms that pacify revolt among the proletariat. For Marcuse, the oppressed working class has been integrated into the bourgeoisie, and working class individuals are distracted by consumerism, materialism, and technology. To Marcuse, this is one of the primary ways capitalist systems have kept the proletariat from rebelling: proletarians are indoctrinated into a society in which it’s completely unacceptable to even question the system:

54

Marx’s Political Philosophy The efficiency of the system blunts the individuals’ recognition that it contains no facts which do not communicate the repressive power of the whole. If the individuals find themselves in the things which shape their life, they do so, not by giving but by accepting the law of things—not the law of physics but the law of their society. (Marcuse 11) Marcuse illustrates how the proletariat have assimilated into the society that oppresses them. Since our capitalist system has been in place for so long, the bourgeoisie no longer needs to oppress the proletariat actively; proletarians oppress themselves, and to question the system appears absurd.

Adding to this idea that modern capitalist societies have ingeniously forced the proletariat to assimilate, McLaren explains that citizens have been molded from within their capitalist systems. “[W]orkers are produced in such a way that they are conditioned to resign themselves to the inevitability of capitalism and their position within it” (157). McLaren goes on to add that specifically in the U.S., the corporatized media plays a key role in conditioning its citizens.

Furthermore, as Adams, Bell and Griffin point out in their book: Targeted or stigmatized people are kept in their place by the agents’ ideology which supports oppression by denying its existence, and blames the condition of the oppressed on themselves and their own failings. Memmi (1965) argued that oppression, if it lasts long enough, becomes so familiar to the oppressed people that they accept it and cannot imagine recovery from it. (20) Liberation seems strange to people who have been oppressed for so long, mostly because they are taught not to see themselves as oppressed. Working class people who aren’t satisfied with their living conditions and wealth then blame themselves rather than question the system in which they live. One (disputed) quotation from John Steinbeck captures this attitude well, “[s]ocialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires” (Andersen).

3) Class Struggle’s Enduring Legacy “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” (Marx and Engels 57). Whereas Marx didn’t predict the ways in which the bourgeoisie would contain the rebellion of the proletariat, he did very accurately describe and predict alienation, revolt, and discontentment of the proletariat.

55

Jarrod Grammel Looking at the more modern history of the U.S., something Marx and Engels were unable to do, one can clearly see the effect of class struggle in shaping the country. First, the U.S. was essentially founded by two classes: rich Europeans who received enormous grants of land in the colonies and poor Europeans who earned their trip to the colonies as indentured servants who had no land and little to no possessions. This divide persisted throughout our colonial period and westward expansion, demonstrated by conflicts between landlords and tenants, most notably shortly before the American Civil War. One of the greatest examples of class warfare in the U.S. is the labor movement that became a central issue toward the early 1900s.

Zinn describes the environment of this critical time, when workers were fighting for unionization rights: The [Industrial Workers of the World] convention drew up a constitution, whose preamble said: “The working class and the employing class have nothing in common. There can be no peace so long as hunger and want are found among millions of working people and the few, who make up the employing class, have all the good things of life.” (Zinn 330) The long and continuing labor movement in the U.S. is something many take for granted. Out of this struggle grew the modern 40-hour work week, child labor laws, and unionization rights for workers.

Sadly, as the 40-hour work week is slowly fading into memory, the hard fought victories of labor over capital is something our society has downplayed. As Zinn points out, there were 73 socialist mayors and 1,200 small-time officials throughout 340 towns and cities in 1911 (Zinn 353). Given the extent to which socialism has been demonized in this country, it’s doubtful that many people understand the valuable role socialists played in improving labor conditions in the U.S. In a way, this only reinforces the argument for the cardinal weakness in Marx’s work, namely his inability to predict that the bourgeoisie would get better at neutralizing, suppressing, and in fact reversing the hard-fought progress of the proletariat.

However, revolt of the proletariat still exists in America and around the world today. As Marx describes, history has largely been defined by class struggle: For many decades now the history of industry and commerce has been but the history of the revolt of modern productive forces against modern conditions of production, against the property relations that are the conditions for the existence of the bourgeoisie and of its rule. (Marx and Engels 67)

56

Marx’s Political Philosophy For Marx and Marxist scholars, struggle is an inevitable and unshakable reality of capitalist societies. Capitalism devalues workers and dulls their capacity for their own development. Therefore, without struggle, workers would be weak and heartbroken (Lebowitz 36). As Lebowitz points out, capital is what keeps people from fully developing themselves: And it is so because capital has captured the fruits of all civilization, is the owner of all the products of the social brain and the social hand, and it turns our products and the products of workers before us against us—for one sole purpose, which is its own gain, profit. (Lebowitz 36) Turning attention to the contemporary United States, one can see this theme of struggle manifest itself in overt ways again, much like during the labor movement. After the rise of the middle class during the Cold War and now as the memory of perfect suburban life fades, class struggle seems to be re-emerging as a critical and defining element of our times. As stated early in this paper, movements like Occupy and the Fight For $15 are slowing coming to the forefront of political discussion in this country. The Occupy Movement has been successful insofar as it has at least made the average American familiar with the inequality of wealth between the 1 and the 99 percent, even if they themselves don’t see this as a major issue. The Occupy Movement emerged in the U.S. political discussion when in 2011, police began to respond severely to Occupy Wall Street protesters, with one notable photo capturing a police officer pepper spraying a group of young people who were peacefully sitting in a row on the ground. Likewise, the Fight for $15 has gone from being an almost-laughable fringe movement only a few years ago to something that’s covered by the mainstream media with politicians from all parties addressing the issue. Now, in the 2016 presidential election, the U.S. currently has a self-proclaimed democratic-socialist running for president and receiving widespread attention in the media. Class struggle is manifesting itself in more public, more assertive ways in recent years. Income and wealth inequality is finally becoming an issue Americans devote to their attention.

TIME recently published a piece titled “Marx’s Revenge: How Class Struggle Is Shaping the World.” In this piece, Michael Schuman writes of the recent political attention paid to class struggle, asserting that [t]ensions between economic classes in the U.S. are clearly on the rise. Society has been perceived as split between the ‘99%’ (the regular folk, struggling to get by) and the ‘1%’ (the connected and privileged superrich getting richer every day).”

57

Jarrod Grammel Schuman goes on to reference a Pew Research Center poll that quantified the current level of class conflict, in which two-thirds of the people interviewed said there was either “strong” or “very strong” class conflict in the U.S. (Schuman). The fact that such a large majority of the population is aware of the inequalities, unjustness, and oppression in our society is noteworthy.

4) Conclusion and Reflections on the 2016 Presidential Campaign Many people are troubled by Marx’s philosophy. Its tenats are relatively misunderstood and even unknown, as few people actually devote time to read The Communist Manifesto. Yet, even after the Cold War demonized socialism and communism to the point that critics of capitalism were jailed and harassed, the philosophy lives on.

As this paper has attempted to show, socialism or communism is by no means a perfect ideology or political philosophy, as none are. However, the ideas put forth by Marx, and Marxist and socialist scholars, are increasingly more valuable to Americans who see wages falling, living standards plummet, and working conditions deteriorating. In the age of corporate domination, people are beginning to question the idea of spending the absolute best hours of the day furthering the goals and padding the pockets of someone and something they care little about.

In twenty-first century American society, citizens value the idea of democracy. These same Americans who value democracy in government, spend the best hours of the day and their life working typically for wholly undemocratic institutions. This seems to be a strange contradiction of values. The corporate hierarchical structure of CEOs, CFOs, presidents, directors, and managers places no value on democracy in the workplace. If workers don’t do what their bosses demand, they are fired and lose their livelihoods. As discussed earlier, this fear is a powerful mechanism to keep the proletariat from resisting and dissenting.

Even in light of this, it’s not an unrealistically optimistic view to recognize that recent events seem to indicate people are slowly recognizing the absurdity of corporate domination, exploitative capitalism and a system that cares only for profit at the expense of humanity. Capitalism is destroying the environment, causing massive inequalities, exacerbating crime and drug abuse, and oppressing the masses. A tipping point will come, unless the bourgeoisie and the corporate overlords find another reform or method to pacify the coming revolt of the 21st century proletariat. Perhaps the bourgeoisie is oblivious, or maybe they already have a plan in place.

As pessimistic as this may be, Bernie Sanders fits the description of the ultimate way to pacify this potential revolt. As a self-proclaimed 58

Marx’s Political Philosophy democratic-socialist, he seems to be just the progressive figure to give the proletariat hope of meaningful change, while leaving all the existing and oppressive power systems in place. Liberals, like Sanders, have historically been used as a sort of pressure valve for the power elite, offering up minor concessions to the proletariat when necessary to prevent the proletariat from taking things into their own hands. Although Sanders goes a bit further in his rhetoric than other liberals of recent years, running for the Democratic nomination is a clear sign that he’s willing to appeal to the power elites, even if he denounces them in the process. The problem with trying to change the system from within is that the system eventually changes you. The disagreement between revolutionaries and reformers lives on, and only time will tell if Sanders will affect meaningful change, if he’s even given the chance. Many people will see this pessimistic view as oversimplifying Sanders and the reformers. But if there’s anything one can learn from reading Marx, it is that reforming a capitalist system will not bring about the radical change needed to address the massive inequalities and systemic oppression in 21st Century America.

59

Jarrod Grammel Works Cited Adams, Maurianne, Lee Anne Bell, and Pat Griffin. Teaching for

Diversity and Social Justice: A Sourcebook. New York:

Routledge, 1997. Print.

Andersen, Mark E. “Temporarily embarrassed millionaires.” Daily Kos.

Kos Media, LLC, 5 July 2015. Web. 20 Mar. 2016. http:// www.dailykos.com/story/2015/7/5/1398182/-Temporarily embarrassed-millionaires Hedges, Chris. Death of the Liberal Class. New York: Nation Books,

2010. Print.

---. “We Kill Our Revolutionaries.” Truthdig. Truthdig, LLC, 22

February 2015. Web. 22 Sept. 2015. http://www.truthdig. com/report/item/we_kill_our_revolutionaries_20150222.

Lebowitz, Michael A. “What Makes The Working Class A Revolutionary Subject?” Monthly Review: An Independent Socialist Magazine

64.7 (December 2012): 35-37. MasterFILE Elite. Web. 7

Dec. 2015.

Marcuse, Herbert. One-Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press,

1964. Print.

Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. The Communist Manifesto. New

York, New York: Simon & Schuster Inc., 1964. Print.

McLaren, Peter. “Contemporary Youth Resistance Culture and the

Class Struggle.” Critical Arts: A South-North Journal Of

Cultural & Media Studies 28.1 (2014): 152-60. Sociological

Collection. Web. 7 Dec. 2015.

Moore, Brooke N., and Kenneth Bruder. Philosophy: The Power of Ideas. Eight Edition. New York: McGraw Hill, 2011. Print.

Schuman, Michael. “Marx’s Revenge: How Class Struggle Is Shaping

the World.” Time Inc., 25 March 2013. Web. 23 Sept. 2015. http://business.time.com/2013/03/25/marxs-revenge how-class-struggle-is-shaping-the-world/.

Zinn, Howard. A People’s History of the United States. New York:

Harper Perennial Modern Classics, 2005. Print.

60

61

An Analysis of the General Practices in Prevention of Surgical Soft Skin Infections: A Comparison between the United States and Spain1 Ja’Marrius Thomas

Faculty Mentor: Dr. Victoria Russell, Department of Modern and Classical Languages; Ms. Edris Brannen, Department of Modern and Classical Languages This article presents a review of the literature on the risk of Surgical Soft Skin Infections (SSIs) within general surgery in the United States and Spain.

Specifically, the general procedures associated with preventative measures for SSIs and nosocomial infections were investigated in both countries. In addition to reviewing the relevant literature, patient-care procedures before, during, and after surgery were elicited among health care providers in both settings followed by critical incident journaling (Flanagan, 1954). The findings help identify specific measures in improving the quality of healthcare and potentially decreasing SSIs occurrences. Furthermore, the differences in general processes used in the Spanish health system and the risk of SSIs were investigated. Based on the findings of this literature review, surgical procedures should be categorized based on their level of complexity and patient treatment (long-term vs. short-term) to increase the quality and efficacy of the procedures. Additionally, some practices in Spain appear to be congruent with SSI prevention standards in U.S. protocol.

This research, which took place in the U.S. and in Spain, was funded by a Quality Enhancement Plan grant from Valdosta State University.

1

62

Review of Literature The following served as guiding questions for this review of the present body of literature in the field: What general procedures associated with preventative measures for SSIs and nosocomial infections are currently employed in the U.S. and in Spain? Are the procedures in place in either setting more efficacious than the other?

The ten references used were chosen in order to identify the efficacy of preventive techniques and guidelines practiced in both the U.S. and Spain.

Background SIs AND NOSOCOMIAL INFECTIONS ARE THE MOST prominent causes of mortality and morbidity in general surgery and in acute care hospital settings. According to Anderson et al. (2008), “SSIs occur in 2-5% of patients undergoing surgery in the United States and approximately 500,000 occur each year” (p. S51).

SSIs have become increasingly difficult to diagnose and treat because they can worsen quickly if circumstances delay treatment. SSIs commonly result from cardiac and orthopedic surgeries according to Edmiston and Spencer (2014), specifically, by pathogens most closely related to the incision of the surgical site. Methicillin-Resistant S aureus and Methicillin-Sensitive S aureus carriers often migrate from the incision site to other areas within the human body resulting in S aureus infections. The pathogen can complicate health or even result in death if left untreated. According to Merlino and Malangoni (2007), there are five generally accepted conditions that identify complicated SSIs including involvement in deep tissues or subcutaneous fat; namely, a need for significant surgical intervention, infections of the foot in a diabetic patient and presence of significant coexisting diseases including diabetes mellitus, and patients with compromised immune systems (S21). This analysis will focus on the guidelines used in preoperative and post-operative care for surgical patients in the prevention of SSIs. Current U.S. guidelines in SSI prevention have shown progress in decreasing the outcome in surgical patients.

According to Edmiston and Spencer (2014), national composite data suggest that “there was a 20% overall reduction in SSIs related to 10 selected surgical procedures from 2008 to 2012” (590). In further research on the U.S. Health System, the Center for Disease Control and Medicare and Medicaid Services created a program in 2007 entitled the Surgical Care Improvement Project (SCIP). The purpose of the SCIP in 2007 was to offer guidelines that would be helpful in reducing the likelihood of SSIs. The SCIP and its guidelines effectively targeted specific areas in which pathogenic substances would be

S

63

Ja’Marrius Thomas highly contained, proving beneficial as the study of SSI preventions continued.

New findings introduced by Edmiston and Spencer (2014) offered a new perspective on SSIs preventions, and have helped in-patient care interventions over time. National and state comparisons of SSIs are now calculated using a standardized infection ratio (SIR). The SIR is mainly used to track nosocomial infections. It compares actual incidences of nosocomial infections with averages or baselines of U.S. occurrences. It also offers additional guidelines that were not previously available in the SCIP. The additions to the SIR include; surgical attire and hand hygiene, antimicrobial sutures, preadmission showers and cleansing, MRSA and MSSA surveillance for high risk surgical patients, antimicrobial irrigation, weight-based dosing and preoperative hair removal (Edmiston and Spencer, 2014). The SIR interprets SSI incidences throughout the U.S. on a national baseline.

For example, if the data suggested that greater than one SSIs within in a hospital existed, then there would be an increase in SSIs. If there was one SSI, then the data would suggest no progress was made in the reduction of SSIs within that hospital, and finally if there was less than one SSI indicated, then a decrease in SSIs would be shown. This baseline takes into consideration any patient differences and procedure-related risk factors such as duration of surgery and surgical wound class. The risk of SSIs within general surgery has begun to show great effects in reduction due to the improvements of the SCIP and SIR. Many of the guidelines to prevent SSIs in acute care hospitals correlate to the recommendations suggested in the Spanish health system. Such practices as administering an antiseptic bath to decrease normal bacterial flora of patients entering hospital facilities and not removing hair unless it interferes with a patient’s area of incision are suggested in the Spanish health system (Baudet et al., 2005). These recommendations have continued to be beneficial for health professionals in preventing SSIs from occurring and in caring for surgical patients.

64

Surgical Soft Skin Infections Treatment of SSIs in the U.S. When treating a patient with a SSI, time is important. In previous practices, doctors in the U.S. would ideally use two methods: a gold standard or the indirect method in post-surgery and surveillance of inpatient and outpatient procedures. According to Anderson et al. (2008), the gold standard consisted of “daily observations of the surgical sites by the physician, trained nurses, or infections prevention personal for 24-48 hours post-surgery” (p. S51-S52). The indirect method consists of a combination of reviewing microbiology reports, patient medical records, and surgeon-patient surveys. This method was considered less time consuming than the direct method, as well as more reliable. The procedures practiced in both the direct and indirect methods in post-discharge surveillance have exhibited poor sensitivity and specificity in the surveillance of SSIs. Previously existing guidelines, recommendations, and requirements were published by Mangram et al. (1999), which suggested that certain complex conditions are associated with the cause of SSIs such as “those that estimate the intrinsic degree of microbial contamination of the surgical site; those that measure the duration of an operation and; those that serve as markers for host susceptibility” (264). In an effort to decrease SSIs in acute care hospitals, Anderson et al. (2008) also included a grading scale to assist in monitoring SSIs. The grading scale is categorized by what is called “strength of recommendation and quality of evidence” (Anderson et al., p. S54-S56). The strength of recommendation is divided into three categories, which delineate good, moderate, and poor evidence to support a recommendation of targeted surveillance.

Prevention Techniques in the U.S. The quality of evidence improves the strength of recommendation by properly allowing controlled and often randomized trials to provide substantial evidence of SSI occurrences. The methods provided by Anderson et al. (2008) created a seemingly solid system that strongly assists acute care hospitals in monitoring and preventing SSIs. In advancing the efforts of SSI preventions, according to Anderson et al., in 2003 the Center for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and Medicare and Medicaid Services developed the Surgical Infection Prevention Collaborative (SIPC) (Anderson et al., 2008, p. S53). This project was created to assess three prominent measures in SSI prevention. In preoperative preparations, the SIPC suggests surgical patients be administered an intravenous antimicrobial prophylaxis within 1 hour before incision and within 2 hours for vancomycin and fluoroquinolones (Anderson et al., 2008). Post-surgery, the antimicrobial prophylaxis is to be continued for approximately 24 to 65

Ja’Marrius Thomas 48 hours for cardiothoracic procedures in adult patients (Anderson et al., 2008). The CDC and Medicare and Medicaid Service also created the SCIP project. The Surgical Care Improvement Project includes prevention methods for surgical procedures such as guidelines for proper hair removal including recommendation for the use of clippers or depilatory methods, and the guidelines prohibit the use of razors (Anderson et al., 2008). The SCIP also suggests controlling a “patient’s blood glucose level post-surgery for cardio patients and maintenance of perioperative normotherma for patients undergoing colorectal surgery” (Anderson et al., 2008, p. S53). Understanding each method described by Anderson et al. and properly practicing these guidelines began to help reduce SSIs from occurring in acute care hospitals.

The guidelines supported by the Strategies for Preventions of SSIs also support the criteria by Edmiston and Spencer in 2014.

Evidence-based strategies for reducing SSIs were the primary focus of the research. Between September 2013 and September 2014, many new findings were developed as the push for SSI interventions progressed. As previously mentioned, Edmiston and Spencer found new methods for decreasing the likelihood of SSIs. These include updates in proper surgical attire and hand hygiene, the use of antimicrobial sutures, the practice of preadmission showers and cleansing, and weight-based dosing. Proper surgical attire and hand hygiene are highly recommended for surgical personnel. The Association of Perioperative Registered Nurses (AORN), which is focused on leadership and excellence in perioperative practices in healthcare, conducted a contest entitled “What’s wrong with this picture” in 2010 which was provided as evidence by Edmiston and Spencer (2014). This study focused on the inappropriate practices demonstrated in the operating room (OR). They looked closely at details such as arm and hair exposure, the act of taking personal items such as food into the OR, and wearing soiled laboratory coats over surgical scrubs. Each of these acts greatly compromises surgical patients when open and exposed in the OR. AORN recommended achievable protocols which were to be practiced in surgical settings as mentioned by Edmiston and Spencer (2014). Firstly, it is recommended that surgical personnel not wear skull caps. Skull caps fail to cover adequately the hairline and nape of the neck (Edmiston and Spencer, 2014). This could result in exposure to dandruff and sweat thereby negatively affecting the patient’s already compromised state. Therefore, it is now suggested that surgical headgear cover hair at the nape of the neck and ears to help reduce the number of bacteria introduced. They also found that SSIs can occur from the hands of anesthesia personnel. Bacterial flora of the 66

Surgical Soft Skin Infections hands can contain both non-pathogenic and pathogenic microbes, which could be transmitted to the patient via IV administration from the anesthesia equipment. Because of these findings, it is suggested that non-scrubbed OR personnel have easy access to alcohol-based hand rub.

In further findings, the use of antimicrobial sutures has been productive in the reduction of SSIs around or near the site of incision.

These sutures are antimicrobial triclosan-coated monofilament sutures. According to the U.S. Food and Drug Act, this technology specifies that the presence of triclosan on the surface of the suture device reduce the risk of microbial attachment, thereby, decreasing the probability of the device becoming a possible nidus, (Edmiston and Spencer, 2014). It is possible, however that wound closures carry contaminates. The risk of contaminated wounds increases the likelihood of SSIs. Through antimicrobial sutures, is it now possible to reduce the number of pathogenic microbes attaching to the sutures of the wound. With fewer microbes available to compromise a wound closure, these sutures offer a great benefit to patients and professionals and continue to reduce SSIs in surgical patients.

Preadmission showers and cleansings were developed in the SCIP and designed to reduce bacterial flora on surgical patients.

This process was strongly recommended in clinical practices, however, initially it did not prove beneficial. This was due to a lack of standardization of protocol in patients admitted to a hospital for surgical procedure. Edmiston and Spencer (2014) found that a standardized patient-centric regimen of two pre-admission showers or skin cleansings with either 4% aqueous or 2% (CHG) chlorhexidinegluconate-impregnated, polyester cloths helps to reduce the concentration of bacterial flora. Skin surface concentrations with CHG can be achieved that are 25 or more times greater than the minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC90) required to inhibit or kill skin staphylococci, including MRSA (Edmiston and Spencer, 2014). They also found that electronic reminders including text messages and email (with text messages being the most popular) help standardize the preadmission cleansing. The standardization of this process included a 2-5-day period of text alerts which prompted the patient to cleanse with a CHG cloth. With these efforts, it is now possible to complete a regimen of cleansing that is conclusive.

Weight-based dosing is a new trend in many hospitals in the U.S. This process was created to increase efficacy thereby increasing the normal 1-gram baseline dosage of a prophylactic regimen. One gram of prophylactic antibiotics could potentially be ineffective in killing gram-positive and negative organisms. Weight-based dosing suggests that a patient with a body mass index (BMI) of 30 kg/m2 or 67

Ja’Marrius Thomas more should receive a 3-gram prophylactic dose of cefazolin at least 30 minutes before the incision is made. Patients with a BMI of 30 kg/ m2 or less should be given a 2-gram prophylactic dose (Edmiston and Spencer, 2014). Weight-based dosing could be beneficial for obese patients. By providing a calculated dosage of a prophylactic antibiotic regimen based on a patient’s BMI, contamination of wound closures could potentially be decreased, thus, allowing the occurrences of SSI to be reduced further.

A new approach for patients who are carriers of Methicillinresistant S aureus or Methicillin-sensitive S aureus has also proven to be beneficial in cardiac and orthopedic surgeries. MRSA and MSSA carriers who have weakened immune systems and undergo a surgical procedure have a higher chance of developing an S aureus infection. A study done on nasal carriers of MRSA, resulting in a SSI, showed an independent risk in orthopedic implant and cardiac surgery 85% of the time (Edmiston and Spencer 2014). Because of the character of these infections, people who are colonized with MRSA are two to nine times more likely to develop an infection than patients who are not carriers. In order to improve the outcome of surgical care in patients who are carriers of MRSA, several strategies were coupled together in a preoperative setting. To reduce the risk of MRSA infections, CHG showers must be implemented, including decolonization with mupirocin and active surveillance of the patient.

When these guidelines are used together, they offer a great deal of efficacy in surgical care.

A report by Edmiston and Spencer (2014) reviewed 4,085 colorectal surgical procedures, representing data from 24 hospitals.

The collected data showed that the use of preoperative care measures were effective when coupled together to reduce the rate of SSI from 17.5% to 2.4%, and an 80% reduction from baseline data (Edmiston and Spencer, 2014). For patients who are nasal carriers of MSRA, mupirocin ointment is recommended as a preoperative care measure. This ointment was most efficient in eradicating the S aureus colonization and it reduced the risk of SSIs. Antimicrobial irrigation is fairly new in surgical practices. This method is a combination of irrigation and debridement of a wound. It has been useful in traumatic open fracture orthopedic surgeries and in intraoperative peritoneal general surgery where fecal contents could rupture. The use of antibiotic irrigation has not been useful in practical settings. Because of its short exposure in inhibiting bacterial growth and potential intraoperative anaphylaxis, this method of irrigation is not suggested. However, surgical irrigation would be beneficial if performed with an antiseptic agent such as CHG. In the likelihood of bacterial growth, CHG would remain in 68

Surgical Soft Skin Infections the intraoperative space where it would reduce the growth of any microbe. CHG has been proven useful in the implantation of surgical devices. Often, surgical devices such as grafts, mesh, and implants can be contaminated resulting in growth on the implanted device after wound closure. The use of CHG with implants could be beneficial in reducing the likelihood of contaminated devices being used in surgical procedures. Edmiston and Spencer (2014) provide reports from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration approving the use of a 0.05% concentration of CHG in irrigation and debridement practices.

CHG has proven to be beneficial in both reducing microbial growth and in efficacy of patient care of surgical procedures.

Prevention Techniques in Spain There are many similarities in perioperative preparations of surgical patients in both the U.S. and Spanish health systems. The Guía para la prevención y control de la infección quirúrgica is the main source that was used to assess the prevention of SSI in the Spanish health system and it was the primary source in which information on SSI preventions was identified for the Spanish health system. First, the process of patient admittance in the Spanish health system requires that a patient’s history include any indicators of possible symptoms of infection or past infections; those being colds, fevers, urinary tract infections, and or respiratory tract infections. The Spanish health system provides specific protocols necessary for SSI prevention.

According to Hospital Universitario Puerto Real [University Hospital of Puerto Real], when first admitting a patient, they should be “fully washed with soap or antiseptic (chlorhexidine solution), including the patient’s scalp, with special attention to the umbilical region, armpits, inguinal region, nostrils and mouth” (Baudet Carrillo et al., 2005, p.

9). By washing a patient with an antiseptic or soap, a reduction of potential SSI related organisms from a patient’s normal flora can be achieved, therefore, limiting the likelihood of a patient developing or spreading nosocomial infections in acute care hospitals. The SCIP also suggests that hair not be removed unless it will interfere with the patient’s operation. This guideline is also suggested in the Spanish health system; however, it is also suggested that if hair must be removed, there should be a minimum of a millimeter of hair left on the patient’s body. This is done in order to prevent skin irritation.

After hair removal, an additional antiseptic bath is recommended to help reduce the colonization of pathogens around or near the surgical site (Baudet Carrillo et al., 2005). These are rather small differences in the perioperative preparations for surgical patients that have proven to be beneficial for the Spanish health system.

69

Ja’Marrius Thomas The administration of prophylactic antibiotics also needs to be increasingly tailored to the patient’s surgical needs and area of incision. The connections between the SCIP’s and Spanish health system’s administration of antibiotics strongly correlate with the Strength of Recommendation and Quality of Evidence grading criteria as well as with Edmiston and Spencer (2014). Although protocol in administering a prophylactic antibiotic is suggested to be issued one hour before surgery begins, the Spanish health system also administers a prophylactic at the beginning of surgery to reduce the amount of microbes related to SSIs. The practice of administering prophylactic antibiotics before surgery could also reduce the length of time surgical patients are kept on antibiotics post-surgery. The grading scale in the Spanish health system allows doctors to “identify high-risk, high volume operative procedures to be targeted for SSI surveillance on the basis of a risk-assessment of patient populations, operative procedures performed, and available SSI surveillance data” (Baudet Carrillo et al., p. 27). The SCIP provided criteria for the strength of recommendation and quality of evidence in SSI prevention. Those guidelines are similar to the grading scale also used in the Spanish health system to assess a patient’s risk level in surgical procedures and for SSI surveillance. According to Baudet Carrillo et al. (2005), the administration of an antimicrobial prophylaxis is used with the objective of reducing the level of bacterial contamination of a wound; however, the antibiotic prophylaxis is only a means of prevention more among the many that must be put in place to prevent surgical infections. The guidelines provided by both the SCIP and also the Spanish health system have very strong guidelines that have continued to decrease the likelihood of SSIs. However, antiseptic baths and limited hair removal have also proven effective in decreasing SSIs in surgical patients (Edmiston and Spencer, 2014).

While providing quality care and treatment is very important in decreasing SSIs, it is also important for health professionals to exhibit good personal hygiene and to practice these skills on a continual basis when interacting with multiple patients. Currently, the CDC devised specific goals and situations which direct health personnel in identifying when hand hygiene is required. According to Hand Hygiene Why, How, & When created by the World Health Organization (2009), hand hygiene is needed before and after direct patient contact; after completing tasks at one patient station before moving to another station; before procedures, such a administering intravenous medications; before and after contact with vascular access; before and after dressing changes; and after contact with items/surfaces at patient stations (Center of Diseases Control & Prevention, 2009). While much of the contact with patients and health 70

Surgical Soft Skin Infections personnel tends to involve the use of gloves, the CDC also advises that hand hygiene occur after contact with blood or body fluids and after contacting a potentially contaminated site before moving to a clean site. These guidelines are also practiced in the Spanish health system and they have assisted the country in their continued effort to decrease nosocomial and SSIs. The SCIP and SCIP of the U.S. and also the Guía para la prevención y control de la infección quirúrgica [Guide for the prevention and control of surgical infection] of Spain should continue to focus on strengthening hand hygiene among health care personnel. Hand hygiene has become an increasingly important concern in preventing the spread of infections between patients and in acute care hospitals. This suggests that there should be a stronger system to assist health personnel in adhering to good hand hygiene while treating and caring for patients. For example, in order for health personnel to adhere to the protocol provided by the CDC, there should be a monitoring system that alerts doctors and nurses when hand washing should occur. Hand washing is very important while interacting with patients and also when using gloves.

Alerting health personnel when they have missed an opportunity to practice hand hygiene with electronic systems or text messages could greatly benefit both the U.S. and Spain in reducing nosocomial and SSIs. These alerts could standardize hand washing protocol and make the system functional.

Conclusion The U.S. and Spanish health systems work to increase efficacy in protocols in preventing SSIs. Many of the guidelines intertwine with each other and have continued to provide evidence of SSIs decreasing over time. The prophylactic treatment is used in both Spain and the U.S., meaning that the reduction of microorganisms for surgical patients reduces the likelihood of SSIs occurring after surgical procedures. The additional dosage of prophylactic treatment post-surgery also assists in reducing pathogens from migrating to other areas of the human body.

The development of SSI and nosocomial preventions will continue to grow as both the U.S. and Spain identify areas in which improvements can occur. On the future efforts of SSIs preventions, “Looking Forward—Infection Prevention in 2016” by Aureden et al.

(2015) provided a perspective for the future years. This article offers additional structural guidelines that when bundled together greatly decrease the risk of SSIs. Firstly, nasal antisepsis before surgery has greatly reduced SSI occurrences in patients who are nasal carriers of MRSA. The CDC has stated that S aureus colonizes in the nose of approximately one-third of the general population while most are 71

Ja’Marrius Thomas colonized with MSSA (Aureden et al., 2015). There are now protocols for the decolonization of MRSA and MSSA in patients who undergo surgical procedure and are considered high risk for postoperative S aureus infections. Many of the risks lie in orthopedic or cardiac procedures. It is recommended that a patient be screened for MRSA and MSSA in order to determine if the decolonization protocol should be used. If a positive result were to prove decolonization necessary, the process includes steps that provide the most efficacy in post-operative surveillance. Decolonization is a 5-7-day process; nasal mupirocin or povidone-iodine and CHG-based antiseptic skin cleansers should first be prescribed to the patient while health personnel including doctors and nurses provide verbal and written instructors for patient use. This decolonization process will potentially prove beneficial in surgical preparations. Antibiotic stewardship is very important as antibiotic resistance is always a concern. Practicing and effectively administering antibiotics when they are most needed and discontinuing regimens when they are most appropriate can reduce resistance and effectively reduce the risk of SSIs. Wound closures have a very important role in SSI preventions.

Aureden et al. (2015) offers perspectives on applying the use of wound edge protectors as a mean of reducing the contamination of surgical wounds. Wound edge protectors are disposable and were available in the 1960s to protect wound edges from skin contamination.

Technology has allowed the edge protector to be single or dual ring layered. No substantial evidence has proven which type of wound edge protector is most beneficial. This has helped reduce a $20,000 cost in superficial surgical wound care treatments proving edge protectors can be helpful (Aureden et al., 2015). “Looking forward—Infection Prevention in 2016” also addressed guidelines for temperature and humidity in ORs, focusing on regulations in order to promote a more sterile OR environment.

Surgical patients and family members should be informed about SSIs and nosocomial infections in order to increase patient knowledge. Proper hand hygiene, coupled with preoperative preparations, and surgical instrument preparations can help limit SSIs from occurring. Acute care hospitals should also consider a more profound structure where patients are categorized based on their surgical risk and likelihood of SSIs occurrences. This system, if created, could limit SSIs and nosocomial infections. Patients who exhibit a greater likelihood of SSI should be placed in areas where long-term treatment is contained and controlled until the infection is eradicated.

72

Surgical Soft Skin Infections SSIs are considered the most prominent causes of patient death and morbidity in general surgery. This research may provide a greater understanding of SSI prevention protocols used in the U.S. and Spain.

Methods in surgical preparations that have helped to diminish the number of SSIs were examined in both settings. It was found that health care providers in both countries follow strict protocols in preand post-operative procedures that are both similar and effective.

Further research and understanding of SSIs and nosocomial infections will help the future of both the U.S. and Spain by reducing the amount of SSIs and nosocomial infection occurring in acute care hospitals.

73

Ja’Marrius Thomas References Anderson, J. D., Kaye, S. K, Classen, D., Arias, M. K., Podgorny,

K., Burstin, H., Calfee, P. D., Coffin, E.S., Dubberke, R.E.,

Fraser, V., Gerding. N.D., Griffin. A. F., Gross, O., Klompas,

M. Lo, E., Marschall, J., Mermel, A.L., & Nicolle, L. (2008).

Strategies to prevent surgical site infections in acute care hospitals. Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology

Chicago Journals, 29( S1), S51-S61.

Aureden, K., Barnes, S., & Myers, F. (2015). Looking forward—infection

prevention in 2016. AORN 102(6).

Baudet Carrillo, M., Borrero Rubio, J.M., Calvo Durán, A., Coello

Oviedo, C., Díaz Navarro, J., Figueroa Murillo, E., Huertos

Ranchal, Mª, J., Jesús de al Calle, I., Martín Vicente Mª, L., Mata

Pariente, N., Pérez Ramos, S., Solino Ocaña, I., & Vergara de

Campos, A. (2005). Guía para la prevención y control de la

infección quirúrgica. Hospital Universitario Puerto Real. 2005.

Cataife, G. Weinberg, D. A., Wong, H., & Kahn, K. L. (2014). The effect

of surgical care improvement project (SCIP) compliance on

surgical site infections (SSI). Medical Care, 52(2 Suppl 1), S66-S73.

Center for Disease Control (2013). Protocol for hand hygiene and glove

use observations. Retrieved from http://www.cdc. gov/dialysis/prevention-tools/Protocol-hand-hygiene glove-observations.html.

Edmiston E. C., & Spencer, M. (2014). Patient care interventions to

help reduce the risk of surgical site infections. AORN. 100(6).

Flanagan, J.C. (1954). The critical incident technique. Psychological

Bulletin, 51(4), 327-358.

Mangram J. A., Horan C. T., Pearson L. M., Silver C. L., & Jarvis R. W.,

The Hospital Infection Control Practices Advisory Committee

(1999). Guideline for prevention of surgical site infection.

Infection Control and Hospital Epidemiology. 20(4).

Merlino, J., & Malangoni M. (2007). Complicated skin and soft-tissue

infections: Diagnostic approach and empiric treatment options. Cleveland Clinic Journal of Medicine, 74 (Supplement

,4) S21-S28.

Richards, M. J., Edwards, J. R., Culver, D. H., Gaynes, R.P., The National

Nosocomial Infections Surveillance System. (2000).

Nosocomial infections in combined medical-surgical

intensive care units in the United States. Infection Control

and Hospital Epidemiology Chicago Journals, 21(8), 510-515.

74