“ Uncanny Domesticity” in Contemporary

Home , Roger Chillingworth, Sarah Orne Jewett, Steven Soter

4 Homely Spaces Readings of Homeliness Agnieszka in American Culture Pantuchowicz

6 The Home and the Asylum Antebellum Representations Maria Kaspirek of True Womanhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables

16 Home as Emotional Space Marta Koval in Marilynne Robinson’s Diptych about Gilead

24 The Homely Sublime in Space Domesticating the Feeling Kornelia of Homelessness in Carl Science Documentary Films Sagan’s Cosmos and its Sequel Boczkowska

36 Homeland and Resilience Immunitas, Katechon, Tomasz Basiuk the Uncanny, and Trauma’s Displacement

50 The Nutshell Studies Zofia of Unexplained Death, Kolbuszewska Doll-house Homicides, Foster Families, and the Subversion of Domesticity in CSI: Las Vegas

60 “I Was Modern to His Victorian” House as a Reflection Aleksandra of the Father-Daughter Relationship in Alison Kamińska Bechdel’s Fun Home

68 Betty Friedan, Jane Jacobs, Piotr Skurowski Richard Sennett and the 1960s’ Challenge to the Suburban Era Mystique of Security and Order

78 The Rise of the House of Usher The Landscape Chamber Marek Wilczyński by Sarah Orne Jewett as a Textual Palimpsest

86 The House of Usher Never Fell Impossible Escapes and the Paweł Pyrka Dark (K)night of the Soul

94 “Uncanny Domesticity” in The Case of Jhumpa Lahiri Jelena Šesnić Contemporary American Fiction

106 A Home on the Range Tadeusz Rachwał and the (Near) Extinction of the American Bison

118 Abstracts Homely Spaces

4 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54) Agnieszka Pantuchowicz Homely Spaces: Readings of Homeliness in American Culture

In the house of fiction you can hear, today, the deep stirring of the unhomely. Homi K. Bhabha, “The World and Home”

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0010.4073 Homely Spaces

Agnieszka Pantuchowicz Homely Spaces 5

The questions which the present issue ofKultura Popularna addresses focus on Agnieszka Pantuchowicz, Ph.D., the constructions and the place of the “ordinary” viewed from the perspective is assistant professor of various “home”-inspired discourses, ranging from housing to domestic at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and policy, through questions of family values, ethics of modesty, simplicity of Humanities in Warsaw, living, unpretentiousness, individual and domestic security, communities, Poland, where she localities and neighborhoods. The homely, unlike the sublime and the beau- teaches translation and literary studies. tiful, seems to be a category which has slipped from the critical horizon of Her research interests the humanities as unaesthetic and too obvious, which obviousness the texts are translation theory and cultural studies, below problematize. Homely spaces are not simply suggestive of places of comparative literature, residence, as the adjective ‘homely’ also brings to mind some kind of modesty, and feminist criticism. something unaffectedly natural which need not be either sublime or beautiful but, in the broadest sense, normal – perhaps in the way the very ideas of home and dwelling are inscribed in our everyday lives as unquestionable necessities which lie at the roots of Western culture. Martin Heidegger’s identification of dwelling with building and being in his well-known essay has supplemented this ontological necessity with a peculiar type of technology governed not by the task to be achieved, but by our vulnerability to homelessness which in our inability to think of dwelling and homeliness as troublesome: “What if man’s homelessness consisted in this, that man still does not even think of the real plight of dwelling as the plight? Yet as soon as man gives thought to his homelessness, it is a misery no longer” (“Building, Dwelling, Thinking”). What is homely hides within its spaces the unhomely, an unwelcome visitor or visitation from its outside which Freud wrote about in terms of the uncanny (unhemlich) and which, seemingly standing in opposition to the homely, contaminates its space with irreducible unfamiliarity and strangeness, the irreducible traces of repression. Since unheimlich also stands in opposition to heimisch, to native and familiar, the space of the homely – in the American context to which the following essays refer – is also the space of colonial bringing of the European home to Others. In the experience of bringing that home, both on the side of the bringer and the brought, a certain disorientation is clearly felt, an unhomely moment which, according to Khomi Bhabha, results from the displacement of the division between the world and the home. “In that displacement,” he writes, “the border between home and world becomes confused; and, uncannily, the private and the public become part of each other, forcing upon us a vision that is as divided as it is disorienting” (“The World and the Home”). The “where” of home is thus a hardly decidable place or location due to its plasticity and expansibility, its spatial rather than topo- graphical whereabouts. It is for this reason that home cannot be simply left behind as it is travel, in movement through space, that the idea of home may come to existence. It is departure from home which, perhaps like human fall from paradise, brings home back as a nostalgia for something lost. Georges Van Den Abbeele notes that the concept of home is only needed (indeed it can only be thought) when home has already been left behind. Rigorously speaking then, one has always already left home, since home can only exist at the price of its being lost” (“Sightseers: The Tourist as Theorist”). This loss may well be imaginary, and yet it seems to be decisive in the work of constructing the domestic, of domesticating both others and ourselves one of whose aspects is the normality, or normalcy, of homely spaces which are, as the papers included in this volume implicitly or explicitly indicate, never exactly normal. The Home and the Asylum

6 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54) Maria Kaspirek The Home and the Asylum Antebellum Representations of True Womanhood in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The House of Seven Gables

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0011.6714 The Home and the Asylum

Maria Kaspirek The Home and the Asylum 7

Maria Kaspirek is In 1840, Elizabeth T. Stone was tricked by her brother Stephen S. Stone a Ph.D. candidate in to accompany him on a ride, not knowing that her brother was leading her American Studies at the straight into the McLean Asylum in Charlestown, Massachusetts after having FAU Erlangen-Nürnberg and a fellow of the DFG- hired a doctor to declare her insane. She would remain at McLean for more funded research program than sixteen months, suffering from isolation and maltreatment, all the while Presence and Tacit proclaiming her sanity. Her crime consisted of following a different religious Knowledge. Focusing on the American antebel- denomination than her family (6). lum era, her disserta- On July 13, 1857, Adriana P. Brinckle was placed at the Harrisburg State tion project examines the construction and Hospital for the Insane in Pennsylvania. Committed by her father because of consolidation of medical her “extravagance”, she would remain at the mental institution for 28 years, and literary knowledge being released only after a new law was passed by the State Committee on on mental hygiene. Lunacy in 1884 (5). By orders of her husband, Elizabeth Packard was kidnapped and carried off to the Jacksonville Insane Asylum in Illinois on June 18th, 1860. She had “defended some religious opinions which conflicted with the Creed of the Presbyterian Church” which gave her husband grounds to claim that her mind was unbalanced (3). Elizabeth Packard was released after three years in the asylum. What these three women experienced was a fate they shared with count- less other women but not all of those eventually escaped the institution, and fewer still would write exposés detailing their harrowing experience at the asylum as Packard, Brinckle, and Stone did. These exposés show a common narrative of women who were – obviously wrongfully – accused of insanity and committed to a mental institution – by brothers, fathers, and husbands – because they deviated from the ways in which ideal womanhood was defined in nineteenth-century America. In the following, the exposés will serve as a starting point to explore antebellum ideals of femininity as represented by both psychiatry and fiction. The first-person accounts position themselves as a counternarrative to the one positing the asylum as a humanitarian, philanthropic institution – which, indeed, was its original intent. A co-product of various antebellum utopian movements aimed to better the condition of the disenfranchised, the asylum and the therapeutic practice of moral treatment it adapted were designed to reform and cure the bodies and minds of the insane – not as a convenient way to get rid of one’s inconvenient wife, sister, or daughter, although the shared plot of the “captivity narratives”, predominantly written by women, would suggest so. The asylum exposés, emerging as a unique genre of nineteenth-century literature, join a long line of accounts that link madness with femininity. Seminal studies by feminist critics Elaine Showalter (1985), Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979), and Phyllis Chesler (1972) have amply demonstrated that the convention of associating insanity and womanhood has an impressive tradition, both in fictional representations and medical theories. Thus, it is not surprising that antebellum America boasts of a variety of texts all engaging in the construction of an ideal of womanhood and the potentially perilous consequences of its compromising. Sentimental novels, women’s magazines and domestic literature are well known to have contributed to the establishment of the ideology of True Womanhood and its domestic agenda. An often under- rated amount of contributions to this ideology, however, must be ascribed to the adherents of a newly emerging branch of medical science preoccupied with maintaining and regaining mental health or rather, preventing and curing insanity. The nineteenth-century terms of this first-wave-psychiatry were asylum 8 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

medicine or mental hygiene, its practitioners were known under the designa- tion of asylum physician or – if they were lucky – even asylum superintendent. Most of these early psychiatrists were educated men of science, socially active reformers, bourgeois gentlemen highly concerned with morality, and prolific writers on the subject of mental hygiene, which asylum superintendent Isaac Ray, pioneering author of The Medical Jurisprudence of Insanity (1838), defines as “the art of preserving the mind against all incidents and influences calculated to deteriorate its qualities, impair its energies, or derange its movements” (163). Asylum physicians offered commentary on many related subjects, ranging from “the management of the bodily powers in regard to exercise, rest, food, clothing and climate, the laws of breeding, the government of the passions, the sympathy with current emotions and opinions, the discipline of the intellect” and many more, always keeping an eye on the surest strategies to promote their medical expertise (163). The growing concern over allegedly rising numbers of insanity especially in the United States led not only to the rapid construction of asylums throughout the country but also to an increased visibility and influence of psychiatry on the antebellum political and cultural stage. Above all, this can be seen in the characteristics of the emerging bourgeois middle class; the separation of gender spheres and the erection of the non-productive woman “into a symbol of bourgeois class hegemony” were supported by the antebellum psychiatric community with bio-medical arguments (Smith-Rosenberg, 13). These self-assumed experts claimed that men were naturally guided by will and reason, whereas women were dominated by their reproductive organs and a weaker nervous system, successfully support- ing men’s assignment to the public sphere and women’s assumed place in the private sphere. Every attempt to step out of the prescribed role was deemed unnatural and inevitably led to physical and mental disease. Unsurprisingly, the mental hygiene experts also paid considerable interest to women’s bodily and mental constitution and their peculiar susceptibility to certain kinds of insanity. Every distinct female body part – the ovaries, the fallopian tubes, the uterus – was regarded as a potential predisposing locus of insanity, every distinct moment of female “crisis” – menstruation, marriage and sex, pregnancy, child birth – was regarded as a potential precipitating cause (Goodell, 295). This put women in an awkward position, since the fulfilment of her allocated role saw her as a menstruating married mother of many. The unexpected demands of marriage might well cause exhaustion and despair in a young girl, hitherto unexperienced with the company of men; however, the statistics might not consider that it was the young husband who felt the marriage to have been a mistake and sought to undo the marriage by remov- ing his bride to an asylum. It is also ironic that “mothering”, so essential to the female ideal, was stressed as one of the leading causes of female insanity. Still, “puerperal insanity”, as it was termed by psychiatrists, was the type and cause of insanity of one in eleven insane women, as assistant asylum physician Richard Gundry reports (295). Either during gestation, child-birth or lactation the woman suffered a nervous breakdown (or refused to take care of her appearance) and was removed to the asylum (Theriot, 73). Additionally, women were “more under the influence of feelings and emotions” and prone to go mad through the loss of a loved one or a disappointment of affections ( Jarvis, 150). In the delineations of women’s anatomical and mental peculiarities, the asylum physicians seem to perpetuate and fortify the association of femininity and madness, put into focus by Showalter, Chesler, and other feminist critics as facilitating the enabling of female oppression. While there is no doubt, that Maria Kaspirek The Home and the Asylum 9 nineteenth century medicine did not miss any opportunity to teach women how to regulate their body, their mind, and their behaviour, a closer look at asylum reports reveals that there were not more women institutionalized than men. In fact, the statistics show a preponderance of male patients in American asylums (140). Asylum statistician Edward Jarvis interpreted this as resulting from the fact that men’s “intellectual functions are oftener exercised … their inclina- tions and propensities, of whatever nature, intellectual, moral, or physical, are more powerful and uncontrollable, and they are more likely to over-work and disturb the brain than women” (150). Jarvis relates men’s greater susceptibility to mental exhaustion to being exposed to “the varies and changes in life and fortune, accidents and injuries” of modern life (151). Physicians were united in the fear that the turbulent modernization of society would result in the degeneration of the nation; indeed, insanity was declared to be a mass disease by superintendent Amariah Brigham (76). For him and other experts on insanity, the apparent rise of mental illness in America must be explained as resulting from being a country “where people enjoy civil and religious freedom, where every person has liberty to engage in the strife for the highest honors and stations in society, and where the road to wealth and distinction of every kind is equally open to all” (78). As the intellectual pattern of civilized life and the competitive marketplace was made out to be the main culprit of facilitating male insanity, early psychiatrists called for the retreat from public and political action into the private sphere. An idealized version of the home and of domesticity was pitted as a safe and balancing haven against a public life full of strenuous economic and political activities, a privatized, isolated place of retreat for men returning from the marketplace. To a woman fell the duty of making the house into a proper home, where she was expected to protect the moral and mental health of those entrusted to her. This task of shielding men’s mental health from the strains of a modernizing society ties in with the movement of female repression and simultaneous idealization which was formulated by bourgeois men in the first third of the nineteenth century and which Barbara Welter christened the Cult of True Womanhood (1996). To be a true woman was to play a “female role bound by kitchen and nursery, overlaid with piety and purity, and crowned with subservience” (Smith-Rosenberg, 13). Religion, household and child-rearing also were the realms to which the antebellum psychiatric community assigned the natural place of women. In her seminal study on domestic individualism, Gillian Brown likewise brings up the reciprocal relationship of women’s sphere and the rapidly expanding antebellum economy in arguing that “the domestic cult of true womanhood facilitated the transition to a life increasingly subject to the caprices of the market” (3). The ideology of the domestic sphere therefore gained momentum as reaction to market economy expansion in correlation with the alleged rise of mental disease. This idealization of the home was not only propagated in medical texts, but also in advice books such as Catherine Beecher’s Treatise on Domestic Economy (1841), in which she painted the home as a place of retreat from a “perpetually fluctuating state of society” (18). In a similar vein,Godey’s Lady’s Book, one of the first women’s magazines, instilled the values of mental hygiene and true womanhood in girls, wives, and mothers. Sentimental novels and their stories of the passive and submissive, but morally superior heroine popularized the domestic agenda even further. In fact, most American writers of fiction at that time engaged either with the female ideal and its consequences, or with 10 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

contemporary psychological theories; or, like Nathaniel Hawthorne, with both (Paryż, 27). In the following, two of Hawthorne’s novels, The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of Seven Gables (1851), will be read through the lens of nineteenth-century psychiatry and domesticity. These two novels can be read as case studies, seemingly backing up the claim of the antebellum psychiatric community that domesticity and true womanhood constitute a tremendous influence on mental health, while approaching this claim in oppositional ways. In The Scarlet Letter the central female figure, Hester Prynne, is an adul- teress and does therefore not qualify as a true woman. On the contrary, she is described to be passionate and defiant, and thus, following the logic of the psychiatric imagination of an ideal woman, she cannot exert a beneficial influence on the men connected with her. Her husband, Roger Chillingworth, who has seemingly returned from the dead, is consumed with vengeance after being confronted with his wife’s affair and slips into bodily and mental deterioration while his quest for the lover’s identity and revenge takes its course. He openly accuses Hester of never having fulfilled her domestic duties towards him:

My heart was a habitation large enough for many guests, but lonely and chill, and without a household fire. I longed to kindle one! It seemed not so wild a dream ... that the simple bliss, which is scattered far and wide, for all mankind to gather up, might yet be mine. And so, Hester, I drew thee into my heart, into its innermost chamber, and sought to warm thee by the warmth which thy presence made there! (80)

In comparing the heart to the hearth, the household fire and the home, Haw- thorne puts to use the rhetoric of domestic ideology as employed in women’s magazines, domestic treatises and medical texts and to which he would later take recourse in The House of the Seven Gables. Hester did not fulfill her wifely duties, she could not turn her husband’s house into a home and she refuses to show loyalty to him even in the moment of the above accusations. The novel shows how the lack of a true feminine influence and domestic life in men’s time of need contributes greatly to Chillingworth’s growing monomania, his obsession with revenge and with Arthur Dimmesdale, the town’s minister and Hester’s secret liaison. Although Hester’s heart belongs to Dimmesdale; however, the illegitimate nature of their relationship denies domestic bliss and therefore its presumed stabilizing qualities. What is more, the lack of domesticity, the guilt and shame Dimmesdale feels are contributing to his slow but steady mental and physical degeneration, helped along by his religious fervour, which was seen, like Chillingworth’s long hours of studying, both as a precipitating and predisposing cause of insanity in the eyes of the antebellum psychiatric community (Brigham, 116). Hawthorne presents his heroine as being unable to qualify as a true woman, unable to provide a mentally safe environment for the men associated with her, and thus forfeiting her domesticating power. Placed in Puritan New England, Hester occupies a liminal status at the outskirts of society, both figuratively and literally – two hundred years later she may have joined the ranks of the women of the asylum. Contemporary reactions to the novel were not favourable as critics, both female and male, pointed out its general morbidity. In her scathing review, Margaret Oliphant deplores the novel’s medical approach. In her opinion, the characters of The Scarlet Letter “are exhibited to us rather as a surgeon Maria Kaspirek The Home and the Asylum 11 might exhibit his pet cases, than as a poet shows his men and women”. She continues to complain: “it is not wonderful … that the new science which is called “anatomy of character” should be in great request ... For ourselves, we have small admiration of the spiritual dissecting-knife” (562). Although this and other critiques lament the apparent medicalization of aesthetics, they simultaneously employ a medical language themselves, showing not only how Hawthorne’s novel is inseparable from medico-psychological discourse but also how the application of this discourse was readily perceived by the public. Apart from “the spiritual dissecting knife”, the elements of the novel most criticized were the ones negating the domestic ideology of the bourgeois middle class. In a letter to a friend, Hawthorne himself relates that the novel sent his wife Sophia, “to bed with a grievous headache” and a broken heart due to the novel’s rejection of domestic bliss (Hawthorne, CE, XVI: 312). It might have been those reactions that led him to write his next novel The House of Seven Gables which was more in line with contemporary ideals and expectations and which he professed to be “a more natural and healthy product” of his mind (CE, 421). Whether this is true or not remains to be debated – after all, Hawthorne’s Berkshire neighbour and author of domestic advice books, Catherine Sedgwick, aptly compares reading the book with wandering “through the wards of an insane asylum” (Dewey, 328). Yet, the central female character of the novel, Phoebe Pyncheon, does differ substantially in every way from Hester Prynne as she exhibits the function of a moralizing, domesticating agent – the function of which Hester has been denied. Phoebe fulfils all the criteria of true womanhood as earlier laid out, which enables her to exert a beneficial influence on the “morbid specimen” inhabiting the House of Seven Gables. Stephen Knadler rightly points out that in Hawthorne’s fiction, “the buried referent is the language of modern psychology, which had been invested with institutional authority” (281). This is especially evident in The House of Seven Gables as Knadler shows that Hawthorne, in describing the “inmates” of the mansion, employs a diagnostic narrator as- signing various signs of deviance and mental derangement to the residents (HSG, 218). Hepzibah Pyncheon, suffering from melancholia and a delusional family pride, has “grown to be a kind of lunatic” and needs, from time to time “a walk along the noonday street to keep her sane” (184). Clifford Pyncheon, recently released from an asylum-like prison is described as “partly crazy, partly imbecile”, and exhibits fits of passion and phases of depression and is diagnosed with mania, monomania and moral insanity in the course of the novel. Holgrave embodies the unsteady young man influenced by contemporary technological innovations, reform movements and radical political democratic thought that psychiatrists and politicians feared would tear society apart. He proclaims himself to be “a morbid”, “a mystic” and his mind as having “a twist aside” (218). In this regard, Holgrave, Hepzibah and Clifford are all deviant from the expected social norm and in dire need of the reforming influence of a feminine angel in the house. This role is assigned to Phoebe who takes it up without hesitation. The qualities of true womanhood – piety, purity, subservience – come naturally to her. What is more, her drive to turn the house into ahome, supposed to serve as a mentally sound environment in the eyes of the antebellum psychiatric community, is innate. This is seen as soon as she moves into the gothic residence. Instead of complaining about the dusky bedchamber, Phoebe immediately puts to use her “gift of practical arrangement” to give the room “a look of comfort and habitableness” (71). She continues to degothicize and domesticate the house, as she takes charge of the 12 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

garden and reclaims the vital domestic space of the kitchen hitherto neglected by her cousin Hepzibah. As she scours pots and brews tea, she reminds the reader of Rachel, the domestic angel in Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852). Both Rachel and Phoebe are “diffusing a sort of sunny radiance” while doing housework which they elevate to something sacramental (204). Hawthorne, Beecher Stowe, medical texts on mental hygiene, and domestic advice books all employ the same spiritual rhetoric that paints the domestic work of women in a sacred light. “When women work, that work is characterized as spiritual, transcendental; woman is imagined as an ideal beyond her body, the selfless domestic angel” (Brown, 64). Phoebe’s “homely witch- craft” also transforms shop-keeping from “proper work” which was deemed unnatural for women into a spiritual-transcendental activity. “I am as nice a saleswoman, as I am a housewife”, says Phoebe, and indeed, she excels at both, turning shop- and house-keeping into playful and angelic tasks (HSG, 78). In taking charge of all areas of the house, Phoebe, so to speak, “rekindles the … household-fire” that warms the hearth, both literally and figuratively as the hearth is the symbolic epitome of domesticity (105). As the fire is kindled, the house, formerly described as gloomy, dismal and rotten, is imbued with Phoebe’s friendly presence and finally turned into a home, an elementary condition in order for the residents to be beneficially influenced. Hawthorne’s narrator mirrors this belief spread by antebellum medical and domestic texts, when he declares a home to be “that very sphere which the outcast, the pris- oner, the potentate, the wretch beneath mankind, the wretch aside from it, or the wretch above it, instinctively pines after – a home!” (141). It becomes clear that in Phoebe’s character Hawthorne shares Catherine Beecher’s conviction that “to American women, more than any others on earth, is committed the exalted privilege of extending over the world those blessed influences, that are to renovate degraded man, and clothe all climes with beauty” (12 – 13). And in fact, the young girl’s influence on her wretched cousins is visible almost immediately. It is her active home-making and her gift to transform all worldly tasks into acts of beauty that drives away Hepzibah’s melancholia and Clifford’s nervousness. For the latter, Phoebe is soon irreplaceable, as she fulfils the role of his “nurse, his guardian, and his playmate” (HSG, 138). One of Hawthorne’s literary tableaux, positioning all the novel’s characters as spending a quiet, happy summer Sunday afternoon in the blooming garden, serves to fortify the positive influence of her “healthy presence”. In those garden scenes, the sinister Holgrave “applied himself to the task of enlivening the party”, “even Hepzibah threw off one tint of melancholy”, and “Clifford grew to be the gayest of them all” (156). Especially Clifford profits from the domestic life Phoebe has created. Prematurely aged due to his wrongful imprisonment, he “grew youthful, while she sat beside him” (139). Continuously unsettled by the reproaches of the villainous Jaffrey Pyncheon and swaying between fits of passion and phases of depression, the established domestic sphere, personified by the true woman, has provided him the refuge the psychiatrists declared would stabilize his mental constitution. Holgrave aptly points out to Phoebe that “whatever health, comfort, and natural life exists in the house, is embodied in your person” (216). The domestic scenes in the garden are reminiscent of the moral treatment regimen practiced in American asylums. As David Kennard summarizes in Therapeutic Communities (1983), “moral treatment meant placing the victim of … social pressures in an environment designed to restore inner equilibrium. In their asylums they attempted to create a new, ideal mini-society in which the virtues of order, calm and productive work would replace the Maria Kaspirek The Home and the Asylum 13 chaos and competitiveness of a burgeoning new world” (13). Patients were set up in situations mimicking a calm domestic environment without restraint or punishment, a practice that was endorsed by virtually every superintendent. As early as 1832, Amariah Brigham argues that since insanity is generally produced by morbid excitement of some portions of the brain, it requires for its cure that this disordered organ should be left in absolute repose. Hence arises the benefit of Asylums for Lunatics ... where their minds are not excited, but soothed by kind words and gentle and affectionate treatment (31).

In fact, the psychiatric community unanimously declared the asylum the only appropriate place for lunatics and the only place where a cure could be effected (Connolly, 413). Hawthorne, on the other hand, portrays the asylum as a place of punishment and a looming threat over Clifford’s head. However, as Benjamin Reiss points out, Hawthorne does seem to embrace the therapeutic premise of the moral treatment regimen (5): through Phoebe’s gentle and affectionate treatment and her admittance of an “odd kind of motherly sentiment” toward Clifford she effectively restores his mental balance and is partly able to resocialize him (HSG, 206). Holgrave is the third inhabitant affected by Phoebe’s socializing powers. Hawthorne depicts him as the embodiment of the modern man, albeit a too progressive one for society’s taste. While the character serves to introduce contemporary technological innovations as well as fads and trends of the nineteenth century, Holgrave is also a radical, and first and foremost the personification of social disorder (Pfister, 156). Phoebe is shocked as she is exposed to his passionate fantasy of tearing down society and paving the way for a new kind of political and social order, which is contrary to her own moral compass and her innate obedience to traditional authority. However, Phoebe, in her role as a true woman and automatic reformer of men, manages to have a more than a balancing influence on him as well. “Without such purpose, on her part, and unconsciously on his, she made the House of the Seven Gables like a home to him, and the garden a familiar precinct” (182). Affected by the innocence and morality of the young girl, he withstands the temptation to mesmerize her and eventually falls in love with her. The ending, the most contested part of the novel, sees Holgrave marrying Phoebe, accepting her presidency over “a superior, moral economy” and forsak- ing his radical beliefs in favour of upward mobility (Brown, 6). He confesses that his past life seemed “lonesome and dreary” but as Phoebe crossed the threshold, “hope, warmth, and joy” entered with her. He dispels her fear of him leading her astray from her “own quiet path” and nature by admitting his “presentiment, that, hereafter, it will be my lot to set out trees, to make fences – perhaps, even, in due time, to build a house for another generation – in a word, to conform myself to laws, and the peaceful practice of society” (HSG, 306 – 7). Through this marriage, Holgrave is domesticated and integrated into the conservative community. Phoebe’s impact on the cases of Clifford on the one hand, and Holgrave on the other hand sheds light on the difference between a supportive therapeutic concept of domesticity and a controlling concept of domestication. As both Hawthorne and Amariah Brigham believed, a woman’s positive influence depended on her own ignorance or aversion of the morbid: “Whatever was 14 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

morbid in [Clifford’s] mind and experience, she ignored, and thereby kept their intercourse healthy by the incautious, but, as it were, heaven-directed freedom of her whole conduct” (143). Stephen Knadler specifies, that in Phoebe’s case the ignorance of the morbid is combined with a restraint in judgement as a respite from the continuous judgement of society (297). This constitutes a necessity in order for the “insane” to regain self-control, a conviction that Hawthorne shared with the early psychiatrists.

The sick in mind, and perhaps, in body are rendered more darkly and hopelessly so by the manifold reflection of their disease, mirrored back from all quarters, in the deportment of those about them; they are compelled to inhale the poi- son of their own breath, in infinite repetition. But Phoebe afforded her poor patient a supply of pure air HSG( , 143).

So, while the concept of domesticity defines the “feminine gaze” as a retreat from a fragmented world “by overturning society’s normative judgments” and by defying categorizations of insanity or deviance, the concept of domestication casts women as the main agents in obeying the rules of mental hygiene, as main agents in the “construction of the subject according to the laws of the norm” and society’s reforming impulses (Knadler, 296 – 297). While The Scarlet Letter deals with obsession, mania, and delusion caused by a lack of domesticity, pushing the central female character to a liminal and marginal social status, The House of Seven Gables portrays the home, domesticity and domestication as therapeutic elements in the treatment of mental derangement in contrast to the opinion of the psychiatric community which posited the asylum as the only truly curative place (even though, one might remember, Catherine Sedgwick did call the House of Seven Gables a lunatic asylum). In Phoebe, Hawthorne ascribes to woman an active, reformist, morally superior role, complicit in the perpetuating of an oppressive ideology of femininity. The novel breaks off just as Holgrave and Phoebe embark upon the journey to their new abode and invites the reader to imagine a happily-ever-after. However, when confronted with the nineteenth-century exposés mentioned in the beginning, the reader might just as well imagine a different outcome: What would happen if Phoebe stepped outside her role as the perfect, moral, self-medicating angel and fails to fulfil the domestic agenda? What happens to the happy couple, when the realities of marriage and the burden of pregnancy, childbirth, or the death of a loved one “overtax” Phoebe? What happens, when Phoebe, like Elizabeth Packard and Elizabeth Stone, chooses a different religious denomination than her husband? We can only wonder whether Phoebe would not become another one of those voices telling the story of their institutionalization; or whether Phoebe would belong to that large group of women, whose voices were never to be heard again after entering the asylum.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Beecher, Catherine. A Treatise on Domestic Economy; 1841. New York: Schocken, 1977. Beecher Stowe, Harriet. Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life among the Lowly; Columbus: Charles E. Merrill, 1969. Brigham, Amariah. Remarks on the Influence of Mental Cultivation and Mental Excitement upon Health. Hartford, 1832. Maria Kaspirek The Home and the Asylum 15

Brinckle, Adriana P. “Life Among the Insane.” North American Review 144 (1887): 190 – 99. Brown, Gillian. Domestic Individualism. Imagining Self in Nineteenth-Century America. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Connolly, John. “On Residences for the Insane.” Journal of Mental Science 5 (1859): 411 – 420 Chesler, Phyllis. Women and Madness. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1972. Dewey, Mary, Ed. Life and Letters of Catherine M. Sedgwick. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1872. Gilbert, Sandra M., Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979. Goodell, William. “Clinical Notes on the Extirpation of the Ovaries for In- sanity.” American Journal of Insanity 38 (1882): 294 – 448. Gundry, Richard. “Observations on Puerperal Insanity.” American Journal of Insanity 16 (1860): 294 – 320. Hawthorne, Nathaniel. The Scarlet Letter. 1850; London: Harper Press, 2010. —. The House of the Seven Gables. 1851; Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. —. Centenary Edition of the Works of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Vol. XVI. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1962. Kennard, David. An Introduction to Therapeutic Communities. London: Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 1983. Knadler, Stephen. “Hawthorne’s Genealogy of Madness: „The House of Seven Gables” and Disciplinary Individualism” American Quarterly 47 (1995): 280 – 308. Oliphant, Margaret. “Modern Novelists – Great and Small” Blackwood’s Ed- inburgh Magazine 77 (1855): 554 – 68. Packard, Elizabeth Parsons Ware. Marital Power Exemplified in Mrs. Packard’s Trial, and Self-Defense from the Charge of Insanity. Hartford: Published by the Authoress, 1866. Paryż, Marek. Social and Cultural Aspects of Madness in American Literature, 1798 – 1860. Warsaw: Bellona Pub, 2001. Pfister, Joel.The Production of Personal Life: Class, Gender, and the Psychological in Hawthorne’s Fiction. Stanford: Stanford Press, 1992. Ray, Isaac. Mental Hygiene; 1863. New York: Hafner Reprint, 1968. Reiss, Benjamin. Theaters of Madness: Insane Asylums and Nineteenth-Century American Culture. University of Chicago Press, 2008. Print. Showalter, Elaine. The Female Malady. New York: Viking Penguin, 1985. Smith-Rosenberg, Caroll. Disorderly Conduct. Visions of Gender in Victorian America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. Stone, Elizabeth T. A Sketch of the Life of Elizabeth T. Stone. Published for the Author, 1842. Theriot, Nancy. „Diagnosing Unnatural Motherhood: Nineteenth-century Physicians and ‚Puerperal Insanity’.” American Studies 30/2 (1989): 69 – 88. Welter, Barbara. „The Cult of True Womanhood, 1820 – 1860.” American Quar- terly 18 (1996): 151 – 174. Zochert, Donald. “Science and the Common Man.” Science in America since 1820. Ed. Nathan Reingold. New York: Science History Publications, 7 – 32. Home as Emotional Space

16 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54) Marta Koval Home as Emotional Space in Marilynne Robinson’s Diptych about Gilead

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0011.6716 Home as Emotional Space

Marta Koval Home as Emotional Space 17

Marta Koval is Associate The idea of home has always been open to diverse readings. It is an excellent Professor at the Institute ground for the discussion of a wide range of ontological and epistemological of English and American issues and its transformations are excellent material for cultural and social Studies, University of Gdansk. She published interpretation of identity, attitudes, and mindset of an individual or a specific two books – Play in community. Home has both personal and collective dimensions and can be the Novel, Playing the interpreted from different, sometimes mutually exclusive perspectives as Novel: On John Barth’s Fiction (2000) and “We a shelter or an asylum, and as a prison. The controversy of home as a place to Search the Past … for abandon, return to and be imprisoned in is one of the key concepts in Gilead Our Own Lost Selves. Representations of (2004) and Home (2008) by Marilynne Robinson. The two novels can be read Historical Experience in both as parts of a single whole or as individual works of fiction. Although they Recent American Fiction” share the setting and the characters and can be interpreted as a meaningful (2013) and is the author of many essays on post whole the writer wanted them to be read independently (but not a sequel), WWII American fiction. each as a freestanding book (Fay) 1. The main story focuses on the domestic life of two aging ministers – the Rev. Ames in Gilead and the Rev. Boughton in Home. Their histories are narrated in a way that brings together the ideas of moral responsibility, transcendentalist admiration of human uniqueness, political urgencies of the mid-20th century, and theological concerns. The town of Gilead as a larger home and a locus of domesticity and tradition and respective family homes of the characters become centers of meaning in the novels. The micro world of family home has a particular significance for the writer herself as a reflection of universal concerns and urgencies. As Robinson noted in her interview for The Paris Review, “the reality that we experience is part of the whole fabric of reality. To pretend that the universe is somewhere else doing something is really not true. We’re right in the middle of it. Utterly dependent on it, utterly defined by it” (Fay). Family home performs multiple functions in both novels although in Gilead the idea of home is less significant and rather one-dimensional. In this novel, which is a confessional letter of the seventy-six-year-old Ames home transforms from a lonely and gloomy place into the locus of family happiness:

We have no home in this world, I used to say, and then I’d walk back up the road to this old place and make myself a pot of coffee and a fried-egg sandwich and listen to the radio, when I got one, in the dark as often as not … I grew up in parsonages. I’ve lived in this one most of my life, and I’ve visited in a good many others, because my father’s friends and most of our relatives also lived in parsonages. And when I thought about it in those days, which wasn’t too often, I thought this was the worst of them all, the draftiest and the dreariest. Well, that was my state of mind at the time. It’s a perfectly good old house, but I was all alone in it then. And that made it seem strange to me. I didn’t feel very much at home in the world, that was a fact. Now I do. (Robinson 2004, 4)

1 One of the critics referred to Gilead and Home as a “dovetailed diptych” (Scott). This definition is no longer precise because with the publication of Lila in 2014 it became a triptych/ trilogy. However, this essay focuses on Robinson’s first two novels, thus, for the sake of this text, they are referred to as a diptych. In Lila, the idea of home does not affect the characters’ development in a meaningful or convincing way, thus including the third novel in the analysis did not seem to bring anything new to Robinson’s vision of home. 18 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

For Ames, the idea of house overlaps with the idea of home and after his marriage both undergo a crucial transformation. In the novel, it is presented in a very physical way: Ames’s much younger wife Lila and their little son Bobby fill the house with joy, life, warmth, and new smells and sounds. Comfortable and domestic atmosphere of Ames’s home encourages sincerity and makes the awareness of the approaching death even sadder. Thinking about home brings into play the notion of tradition which “being at home” implies. In The Need for Roots by Simone Weil that was published in 1949, only a little earlier than the action in Robinson’s novels takes place and thus presumably reflective of a global state of mind of the time, the French philosopher explores the notions of obligation, order, obedience, security, responsibility, freedom, security, and uprootedness and their manifestation at different levels (national, regional, and local). Weil views uprootedness as the “most dangerous malady to which human societies are exposed” (47). In her mind, it emanates from a departure from tradition (“loss of the past” as she calls it) that may have far-reaching tragic consequences as the history of humanity shows (119). Although Weil analyzes uprootedness from a broad historical, political and social perspective and sees a possibility of “growing roots” in Christian religion, her ideas can be used for individual character interpretations beyond the limits of religious reading. On a microscale, tradition is inevitably linked to the idea of family and home as a metaphorical space where it is created and guarded. In Gilead, this perspective is made obvious only once when Ames’s elder brother Edward who went to Germany to study philosophy comes home to visit his parents and refuses to say grace at the dinner table because he cannot do it “in good consciousness.” The father takes it as a profound and unacceptable disrespect for family traditions which Edward is never forgiven – he leaves his parents’ home and never visits it again while his younger brother is not allowed to maintain any contacts with him. The parents blamed Edward’s departure from the family nest and his stay in Europe for the emergence of atheistic views. Ames mentions this episode only briefly because in Gilead neither the idea of home nor the idea of tradition or family roots are threatened in any significant way. Home here is presented as the locus of unchallenged domesticity, stability, psychological intimacy, and emotional comfort. In the second part of the diptych the notion of home becomes particularly powerful and multi-dimensional – in fact, it is one of the crucial philosophical concepts of the novel. As the title implies, Home creates the cult of the family place and charges it with multiple, often contradictory meanings: a guardian of traditions, an asylum, an emotional prison and the first school. Tadeusz Sławek in his speculations about the “where” nature of home and oikology points to the arrogance of the idea of home as “my,” “my own,” and “family” space, that is the kind of space that excludes otherness and opposes the intrusion from the outside. The Boughtons home is very much this kind of place – friendly and forgiving to those who belong there and at the same time detached from the outside world. Nothing changed there over years “except to fade or scar or wear” (Robinson 2008, 52) and it was as if “frozen” in the past. Home is the central metaphor of the novel. Most of the action evolves around the Boughtons’ family house – kitchen, living room, porch, and garden. “Difficult, ordinary life” that the house and its inhabitants live turns to be even more difficult with the return of Jack – Boughton’s prodigal son who was away from home for twenty years. The figure of Jack makes the house and home acquire a particularly powerful moral significance and adds a painful ethical Marta Koval Home as Emotional Space 19 urgency to the story. One of the reviewers of Home described it as “book full of doubleness and paradox, at once serene and volcanic, ruthless and forgiving. It is an anguished pastoral, a tableau of decency and compassion that is also an angry and devastating indictment of moral cowardice and unrepentant, unacknowledged sin” (Scott). Jack’s return makes the controversial character of family home even more explicit and highlights its transformation which is very different from the one we observed inGilead . Multiple functions and roles of the family house intertwine although in all of them it is presented as a space where moral dilemmas can be verified or challenged. The image of home − so dear but so obsolete and dysfunctional – acquires the meaning of the idealized past. Home becomes for its inhabitants an identity framework that “incorpo- rates a crucial set of qualitative distinctions,” which allows an individual to function with the sense that some action, or mode of life, or mode of feeling is incomparably higher than the others which are more readily available to us … The sense of what the difference consists in may take different forms. One form of life may be seen as fuller, another way of feeling and acting purer, a mode of feeling or living as deeper, a style of life as more admirable, a given demand as making an absolute claim against other merely relative ones, and so on. (Taylor, 19 – 20)

Whereas in Gilead Ames’s house is mainly presented as a physical space charged with significant though uncontroversial emotions, inHome the house is not only an element of the townscape but it is an ethical checkpoint for the older and younger Boughtons. It establishes a moral framework for all God-fearing and decent members of the family except Jack. For a large and joyful family, their home in Gilead is the stalwart of traditions and stability. It has its rules and conventions that for years remained unchanged and affected the behavior of its inhabitants who kept coming there with their wives, children, and grandchildren. Even the interior of the place reflect the atmosphere of good old days: large pieces of furniture and crowded rooms, styled to reflect standards of respectability and serviceability and “commemorate heroic discipline and foresight” (Robinson 2008, 52). Thus, even elements of the material world become one of those qualitative distinctions of the family collective identity. The house itself is a special character of the novel and its life, history, and charming and at the same time oppressive atmosphere is tuned to significant family events. The house has “a soul” of its own – an inner identity, which family members feel in different ways depending on their life situation at a given moment. For Glory, it is a deserted and heartbroken place while her father feels it as a living creature, a life-long companion that can suffer and rejoice:

The house embodied for him the general blessedness of his life, which was manifest, really indisputable. And which he never failed to acknowledge, especially when it stood over against particular sorrow. Even more frequently after their mother died he spoke of the house as if it were an old wife, beautiful for every comfort it had offered, every 20 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

grace, through all the long years. It was a beauty that would not be apparent to every eye … It was a good house, her (Glory’s – M.K.) father said, meaning that it had a gracious heart however awkward its appearance. (Robinson 2008, 3 – 4)

For Boughton’s now grown-up children the house is an emotional and psychological fortress of genuine domesticity and a museum of the past they admire but would not take with them into their present lives:

There on the immutable terrain of their childhood her brothers and sisters could and did remember those years in great detail, their own memories, but more often the pooled memory they saw no special need to portion out among them. They looked at photographs and went over the old times and laughed, and their father was well pleased. (Robinson 2008, 8)

The house itself and the patriarchal father created a special ethos of the family which everyone was expected to share. Those who failed to do so or whose life did not work out the way it should suffered and tried to hide the truth as Glory did. Or they painfully looked for answers and explanations and also suffered like Jack because the ethos of home did not offer many alternatives. Glory returned to Gilead after her private life collapsed. Her father needed someone around and she needed an emotional shelter. Gilead seemed an ideal place for it – everything there reminded her of the happy past that was safely locked in time and protected from any changes or intrusions of the present:

She was thoroughly used to Gilead as the subject and scene of nostalgic memory. How all the brothers and sisters except Jack had loved to come home, and how ready they always were to leave again. How dear the old place and the old stories were to them, and how far abroad they had scattered. The past was a very fine thing, in its place. But her returning now, to stay, as her father said, had turned memories portentous. To have it overrun its bounds this way and become present and possibly future, too − they all knew it was a thing to be regretted. (Rob- inson 2008, 7 – 8)

For Glory, the idea of home was closely linked to the authority of her father. She returned to Gilead to help him, to heal her emotional wounds, and simply to give herself some time for contemplation. Gilead belonged to the past, so it gave a good chance to stay undisturbed. Earlier, when she lived alone she thought about her family home and diligently repeated the old rituals – it helped her to “remember the household she came from, to induce in herself the unspecific memory of a comfort she had not been really conscious of until she left it behind” (Robinson 2008, 102). In this instance, family home clearly functions as an asylum – a temporary shelter one will soon leave (Sławek). Family home that gave a sense of comfort and security was also the kind of place she would never create for herself. Rather unexpectedly, Glory reveals her unfulfilled dream: her house would have been very different from “this good Marta Koval Home as Emotional Space 21 and blessed and fustian and oppressive tabernacle of Boughton probity and kind intent” (Robinson 2008, 102) − it would be spacious, sunlit, and simple. Thus the old home full of traditions is no longer viable and its atmosphere and physical shape become restrictive, if not oppressive. However, Glory will never be able to recognize it openly because the identity framework established in her old home does not allow for it. For Glory, home implies social, economic and religious rituals that ensure a sense of an asylum that is separated from the rest of the world:

How to announce the return of comfort and well-being except by cooking something fragrant. That is what her mother always did. After every calamity of any significance she would fill the atmosphere of the house with the smell of cinnamon rolls or brownies, or with chick- en and dumplings, and it would mean, This house has a soul that loves us all, no matter what. It would mean peace if they had fought and amnesty if they had been in trouble. (Robinson 2008, 252)

The old Boughton cherished his vision of home and wanted his family to share it which they, except for Jack, diligently and even willingly did. He knew that his son did not feel at home in their house bustling with life and joy and tried to explain it to himself: “[H]e was always alone, the way he used to be, and I would wonder what kind of life he could have, with no one even to care how he was, what he needed” (Robinson 2008,169). Jack as a petty thief, a wanton trickster, a mean-spirited transgressor, and a drinker seemed to be an eternal misfit. After a twenty-year absence he returned looking for an asylum like Glory and trying to come to terms with the idea of predestination and his bitter fate. Although Jack rejects the identity framework established by his family and his old home, it is the only identity framework available to him. He refers to it in his attempts to place himself emotionally and psychologically and, on a larger scale, to verify his life: “I came here because everything had fallen to pieces … . I was clutching at a straw, coming to Gilead. No doubt about that. I’ve had some experience with them. Straws” (Robinson 2008, 208). Jack returned to Gilead for help and he often uses the phrase “coming home”: “I just wanted to come home. Even if I couldn’t stay. I wanted to see the place. I wanted to see my father. I was – bewildered, I suppose … . I was scared to come home. … My life is endless pain and difficulty for reasons that are no doubt apparent to anyway I pass on the street but obscure to me” (Robinson 2008, 210 – 11). Thus we can claim that even for a misfit like him home performed its crucial function: it established an identity frame. Loyalty to tradition and unwillingness to change the established rules creates a paradoxical situation: the house could no longer be home, it turned into a museum and a place of worship for younger family members who came there for holidays, and an asylum but also a psychological prison for both Jack and Glory. The idea of the asylum implies tension between different realities (the old one to be escaped and the new one to be embraced) and presumes the acceptance of and adjustment to the rules of the new place by someone who decides to stay there (Slawek). Gilead was not a new place for Jack. He knew how things used to be there but he himself became a different person and the reality of his life had little to do with the past or present reality of Gilead. He wanted to know whether he was doomed to be a villain and whether he 22 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

would be able to live in Gilead together with his colored civil wife and their son. A decent home of the old kind Presbyterian minister welcomed him back but would not accept his changed life. A manicured reality of happy home did not open to a new experience of racial heterogeneity and tolerance. For Jack, his parents’ home in Gilead became an asylum. However, as Sławek claims, the idea of home as the asylum implies a transient nature of the place where one can find a shelter but must accept rules and terms imposed by the host. At that point, home can transform into a prison and in order to avoid it, Jack leaves Gilead again. Stability and awareness of traditions that were expected to protect from loneliness perversely transformed the place into a citadel of loneliness. Soli- tude in general is something Robinson admires and cherishes herself. In one of her interviews she speaks of the blessings of solitude which for her serves as an inspiration. At a certain point, the writer called solitude “the cream of existence” (Fay). This is the type of solitude that Ames experienced. Jack and Glory’s loneliness is neither creative nor inspiring. It enhances misery and alienation. For the protagonists of the novel, being at home does not mean mental or emotional comfort. On the contrary, it makes the dilemmas they face and the challenges they deal with even more complicated and painful. The difficult experience is something the writer values above all and makes her characters go through:

The ancients are right: the dear old human experience is a singular, difficult, shadowed, brilliant experience that does not resolve into being comfortable in the world. The valley of the shadow is part of that, and you are depriving yourself if you do not experience what humankind has experienced, including doubt and sorrow. We experience pain and difficulty as failure instead of saying, I will pass through this, everyone I have ever admired has passed through this, music has come out of this, literature has some out of it . We should think of our humanity as a privilege. (Fay)

However, contrary to Robinson’s declarations, pain and suffering do not make any of the novel’s characters undergo catharsis. The pain of being at home only forces them, Jack in particular, to realize their helplessness and loneliness and enhance doubt and sorrow. For us as readers, the emotions of the characters that being at home brings into the foreground are a way to see a contradictory and restrictive nature of home where the moral imperative of the family makes the them tell lies and discourages from revealing and sharing their doubts. The austerity of the Boughtons’ family house contrasts with the warmth of the garden around it. At the moment of Jack’s arrival it is still shrubbery and for all Glory’s efforts looks neglected. But even as such it radiates warmth and plays with colors as if nature itself welcomes the heartbroken Glory and Jack offering them moments of emotional comfort:

They had opened the flowers of bleeding hearts to reveal the tiny lady in her bath. Corn on the cob they had all loved, though they hated to shuck it, and they had all loved melons. Jack tended these things with particular care. Marta Koval Home as Emotional Space 23

When he was restless he would sometimes walk out into the garden and stand there with his hands on his hips, as if it comforted him to see their modest flourishing … His father watched from the porch day after day and asked him what it was he was planting … Jack brought him a sprig of bleeding heart, the bud of a pumpkin blos- som. “Yes,” the old man said, as he did when memory stirred. “Those were good times.” (Robinson 2008, 151)

Colors and scents of flowers and their undeniable and unsophisticated beauty imply simplicity and emotional intimacy, which the house fails to ensure. The multifunctional and controversial character of home in Robinson’s novels brings into play issues of tradition, roots, responsibility and freedom of choice. Home transforms from an asylum into a place of hidden emotional struggle. Coming home and abandoning home are the two aspects of the protagonists’ life – none easier than the other. Robinson’s novels subvert the stereotype of protective domesticity by affirming its restrictive and selective character.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Fay, Sarah. Interview with Marilynne Robinson. The Paris Review – The Art of Fiction No 198, Marilynne Robinson (Fall 2008). 20 July 2015. http:// www.theparisreview.org/interviews/5863/the-art-of-fiction-no-198-marilynne-robinson\. Robinson, Marilynne. Gilead. New York: Farrar, Straus, Giroux, 2004. Robinson, Marilynne. Home. New York: Picador, 2008. Scott, A.O. “Return of the Prodigal Son.” The New York Times 21 September 2008. 20 July 2015. http://www.nytimes.com/2008/09/21/books/review/ Scott-t.html?_r=0. Sławek, Tadeusz, “Gdzie? Rozważania oikologiczne.” Antropos? 16 – 17 (2001). 21 October 2013. http://www.ojkologia.us.edu.pl/artykuly/75/gdzie-rozwa- zania oikologiczne/. Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self. The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989. Weil, Simone. The Need for Roots; Prelude to a Declaration of Duties Towards Mankind. Trans. Arthur Wills. London and New York: Routledge, 2003. The Homely Sublime in Space

24 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54) Kornelia Boczkowska The Homely Sublime in Space Science Documentary Films: Domesticating the Feeling of Homelessness in Carl Sagan’s Cosmos and Its Sequel DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0011.6717 The Homely Sublime in Space

Kornelia Boczkowska The Homely Sublime in Space 25

Kornelia Boczkowska The release of Carl Sagan’s Cosmos: A Personal Voyage, the thirteen-part tel- is a senior lecturer evision series broadcast by the PBS in 1980, marked a genuine revolution in in the Department of the development of American space science documentary film. Authored by Studies in Culture at the Faculty of English, Adam Carl Sagan, Ann Druyan and Steven Soter and presented by Sagan himself, Mickiewicz University the production cherished an unprecedented popularity worldwide, being the in Poznan. She holds most extensively watched PBS series as of 2009 and having won the prestig- a Ph.D. in English with a specialization in ious Emmy and Peabody Awards. Presumably, some of the chief reasons American culture studies, for its global success include the use of groundbreaking special effects, an and an M.A. in Russian and English. She has atmospheric score composed by Vangelis, a novel scientist-hosted format published on American as well as a relatively accessible, philosophical and stirring narration. The and Russian space art fact that the series is described as “a watershed moment for science-themed as well as on landscape and travelogue forms in television programming” (Itzkoff) is also due to the unquestionable authority the postwar American and visionary rhetoric of Sagan who made his name not only as a television experimental and figure as well as an effective science advocate and communicator, but also avant-garde cinema. as a scientist and author of both popular science and science fiction books written for a broad audience. Krone praises Sagan’s notable contribution to the popularization of astronomy as follows (68):

Carl Sagan searched for worlds “fabulously unlike Brook- lyn” since at age nine, in 1942, he was fascinated by the adventures on Mars created by Edgar Rice Burroughs. That began his interest, followed by his career as astron- omer, astrophysicist, exobiologist, Director of Cornell University’s Laboratory for Planetary Studies, and Pro- fessor of Astronomy and Space Sciences. He was a best- selling author – twelve books and 400 journal articles.

Even more importantly, however, a vast experience Sagan gained allowed him to alter the image of space science documentary and render his series seen as canonical in its visual and narrative conventions. A sophisticated use of modern art, animation and digital imagery became not only iconic in terms of science visualizing techniques (Lomberg, 194), but it also reinforced a sense of transcendence while drawing on a mediated representation of the cosmic and astronomical sublime. Also, Sagan’s ideological rhetoric appears to be evidently founded on cosmological issues traditionally tackled within the province of religion (Krone, 68; Klassen and Zimmermann, 30; Lessl, 175). Lessl argues that while maintaining a hybrid generic form, Cosmos (175)

sets the instructional elements of the series within a larger mythical framework reminiscent of numerous works of science fiction. The presentation of science (…) creates a mythic understanding of science which serves for television audiences the same needs that religious discourse has traditionally satisfied for churchgoers.

Specifically, the core of Sagan’s ideology, as observable in the production, clearly centers around spreading the idea of human uniqueness and weaknesses as well as a continuous need to search for extraterrestrial life and intelligence (Krone, 68 – 69). His best-selling book Intelligent Life in the Universe, co-written with Iosif Shklovsky, largely contributed to vivifying the public interest in detecting alien signals and the official establishment of a multi-million-dollar SETI programme by NASA in 1971. An open-minded, critical and holistic 26 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

approach to studying the nature of science and mankind’s connection to the cosmos is best summarized by Sagan himself (276): “It [studying science] has two rules. First: there are no sacred truths, all assumptions must be critically examined; arguments from authority are worthless. Second: whatever is inconsistent with the facts must be discarded or revised.” It seems that within American astroculture studies, the subject of space science documentary film, though having a considerably long tradition, has been hardly explored in scholarly terms. The post-war years, often characterized by a popular science boom (Gregory and Miller, 69), brought some revolutionary changes in the development of the genre, which showed a gradual tendency to move toward more complicated representational extremes. Largely triggered by the rise of specialist science writers and development of television, some early science documentaries have taken up the subject of outer space and space exploration by producing a particular form of textuality, thus “mediating between arcane forms of otherwise inaccessible knowledge, and popular everyday forms of understanding” (Silverstone, 72). As a subgenre of the science documentary, a space science documentary utilizes a standard and simple format by providing explanatory voice and illustrative visuals in the style of photographic realism (Mayeri, 64). In some early documentaries of this kind, including Disney famous television series, Man in Space, Man and the Moon and Mars and Beyond (1955 – 1957), linear essaylike structure was achieved through the combination of still images, video, graphics and animation with a voice-over narration, which was likely to convey certain ideological subtexts. However, in some later programmes produced since the late 1970s during the second science boom, the task of portraying largely unseeable astronomical phenomena or futuristic space technology can be deemed more complex. Therefore, in order to present the viewers with visually appealing, simplified and comprehensible representations, space science documentaries had to rely on a set of familiar cultural and historical conventions of depicting space- and space exploration-related concepts. One of such conventions is centered around the idea of domestic space, defined as “an environment that can exhibit a sense of place for the dweller” (Clemons, Searing and Tremblay, 130), where a sense of place is understood as belonging to and feeling secure within the given surroundings (Hiss, 35). Naturally, the concept has evolved in a strong relation to the self as well as home design and interior, which tend to convey symbolic meanings and thus become capable of transforming a space into a place. Unsurprisingly then, domestic space has been often explored in a highly interdisciplinary manner (see e.g. Altman and Wermer), combining perspectives of environmental psychologists (see e.g. Brierley), anthropologists (see e.g. Cieraad), social or art historians (see e.g. Foy and Schlereth; Briganti and Mezei) and human geographers (see e.g. Duncan and Lambert), who studied the subject from the points of view of material culture as well as social, cultural and consumer studies. Interestingly, however, the notion has been hardly examined in the context of space studies and astroculture, the latter of which stands for “a het- erogeneous array of images and artifacts, media and practices that all aim to ascribe meaning to outer space” (Geppert, 8). As pointed out by Schmölders, since the beginning of the space age era, humans have literally domesticated outer space primarily through utilizing space and homemade technology (59):

Scholars, engineers and designers plan hotels and sub- divisions for the moon and Mars, invent space elevators, Kornelia Boczkowska The Homely Sublime in Space 27 sell space trips, and so forth. Furthermore, the Coper- nican shock has dissipated in a major way because of the Internet. Thanks to outer space and satellite-based communication, any private computer owner can use the technology of Google Earth to look up terrestrial addresses, as though they were looking in at earth from outer space. Conversely, Google Sky is opening up a re- verse perspective into the depths of space, based in large part on Hubble Space Telescope images.

At the same time, this clearly metaphoric process of domestication has involved both taming and trivializing the feeling of sublime homelessness present in space-related content exposed in the media, particularly since the advent of television (Schmölders, 59). Some of the most common ways of achieving it is, as mentioned before, an apparent dependence on a set of familiar cultural codes, defined as “symbols and systems of meaning that are relevant to members of a particular culture” (Hyatt and Simons, 23). This approach has been used, for instance, in psychological studies of space exploration, where the motif of home or homely surroundings, often represented by terrestrial substitutes, played a pivotal role in a series of experiments conducted on the ISS crew members (see e.g. Bishop, 47 – 78). In science documentary film, however, various conceptualizations of outer space also rely on domestication of the sublime as explored in literary theory or visual arts. For example, Sandner contends that in the context of the fantastic discourse, this process synthesizes the sublime with the beautiful and brings it “into the human sphere in an essentially connective and unifying way,” while drawing on Longinus’ theory of the sublime seen as human interaction, which reinforces a sense of safety (166). Meanwhile, Blair proposes the concept of the domestic sublime defined as a sublimity rooted in contemporary domesticity where Kantian sublime’s limitlessness “resides in the presentation of excess labor, materials and potential” related to the home or human dwelling in general. On the other hand, in line with Geertsema’s hypothesis that domestication and subjection of wilderness paradoxically empower nature, one may argue that the representation of the cosmos privileges outer space environment through connoting with the process of colonization and progress (100). Hence, as suggested above, the feeling of homelessness, often accompanying contemplating the realm of outer space, appears to be inseparably connected with the (domesticated) sublime, lavishly present in the U.S. space-related imagery produced since the outset of the space age era. In one of her recent works, Picturing the Cosmos: Hubble Space Telescope Images and the Astronomical Sublime, Kessler comments more broadly on 20th century practices of representing space subjects in the U.S. culture where scientists and artists often utilize the mode of the sublime when translating complex data into a number of popular images depicting galaxies, nebulae or star fields. More specifically, she argues that rather than coming up with an entirely novel system of visualizing space, they have extended an existing one, inseparable with the idea of exploration and settlement, to subsequent stages of space exploration. This mode, used extensively in the last few decades, is that of the mythicized American frontier that has “functioned as the framework through which a new frontier was seen” (Kessler, 8). A similar view is expressed by Sage who, in the introduction to his recently published book, How Outer Space Made America: Geography, Organi- zation and the Cosmic Sublime, investigates the way and reasons why the U.S. 28 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

space programme reproduced the nation’s geographical, cultural and political imagination by appealing to the image of America as the transcendental and sublime state. The scholar claims that audiences exposed to the visions of outer space and space exploration, whether generated by space telescoped or popular media, are always confronted with a strong sense of sublime vastness and infinity (Sage 2014, 1):

Those passionate about outer space have long been in awe of its apparent ‘spacelessness,’ outer space appears un- bounded, infinite, sublime. When we see or think through Space, whether by looking at images produced by a powerful space telescope or enjoying a science-fiction film, we can journey in an instant to the most distant reaches of the universe, and simultaneously billions of years back in time, or into a barely imaginable future, far beyond the possibility of human life.

Meanwhile, in the wake of earlier scholarly discussions on the cosmic sublime, Lyotard suggests that the sublime of transcendence is sometimes replaced by the sublime of immanence (53 – 54). More specifically, he argues that humans’ capability of feeling and imagining the cosmos constitutes the cause for sorrow as they realize the constraints of their own physical condition. In this way, Lyotard challenges a largely positive vision of the sublime, stemming mostly from the vastness of space and limitless possibilities created by new space technologies, by noting that modern astrophysics also draws on evoking a negative sublime feeling by providing their audiences with painful and finite outer space experiences. As noted before, Sagan’s reliance on evoking both the cosmic and astronomical sublime is skillfully combined with creating a set of familiar, homely surroundings, which tend to trivialize and domesticate outer space environment as presented to the viewer. With regard to editing, this measure is achieved by means of dramatized sequences, rostrum camerawork, time-lapse, slow-motion and microphotography, hand-made animation as well as the combination of live location and studio footage with composited sequences of Sagan walking across a cosmological calendar (Campbell, 14). Meanwhile, in terms of narrative conventions, a clear reference to domestic elements has been made by introducing a special, curiosity-fueled vessel called “Spaceship of the Imagination,” which, with Sagan travelling aboard as the captain, journeys through space and time, familiarizing the audience with various astronomical objects and phenomena. Reminiscent of a dandelion seed from the outside, the interior appears to be both futuristic and cozy through merging Star Trek- like shapes with cathedral ceilings. On the other hand, an enormous window positioned in the middle of the spacecraft’s cockpit reinforces the sublimity of outer space views while the vehicle traverses the far-flung reaches of the remote universe, thus literally connecting the homely space with the fearful, yet ravishing unknown. What is more, throughout the episodes, Sagan makes numerous references to the cultural heritage of the world’s nations while narrating, explaining or speculating on the depicted scientific concepts. While the most well known instances of this kind include a description of the ancient Library of Alexandria, a selection of samurai warriors, the Dutch tradition of sailing ship explorers, the Anasazi’s ceremonial calendars or the destruction of the Aztecs by Spanish conquistadors, symbols and systems of meaning related Kornelia Boczkowska The Homely Sublime in Space 29 to American history and culture encompass some commonly recognizable figures, places and events. These embrace, for example, Edgar Rice Burroughs’ science fiction novels, Percival Lowell’s famous observations of Martian “canals,” Robert Goddard’s rocket-building experiments, the U.S. space programme’s achievements or natural and urban locations, such as Jackson Lake, Wyoming, Rockefeller Center, St. Patrick’s Cathedral or Brooklyn. Particularly the latter can be deemed representative of the homely sublime, the aesthetic category, which seeks to render certain visual elements of the Romantic wilderness “comparatively safe” (LeMenager, 52). For instance, such an impression may be reinforced by the urban sublime of New York City, present in the third episode of the series, Harmony of the Worlds. Here, the view of the seventh-floor roof gardens of the Rockefeller International Building as well as the bird’s-eye view the Rockefeller Center itself, St. Patrick’s Cathedral or neighbouring streets is likely to foster the feeling of sublime dread and fear in the face of the impossible totality of uncanny urban technostructure (Den Tandt, 25). At the same time, except for its overwhelming quality, the height and magnitude of the visible buildings and skyscrapers, whose image accompanies Sagan’s scientific and philosophical narration on astrology, place the viewer on a continuum from the divine to the domestic cityscape. The majestic and gloomy Manhattan, oscillating between the sublime and the uncanny (Lindner, 63), simultaneously awes and retains human characteristics; its widely recognizable modern skyline and crowded places create a sense of security and familiarity combined with a sense of mystique and transcendence. A similar function is served by introducing other iconic filming locations, whether in America or abroad, the latter of which include Pythagoras’ Cave in Samos, the Great Hypostyle Hall in Egypt, the Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, England or Cavendish Laboratory at the University of Cambridge. Specifically, however, the U.S. locations, such as Lowell Observatory in Flagstaff, Arizona (Episode 5: “Blues for a Red Planet”), the Great Kiva at Chaco Canyon, New Mexico (Episode 3: “The Harmony of the Worlds”), Sagan’s home district in Brooklyn, New York (Episode 7: “The Backbone of Night”), Very Large Ar- ray, New Mexico (Episode 10: “The Edge of Forever”) or The Regina Maris at Glen Cove Creek, New York (Episode 11: “The Persistence of Memory”), all seem to incorporate the natural sublime, typically embracing such qualities as terrorizing and awe-inspiring vastness, infinity or magnificence, with the homely sublime evoking a sense of monumental, yet domesticated and somehow confined place. When the audience is in turn confronted with outer space environment, mostly generated digitally, the thrill of cosmic and astronomical sublime, at both microscopic and macroscopic scale, is balanced with the interior of Sagan’s spaceship or the view of some familiar locations used by the scientist to strengthen the effect of human sublime, the symbol of mankind and its deep interconnection with the cosmos. Unsurprisingly, the series’ 2014 sequel, Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, written by Ann Druyan Steven Soter and presented by Neil deGrasse Tyson, follows numerous conventions utilized by its predecessor. Broadcast on ten 21st Century Fox networks, the programme, though not as popular as Sagan’s, was generally praised by the critics and won several television broadcasting awards, including the Emmy and Peabody Awards. As the producers’ goal was to capture the spirit of the original Cosmos, it followed the thirteen-episode and scientist-hosted format as well as used a similar storytelling approach by introducing such elements as the Ship of the Imagination and the Cos- mic Calendar. Naturally, the use of far more state-of-the-art and extensive 30 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

computer-generated graphics, animation footage and special effects allowed to present the viewers with more elaborate and convincing representations of astronomical phenomena. Tyson, one of America’s most pre-eminent science communicators inspired by Sagan as a college student, intended to include a number of “uplifting themes” (“Neil deGrasse Tyson”) in the script capable of fostering wonder and skepticism that would ascribe meaning to the discussed concepts in the way they reflect philosophical and religious ponderings of 21st century audience. Below Campbell draws certain parallels between the original series and its sequel in terms of selected representational strategies (14):

Tyson’s programme also neatly links together the trends of 21st century factual entertainment programmes, using CGI extensively throughout in a variety of forms, with some of the techniques of science programmes of the 1950s. Sagan’s series had used dramatic reenact- ments of historical discoveries, although only his voice is heard narrating the events being depicted by actors, whereas Tyson’s series reconstructs historical sequences in a drawn animation style, very similar in appearance to that used in Disneyland films about space in the 1950s, and featuring a range of actors presenting the events being recounted.

Naturally, there are also differences between the series considering their reliance on the aesthetics of the sublime. Namely, it seems that the sequel is likely to draw on the cosmic and astronomical sublime in favour of the homely sublime evident, for instance, in MacFarlane’s updated design of a highly futuristic and largely transparent Spaceship expected to “remain timeless and very simple” (Mandi) with the ceiling projecting the future events and the floor envisioning those that occurred in the past. Also, an expansive and ethereal backing score by Alan Silvestri as well as a number of terrestrial locations, mostly set in places, which expose boundless and untamed or picturesque and tranquil qualities of nature often inspired by the Hudson River School’s aesthetics, clearly contribute to this impression. Following Campbell’s argument, A Spacetime Odyssey appears to rely on the three recurring visual tropes typical for post-2010s space science documentary films, including astronomical imaging, documentary cinematography and screen fiction aesthetics (67 – 73). While the first trope is particularly evident in the use of diffraction spikes in the series’ animated sequence, which recounts Giordano Bruno’s vision of the scale of the universe (Episode 1: “Standing Up in the Milky Way”), the latter usually manifest themselves in a ubiquitous adoption of docu- and photorealist techniques like flare lens as well as natu- ralistic light and colour combined with the Magisterial Gaze, which denotes “seeing the landscape from an elevated perspective” where “the viewer assumes a Godlike gaze” (Sage 2008, 32). According to Campbell, except for numerous CGI sequences, the Magisterial Gaze effect is utilized in the representation of Tyson’s ship of imagination, which (75)

explicitly positions him as able to transition between a downwards gaze to the cosmological past, an upwards- gaze to the future, and a horizontal gaze for the present. The movement of the ship around, over, under, into and Kornelia Boczkowska The Homely Sublime in Space 31 through objects constantly shifts this perspective, but always seems to retain a notion of authoritative gaze over the images being shown.

Another recurrent visual trope persistent throughout the series is that of the Grand Tour framing of space, which is constructed “into three distinct phases starting with a terrestrial origin and looking into space, then touring the solar system, and finally into deep space back to the dawn of the cosmos and the Big Bang” (Campbell, 76). In A Spacetime Odyssey, this effect is achieved with the image of cliffs and a campfire, the latter of which evokes associations with the human progress or, more specifically, ancient technologies and beliefs related to astrology, that later give way to Tyson’s narrative on the Big Bang, the origin and evolution of life, the speed and the wave theory of light, the age and paleogeography of Earth, electromagnetism, greenhouse effect, the composition and fate of stars, dark energy and dark matter or extraterrestrial life. Campbell argues that such a paradigm “offers a clear encapsulation of Kant’s mathematical sublime, as the vastness of the universe is shown to be containable within a conceptual framework of understanding, and the technological means of both obtaining that understanding and visualizing it” (80). In this context, the series relies on the cosmic, astronomical and technological 1 rather than homely sublime as it often invokes a sense of movement of a given object toward the viewer, hence implying a “dynamic, kinetic gaze” (Bukatman, 99). In their attempt to categorize A Spacetime Odyssey‘s recurring themes, Mehta, Mishra and Henriksen make a similar observation by noting that it specifically draws on the notion of the sublime and intellectual beauty, Grand Design, which “lies in recognizing the truth and the fundamental structures that govern the universe,” and aesthetic experience enhanced by western classical music, which creates “an aesthetically satisfying ambience.” It seems almost indisputable that the late 1970s and 1980s witnessed a revival of public interest in popular science, which experienced a clear decline since the mid-1960s. The trend, dubbed by Newsweek “the science boom” (Schardy, 104) and partly triggered by the Apollo mission-inspired environmental and New Age movements, led to the appearance of Cosmos and publication of several new popular science magazines, including Astronomy (the first issue appeared in 1973) or Omni or Star & Sky, which all featured astronomical phenomena and current advancements in space science (Westwick, 37). Nev- ertheless, it is Sagan’s series that is often credited with revolutionizing the image of science documentary by relying on a scientist-hosted format as well as a mediated, entertaining and easily-consumed experience of the homely

1 Originally proposed in Leo Marx’s famous work, The Machine in the Garden, the concept was ideally supposed to strive for the “middle landscape” through reconciling the machine with the pristine and pastoral wilderness. One of its earliest descriptions, however, was proposed by Charles Caldwell in the 1832 issue of the New England Magazine: “Objects of exalted power and grandeur elevate the mind that seriously dwells on them, and impart to it greater compass and strength. Alpine scenery and an embattled ocean deepen contemplation, and give their own sublimity to the conception of beholders. The same will be true of our system of Railroads. Its vastness and magnificence will prove communicable, and add to the standard of the intellect of the country” (195). Some more recent analyses of the technological sublime, the most notable of which include David E. Nye’s monograph, define the notion as a distinctively American formation and “an essentially religious feeling, aroused by the confrontation with impressive objects”, which has become “self-justifying parts of a national destiny, just as the natural sublime once undergirded the rhetoric of manifest destiny” (xiii). 32 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

sublime. As suggested in the course of the analysis, the examined concept aims to reinforce the cosmic and astronomical sublime while emphasizing familiarity of terrestrial locations as well as the scope and interconnectedness between the universe and the world’s technology, natural resources and all the living creatures. Also, the production’s success led to the release of similarly engaging documentaries where the spectator’s pleasure derives from the presence of a scientist, usually a media celebrity, as well as technology’s ability to create visually appealing and simplified representations of astronomy-related concepts and events, which all serve to validate and domesticate the unknown and often terrorizing sublimity of outer space views.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Altman, Irwin, and Carol M. Werner, eds. Home Environments. New York: Plenum Press, 1985. Bierly, Mandi. “Seth MacFarlane Explains the New Ship on ‘Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey.’” Entertainment Weekly. 8 Mar. 2014. 14 Dec. 2015 http://www.ew.com/article/2014/03/07/cosmos-spacetime-odyssey-seth- macfarlane-ship\. Bishop, Sheryl L. “From Earth Analogs to Space: Getting There from Here.” Psychology of Space Exploration: Contemporary Research in Historical Perspec- tive. Ed. Douglas A. Vakoch. Washington, DC: NASA, 47 – 78. Blair, Christensen. The Domestic Sublime. Institute for Doctoral Studies in the Visual Arts. 29 Sep. 2014. 9 Jan. 2018 https://www.idsva.edu/ student-journal/2014/9/29/the-domestic-sublime\. Briganti, Chiara, and Kathy Mezei, eds. The Domestic Space Reader. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2012. Bukatman, Scott. Matters of Gravity: Special Effects and Supermen in the 20th Century. London: Duke University Press, 2003. Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990. Caldwell, Charles. “Thoughts on the Moral and Other Indirect Influences of Rail-roads.” The New-England Magazine 2 (1832): 292 – 297. Campbell, Vincent. Science, Entertainment and Television Documentary. London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2016. Cieraad, Irene. “Introduction: Anthropology at Home.” At Home: An Anthro- pology of Domestic Space. Ed. Irene Cieraad. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2006. 1 – 12. Clemons, Stephanie A., Erin E. Searing, and Kenneth R. Tremblay. “Percep- tions of Sense of Self Through Interiors of Homes.” Housing and Society 31.2 (2004): 129 – 144. Cosmos: A Personal Voyage. Dir. Adrian Malone. PBS, 1980. Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey. Dir. Brannon Braga, Bill Pope, and Ann Druyan. 20th Century Fox Home Video, 2014. Den Tandt, Christophe. The Urban Sublime in American Literary Naturalism. Urbana – Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 1998. Duncan, James S., and David Lambert. “Landscapes of Home.” A Companion to Cultural Geography. Eds. James S. Duncan, Nuala C. Johnson and Richard H. Schein. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2004. 282 – 403. Foy, Jessica H., and Thomas J. Schlereth, eds.American Home Life, 1880 – 1930: A Social History of Spaces and Services. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1992. Kornelia Boczkowska The Homely Sublime in Space 33

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Homeland and Resilience

36 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54) Tomasz Basiuk Homeland and Resilience: Immunitas, Katechon, the Uncanny, and Trauma’s Displacement

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0011.6718 Homeland and Resilience

Tomasz basiuk h o m e l a n d and resilience 37

Tomasz Basiuk teaches A capacity characterizing individuals, groups, systems and materials, “resil- at the University of War- ience” has become a buzzword with multiple valences resonating in policy saw American Studies statements and scholarly articles, and bearing on a number of political, eco- Center. Working mainly in queer theory and nomic, environmental, and cultural issues. Resilience connotes durability and life writing, he studied elasticity: the ability to withstand and to bounce back. To be resilient is to political theory with Seyla have a way of responding to stress. Unlike resistance, whose connotations are Benhabib and Susan Buck-Morss. In 2016 he stoutness and stability, resilience has a dynamic quality. First associated with co-sponsored a “Transat- engineering, resilience is also invoked in psychology, where it communicates lantic Symposium” graduate studies conference the sense that the self does not simply weather infelicitous circumstances on “The Politics and Cul- but adapts to them by inscribing itself anew. In medicine, resilience is at the ture of Resilience” with very core of the body’s immune system. In ecology, it came to describe an Humboldt University in Berlin and Oregon State ecosystem’s ability to withstand a stress factor, as well as its ability to regain University at Corvallis. a state of equilibrium following a change which the system has been prompted to undergo. 1 Resilience is also linked to sustainability, especially where the renewability of resources is concerned – though resilience underscores a system’s internal self-organization while sustainability is more suggestive of factors external to that system (Folke et al. 440). In ecology and elsewhere, resilience is linked to systems theory because it is conceived as a feedback loop, which implies interrelatedness between a system and its environment, and between the system and its constitutive parts. The concept of resilience is used in cultural studies to compare the social and cultural resilience of different groups (Ungar). In the context of economics, legal studies, and human geography, one speaks of the resilience of specific industries or forms of property holding and their relationship to the ecosystem and to other factors (Adger). In matters of policy, one examines the resilience of communities in the context of local, national and regional security. As one group of authors puts it, “resilience is fast becoming the organizing principle in contemporary political life” (Brassett et al. 222). In interpreting the TV series Homeland (2011 – ), this paper speculatively places resilience alongside certain other concepts. One is trauma, a Freud- ian term which Dominic LaCapra links to working through the memory of a disruptive experience. Another is Freud’s notion of the uncanny, whose connotations of the familiar and the secretive form a conceptual feedback loop in its own right. A comparison between resilience, trauma, and the uncanny suggests the possibility of trauma’s partial conceptual displacement by resilience. Another pertinent notion is Roberto Esposito’s immunitas, a term that refers to the analogy between the body’s immune system and the body politic. Esposito contends that immunitas and communitas are interdependent, inviting a comparison with resilience as a feedback mechanism. Yet another concept is the katechon. This enigmatic term occurs in a letter by Paul, where it stands for that which keeps the apocalypse at bay, thereby also delaying the coming of the eternal kingdom. 2 Introduced to political theory by Carl Schmitt, katechon is analogous to a system’s adaptability to stress. It is invoked by Esposito and by Paolo Virno, who sees the multitude as katechon. Resilience in Homeland is

1 A well-known example are the two general states of aquatic basins: clear waters and turbid waters, the latter often allowing for the growth of toxic algae. A water basin, such as a lake, is an ecosystem capable of withstanding stress factors prompting a shift from clear to turbid. In some circumstances, a water basin having turned turbid may be prompted to return to the clear state. (Gunderson 428 – 9). 2 “And now ye know that which restraineth, to the end that he may be revealed in his own season. For the mystery of lawlessness doth already work: only there is one that restraineth now, until he be taken out of the way” (2 Thesallonians 2: 6 – 7). 38 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

thus discussed with reference to concepts pertinent to psychoanalytic and to political theory. This discussion suggests that displacing trauma with resilience is partly analogous to Virno’s identifying the multitude as katechon. The analogy, enacted in Homeland, appears to complicate the immediately available reading of the series as nationalistic propaganda. Homeland and resilience

Launched on Showtime in 2011, Homeland is a political thriller created by Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon, loosely based on the Israeli series Hatufim. The seriesHomeland is set against the backdrop of the recent US wars in the Middle East and the so-called “War on Terror”. Its protagonists are spies and, as portrayed in Homeland, the CIA and its acolytes are endowed with extraordinary prerogatives to protect the nation against terrorist attacks. The show appears to legitimize such special powers as those introduced by the USA PATRIOT Act. It thus performs a pedagogical and even propagandistic function, perhaps especially for its American audience. Notably, this affirmative message has met with digital-era resistance when an episode of Homeland was hacked and Arabic graffiti were added that read “Homeland is racist” and “Homeland is a joke and it didn’t make us laugh” (Voon). While the show promotes American patriotism in ways some find objectionable, the CIA’s portrayal is far from monolithic. Instead, the Agency and its associates form a complex ecosystem of both institutional and personal interdependencies in which loyalty and betrayal intertwine, no longer mutually exclusive. The plot ofHomeland thus revolves around resilience understood as a feedback loop, even if the concept is not literally stated in the script. The show’s central figure is Carrie Mathison (Claire Danes), an exception- ally gifted special agent whose brilliance is intractably interwoven with her bipolar disorder. Carrie, ever adapting to shifting circumstances, epitomizes resilience in the psychological sense. Aided by her medication, but also drawing on her remarkable mental resources, she transcends her mental handicap by transforming it into exceptional analytical strength. Because she herself undergoes changes which are more extreme than is typical for most people, Carrie is capable of seeing how others think and what they are trying to do. In bursts of manic activity, she spends long hours and even days staring at her case notes, second-guessing the enemy’s intentions, and disambiguating double identities. She correctly conjectures that Nicolas Brody (Damian Lewis), a US marine who spent several years in Al-Qaeda’s captivity and is being hailed as a hero upon his return home, has in fact been turned by the enemy. Strikingly, she also grasps that Brody’s capacity for resilience means he can be turned again. In a plot development which further complicates her characterization, she begins to obsess over Brody and strikes up an affair with him. Eventually, she divides her loyalty between the CIA and her lover, enlisting him as an agent working for the US, sending him back to the Middle East, and then maneuvering him and others in such a way as to betray neither her country nor Brody, so long at least as such diffuseness proves possible. Carrie capably manages stimuli that would likely be disruptive for anyone with a more static psychology. Her character, including her bipolar disorder, illustrates that resilience is a dynamic method of responding to unsettling impulses, both internal, such as Carrie’s character traits and her medical condition, and external, such as the effects of the drugs she takes and her many Tomasz basiuk h o m e l a n d and resilience 39 challenging, overlapping professional and personal entanglements. Indeed, her condition makes problematic a neat distinction between the world inside her head and the world around her. However, this confusion in no way diminishes her practical effectiveness, and at times enhances it. Carrie is akin to a complex feedback loop, and thus an epitome of resilience. TheCIA itself is portrayed as a dynamic system characterized by resilience. On the one hand, Carrie and her boss Saul Berenson (Mandy Patinkin) often struggle with the rigidity of their institution; on the other, with Saul’s rise to the position of managing director, a more complex portrayal of the Agency emerges. The CIA is shown to be a duplicitous player in both national and international politics. When the rationale for its very existence is put in question after a major security breach resulting in a shocking terrorist attack on its headquarters, Saul responds to this political threat by dissembling. This is strikingly reflected in his complicated relationship with Carrie, as their mutual loyalty and his seeming betrayal intertwine. Even though Saul blackballs Carrie in a Congressional committee hearing and cuts her loose, they both regard this act as a mere tactical move despite profoundly adverse consequences to Carrie. Conversely, Carrie subsequently disobeys Saul’s explicit orders to abandon him to his kidnappers, putting at risk the entire US policy in the Middle East so as to save his life. Her call seems motivated as much by her personal loyalty to Saul as by her desire to influence the intelligence community by bringing him back. Brody’s relationship to Saul partly mimics Carrie’s when Brody moves ahead with a daring assassination plan while ignoring Saul’s explicit orders to abandon the mission as too dangerous. Saul is led at last to sacrifice Brody, not unlike he has sacrificed Carrie at an earlier point in the story – a decision which Carrie once again appears to accept. All three characters’ actions are motivated by their complicated mutual relations and by the constantly shifting political and military circumstances to which they are responding. Familiar tropes revised

As this plot summary suggests, Homeland regurgitates well-established tropes, including madness as the root and public face of genius (Carrie), conversion as determining political identification and identity (Brody), and the mask of transparency worn by those in power even as they engage in behind-the- scenes shenanigans (Saul). Indeed, Homeland brings these tropes to a kind of logical limit: Carrie’s insanity and her genius become indistinguishable, Brody’s political loyalties are ultimately a matter of conjecture, and Saul’s motives remain opaque despite the pretence of straightforward honesty. Thus perverted, these familiar tropes acquire an almost illegible complexity. The confounding interdependencies both within and between individual and institutional subjects, much like the many irresolvable questions posed by the plot, point to a feedback-based logic undergirding both the motivation behind a particular action and its consequences. This rendering of complexity is clearly paradigmatic for the show’s representation of reality. By the same token, resilience as the formal and thematic dominant of Homeland may be variously located by the viewer in individual characters, institutional entities, and a range of couplings and alliances between individuals, institutions, and between individuals and institutions. There is a close affinity between the series’ portrayal of resilience and its means of building suspense: the pathos of resilience is what makes Homeland an engaging political thriller. 40 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54) Resilience and trauma In keeping with the genre conventions of the thriller, Homeland is focused on exigencies in the present. Trauma, understood to be a past event which defies assimilation into the normal flow of events and whose negative consequences are felt in the present, is explicitly thematized in the series. For example, Brody’s flashbacks to his captivity include scenes of people being tortured and killed. In another development, the CIA’s predicament following the bombing of its offices suggests that the institution as a whole, as well as its members, may be suffering from traumatizing consequences of this lethal attack. And yet, just as the CIA responds to the challenge by employ- ing uniquely pragmatic means, so Brody is shown as having adapted to the conditions of his imprisonment: he has learned Arabic, converted to Islam, and become a teacher of English to the son of an Al-Qaeda leader. There is little focus on his working through the trauma. 3 When these flashbacks to his captivity occur, Brody remains focused on developments in the present. This mode of response, like that of theCIA , which is entirely consistent with the conventions of the thriller, represents also a shift away from a focus on trauma and toward resilience. Resilience bears a non-obvious relation to trauma. The latter concept originated with psychoanalysis in the context of the First World War and then rose to academic prominence because of its importance to Holocaust studies. As a painful past disruption that exerts a potentially destructive influence in the present, trauma is both located in the past and not containable in it. Trauma’s persistence in the present is illustrated by such concepts as survivors’ guilt and second-generation trauma, which are characterized not only by their rootedness in the past but equally by immediate psychic pressure. The emphasis in trauma on unrelenting stress, rather than only on an event in the past, is implied in the concept of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). The condition is conceived as a quasi-permanent state, synonymous with persistent distress: beyond the need to work through trauma by way of therapeutic recollection and conceptual reframing, there is the even more immediate need to address the persistent distress trauma causes in the present. Emphasis thus shifts to ongoing mental and physical pain as traumatizing, that is, as overwhelming and disabling the subject regardless of the possible relationship between this condition and an event in the past. A comparison suggests itself with Walter Benjamin’s image of the modern individual as constantly paring the intrusion of unwelcome stimuli in the form of ubiquitous noise and visual oversaturation. And yet, trauma’s conceptual thrust entails its rootedness in a past event. This meaning is reinforced in comparisons drawn between past and present events to suggest the latter’s traumatizing character. One might say, for example, that the Holocaust is reiterated in other, more recent genocides. That such comparisons may have merit does not guarantee their helpfulness, however. It is not always useful to see events in the present as reiterating past events or as determined by them. Jacques Rancière points out in his comments on what he calls the ethical turn in aesthetics and politics that excessive reliance on framings in terms of past trauma can have the effect of disabling action in the present: “With the ethical turn… history becomes ordered according 3 By contrast to Homeland, the Isreali series Hatufim (Prisoners of War aka. In the Hands of the Enemy, literally: Abductees, 2009 – 2012 ), on which Homeland is based, explicitly foregrounds the therapeutic process, especially in its portrayal of returning veterans and former prisoners of war. Tomasz basiuk h o m e l a n d and resilience 41 to a cut in time made by a radical event that is no longer in front of us but already behind us… the already endured catastrophe from which only a god could save us” (201). In some instances, it may be more efficacious to cope with the present challenges as they are determined by the more immediate exigencies specific to them. The point is not to deny the reality of trauma, or to negate the value of working through traumatic experience, but to keep the term’s excessive application from obscuring other strategies. Excessive emphasis on past trauma also runs the intellectual risk of nostalgia. A focus on a past traumatic event as the likely cause of present traumatizing distress is especially problematic when it puts forth an even more distant past prior to the traumatic event that is somehow distress-free. In this case, the call to work through the trauma may imply that the subject should be returned to an antediluvian state of innocence. However, such idyllic past may itself be a myth, provoking the illusion of a time without politics and without the need for resilience. Such nostalgia may bring momentary emotional relief but is unlikely to promote a clear understanding of either the past or the present. Resilience and the uncanny

Freud’s concept of the uncanny provides another model with which to think about the persistence of distress. To experience the uncanny is to have the sense that something familiar appears strange to the point of being unrecog- nizable, provoking considerable discomfort. The effect is conceptually linked to psychic trauma because trauma causes the conscious mind to protect itself by shutting out information or emotion through the mechanism of repression, possibly yielding an uncanny sense. But an uncanny sense may likewise arise from a superstition or a coincidence, as Freud demonstrates (949). It is akin to a riddle, which creates cognitive and sometimes emotional discomfort. In the first place, then, the uncanny arises in response to a cognitive complica- tion experienced in the present. Like any effective riddle, it simultaneously demands a solution and prevents us from reaching it. It provokes a feedback response insofar as we go back and forth, trying out possible answers. This feedback loop mechanism arguably makes the uncanny an aesthetic equivalent of resilience. Uncanny is one word with which to describe Homeland. The show puts forth a world of political intrigue that many viewers understand to be behind the façade of any government but that they may feel uneasy about because witnessing duplicity can be overwhelming. Moreover, Homeland brings home the official world’s astonishingly tenuous status, a prospect that may justifi- ably make one nervous. Not only do political machinations turn out to be necessary despite being objectionable but the likelihood of their failing and the dismal consequences of such failure raise the stakes to exorbitant levels. Rooting for characters they distrust for their duplicity and their betrayals, viewers may experience emotional discomfort and cognitive confusion. The show’s troubling opacity about characters’ motives and about the precise significance of some plot developments contributes to the uncanny effect – as do such character traits as Carrie’s extraordinary analytical abilities and Brody’s astounding capacity to adapt. 42 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54) Analogy with the immune system and the body politic The uncanny is partly analogous to the immune system, itself virtually synonymous with resilience. The immune system’s purpose it is to either contain or expel that which it identifies as alien. At first glance, the uncanny and the immune system may seem vastly different because the uncanny mistakes something familiar for something unfamiliar, whereas the immune system copes with the factually alien. However, a well-known paradox of the immune system highlights its similarity to the uncanny. The paradox is that the immune system can only protect against that which it recognizes: the immune system cannot protect against that which is completely alien but only against that which is at least somewhat familiar. That which the immune system brands as alien or strange—whatever, in keeping with its procedures, it recognizes as something to be contained or expelled—must also be familiar enough to be recognized in the first place. Therefore, the central question about the immune system is why it does not act against itself, and against the organism which it protects, as in fact happens in auto-immunological illness. Much as in the case of the uncanny, the riddle here is how to separate out that which is being protected from that which the immune system is protecting against, the familiar from the alien—the familiar from the alien that may be disguised as familiar, but equally, the familiar, which may be disguised as alien, from the actually alien, which must be at least somewhat familiar to be recognized in the first place. In Immunitas, Roberto Esposito applies the discourse of immunology to political theory. The self-constitution of the community depends on sorting out who belongs to it and who does not. The same paradox besets the political community as does the immune system: how can it be known who belongs and who does not if the very determination depends on familiarity with the unfamiliar? Esposito argues that the concepts immunitas and communitas are mutually co-dependent even though their definitions rely on wholly divergent conceptual figures (100 – 101). Where immunitas is limiting and exclusive, communitas is expansive and inclusive. For the borders of communitas to be policed, however, communitas must be given a content. This double requirement results in the interplay of mental images of the sacred core as either plenitude or emptiness, on the one hand, and of a perpetually finessed borderline whose tightness is synonymous with porosity, on the other. Both communitas and immunitas are thus aporetic concepts. The relevance of Esposito’s deconstructionist reading of immunitas and communitas to Homeland lies precisely in the difficulty of disentangling who belongs to the community. Brody is effectively a double agent, persuaded by Carrie to turn against those who turned him. But if being turned and then being turned again are possible, how can anyone know anymore whose side Brody is on? Can Brody himself know the answer? Another such blurring occurs with Brody making a secret of his conversion to Islam upon returning to the US. He hides a copy of the Quran and a prayer rug in his garage, where he clandestinely performs his devotional rites. Brody keeps his newfound faith under cover lest it point to his political allegiance to Al-Qaeda, though of course his religious identification and his political allegiance are not synonymous and remain unrelated in any essential way. This plot development illustrates the problematic character of immunitas as it grapples with shifting Tomasz basiuk h o m e l a n d and resilience 43 definitions of who belongs and why. Moreover, the series invites an analogy between Brody’s secret prayers and Saul’s equally private prayer over the bodies of victims of the terrorist bombing of the CIA headquarters, for which Brody is framed. Although Judaism is obviously far more integrated within the American imagery than Islam, the Mourner’s Kaddish uttered by Saul sounds almost as alien—as un-Christian, and perhaps as un-American—as do the verses spoken by Brody. 4 More generally, and in a manner analogous to Esposito’s discussion of communitas and immunitas, the distribution of religious and ethnic affiliations among the Americans in Homeland—also with Saul being married to Mira Berenson (Sarita Choudhury), who at one point leaves him to move to New Delhi—suggests how difficult it is to put forth a common American identity or to delineate its outer boundary. This diversity may be read as both a challenge to American resilience and as its very mechanism. Paradoxical blurrings of identities and boundaries are not only a matter of religious or ethnic affinities but pertain also to the concept of citizenship. When Carrie is questioned by a Congressional committee on irregularities within the CIA, she is reminded that she has permitted herself to be stripped of some of her civil rights when she signed up with the Agency. As someone responsible for national security, she has been given access to information and tools which ordinary Americans do not have. But a precondition of this special access has been that she has had to forfeit some of the same freedoms she set out to protect. The requirement extends the paradox ofimmunitas and of its relationship to communitas. For the sake of communal resilience, Carrie, whose job it is to keep the political community intact, must herself be excluded from it by signing away her (supposedly inalienable) rights, which define who belongs to the community. The series introduces this paradoxical exception precisely at the point where the protection of rights is most ostensibly at stake. Esposito’s discussion of immunitas and the manner in which this concept is reflected inHomeland illustrate that resilience, insofar as it is analogous to the immune system and the body politic, is ridden with unavoidable contradiction. Katechon

Esposito’s Immunitas includes a chapter on katechon (52 – 79), an enigmatic term used in Paul’s second letter to the Thessalonians. In keeping with the theological tradition, katechon is one who restrains or withholds, which is to say that katechon prevents the forces of evil from taking over. But katechon is not unequivocally on the side of good because, in restraining evil, it withholds Armageddon, the final showdown between good and evil, thus keeping at bay the coming of God’s undivided rule. And so katechon is a form of compromise, similar to a safety valve which keeps a system from running entirely off course at the cost of curbing its capacity for achieving a desirable result. The role of katechon was ascribed to various historical entities, for example, to the Holy Roman Empire by Carl Schmitt, who also interprets katechon as institutions of the republic (The Nomos of the Earth…59 – 62). The American system of checks and balances is a good example of katechon in this sense: division of powers is designed to limit abuse but it can make governing less efficient and more preoccupied with its own procedures.

4 The poignancy of the slippage between Judaism and Islam, illustrated with Brody’s and Saul’s prayers, is heightened by Homeland being based on an Israeli series. 44 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

The republican katechon results in the kind of paradoxes characteristic of the immunological processes in the physical body and in the body politic. The logic is apparent in the way that Carrie’s rights are curtailed in exchange for her special prerogatives and for the sake of the rights of others being all the better protected. It is also observable in the manner that both the CIA and individual protagonists perform commendable acts by committing all manner of infraction. Espionage, diplomacy, and international relations in general are presented as a game in which gains and losses are secondary to the overall object of keeping the political game in motion, as an alternative to outright conflict. Paolo Virno on biopolitics and the state of exception

The paradoxical combination of precariousness and special powers, characteristic of Carrie’s situation vis-à-vis her rights, is describable as state of exception. The notion is important to biopolitics, a discursive field to which Esposito’s immunitas also pertains. 5 Giorgio Agamben’s commentary on state of exception is particularly well known; the term is broadly understood as the sovereign’s response to conditions that threaten his sovereignty. Paolo Virno also addresses state of exception in the context of biopolitics. He sees it as an overcoming of the divide between the state of nature and the civil state, which he respectively describes as the realm of hard fact and the realm of linguistic order. The related term “state of emergency” spells out the common legitimization for the state of exception because it puts forth the intrusion of natural fact upon the linguistic fact of the law in a manner rendering the law ineffectual. This dispensation of “exception” in the face of “emergency” is in the first place biopolitical insofar as it pertains to some exigency pertinent to bodies, e.g., a natural disaster, an epidemiological threat, a terrorist attack, a military contingency, a crisis related to the supply of food or drinking water, and so on—a crisis affecting bodies may occur naturally or it may be brought about by someone’s doing. Either way, the civil state is suspended and its protocols are supplanted by rule based in exception, allowing the crisis to be more effectively dealt with. As a part of this process, a new legal and political order may be installed to resolve the crisis or to prevent its recurrence. State of exception thus reenacts what Walter Benjamin and Jacques Der- rida call the violence of law, meaning the foundational violence which institutes the law. However, Agamben and Virno see the present-day prevalence of the state of exception as distinguished by its would-be permanence. Unlike the notion that the law is based on a foundational act of violence, an idea potentially triggering an association with the psychoanalytic category of trauma which results from a past event, the permanent state of exception is more akin to continuing distress related to cognitive dissonance, as the category of the uncanny suggests. State of exception denotes a manner of dealing with distress (“emergency”) that simultaneously causes distress due to the suspension of existing law and the necessarily arbitrary generation of new laws. 5 Biopolitcs is founded with Michel Foucault’s lectures titled “Society Must Be Defended” in the mid-1970s. His discussion focuses on sovereignty as based on the principle of “making live and letting die,” in contrast to the classic notion of sovereign power as “letting live and making die” (247). Tomasz basiuk h o m e l a n d and resilience 45

A further analogy emerges between state of exception and immunitas, the latter akin to a permanent state of exception because it is always facing new crises, prompting it to identify foreign agents ever in need of being eliminated or contained. This is tantamount to positing that immunitas is constantly in the process of being founded – that it is always redefining itself. The logic of this continuous self-(re)definition is akin to the feedback information loop, which is to say that immunitas—whether in the body’s immune system or the body politic—both acts on the objects it identifies as alien and readjusts its procedures based on the result. Such feedback mechanism is a practical, if approximate, solution to the logical contradiction pointed out above, wherein the ability to recognize alien elements depends on their being recognizable at all, and hence on their being already familiar. A similar feedback loop between responding to hard fact and finding an adequate method of governance is foundational for state of exception, which is ridden by its own paradox due to governance being deemed simultaneously necessary and untenable under previously established principles. As a paradigm underlying both the state of exception and immunitas, resilience is a mechanism based on continuous readjustment between a system and its environment; that is, between a set of procedures that are always linguistic at heart and the extralinguistic fact to which they are responding. These analogies further suggest that both immunitas and state of exception entail a balancing act preventing them from becoming runaway systems destined for self-destruction. In the case of immunitas, the runaway scenario involves a response to the threatening presence of alien elements that would eliminate them along with anything and everything else, thus rendering the immune system destructive instead of protective. In the case of the state of exception, adequate response to factual circumstances risks setting up a total- izing regime that would be devoid of legitimacy. In both contexts, resilience entails the ability to implement a stabilizing, self-limiting procedure. The question which therefore arises is one about the precise relation between katechon and the state of exception (and likewise between katechon and immunitas), as a matter of achieving resilience. Although a state of exception is introduced to address an existing or impending imbalance, and is thus readable as katechon, it also contravenes, and may altogether eliminate, some pre-existing katechon, such as a constitutional system of checks and balances. Indeed, as soon as the state of exception is denounced as resulting in the sovereign’s unlimited power, in scope or in temporal terms, it becomes the opposite of katechon. By analogy to immunitas and to resilience, such elimination of katechon must result in the collapse of immunity and a radical diminishment of resilience, even if its original purpose has been to build them up. Multitude as katechon

In such convoluted circumstances, what is a body to do? Virno begins to respond to this question by establishing a necessary connection between the state of exception and multitude. The term “multitude” originated with Machiavelli, was reiterated by Spinoza and by Hobbes, in however different ways, and was invoked more recently by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. Virno argues that the subject of biopolitics, as biopolitics is practiced in a state of exception, is no longer the demos but multitude. Where demos presupposes a sense of unity based on consensual respect for legal principles 46 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

(civil state), state of exception invokes hard facts to banish people from any such consensual space, turning them into a multitude. The state of exception and multitude thus arise jointly in an exigency which blurs the line between the state of nature and the civil state: multitude is a by-product of the state of exception, and the state of exception is unthinkable without the emergence of multitude. Like demos, multitude occupies a common space, but that space is unstructured where the space of the demos was symbolically structured. In a Biblical reference to Israel after its escape from Egypt, Virno compares multitude’s inherent polyvocality, unbound by a common principle, to murmurings in the desert (22 – 24). Virno is interested in how the state of exception, implemented by the sovereign to exercise biopower, posits a potential biopolitical alternative which stems from the multitude’s murmurings in the desert. To this end, he reconsid- ers katechon. His discussion of the state of exception first suggests that that state can itself be understood as katechon when it prevents a disaster or a final showdown from taking place, but also because, in doing so, it may prevent a superior solution from being adopted. Second, Virno dispenses with Sch- mitt’s assumption that katechon is necessarily synonymous with institutions of the republic and suggests instead that katechon may also reside in a multitude. With this step, katechon is given emancipatory potential: rather than katechon containing murmurings in the desert, those murmurings can now serve as katechon (62 – 65). Virno posits that the multitude can balance out the sovereign’s special powers in a state of exception. Moreover, multitude can self-organize in ways that will prevent a deterioration into chaos, which is to say that multitude can be its own katechon, capable of assuming a self-regulating function. This is perhaps increasingly observed in contemporary societies—for example, in grassroots political activism and in market niches that remain unregulated or only partially regulated—where such developments are conceptualized not only as actions undertaken by individuals but also as forms of sociality that transverse other, existing organizational forms. Multitude in Homeland

In Homeland, the sense of katechon arising from anarchic impulses and processes is illustrated by the way Carrie and Brody are portrayed as unlikely heroes and in the extremely unbureaucratic way in which Saul runs the CIA. Of course, these portrayals coincide to a degree with much-hailed American individualism; characters like Carrie, Brody and Saul, who keep going off on frolics of their own, end up saving the day precisely because that they break away from institutional frames. However, besides seeing these characters as individual agents, we may also see them as forming self-appointed teams, akin to emerging social cells. We may think of these characters, whose constitutional rights are in question or have been suspended, as being effective because they collaborate outside the usual institutional constraints. This prospect, which Homeland enables, turns it into a portrayal of the multitude as katechon, insofar as these self-appointed groupings of not-quite-citizens manage to forestall military conflict and prevent acts of terrorism, as well as adequately self-regulate. Ultimately, Homeland occupies the middle ground between the sovereign’s self-redefinition and legitimization via the state of exception and the more Tomasz basiuk h o m e l a n d and resilience 47 directly anarchic notion of the multitude as katechon. Or rather, the show in- cessantly oscillates between these solutions, suggesting that they form a kind of feedback loop. The multitude as katechon in Homeland is neither easily distinguished from the bearers of sovereign privilege nor does it emerge in the complete absence of the civil state. Instead, it exists in the interstitial spaces where extraneous hard facts render that state temporarily ineffective even though it has claimed exceptional powers for itself. Homeland thus advocates resilience as a multilayered response to security threats to the nation. It le- gitimizes the state of exception not solely by pointing to material exigencies exceeding the civil state’s normal capabilities, which require the sovereign to assume special powers; it does so equally by suggesting that the multitude’s emergence, which the state of exception inevitably prompts, results in additional resilience. Moreover, the multitude’s emancipatory and even partly anarchic potential is shown to be consistent with individual freedoms and with the freedom to associate, which are foundational for American democracy, even though this potential plays itself out in a qualified legal void rather than in the realm of constitutionally protected rights. While the logic is aporetic, the message sent by Homeland focuses on the pragmatic. Rather than contemplate its own paradoxicality, Homeland foregrounds the logic of the feedback loop by identifying it in figures of resilience: in the interdependence between constitutional rights and their protection, whether by formal or anarchic means, and in the interdependence of the efficacy of governance and its legitimization. A political thriller, Homeland persuasively puts forth the transition from trauma as a concept invested in the past to the uncanny as the sense that the present moment is a riddle in need of solving. This transition, enacted in the name of resilience as a matter of state security, is accompanied by a more discreetly given but no less significant, and indeed partly analogous, transition from the state of exception as a manifestation of the aporetic immunitas and of its reliance on the mechanism of katechon to the more overtly anarchic katechon embodied by the multitude that emerges with the state of exception. The analogy lies precisely in the absence, in Virno’s image of the katechon, of past foundational violence, synonymous with trauma and requisite for the legitimization of the sovereign and his law. Such privileged, and privileging, traumatic violence is displaced by the self-regulating resilience of a multitude composed of not-quite-citizens that arises in uncanny response to the no less uncanny, because it is seemingly permanent, state of exception. This is not to say that the exigency to which the state of exception responds is never violent, nor that the sovereign’s response to this exigency, or the multitude’s response to that response, is free of violence. However, these instances of violence are not yet obscured by the passing of time and the form of this violence is not yet canonized as law. In consequence, there is a democratizing promise to the latter transition, however entangled it is with resilience conceived as a matter of state security.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Adger, W. Neil.“Social and ecological resilience: are they related?” Progress in Human Geography 24,3 (2000): 347 – 364. Agamben, Giorgio. Homo Saccer. Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Translated by Daniel Heller Roazen. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998. __. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chi- cago Press, 2005. 48 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

Benjamin, Walter. One-Way Street and Other Writings. Translated by J.A. Un- derwood. Penguin Modern Classics, 2009. Brassett, James, Stuart Croft and Nick Vaughan-Williams, “Introduction: An Agenda for Resilience Research in Politics and International Relations.” POLITICS: 2013 VOL 33(4), 221 – 228. Derrida, Jacques. “Force of Law. The ‘Mythical Foundation of Authority.’” Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice. Drucilla Cornell and Michael Rosenfeld, eds. New York: Routlege, 1992. Esposito, Roberto. Immunitas. The Protection and Negation of Life. Translated by Zakiya Hanafi. Cambridge,UK : Polity, 2015. Folke, Carl, Steve Carpenter, Thomas Elmqvist, Lance Gunderson, CS Holling and Brian Walker, “Resilience and Sustainable Development: Building Adaptive Capacity in a World of Transformations.” Ambio Vol. 31 No. 5, August 2002: 437 – 440. Foucault, Michel. Society Must Be Defended. Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975 – 1976. Edited by Mauro Bertani and Alessandro Fontana. Translated by David Macey. New York: Picador, 2003. Freud, Sigmund. “The ‘Uncanny.’” Translated by Alix Strachey. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, Vincent B. Leitch, et al., eds. New York: W.W. Norton, 2001, 929 – 952. Gunderson, Lance H. “Ecological Resilience—In Theory and Application.” Annual Review of Ecology and Systematics Vol. 31 (2000): 425 – 439. Hardt, Michael and Antonio Negri. Multitude. War and Democracy in the Age of Empire. New York: Penguin Books, 2004. Hatufim (aka. Prisoners of War). TV series. Created by Gideon Raff. Distributed by Israel’s Channel 2. 2009 – 2012. Homeland. TV series. Created by Alex Gansa and Howard Gordon. Distributed by Showtime. Launched in 2011. Ungar, Michael. “Resilience across Cultures.” British Journal of Social Work (2008) 38: 218 – 235. Rancière, Jacques. Dissensus. On Politics and Aesthetics. Edited and translated by Steven Corcoran. London: Continuum, 2010. Schmitt, Carl. The Nomos of the Earth in the International Law of the Jus Publi- cum Europaeum. Translated by G.A. Ulmen. New York: Telos Press, 2003. Virno, Paolo. Multitude. Between Innovation and Negation. Translated by Isabella Bertoletti, James Cascaito, and Andrea Casson. Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2008. Voon, Claire. “Street Artists Hack Homeland With Arabic Grafitti.” Hy- perallergic 15 October 2015. Online. http://hyperallergic.com/245449/ street-artists-hack-homeland-with-arabic-grafitti/

The Nutshell Studies

50 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54) Zofia Kolbuszewska The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death, Doll-house Homicides, Foster Families, and the Subversion of Domesticity in CSI: Las Vegas

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0011.6719 The Nutshell Studies

Zofia Kolbuszewska The Nutshell Studies 51

Zofia Kolbuszewska There are no miniatures in nature; the miniature is a cul- is Associate Professor tural product, the product of an eye performing certain in the Department of operations, manipulating, and attending in certain ways English, University of 1 Wrocław. She published to, the physical world. The Poetics of Chro- [T]he spatial and visual categories of domesticity become notope in the Novels of most compelling when they are transgressed. 2 Thomas Pynchon (2000) 3 and The Purloined Child: Every death has at least two stories American Identity and Representations of Child- hood in American Litera- Uncanny meticulous scale models recreating would-be scenes of murder are ture 1851 – 2000 (2007). the signature of the Miniature Killer to whose exploits several episodes of the She edited a volume on season 7 of CSI: Las Vegas are devoted. Usually the killer has the miniatures Thomas Pynchon and the (De)vices of Global delivered to the investigators before the actual crimes take place. Naren (Post)modernity (2012). Shankar, Executive Producer of CSI: Las Vegas reveals in an interview with John K. Dehn and Susan Marks, the makers of the film Of Dolls & Murder, that the modus operandi of the killer, a young psychotic woman called Natalie has been inspired by The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (27:37), a collection of eighteen doll-house style dioramas designed and built by Frances Glessner Lee (1878 – 1962) in the 1930s and 1940s in order to train homicide detectives. Glessner Lee’s dioramas and the models of crime scenes built by Natalie, the Miniature Killer, reveal similarity in that they draw our attention to the importance of materiality and touch in crafting miniatures and bring out the dialectic of the haptic and optical cognition, staged by all doll-houses, thus complicating a gender tension at the very core of the concept of forensic investigation. Visual and haptic have been traditionally associated with the feminine gender, while the verbal was associated with masculinity. The scrutiny of materiality of traces and visual documentation of crime scenes were carried out by men in the times of Glassner Lee, while in the beginning of the twenty first century the affectionate treatment of diorama’s tactile quality by Natalie is juxtaposed with the scientific objectivity of the laboratory team’s investigation. Thus, in both cases miniature models serve as manifestations of a frustration connected with the traditional shape of a family, the structure of society, and the miniature makers’ place in them. Yet, even as the dioramas noted above reveal and simultaneously contain the foundational darkness, boundlessness and violence which, as Mark Wig- ley emphasizes in Derrida’s Haunt, underlie and make possible the concept of domesticity, they diametrically differ in the way they problematize the concept and functioning of domesticity, family, and a foster family. Frances Glessner Lee’s miniature crime scenes are to a greater degree corrosive to the traditional notion of domesticity and subversive in view of gender politics than those painstakingly crafted by Natalie, even as Glessner Lee was active in the first half of the twentieth century and the CSI: Las Vegas features the crimes committed in the beginning of the twenty first century. Through the act of constructing The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death she subverts power relations, gender constructions, and stereotypical professional competence and incompetence attributions. Glessner Lee’s miniature models of crime scenes

1 Susan Stewart, On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Souvenir, the Collection (Durham: Duke UP, 1993), 55. 2 Laura J. Miller, “Denatured Domesticity: An Account of Femininityand Physiognomy in the Interiors of Frances Glessner Lee,” Negotiating Domesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture, ed. Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Bydar (London: Routledge, 2005), 208. 3 A remark made by the head of the Forensic Lab, Gil Grissom in CSI: Las Vegas S7 e08). 52 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

also demonstrate the fuzziness of the boundaries separating home from the micro-politics of mundane reality of the country and macro-politics of the country’s war on crime, whereas owing to the double coding of her artefacts, Natalie directs us back to the drama of emotional domestic violence represented in the TV series as disconnected from social and political circumstances. Apparently, it is to be blamed on perennial evil. In this essay I discuss the vision of inherently violent domesticity manifested in the miniatures made by the killer featured throughout the season 7 of the CSI: Las Vegas show, as well as domesticity threatened and compromised by violence invading it from the external world, a threat that contemporary American war on crime posits as lurking closer to home than it is usually imagined. First, I juxtapose the idea of domesticity seemingly isolated from the threats of the external world with the sense of domesticity arising from the relationships within the foster family of professional crime-investigators Frances Glessner Lee aspired to be a member of the foster family by constructing her miniature crime scenes. Secondly, I pit the domesticity riddled with internal violence and besieged by external crime against the space of the crime laboratory interpreted as a paradoxical simulacrum of domesticity, where the team of forensic technicians and investigators constitute a family-like community, coalescing around the father figure, the director of the laboratory. Inquiring into Derrida’s reflection on architecture and the architecture of the philosopher’s thought, Mark Wigley shows how “[t]he house of metaphys- ics is deconstructed by locating the ‘traces of an alterity which refuses to be totally domesticated’” (Derrida 117 qtd in Wigley 108). The critic notes that Derrida “repeatedly, one might almost say compulsively, identifies the unde- cidables that uncannily intimate the violence within the familiar domain, which is to say, the domain of the family, the homestead, the house” (109). Because the uncanny “exposes the covert operations of the house,” its “constitutional violation of the ostensible order of the house is itself repressed, domesticated by the very domestic violence it makes possible” (109). Wigley is particularly interested in the violence of most banal of spaces, “spaces that are violent in their very banality” (121). He further emphasizes that

the violence is always domestic, but not because it goes on within an interior; Rather, it is the violence of the interior as such, a violence that is at once enacted and dissimulated by familiar representations of space, representations that are so familiar that they are not even understood to be representations. (120 – 121)

The doll-house is such a violently familiar space. Susan Stewart points out that “[t]he doll-house, as we know from the political economy as well as from Ibsen, represents a particular form of interiority, an interiority which the subject experiences as its sanctuary (fantasy) and prison (the boundaries or limits of otherness, the inaccessibility of what cannot be lived experience)” (65). Yet, the doll-house is the epitomy of miniatures (61). Discussing the cultural and ideological aspects of miniature, Stewart notes that the world of the miniature is metaphoric thus making the mundane life “absolutely anterior and exterior to itself” (65). Miniature invokes the time that negates “change and the flux of lived reality” (65), a kind of transcendent time which tends toward “tableau rather than toward narrative, toward silence and spatial boundaries rather than toward expository closure” (66). As long as the absolute Zofia Kolbuszewska The Nutshell Studies 53 boundaries of the miniature world are maintained it remains perfect and uncontaminated (68). The critic notes that as a model of enclosed space the doll-house is traditionally expected to “present domesticated space as a model of order, proportion, and balance” (68). Yet, the very act of enclosing creates “a tension or dialectic between inside and outside, between private and public property, between the space of the subject and the space of the social” (68). The enclosed world is constantly threatened by “[t]respass, contamination, and the erasure of materiality” (68). Historically, such harmonious, safe and secure space was represented in miniature doll-houses fabricated by middle- and upper-class women who practiced it as a hobby or as a covert pursuit of a modicum of control within a patriarchal world in the 19th and 20th centuries. By the late 1940s the displays of adult miniaturists’ works were very popular in American museums (Bird 33). Doll-house makers were strongly emotionally attached to “tiniest scraps and shards of their work” (33). One of the most popular exhibits at the Smithso- nian Institute is a dollhouse fitted with miniatures that fill its twenty three rooms, painstakingly crafted by Faith Bradford (1880 – 1970), a Washington, D.C. librarian. Bradford wrote the biography of the Doll family inhabiting the doll-house in the Smithsonian, in which she “idealized the domestic life of ‘an American family of the type that is passing, a large family of comfortable means but not great wealth’” (Gill Jacobs 236 – 237 qtd in Bird 40). She set her narrative “somewhere” in the United States between 1900 and 1914 (Bird 40). While Glessner Lee’s Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death inscribe themselves in this tradition of female doll-house making, they simultaneously transgress it. Virtually forgotten by all but a narrow circle of professionals in the second half of the 20th century, Frances Glessner Lee’s crime scene miniatures project was brought to the public attention due to the surge of interest in criminal investigation at the beginning of the 21st century, also manifest in the exponentially growing popularity of such forensic procedurals as the TV show CSI: Las Vegas, which started in 2000, along with its spin offs CSI: NY and CSI: Miami. These shows have emerged in part from a frustration caused by the fact that, as the head of the crime investigation laboratory in CSI: Las Vegas, Gil Grissom puts it, “all the vices are closer to home” (S7 e16). This situation elicits either a denial or a paranoid reaction, and leads to the “disownment of what lies beyond the domestic realm’s visible boundaries” (Miller 198). Miller observes that “[o]f all the fictions fabricated and exhibited in the construction of domestic space, the conceptual opposition of public and private is domesticity’s greatest and most cherished conceit” (198). On the one hand the domestic interior is “underpinned not only by its own fictions, but also by its occupants’ need for external acknowledgment” (197). On the other hand, the unsanctioned gaze within domestic space is to be contained and controlled by means of such instruments as housework, etiquette, propriety and daily routines. However, “the threat of covert witnesses to the domestic drama being staged is mediated, rather than eradicated, by these tools” (197). Due to their accessibility to inspection, doll-houses and miniature models of domestic interiors both perform and embody the tension between the external gaze and internal insulation. Appositely, Susan Stewart stresses “the essential theatricality of all miniatures. […] the miniature becomes a stage on which we project, by means of associations or intertextuality, a deliberately framed series of actions (54). Both Glessner Lee’s and the Miniature Killer’s models of crime scenes seem to represent the resolution of the tension 54 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

between the outside and inside in favor of the irruption of the exteriority and the incursion of unsanctioned gaze into the domestic space. The intrusion of external violence depicted in these miniatures only brings out the violence inherent in the generational, social and gender divisions characteristic of the particular historical moments, which underlie the premises of domesticity. Yet, even as testifying to the eruption of the politicized outside into the domestic sanctuary, Natalie’s dioramas turn back to the violence inherent in the emotional and psychological ties within a family and code it as depoliticized and ahistorical evil. The coded message for the investigators is conveyed by means of partial images of broken doll inserted in otherwise faithful imitations of actual crime scenes. The popularity of forensicTV shows has contributed to the rise of the so called CSI effect. The CSI TV franchise has depicted the forensic science as glamorous and presented jobs in forensic laboratory as exciting and desirable. “The information portrayed on the show not only appears to influence the general public, but perhaps also juries and judges. Today’s viewer is tomor- row’s jury member. […] some jurors now expect to see forensic evidence in the case they participate in, just as they see it provided on CSI” (VanLaerhoven and Anderson 30). Kurt Hohenstein suggests that “Americans have embraced the scientific model for criminal justice widely popularized byCSI because it appears to offer easy answers to complicated conflicts among legal ideas and institutions, the law, and the perceived dichotomy between the rights of the accused and victims” (67). This desire for unambiguous and easy answers can be traced to the perception of modern life as saturated with crime. Crime and disorder have been considered “inevitable features of modern life” by “politicians and polemicists alike” (Wilson 6). They have “repeatedly counseled the public to accept limits on the state’s authority and to understand that enduring solutions to crime’s expansion [are] unlikely” (Wilson 6). David Garland further advises that “the threat of crime has become a routine part of modern consciousness, an everyday risk to be assessed and managed in much the same way that we deal with road traffic” (Garland 2, qtd in Wilson 10) – a risk that has infiltrated domesticity which so far has been construed as safe, secure, peaceful and uncontaminated. Mark Seltzer discusses the entanglement of the public worlds of the professional experts and private spaces of lay persons in the risk society. Following Stuart Hall, he points out that criminal series, criminology reality shows and documentaries reveal the structure of contemporary public sphere: “events and issues only become public in the full sense when the means exist whereby the separate worlds of professional and lay person, of controller and controlled, are brought into relation with one another and appear, for a time at least, to occupy the same space” (Hall 145 qtd in Seltzer 40). CSI shows are premised on the work- centered life, observes Seltzer, and further remarks that: CSI is, of course, crime scene investigation—the acronym, as with PTSD (posttraumatic stress disorder), ADHD (attention deficit with hyperactivity disorder), or OCD (obsessive – compulsive disorder) in the DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) indicating that expert, professional work is going on, that it has located its “object”—and black-boxed it. The black box here is the crime scene itself, the ritualized demarcation of physical space as information zone and the technical processing of physical evidence, which is nothing but that which can be technically processed. The technical media determine the situation, allowing the moral neutrality of the media technician itself to be moralized. (14) Zofia Kolbuszewska The Nutshell Studies 55

The space of a crime laboratory functions like a paradoxical simulacrum of domesticity. The team of forensic technicians and investigators constitute a family-like community, coalescing around a father figure, the director of the laboratory. In CSI: Las Vegas Gil Grissom is the father figure. He is “a white and distinctly unethnic man” in contrast to the team which “contain[s] a diversity of racial, ethnic and gender identities” (West 123). Admittedly, “[w]hite hegemony presides over a cosmopolitan coalition (123),” yet, rather than being modeled on the white middle class family, the laboratory team is conceived of as a community bound together by professional commitment to inquire into and fend off encroachments on the security of individuals at home and in the streets of the city. The team is more reminiscent of a foster family, where foster children may have been victims of abuse and survivors of traumatic events with criminal records of juvenile delinquency. Indeed, impeccable professionals as they are at present, all crime investigators employed in the laboratory had their own brush with trauma, violence, death, lawlessness, abuse and addiction in the past. Fittingly, in contrast to traditionally understood white, middle-class domesticity carefully separated and guarded from perils and chaos of the world outside, the simulacrum of laboratory domesticity is founded precisely on constantly crossing the boundaries between the inside and outside, the pure and the tainted, security and threat, as well as crossing the lines of social political, racial and gender divisions due to the nature of scientific protocols and procedures of evidence collecting. Yet, crossing the lines does not necessarily entail transgression. Crime scene investigators return from their excursions into the wilderness and chaos of the life in Las Vegas, a city founded by gangsters, back to the routine, order and predictability of the laboratory, where, however, “liberal difference” is tolerated “so long as it is framed […] by the hegemony of white, patriarchal identity” (West 123). Here, the Derridean uncanniness of domestic violence is transformed into familiarity. Violence is familiar from work at crime scenes or personal history of the team members, and appears to be reckoned with in the functioning of the foster family of professionals, rather than resulting from the return of the repressed. Yet, in the end of the day, as in Glassner Lee’s Nutshells, it is the uncanniness of different cultural suppressions, such as the truth about a class, gender and racial structure of the society, that transpires in the CSI: Las Vegas crime laboratory. Again, the violence of the intruding outside matches the inherent violence of domesticity. While “living with crime” has been assimilated by both the public and domestic sphere, the uncanny violence of the repressed awareness of class, gender, and race constructions seeks expression in the flashes of the return of the repressed – also in the home space of the crime laboratory. Yet, because the interiority of domesticity has been replaced by the exteriority of the professional management of hazard, in no circumstances will class, gender, and race constructions undergo transformation. The national war on crime and profiling will actually enhance them. Frances Glessner Lee was an heiress of the fortune amassed by founders of the International Harvester Company, a U.S. manufacturer of agricultural machinery, construction equipment, trucks, and household and commercial products from 1902 to 1985. Married at the age of 19 to Blewett Lee, she left her husband and children “to pursue her talent for building and visualization, and her interest in criminal investigation” (Miller 199). Her friendship with her brother’s classmate, George Burgess Magrath, later the Chief Medical Examiner of Suffolk county, Boston, led to her involvement in criminology. 56 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

In 1931 she endowed Harvard University’s Department of Legal Medicine and was instrumental in organizing Harvard Associates in Police Science seminars (1945-) 4. However, as Laura J. Miller points out, The Nutshell Stud- ies of Unexplained Death facilitated an escape from the confinements of her identity initially shaped by her genteel origin, financial comfort, and Victorian upbringing because “[a] crime scene or the morgue were hardly spaces for ladies of good breeding and fine manners to discuss, not to mention appear” (202). Ironically, in creating miniature interiors, she “evidently never [left] the very space she hoped to transcend” (202). It might thus seem that “leaving behind” domestic space for the public sphere only reinforces the very boundaries that serve to make the interior a space of confinement. Instead, Glessner-Lee forged her own brand of forensic analysis which emphasized the porosity of boundaries between interiority and exteriority and pursued her own version of a career, simultaneously questioning gender stereotypes in the profession of forensic investigation (202). The Nutshells Studies of Unexplained Death have been used for the instruc- tion in forensic techniques ever since, even if the miniature interiors crafted by her “exhibit moral assumptions embedded in the act of seeing space, absorbed from many contemporary discourses” (Miller 202). The dioramas simultaneously question those moral assumptions by re-interpreting the domestic space as a crime scene. They open domesticity to the external gaze of inspection by professionals rather than a housewife and thus provide an interstitial, liminal space “located between the seemingly rigid, proprietary spheres of public and private, inside and outside, and masculine and feminine” (199) as these categories were defined and—Miller emphasizes—also challenged in Glessner Lee’s lifetime (199). Yet, Miller finally admits that attempts to “resolve the Nutshells’ evidence in light of the circumstances of Glessner Lee’s life” (208) reveal a contemporary myth, on which CSI shows thrive: that our visuality can be penetrating and objective and that eventually it will expose the truth (208). Aptly, Natalie, the Miniature Killer, challenges patriarchal and epistemological hegemony of the laboratory chief by meeting him on his own turf—that of crime scene investigation. However, she replaces the rationality of scientific analysis—which is a domain of crime scene investigators—with manual skills, dexterity and fondness for touch associated with the feminine occupation of doll-house making. Natalie learned her skill in crafting miniature models from her foster father, devoted to building models of trains and the landscapes they traverse. He protects Natalie, the only foster child he was emotionally close to, by admitting to committing the murders she was guilty of, and when communicating it to the investigators on Skype, commits suicide. Deprived of emotional ties to the only person she loved, Natalie plans to avenge her foster father by striking at Sarah, the person the fatherly figure of the laboratory foster family is attached to, thus inflicting pain both on the director of the laboratory and on the woman. Natalie crafts a miniature model of a car crash in which Sarah is to be merely wounded but will be left to die in the desert. Ironically, The Miniature Killer’s mimetic obsession and meticulousness, perfectionism in rendering her dioramas exactly like the would-be models, i. e. future crime scenes, help to apprehend her by scrutinizing her contacts with the arts and

4 2015 Frances Glessner-Lee Seminar in Homicide Investigation The last to date Frances Glessner Lee Homicide Investigation Seminar was held at the Office of the Chief Medical Examiner, 900 West Baltimore Street in Baltimore, Maryland, October 26 – 30, 2015. Zofia Kolbuszewska The Nutshell Studies 57 crafts community and businesses providing miniature makers with tools, raw materials and prefabricated parts. Mark Morris emphasizes the material excess of crafted models. Due to their materiality they exceed their referential function and express “something more and something else than what might be identified with the referent” (65). Morris further observes that: “Miniatures play to a fantasy of distance,” yet, the distance implied by the small scale of the miniature “signals both a spatial and temporal gap” (125). Indeed, the miniature re-creation of would-be murder scenes as well as murders committed subsequently by Natalie are triggered by a memory of the experience of strangely distanced—miniature—perspective on a body of her four-year-old sister pushed by Natalie to death from a tree- house. This led to the rejection of the girl by her father and placing her in foster care. He then replaced the dead daughter with a clay-biscuit doll-puppet and pursues the career of a ventriloquist. In each miniature built by Natalie there is a fragment of a picture of a bleeding clay-biscuit doll. Natalie’s double coded models allegorize the inherent violence of domesticity by paradoxically telling a story of violence and crime destroying domesticity from the outside. Susan Stewart observes that “[t]he miniature, linked to nostalgic versions of childhood and history, presents a diminutive, and thereby manipulatable, version of experience, a version which is domesticated and protected from contamination” (69). Conversely, Natalie’s miniatures thrive on contamination—they preserve a loss that has already taken place (murdering of the sister) and the losses to come (not yet committed murders). These scale models of homicide scenes rehearse and repeat the non-domesticability of loss and the impossibility of protecting home from corruption. However, while on account of their composite nature—they present elements of various crimes and do not imitate entire factual crime scenes— Glessner Lee’s miniatures are artifices 5, i. e. iconic signs whose similarity to the referent is imputed, the Miniature Killer in a melancholy gesture conflates the sign (miniatures of future crime scenes) and its referent (actual crime scenes) by committing thus announced murders. Stewart points out that miniatures offer spatial transcendence by erasing “productive possibilities of understanding through time. Its locus is thereby the nostalgic” (60). Yet, Natalie mocks the ideal home as a locus of nostalgia (from Greek: sickness caused by longing for home) by staging posteriority of the future (depiction of the murders to be committed) and anteriority of the past (the murder of the sister each time resurfaces as a puzzle fragment inserted in crime scene models announcing homicides to be committed) thus creating an apocalyptic tableau which of course fits well the timelessness of the miniature, but destroys the nostalgic harmony of the past. Stewart notes that “the interiority of the enclosed world tends to reify the interiority of the viewer” (68). It might as well be observed that the rei- fied interior of the miniature maker is reflected in the arrested tableau-like inanimateness of the miniature. Indeed, Natalie’s models of crime scenes 5 The artifice has been introduced by Roman Jacobson by extending the tripartite system of signs proposed by Charles Sanders Peirce (index, symbol, icon) to embrace a sign designated as „artifice.” Studying the relationships determining Peirce’s typology Jacobson employed Greimas’s semiotic square to show that logically there should exist a class of signs whose similarity to the referent is imputed rather than factual: *contiguitysimilarityfactualINDEXI- CONimputedSYMBOLARTIFICE Jakobson worked on his proposition over years; he discussed it in detail with the art historian and theoretician Donald Preziosi in the 1980s. See Donald Preziosi, Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums and the Phantasms of Modernity* (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003), 143 – 144. 58 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

arrest the external world in replicating it thus reflecting the inanimate world of her melancholy interiority—she was turned emotionally dead by an original trauma experienced at home in a fit of domestic violence that revealed the inherent violence of domesticity. The Miniature Killer thus tells a double-articulated story. By shattering security, safety and peacefulness of domesticity through committing crime, and by mocking the nostalgic locus she communicates the impossibility of home. Although the miniatures crafted by Natalie seem to function as signifiers for the crimes to be committed, as a matter of fact they express more than just pointing to their referents. By means of inserted partial images depicting a clay-biscuit doll they allegorize in a Derridean vein what the makers of the CSI: Las Vegas construe to be an ineluctable and horrifically irrational kernel of evil. Natalie inscribes the uncanniness of Derridean violence right in the very center of domesticity; domesticity shaped by its own destruction from within. Only a foster family structured around scientific rationality is capable of facing and containing this violence because in a foster home the knowledge of this violence has not been repressed. Violence is recognized as crucial part of the porous interstitial space that arises when the boundaries of the domestic and the external, public world have been blurred. However, the laboratory foster family are not invested with the conscious of other repressions which concern the construction of class, gender, and race in the American society. It perhaps comes as no surprise that the makers of the CSI: Las Vegas were inspired by Frances Glessner Lee’s The Nutshell Studies of Unexpected Death. It is however compelling to what degree they sanitized the subversive power of her dioramas, by mitigating their challenge to gender stereotypes when presenting Natalie’s miniatures. Uncannily, Glessner Lee’s models situ- ate themselves in a space between scientific investigation of criminal evidence and awe before rational inexplicability of crime taking place at the center of home, the space which is supposed to be a utopian haven offering a respite and sheltering from the corruption of the external world. By constructing the dioramas of crime scenes Glessner Lee literally crafted her position in what might be designated as a foster family of Police Chiefs and Medical Examiners, a family coalescing around scientific rationality. By making The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death she confirmed her “revised nostalgia” 6 for and a distance to domesticity, whose porous boundaries she explored, and corroborated her simultaneous attraction and resistance to the foster family, where white, patriarchal identity determines the degree of tolerance for liberal difference. Glessner Lee’s dioramas subtly subvert this hegemonic position by staging a “dialogue between outside and inside, between partiality and transcendence with regard to authority and authorial knowledge” (Stewart 69). Yet, even as sanitized versions of Glessner Lee’s miniatures, the Miniature Killer’s models of crime scenes also inadvertently transcend the division between the authority of hegemonic scientific objectivity and the subjective affection for materiality, traditionally gendered feminine, harbored by the whole miniature makers’ community, regardless of their gender identification.

6 The term “revised nostalgia” was first introduced by James Berger in „Cultural Trauma and the ‚Timeless Burst’: Pynchon’s Revision of Nostalgia in Vineland,” Postmodern Culture 5.3 (1995) : 43. In revised nostalgia, it is not so much an impulse to „seek to return to a site of original wholeness; rather, the unrealized possibility of social harmony and justice itself compulsively returns, providing an alternative to existing conditions and a motive for changing them.” Zofia Kolbuszewska The Nutshell Studies 59

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bird, William L., Jr. America’s Doll House: The Miniature World of Faith Bradford. Washington: Smithsonian Institution & New York: Princeton Architec- tural Press, 2010. Derrida, Jacques. “Deconstruction and the Other.”Dialogues with Contempo- rary Continental Thinkers. Ed. Richard Kearney. Manchester: Manchester UP, 1984. Garland, David. Culture of Control. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2001. Gill Jacobs, Flora. A History of Dolls’ Houses. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1953. Hall, Stuart et al. Policing the Crisis: Mugging, the State and Law and Order. London: Macmillan, 1978. Hohenstein, Kurt. “CSI and Law & Order: Dueling Representations of Science and Law in the Criminal Justice System.” The CSI Effect: Television, Crime, and Governance. Ed. Michele Byers and Val Marie Johnson. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009. 61 – 74. Miller, Laura J. “Denatured Domesticcity: An Account of Femininity and Physiognomy in the Interiors of Frances Glessner Lee.” Negotiating Do- mesticity: Spatial Productions of Gender in Modern Architecture. Ed. Hilde Heynen and Gülsüm Baydar. London: Routledge, 2005. Morris, Mark. Models: Architecture and the Miniature. Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, Ltd., 2006. Of Dolls & Murder. Dir. Susan Marks. Produced by John K. Dehn and Susan Marks. I See Dead Dolls Films, LLC., 2011. Preziosi, Donald. Brain of the Earth’s Body: Art, Museums and the Phantasms of Modernity. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. Seltzer, Mark. True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity. New York: Routledge, 2007. Stewart, Susan. On Longing: Narratives of the Miniature, the Gigantic, the Sou- venir, the Collection. Durham: Durham UP, 1993. VanLaerhoven, Sherah and Gail Anderson. “The Science and Careers ofCSI .” The CSI Effect: Television, Crime, and Governance. Ed. Michele Byers and Val Marie Johnson. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009. 29 – 59. West, Patrick. “The City of Our Times: Space Identity and the Body in CSI: Miami.” The CSI Effect: Television, Crime, and Governance. Ed. Michele Byers and Val Marie Johnson. Lanham: Lexington Books, 2009. 111 – 131. Wigley, Mark. Derrida’s Haunt: The Architecture of Deconstruction. Cambridge: TheMIT Press, 1997. Wilson, Christopher P. Learning to Live with Crime: American Crime Nar- rative in the Neoconservative Turn. Columbus: The Ohio State UP, 2010. “I Was Modern to His Victorian”

60 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54) Aleksandra Kamińska “I Was Modern to His Victorian”: House as a Reflection of the Father– Daughter Relationship in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0011.6720 “I Was Modern to His Victorian”

Aleksandra Kamińska “I Was Modern to His Victorian” 61

Aleksandra Kamińska Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic, Alison Bechdel’s graphic memoir, starts earned her MA at the with the drawing of a young man, standing shirtless in front of a house. American Studies Center, Re-drawn photograph of Bechdel’s father, posing against the house, creates University of Warsaw. Currently she is a PhD a notably fitting opening for a story focused on the difficult father-daughter student at the Faculty of relationship and possibilities of reconstruction. In Fun Home, reconstruction Artes Liberales, Univer- is her father’s biggest passion – he tries to refurbish the house and overhaul sity of Warsaw, working on her thesis “Archiving its old allure – and has more symbolic meaning, as Alison Bechdel attempts Girlhood: Self-Represen- to reestablish the relationship with her deceased father through the memoir. tation of Girls in Visual She also aims to answer the question whether her father’s death was a suicide, Culture and Literature.” reimagining and redrawing his final moments. Bechdel’s story is extremely personal and intimate: she describes challenging family intricacies, portrays experience of growing up with obsessive compulsive disorder, and discovers problematic aspects of her father’s secret life. She also painstakingly depicts two places where she had spent majority of her childhood: the eponymous “fun home” – funeral home where her father worked, and the house where she lived with her whole family. Heavily ornamented Victorian house, located in a small town in rural Pennsylvania, constitutes the core of Bechdel’s memoir. The first part of this paper explores the ways in which the house functions as an axis of Bechdel’s narrative: both on the visual layer of the memoir, and as a labyrinth resembling the structure of the story. The second part examines how Bechdel draws and writes about the house as a reflection of her family relations, focusing on the hidden homosexuality of her father. As I argue, the house is more than just the background for Bechdel’s family tragedy: it becomes its symbol. It is an area where the author’s father, Bruce, an Eng- lish teacher and a funeral home director, finds an outlet for his constrained personality. A closeted gay man, he skillfully remodels the house, in order to create a picture of perfect background for his seemingly traditional family. However, those efforts cannot hide his queerness in the anachronous, gothic and extravagant house. I analyze the relationship between Alison Bechdel and her father, pointing out the connection between their aesthetic preferences and ways of expressing gender identity. This article examines how the main themes of Fun Home – isolation, queerness and gender identity – are mirrored in Bechdel’s family house. The memoir is a non-linear narrative divided into seven chapters. Even though in every chapter Bechdel writes and draws about different aspect of her life, all of them, at least partially, take place in the house. Robin Lydenberg claims that it serves the role of one of the memoir’s characters: “a Victorian Gothic Revival ‚fixer-upper’ that is the object of Bruce Bechdel’s loving attention, functions as a main character in this domestic saga” (58). Numerous and detailed drawings of the house, both from the inside and the outside, seem to strengthen Lydenberg’s observation. In some of the panels, the house’s interior takes center stage, while its inhabitants serve as part of the setting: Bechdel draws a corridor or the foot of the stairs with a member of the family barely seen in the corner of the panel. She carefully retraces the wallpapers, redraws paintings from her father’s library and sketches crystal ornamental chandeliers. Her attention to detail is not limited to depicting the house, but it is easy to connect her passionate accuracy with her father’s obsessive precision in house renovation and constant redecoration. Her portrayal does not lack mockery: when illustrating the interior of her father’s library, she redraws the painting of a bird, adding an arrow pointing to it with a remark: “honest to God, we had a painting of a cockatoo in the library” (83). Through text and image, she links precision with fondness and humor. 62 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

In a different panel, also presenting Bruce’s library, Bechdel again adds the pointers to highlight that the curtains were velvet, the valances gilt, and the wallpaper flocked: Bruce managed to create a truly outstanding interior. She comments the picture: “if my father liked to imagine himself as a nineteenth- century aristocrat overseeing his estate from behind the leather-topped ma- hogany and brass Second-Empire desk … did that require such a leap of the imagination?” (60). The house was an object of Bruce’s admiration, he was fully engaged in creating certain image of the house and the family. Bech- del’s statement can be read as a remark on Bruce’s taste, but also as a sign of how his desires and ambitions would be echoed in his choices considering interior design. Lydenberg points out that showing how the mentality of the house’s residents is reflected in the condition of the house itself is a known practice in literature: “this trope of the house as an embodiment of the psychological and physical states of its inhabitants is particularly well developed in the nineteenth-century realistic novel” (58). It is hard to determine whether Bechdel deliberately tries to reference a popular literary trope in Fun Home, although considering plentiful references to literature in the memoir, it is highly possible. Bechdel clearly connects the peculiarity of the house with its renovator – her father. The Bechdel family lives in a Gothic Revival house built in the nineteenth century. When Alison Bechdel’s parents bought it in the early 1960s, the house was in a poor condition – Bruce spends next eighteen years renovating it. Alison Bechdel stresses how her father was constantly remodeling and restoring the house. The house itself was far from ordinary, furnished and decorated in such a way that the guest, or even the household members, could feel like visitors in a truly eccentric funhouse: surprised, startled by its unpredictability. Bechdel notes that numerous mirrors and multiple door- ways often made the guests lost. ThroughoutFun Home, Bechdel plays with the myth of Icarus and Daedalus: in the memoir her father takes the role of Icarus, Daedalus or the minotaur; sometimes he is both the inventor and the monster at the same time. Bechdel recalls the myth: “He hid the minotaur in the labyrinth – a maze of passages and rooms opening endlessly into one another... and from which . . . escape was impossible” (12). Her statement is juxtaposed with a picture of her younger self, running out of the house and coming back two panels later. Ariela Freedman notes: “It is clear that the labyrinth her father has created has trapped her as well, and it is also evident that the labyrinth will bring her back to herself ” (132). Bechdel’s drawings reveal different portrayals of her father: when she references the minotaur, Bruce appears as a spooky shadow over his scared daughter. In the memoir Bechdel’s father seems to be present in every corner of the painstakingly renovated house, and the daughter is not able to escape him. Through the queerness she shares with Bruce, she is forever connected – or even trapped – with her father. Bechdel learns that her father is gay just after her own coming out: thus in a situation in which she could be “out” of the family, instead she creates a new connection with Bruce, not able to free herself from him. The structure of Fun Home resembles a labyrinth: Bechdel, herself lost in the memories and the hidden queer life of her father, arduously navigates through secrets and family’s repressions. She tries to find the truth about Bruce between his favorite books, in buried photographs and forgotten letters, which serve as signposts on her attempt to get to know her dead father. These memorabilia, which she redraws in the narrative, constitute an important part of the graphic layer Aleksandra Kamińska “I Was Modern to His Victorian” 63 of the memoir, 1 alongside the images of elaborately decorated interiors. The images presented in Fun Home construct a link to both the mysterious, tricky, hard to navigate habitat that Bechdel grew up in, and her father’s obsessive attention to detail and personal aesthetics. The family lived together, but as Bechdel explains: “Our home was like an artists’ colony. We ate together, but otherwise were absorbed in our separate pursuits” (134). Her reflection accompanies a panel in which the reader can see young Alison Bechdel drawing or writing in her room, one of her brothers playing with plane models, the other brother playing the guitar, the mother playing the piano, and the father occupied with restoration – each member of the family located in a different room, alone. Through her drawings, Bechdel expresses the isolation in her family. In the memoir she explores family’s tensions and secrets, using the house as an illustration and point of reference. The title of the book – Fun Home – is a play on the “funeral home,” a nickname which young Alison Bechdel and her brothers used to call the funeral home, where their father was working. However, the title can also be read as a bitter remark on the house she lived in – this “fun home” was neither fun, not really a shelter, but an unapproachable museum, a hostile labyrinth in which each member of the family was lost, and struggled with the family’s secrets alone. Bechdel devotes the whole first chapter ofFun Home to point out the ways in which her home was unique, and to describe her father’s relationship with it. Bruce’s passion for decorating and adding numerous, often anachronistic embellishments to the interior, led to a situation in which the house resembled a museum, not inhabited by any family; in one of the panels, even the mother is complaining that she is “sick of cleaning this museum” (261). Young Alison Bechdel did not want to believe that her house was out of ordinary. In one of the first panels she states that “when other children called our house a mansion, I would demur. I resented the implication that my family was . . . unusual in any way” (5). She was afraid that her house would disclose the peculiarity of her family – or its queerness. As an adult she re-visits possible clues of her father’s homosexuality. Already as a child, Bechdel realized that their house, and her father’s attachment to it, is unconventional and strange, as she was looking for similarities between the household from The Addams Family and her own. Her associations with strange characters from The Addams Family can be interpreted as more symbolic than Bechdel realized as a child. An unusual, old house located far from big cities, mother joking about being a vampire, the ubiquitous theme of death, lies, secrets and mysteries – Fun Home can be read as a gothic story. In a gothic narrative, a weird house, in which children play under chandeliers resembling skulls, most often hides a terrifying secret; Bechdel’s house does have a secret: her father’s queerness. Yet Fun Home can be understood as gothic not only because of Bechdel’s eerie and anachronistic house located unexpectedly in a small town in Pennsylvania, or even unac- customed attitude towards death. Bechdel depicts her father in a way that invokes gothic connotations: Bruce is the monster in the labyrinth that his daughter is so afraid of. He is often more than just a cold and distant father; Bechdel portrays him as a cruel beast, who does not care about his family and focuses only on his passion, restoring the mysterious house.

1 See more: Kamińska, Aleksandra. “Expressing the Uncertainty, Reflecting Memory: The Role of Memorabilia in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” Spaces of Expression and Repression in Post-Millennial North-American Literature and Visual Culture. Ed. Izabella Kimak and Julia Nikiel. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2017. 93 – 101. 64 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

This fascination with décor and renovation may be significant on the symbolic level. Christian W. Schneider observes that Bruce’s “laborious effort involves creating an elaborate facade, the perfect home for an ostensibly perfect family, which he shapes to his will. True to a Gothic sense of construction, the twists and secrets are hidden beneath this affected exterior” (np). As already mentioned, Bruce’s biggest secret – his queerness – is hidden in the eerie house. At the same time, Bruce’s portrayal is saturated with isolation, mystery, death – themes that are essential for gothic. As Schneider notes, Bruce’s “queerness adds to his Gothic character in the eyes of his daughter. The elaborate act of suppression contributes to the inexplicability of his behavior and strengthens his deep and often frightening otherness in young Alison’s childhood memories” (np). This distressing behavior, so confusing for his daughter, changes him into a monster. Therefore, the theme of death in Fun Home can be connected with the story’s gothic character, father’s queerness, and the way Alison Bechdel portrays her home. In the opening chapter of Fun Home, Bechdel emphasizes that Bruce’s love for decoration and renovation of the house, was for him more important than his children. She bitterly comments: “Sometimes . . . my father actually enjoyed having a family. Or at least the air of authenticity we lent to his exhibit. A sort of still life with children” (13). This remark discloses Bechdel’s difficult relations with her father: her sad realization that Bruce was only preoccupied with creating a perfect background for his seemingly traditional family, and not engaged with the family itself. He treated his children like stage props or assistants, helping him to create the desired image. In her memoir, Alison Bechdel leaves no doubt that Bruce was not a caring and loving father, but an aloof person, fixated on his goal. Bechdel stresses several times her father’s commitment and skills in decorating and renovating the house. She writes that “restoration wasn’t his job. It was his passion…. Libidinal. Manic. Martyred” (7). The reader sees the picture of Bruce carrying a pillar, resembling Jesus Christ carrying the cross, with the outline of the house visible in the background. House renovation combined with interior design was Bruce’s biggest project, so important to him, because, in fact, it was a different “project” – an attempt to construct the image of traditional, heteronormative family. Paradoxically, Bruce’s efforts to create an impression of established, heteronormative head of a family, at the same time can be read as signs of his queerness. Bechdel notes, not without some satisfaction, that her father “could trans- figure a room with the smallest offhand flourish” (6), as he was a truly skilled and gifted interior designer. In a way, his occupation can be seen as an example of his anachronistic figure, and a good fit for the Victorian house. Deborah Cohen argues that “the Victorian interior was neither chiefly the responsibility, nor even the prerogative of women. Through the late nineteenth century . . . men played a crucial role in the fitting out of the home … Decorators were men” (157). She points out the shift, noting that “by the 1920s and 1930s, home decoration had become nearly exclusively a woman’s domain” (157). Con- temporary male interior designers are often assumed to be gay. Therefore, if Bruce by his constant renovations and decorations tries to create a picture of heteronormative family, he instantly fails, because at the same time his actions undermine his normativity. In fact, this strange relation between his goal of creating the image of a perfect family, and his ways of achieving it, can pose a question whether he does not undermine it at the same time. In Bechdel’s family, traditional gender roles are constantly challenged: the daughter, even as a small child, already preferred more masculine clothes, Aleksandra Kamińska “I Was Modern to His Victorian” 65 rejecting everything pink, flowery and not-practical, taking pride in being called a butch. Bruce’s aesthetics contrast with his daughter’s taste: his admiration for ornaments, combined with focus on the interior design and his physical appearance, expose traits that are often perceived as feminine, and can be read as queer. Alison Bechdel declares: “I was Spartan to my father’s Athenian. Modern to his Victorian. Butch to his nelly. Utilitarian to his aesthete” (5). She creates a direct connection between her own and Bruce’s aesthetics, and their displays of gender identity. In one of the panels the reader sees Alison Bechdel as a child and her father standing in front of a mirror, preparing to go to a wedding. Bruce is dressed in a very elegant velvet suit and young Bechdel wears archaic looking dress, which she describes as the “least girly dress in the store” (98). She comments this memory: “Not only were we inverts. We were inversions of one another” (98). In that particular fragment, Bechdel shows their contrast when it comes to aesthetics, but she also introduces a key issue by saying that she was a “butch to his nelly.” Her preferences are completely different from her father’s: she wants everything to be austere and functional, she hates ornaments, flowers and color pink, admires men’s fashion. Some kind of admiration for masculinity, although channeled differently, is one of aspects on which they can both agree. When Bruce notices his daughter’s masculinity, he makes everything to restrict it: he dresses her in “girly” clothes, cares for her hair-pins, puts pink wallpaper in her room. Renata Lucerna Dalmaso points out that Bruce’s: “behavior towards his daughter is repeatedly portrayed as of someone trying to re-mediate an excess of masculinity or a lack of femininity” (573), which is visible mostly prominently through his fashion selection for young Alison Bechdel, but also when he installs flowery wallpaper in her room. Bechdel portrays in Fun Home how her and her father’s gender identities and queerness can be traced through focus on their aesthetic preferences. Bruce’s style or taste visible in his constant redecoration of the house is at the same time a much more meaningful declaration. Deborah Cohen connects the major shift of interior design becoming women’s activity with Oscar Wilde’s scandal in 1895: “If a whiff of femininity lingered around aesthetes and, by extension, home decoration before Wilde’s public humiliation, afterwards the link between effeminacy and homosexuality was forged solid” (158). She argues that “in the aftermath of Wilde’s trials, it is possible to catch a glimpse of a homosexual identity in the making – one which would, in the twentieth century, turn the home into a place for uncloseted self-expression and allow men to transcend provincial prejudices by allying themselves with good taste” (158 – 159). Bruce’s dandy and anachronistic persona, combined with enthusiasm for home decoration easily can be read as queer in a 1970s small town in Pennsylvania. Taking care of the house is for Bruce a chance for authentic self-expression; his actions correspond with the model characterized by Deborah Cohen. This is not the only way in which Bruce’s meticulous house renovation can be understood as a sign of his queerness. In her repeated play with the myth of Icarus and Deadalus, Bechdel writes about her father: “He was an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a Daedalus of décor” (6). She later stresses that he: “used his skillful artifice not to make things, but to make things appear to be what they were not. That is to say, impeccable” (16) and illustrates her observations with a picture of the whole family standing neatly in front of the house, posing for a photograph to be taken, with her father holding the camera. By making thorough improvements and embellishments, Bruce was evidently struggling to create the image of a conventional and heteronormative family. Yet he did not fully commit to his traditional family, but was 66 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

constructing a smokescreen by creating a perfect house. Yet, this almost too perfect house was what could disclose him. Helene Tison suggests that his obsessive and exaggerated remodeling and decorating is already a manifestation of Bruce’s rejection of traditional gender roles and normativity. Tison argues that “The house in family home drag exposes the ‚sham’, the role-playing; it is metonymic of the impossible quest for a gender original and destabilizes the very notion of family” (28). Bechdel herself declares that her house was “not a real home at all but the simulacrum of one” (17), and since her parents failed to create a “real” home – her family also does not fulfill her hopes and needs. Bechdel connects embellishments – using the decorations from the house as a starting point – with lies. That is why, already as a child, she rebelliously says: “when I grow up, my house is going to be all metal, like a submarine” (14), to escape from the deceit she experiences in the family. Bechdel not only rejects any adornments, but also the outdated style of the house, a figure of her father’s preferences, looking for the modern to contrast his Victorian taste. From Bechdel’s drawings and descriptions, it is clear that the Gothic Revival style house is anachronistic in both its exterior and interior designs. If the house is Bruce’s greatest form of expression, a symbol of his style, it can be read as a drag also in reference to the definition of drag proposed by Eliza- beth Freeman in Time Binds. Freeman states that “Time Binds began when I understood someone else’s self-presentation as drag, if drag can be seen as the act of plastering the body with outdated rather than just cross-gendered accessories, whose resurrection seems to exceed the axis of gender and begins to talk about, indeed talk back to, history” (xxi). Bruce’s outfits consist of flamboyant velvet suits and extravagant shirts with jabots, looking overstated, dandy and anachronistic. The overdressed house serves as an extension of his outdated style, and in that meaning, his drag. To broaden the link between the outdated and the drag: also Bruce’s renovations can be understood as an anachronistic practice (from Victorian times), and for that reason – as another implication of his queerness. The exaggeratedly decorated house can be read as a drag, a smokescreen or a lie: yet it definitely is the ultimate symbol of Bruce’s queerness and his hidden homosexual life. Matt Cook argues that “Bechdel’s Fun Home . . . keys into some commonly circulating ideas about the relationship between home and homosexuality and yet is also a tale of a quirky and unique home and family life” (178). Bechdel’s memoir is an intense exploration of gender roles, partly on the example of how Bruce takes care of the home. The house plays a multidimensional role: drawn carefully by Bechdel it acts as the narrative’s separate character, it resembles the structure of the memoir – a winding labyrinth full of secrets, it creates the basis for reading the narrative as gothic, and its seeming perfection can be understood as Bruce’s drag. The house mirrors Alison Bechdel’s questions about her father’s queerness, isolation in the family, secrets, and therefore becomes a central element in Fun Home, a complex symbol of Bechdel’s family struggles.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. New York: Houghton Mifflin Company, 2006. Cohen, Deborah. “In Possession: Men, Women, and Decoration.” The Domestic Space Reader. Ed. Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2012. 157 – 159. Web. Au- gust 20th, 2015. Aleksandra Kamińska “I Was Modern to His Victorian” 67

Cook, Matt. “Queer Domesticities.” The Domestic Space Reader. Ed. Chiara Briganti and Kathy Mezei. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, Scholarly Publishing Division, 2012. 173 – 179. Web. August 20th, 2015. Dalmaso, Lucena R. “Queering the Gendered Body: Performances on Mascu- linity and Femininity in Alison Bechdel’s Graphic Memoir Fun Home.” International Journal of Comic Art 15(2), 2013: 559 – 578. Freedman, Ariela. “Drawing on Modernism in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home.” jml: Journal of Modern Literature 2009: 125 – 140. Web. September 3rd, 2015. Freeman, Elizabeth. Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Durham and London: Duke University Press, 2010. Lydenberg, Robin. “Under Construction Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.” European Journal of English Studies 16.1 (2012): 57 – 68. Web. September 1st, 2015. Schneider, Christian W. “Young daughter, old artificer: Constructing the Gothic Fun Home.” https://www.academia.edu/435797/Young_daugh- ter_old_artificer_Constructing_the_Gothic_ Fun_Home. Web. August 7th, 2015. Tison, Helene. “Drag as metaphor and the quest for meaning in Alison Bech- del’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic.” GRAAT 1 (March 2007): 26 – 39. http://www.graat.fr/bechdel003aaaa.pdf. Web. August 5th, 2015. Betty Friedan, Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett

68 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54) Piotr Skurowski Betty Friedan, Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett and the 1960s’ Challenge to the Suburban Era Mystique of Security and Order

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0011.6721 Betty Friedan, Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett

Piotr Skurowski Betty Friedan, Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett 69

Piotr Skurowski is Chair It has often been stated that the 1960s challenge to the established norms, assump- of the Department of tions and cultural practices left a lasting legacy in American history. Undeniably, one English at SWPS Univer- of the most important components of that legacy was the critique of the prevailing sity, where he has also served as Dean of the social and spatial order. The search for order (symptomatically, the title of Robert Faculty of Arts and Social Wiebe’s classic overview of American political, economic and social history from Sciences. His main 1877 to 1920) has long been a major preoccupation of the successive generations professional interests lie in the area of U.S. Cul- of American social reformers, politicians, administrators etc. By the 1960s, the tural History and Cultural obsessive concern with order – and the corresponding fear of disorder leading to Studies. His publications include monographs on a sense of insecurity-- began to be looked upon as repressive and unproductive. Henry Adams and on The 1960s and early 1970s were, in the view of Sharon Zukin, a watershed the image of Europe in in the institutionalization of urban fear’ and, as Zygmunt Bauman explains, American Progressivism. were a time when “(v)oters and elites – a broadly conceived middle class in the United States – could have faced the choice of approving government policies to eliminate poverty, manage ethnic competition, and integrate everyone into common public institutions. Instead, they chose to buy protection, fueling the growth of the private security industry.” (Liquid Modernity 94) The rise of the private surveillance industry was but a last-ditch attempt to thwart the inevitable social change, marked by the intrusion of urban “disorder” into the life of the white urban middle classes – a way of life predicated on, among others, the male and racial hegemony. It has to be observed, though, that the latter showed amazing stability and continuity, drawing on a not-to-be-ignored strength of traditional attitudes and values. In the context of the 1960s, the word “mystique” immediately brings to mind Betty Friedan’s 1963 bestseller famously dealing with the “feminine mystique.” Yet the decade – just like the ones preceding and following it – also subscribed to a number of other than “feminine” mystiques. The suburban era in particular, whose origins may be traced to the post-WWII years, was rife with “mystiques”. The suburban lifestyle in itself was being “mysticized” as “the” solution to the most acute social problems of the time, meaning especially the fears and insecurities engendered by the increasingly volatile social situation in the inner cities. The flight to the suburbs was advertised as the practical solution for the white middle class wishing to improve their living conditions but also – perhaps most importantly – those seeking the security and order promised by the new suburban environment. The suburban “mystique” was largely predicated on the promise of a secure and orderly way of life, contrasted with the “city jungle” stereotype, portraying the city life as threatening to the family and marked by chaos. Many of the promises extended by the suburbia, however, turned out to be empty, or so it seems judg- ing by the increasingly vocal criticism of suburban lifestyles that could be heard in the mass media, popular culture and literature of the 1950s, ‘60s and ‘70s. This new critique of suburbia provides a counterpoint to, or may perhaps be seen as a continuation of, the anti-city tradition in American culture – a continuation in the sense that what up until then (suburban lifestyle) seemed to be an alternative way of life – alternative to city life that is – took on some undesirable features of urbanity: decondensed and decongested as it was, the suburban way of life could no longer be seen as located on the “nature” side of the city/country divide – with the corresponding conformity, standardization and inauthenticity, it now seemed to its critics even less “natural” than the previously criticized urban living. The search for security and order in suburbia, from the viewpoint of their critics, led to disastrous consequences, both for the suburb and the city. 1 1 On postwar anti-urbanism see Steven Conn, Americans Against the City. Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century (New York: Oxford University Press, 2014). The suburban sprawl is commonly attacked as a symptom of American malaise. For representative anti-suburban 70 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

Betty Friedan’s unmasking of the “feminine” mystique was arguably the most influential and radical critique of what can be called the suburban mystique of her time. The predicament of the American middle-class womanhood in the 1950s and ‘60s was clearly, to a large extent, a predicament resulting from the new suburban lifestyle taken up by the millions. The gist of Friedan’s argument – referring to “the problem” of the American middle class women arising from the ruling ideology condemning them to lives marked by male dominance, social isolation, or lack of occupational fulfillment – is commonly known, and it’s beyond the scope of this article to summarize the argument in detail, except for those fragments that directly refer to feelings of (in)security. 2 What needs to be said here is that Freidan’s social diagnosis of the unhappy American housewife (as well as unhappy husbands, children and families), and most importantly her call for women to liberate themselves from the “mystique” of “femininity”, was evidently subversive of the existing social order, particularly of the suburban order, where the already existing male hegemony was carried to its extreme with the women trapped in their social roles as mothers and wives to the extent not so easily possible back in the city. In a famous passage (which she later came to regret) Friedan compared the oppressiveness of the suburban social order to the Nazi concentration camps – and though misplaced, the comparison is symptomatic of the emotions stirred up by the social and psychological crisis linked to the new suburban lifestyle. Friedan’s best-selling book elicited a strong emotional response, particularly conservatives. Strong resentment from the cultural conservatives may have been the best proof that it (the book) caused quite a panic and was perceived a threat to the existing social order. It is an irony of sorts that for today’s reader Friedan sometimes sounds strikingly conservative. In the estimate of Stephanie Coontz, for example, Friedan’s warnings about “the homosexuality that is spreading like a murky smog over the American scene” sounded more like something that would come out of the mouth of a right- wing televangelist than a contemporary feminist. So too did her alarmist talk about permissive parenting, narcissistic self-indulgence, juvenile delinquency, and female promiscuity: “…I was also indignant that Friedan portrayed all women in that era as passive and preoccupied with their homes. What about the African-American women who had led civil rights demonstrations and organized community actions throughout the 1950s and early ‘60s” (Coontz, loc.188 – 195 and 724 – 751). Despite those objections, to Coontz herself, just like to all her interviewees, Friedan, in perspective, made a big difference in their personal lives, and was the single most influential leader of the National Organization for Women (NOW). 3 It was specifically the American woman’s shaky sense of security that, in the view of Friedan herself, was the main reason women generally feared to respond to the feminists’ call for equal rights: “‘Rights’ have a dull sound to people who have grown up after they have been won” – wrote Friedan – “(b)ut like Nora [reference to Ibsen’s play The Doll’ House], the feminists had to

arguments see James Howard Kunstler, The Geography of Nowhere (1993) and Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck,Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream (2000). 2 In Poland, the full text of Friedan’s book became available pretty late: the Polish language edition of the book appeared only in 2013, on the 60th anniversary of the original publication. 3 On the influence of Friedan in Polish feminism, see Agnieszka Graff, „Wstęp. Mistyka po amerykańsku, mistyka po polsku”. In: Betty Friedan, Mistyka kobiecości. Transl. Agnieszka Grzybek (Warszawa: Czarna Owca, 2012). Ebook. Loc. 45 – 351. Piotr Skurowski Betty Friedan, Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett 71 win those rights before they could begin to live and love as human beings. Not very many women then, or even now, dared to leave the only security they knew – dared to turn their backs on their homes and husbands to begin Nora’s search.” (76) Consequently, Friedan attacked the 1950s ideals of suburban domesticity and the corresponding feelings of (in)security, leading to a sense of entrap- ment: “Fulfillment as a woman had only one definition for American women after 1949— the housewife-mother. As swiftly as in a dream, the image of the American woman as a changing, growing individual in a changing world was shattered. Her solo flight to find her own identity was forgotten in the rush for the security of togetherness. Her limitless world shrunk to the cozy walls of home.” (38) From early on, Friedan argued, women were socialized into a culture of dependency on their male partners, seen as the main source of security: “In the coeducational colleges, girls are regarded by others-and think of themselves-primarily in terms of their sexual function as dates, future wives. They ‘seek my security in him’ instead of finding themselves, and each act of self-betrayal tips the scale further away from identity to passive self-contempt,” (165) wrote Friedan, who went on to argue that the American woman had made a “mistaken choice”: “she ran back home again to live by sex alone, trading in her individuality for security.” (195) What it took, wrote Friedan, for a young woman to drop her posture of insecurity and submissiveness, was persistence in seeking education, a major factor in achieving an autonomous identity: “A therapist at another college told me of girls who had never committed themselves, either to their work or any other activity of the college and who felt that they would ‘go to pieces’ when their parents refused to let them leave college to marry the boys in whom they found ‘security’. When these girls, with help, finally applied themselves to work--or even began to feel a sense of self by taking part in an activity such as student government or the school newspaper-they lost their desperate need for ‘security.’ They finished college, worked, went out with more mature young men, and are now marrying on quite a different emotional basis.” (167) In her “Epilogue,” written for the 1974 Dell edition of Mystique book, Friedan turned to a confessionary mode, wherein she reminisces on how she ultimately freed herself from the security mystique inherent in the idea of marriage: “I finally found the courage to get a divorce in May,

I am less alone now than I ever was holding on to the false security of my marriage. I think the next great issue for the women’s movement is basic reform of marriage and divorce.” (379)

Such life decisions – giving up on the “mystiques” of femininity, suburban bliss, security by the side of one’s spouse, were scary, Friedan admitted. However, such decisions often needed to be undertaken in order to achieve liberation. In her own case, it took a long-accumulated anger and the realization of a destructive self-denial to finally overcome her fear of losing ‘security’ and unsubscribe from the dominant narration: “I didn’t blame women for being scared. I was pretty scared myself. It isn’t really possible to make a new pattern of life all by yourself. I’ve always dreaded being alone more than anything else. The anger I had not dared to face in myself during all the years I tried to play the helpless little housewife with my husband-and feeling more helpless the longer I played it-was beginning to erupt now, more and more violently. 72 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

For fear of being alone, I almost lost my own self-respect trying to hold on to a marriage that was based no longer on love but on dependent hate. It was easier for me to start the women’s movement which was needed to change society than to change my own personal life.” (367) It is rather symptomatic that the logic of liberation spelled out in the book, tantamount to the repudiation of the “feminine mystique” led Friedan to the rejection of the suburban ‘mystique’ at the same time: “We had to move back to the city, where the kids could do their own thing without my chauffeuring and where I could be with them at home during some of the hours I now spent commuting. I couldn’t stand being a freak alone in the suburbs any longer.” (366) The second and third book in this selection, while also related to the ideas of order and security, as well as strategies to achieve them, deal with suburban- ism rather indirectly, in the sense that they talk about the urban crisis which to a large extent was precipitated by the flight to the suburbs. Both Jacobs and Sennett wanted to preserve the city as the rich, complex social milieu; both in fact celebrate the urban – as opposed to suburban – way of life, even though they were mostly looking at the city from different perspectives. Inevitably, the issues of security and order were central to their argument, as they indeed are to the contemporary social debate at large. Jacobs’s The Death and Life of the Great American Cities (1961), which actually preceded Friedan’s book by two years, shared a lot with The Feminine Mystique, even though at first glance it deals with different topics, as it focuses on an attack on the modernist urban planning and its disastrous social consequences. Jane Jacobs’s book, together with Betty Friedan’s bestseller, arguably constituted two most influential books of the 1960s and exerted a palpable impact on their time – in the case of Jane Jacobs, it can be argued, her impact even exceeded that of Friedan’s, at least in the long time-perspective: her book has since its publication become the Bible of the urban planning education and the most influential urban planning idea of recent decades (New Urban- ism) has all but enshrined Jane Jacobs as the founding mother of a revolution in urban planning. 4 Jane Jacobs led a backlash against the practices of the contemporary urban planners and administrators (most famously, of course, she led a titanic struggle against the activity of Robert Moses, the “czar” of New York City’s urban renewal in the thirties, forties and fifties). Parallel to Friedan, Jacobs challenged the contemporary city-planning ideology, with its ‘mystique’ of zoning and big-scale urban planning (prioritizing automobile traffic) as the foundation of urban order – in fact, the same planning that led to the suburban sprawl and the decline of America’s inner cities, including the decomposition of many local communities. Different from the rather individualistic message of Friedan who challenged the suburban American women to find their true identities and realize their individual ambitions, Jacobs was a communitarian, trying to preserve and revive the social bonds she claimed existed within the inner city. Next to Herbert Gans, she believed an urban community could function as an urban village, cultivating strong neighborly ties. As it has been said, Jacobs challenged the dominant planning philosophy trying to impose on the city a new architectural, spatial and social order, which in her view was totally disruptive of the social relations in urban neighborhoods

4 See, for example, Andres Duany, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck,Suburban Nation (2000): 82 – 88; Kenneth Hall, Gerald Porterfield,Community by Design (2001): 105. Piotr Skurowski Betty Friedan, Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett 73 and led to what she famously termed “the death of the city.” Jacobs’s effective blocking of Robert Moses’ plans for the construction of the Lower Manhat- tan expressway in the 1960s became the cause célèbre of the urban progressives fighting the sweeping renewal plans which aimed to cure the impending sense of growing urban disorder and “decay” by condemning many vibrant neighborhoods to make space for new construction. As she wrote, “It is futile to plan a city’s appearance, or speculate on how to endow it with a pleasing appearance of order, without knowing what sort of innate, functioning order it has. To seek for the look of things as a primary purpose or as the main drama is apt to make nothing but trouble. “ (loc.272 – 274). And she went on condemning the pseudo-order proposed by the city planners: „There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.” (loc. 282 – 284) Jacobs protested against the increasing standardization and uniformization stemming from the single-use zoning philosophy then commonly accepted by the city planning profession. Paradoxically, the excessive use of standardization of urban space led to a disorienting, and thus psychically destabilizing, sense of spacelessness and directionlessness, or to urban disorder à rebours. “If the sameness of use is shown candidly for what it is—sameness—it looks monotonous. Superficially, this monotony might be thought of as a sort of order, however dull. But esthetically, it unfortunately also carries with it a deep disorder: the disorder of conveying no direction. In places stamped with the monotony and repetition of sameness you move, but in moving you seem to have gotten nowhere. North is the same as south, or east as west. Sometimes north, south, east and west are all alike, as they are when you stand within the grounds of a large project. It takes differences—many differences—cropping up in different directions to keep us oriented.” (loc. 3611 – 12) Being something of a spatial anarchist, Jacobs was by no means a social one – while rejecting the abstract order superimposed on the city by the all-powerful city planners and big-time developers, she strongly believed in the small-scale, local order of established communities. What to mainstream urbanists and planners was urban chaos that needed to be put in order and harnessed, to Jacobs was precisely the opposite – a traditional, organic kind of social order and balance that needed not being tampered with by social engineering. In the view of Marshall Berman, Jacobs formulated a “feminine” urban vision, preoccupied with the quality of everyday domestic life of the average inhabitant; thus she can be regarded as a mid-20th century continuator of Jane Addams. In Berman’s words “Jacobs made her readers feel that women know better what it means to live in the city – day by day, street by street – than the men who build and plan those cities.” (Berman 150 – 151) Jacobs famously wanted to preserve the life of the street – in contradiction to the logic of modernist planning, symbolized by Robert Moses, whose main preoccupation was to convert street space into vast spaces designed for automobile traffic. Influential architects and urbanists like Siegfried Giedion praised Robert Moses for the construction of Triborough Bridge, Grand Cen- tral Parkway and West Side Highway, each symbolizing a “new urban form.” For Gideon, there was no space for the streets any more – they should cease to exist, just like the city in its traditional form. (Berman 143) The liquidation of the walkable street or its preservation – as a crucial socializing space – was an important dimension of the urban (in)security 74 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

discourse of the post-war period. Likewise, security of city living was an important preoccupation with Jacobs, as the fear or urban crime and violence was a major force behind the suburban flight and the ensuing decline of the cities she desperately wanted to keep alive. Jacobs did not believe the regular policing of the city could be relied on as far as ensuring security and protecting the public order were concerned. Secu- rity and order could only be achieved in a traditional, village-like community she believed her neighborhood in New York’s West Village and Greenwich Village was like. As she elaborated in a famous fragment from her book, striking by its lyrical description of the interactions of pedestrians: “under the seeming disorder of the old city, wherever the old city is working successfully, is a marvelous order for maintaining the safety of the streets and the freedom of the city. It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance—not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing offen masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any one place is always replete with new improvisations.” (50) It is hard not to notice a highly aestheticized, idealistic, perhaps utopian, side to Jacobs’s vision of urban order, where the sidewalk crowd’s movements take the form of an intricate ballet. One may speculate that, had the book been written a decade later, her view of the city would have been darker. And though she does refer to the ugly side of city life (“today barbarism has taken over many city streets, or people fear it”), one is prone to accept the critique of the noted philosopher and urban sociologist Marshall Berman, who said that Jacobs’s vision is at the same time the vision of a “white” city from the time the mass exodus of the white population dramatically changed the city’s racial proportions, where New York City life is being portrayed in almost pastoral terms; it’s still a city without the narcotics, gang warfare and widespread criminality, a city whose streets seem to be safe. (Berman 154 – 155) Another influential sociologist and urbanist, Sharon Zukin, also commented on Jacobs’s idealism, and her alleged inability to discover the deeper economic dimension of life in the Village, where the gentrification process (spurred by people like Jacobs herself) ultimately led to de-authentification of the place. Thus Zukin accused Jacobs of failing “to recognize the growing influence of her own perspective, to see that families like hers are gradually moving to the West Village’s nineteenth-century houses because they appreciate the charm of the area’s little shops and cobblestone streets. She doesn’t seem to realize that she expresses a gentrifier’s aesthetic apprecia- tion of urban authenticity.” (Zukin 18) What Berman and Zukin’s criticisms seem to have in common, is the idea that Jacobs’s plea for disorder – as a cure to the malaise caused by modernist urban planning – was, in part at least, misplaced on account of ignoring the socio-economic underpinnings of the urban problem. Finally, let us turn to the book that came out nine years after Jacobs’s, actually on the threshold of the sixties and seventies: Richard Sennett’s The Uses of Disorder (1970). Sennett repudiated the policies leading toward the suppression and avoidance of diversity, stemming, in his view, from false nostalgic Piotr Skurowski Betty Friedan, Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett 75 beliefs about “the good old days” of the past and about the allegedly devastating influence of city life on family: “the idea that city conditions somehow contribute to the instability of the home (…). Evidently, the assumption is that the diversity of the city threatens the security and attachment family members feel for each other. Especially as suburban community life has come to dominate cities, there has grown up a mythological family image of affluent homes where Dad drinks too much, the kids are unloved and turn to drugs, divorce is rampant, and breakdowns are routine. The good, old, rural families, by contrast, were supposedly loving and secure. The trouble with this popular image is that it simply isn’t true.” (58) Consequently, Sennett formulated a vision of New Anarchism, as opposed to the “puritanical” drift in contemporary urbanism, aiming at imposing a coherent and repressive order on the organic disorder of city life. Sennett rejected the exclusionist and purifying logic of the so-called urban revitalization, the latter encouraging the wholesale removal of the “decayed” portions of the city and its replacement by either big-scale housing projects built specifically to quarter the poor and unemployed, or vast highway construction and commercial undertakings – all in a vain attempt to rebuild the rich social texture of pre-revitalized communities. For Sennett, disorder was a natural feature of city life – the social structure of the big city was too complex to be regulated by any all-inclusive, big-scale plan or policy, establishing a superficial, or artificial, social and spatial order based on the principle of segmentation and exclusion – the principle which ran against the inherent logic of urban life predicated on the constant mixing of the population (“multiple contact points”). In that regard, Sennett’s argument actually ran parallel to Jacobs’s, even though he distanced himself from her illusions about the possibility of rebuilding strong ethnic communities in the midst of urban society. In particular, Sennett stressed the corrosive effect of the culture of privacy (the effect of the so-called “intense family” carried to greatest proportions by the suburban culture) on the social and public life – an idea that was to find a more detailed treatment in his later works, including Families Against the City and The Fall of Public Man. As he admitted, “My own thinking has come to diverge from that of Jane Jacobs, in her strong and incisive book The Death and Life of Great American Cities. For she makes of the past an era of small, intimate relations between neighbors in city life, and sees that condition as one to be restored. This revival, as I shall try to show, can never be; we need to find some condition of urban life appropriate for an affluent, technological era.” (50 – 51) It was naïve on the part of Jane Jacobs, argued Sennett, to believe that the inner cities may achieve any lasting social peace and stability. “Jane Jacobs and other popular writers are greatly at fault for looking at the dense ethnic inner-city areas as traditionally stable places where people got to know their neighbors through years and years of common association. Historically and demographically this has not been true. There has been and is a great deal of movement from place to place within dense cities and between them.” (152) Urban life, he insisted, is always marked by a potential for conflict, as the various groups inhabiting a given area would tend to articulate their own claims to public space and place in the local hierarchy. The inevitable tensions and conflicts between groups will never allow to achieve a lasting social peace and security. Yet the resulting competition, including sporadic outbursts of violence may, paradoxically, more effectively defuse and moderate conflict than any attempt to “purify” the social life by imposing arbitrary and artificial order. 76 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

In conclusion, despite their different perspectives and visions all three discussed writers were responding to the crisis caused by suburbanization, botched attempts at urban revitalization and corresponding fragmentation of social life, as well as its privatization; all three rejected the logic and ideology behind suburbanization and single-use zoning. Friedan, Jacobs and Sennett can be perceived as the key voices in the contemporary social debate focusing on the need for personal security and social order in the quickly transforming urban milieu. For all their different concerns and strategies of resisting the “mystique” of commonly accepted wisdom, their work directly engages some of the most acutely felt problems stemming from the widespread feelings of insecurity and fears of disorder accompanying the fast pace of social change. In the case of Jacobs and Sennett, especially, the fears they were addressing were directly linked to xenophobia. However, Friedan’s book may be read as a diagnosis of a condition produced by the xenophobic “white” flight from the city. 5 All in all, the three discussed books, as well as much of the urban (in)security discourse they represent – both in the 1960s and in the present – stem from the never-resolved predicament of anxiety-ridden modern city living, constantly in search of new policies, therapies and cures to counteract the destabilizing consequences of unrelenting social change. In this context, it is worthwhile to conclude by quoting a passage from Zygmunt Bauman’s City of Fears, which puts into a larger perspective the urban (in)security discourse, hinting at the impossibility of ever harnessing the liquid social reality: “Being a permanent component of city life, the ubiquitous presence of strangers within sight and reach adds measure of perpetual uncertainty to all city dwellers’ life pursuits; that presence, impossible to avoid for more than a brief moment, is a never drying source of anxiety and of the usually dormant, yet time and again erupting, aggressiveness.(…) In chasing [the accumulated anxieties] away from one’s homes and shops, the frightening ghost of uncertainty is, for a time, exorcised. The horrifying monster of insecurity is burnt in effigy. (…) But liquid-modern life is bound to stay erratic and capricious, and so the relief is short-lived, and hopes attached to the ‘tough and decisive measures’ are dashed as soon as they are raised.” (Bauman 2003: 27 – 28).

BIBLIOGRAPHY Bauman, Zygmunt. City of Fears, City of Hopes. London: Goldsmiths College, University of London, 2003. Bauman, Zygmunt. Liquid Modernity. Malden, MA: Polity Press, 2000. Berman, Marshall. “In the Forest of Symbols: Some Notes on Modernism in New York City”. Metropolis. Center and Symbol of Our Times. Ed. Philip Kasinitz. New York: New York University Press, 1995. 130 – 159. Conn, Steven. Americans Against the City. Anti-Urbanism in the Twentieth Century. New York: Oxford University Press, 2014. Coontz, Stephanie. A Strange Stirring. The Feminine Mystique and American Women at the Dawn of the 1960s. New York: Basic Books, 2011. Kindle file.

5 The Feminine Mystique was, of course, attacked by Black feminists as racist (most notably by bell hooks), on account of completely ignoring the specific predicament, and the separate perspective of the African-American women. See, for example, a more recent sample of this view in Ashley Fetters, „4 Big Problems with The Feminine Mystique”, The Atlantic, Feb. 12, 2013, online. Piotr Skurowski Betty Friedan, Jane Jacobs, Richard Sennett 77

Duany, Andres, Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk and Jeff Speck.Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. New York: North Point Press, 2000. Fetters, Ashley. “4 Big Problems with The Feminine Mystique.” The Atlantic, Feb. 12, 2013. Online. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Dell, 1974. Graff, Agnieszka. “Wstęp. Mistyka po amerykańsku, mistyka po polsku”. In: Betty Friedan, Mistyka kobiecości. Transl. Agnieszka Grzybek. Warszawa: Czarna Owca, 2012. Mobi file. Loc. 45 – 351. Hall, Kenneth and Gerald Porterfield. Community by Design. New Urbanism for Suburbs and Small Communities. New York: McGraw-Hill, 2001. Jacobs, Jane. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Vintage Books, 1992. Kunstler, James Howard. The Geography of Nowhere: The Rise and Decline of America’s Man-Made Landscape. Glencoe, Ill.: Free Press, 1993. Sennett, Richard. The Fall of Public Man. London: Penguin Books, 2002. Sennett, Richard. Families Against the City: Middle Class Homes of Industrial Chicago, 1872 – 1890. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1970. Sennett, Richard. The Uses of Disorder. Personal Identity and City Life. New York, London: W.W. Norton, 1970. Zukin, Sharon. Naked City. The Death and Life of Authentic Urban Places. New York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010. The Rise of the House of Usher

78 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54) Marek Wilczyński The Rise of the House of Usher: The Landscape Chamber by Sarah Orne Jewett as a Textual Palimpsest

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0011.6722 The Rise of the House of Usher

Marek Wilczyński The Rise of the House of Usher 79

Marek Wilczyński is The opening paragraph of Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) is one of professor of American the classic passages of American literature. Here is just its first, long, richly literature and American alliterated, and perfectly rhythmic sentence: Studies at the University of Gdańsk and American Studies Center of the During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in University of Warsaw. the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppres- He specializes in nineteenth-century sively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone on literature and culture with horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; a specific focus on the and at length found myself as the shades of the evening culture of New England. drew on, within view of the melancholy house of Usher. (Mabbott, 397)

Forty-eight years later, in November 1887, Sarah Orne Jewett published in The Atlantic Monthly a short story entitled “The Landscape Chamber,” to be included just next year in The King of Folly Island and Other People, her fifth collection of short fiction. The opening paragraph of the story seems to pro- voke a vague sense of deja lu, though the tone of the hypothetical hypotext is indeed quite different:

I was tired of ordinary journeys, which involved either the loneliness and discomfort of fashionable hotels, or the responsibilities of a guest in busy houses. One is always doing the same things over and over; I now promised myself that I would go in search of new people and new scenes, until I was again ready to turn with delight to my familiar occupations. So I mounted my horse one morning, without any definite plan of my journey, and rode eastward, with a business-like haversack strapped behind the saddle. I only wished that the first day’s well- known length of road had been already put behind me. One drawback to a woman’s enjoyment of an excursion of this sort is the fact that when she is out of the saddle she is uncomfortably dressed. But I compromised matters as nearly as possible by wearing a short corduroy habit, light both in color and weight, and putting a linen blouse and belt into my pack, to replace the stiff habit-waist. The wallet on the saddle held a flat drinking-cup, a bit of chocolate, and a few hard biscuit, for provision against improbable famine. Autumn would be the best time for such a journey, if the evenings need not be so often spent in stuffy rooms, with kerosene lamps for company. This was early summer, and I had long days in which to amuse myself. For a book I took a much-beloved small copy of The Sentimental Journey. (Jewett, 185)

First of all and obviously enough, between the two beginnings – and the two stories in general – there is a difference in diction: fantastic vagueness and ambiguity versus realistic detail and socially conditioned precision. Second, in “The Landscape Chamber,” unlike in Poe’s tale, the first-person narrator- protagonist is a woman, which determines some circumstances referred to in the paragraph. She has to deal with a discrepancy between the rider’s costume and the conventional female attire, but solves the problem easily and successfully. 80 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

It is perhaps due to the diminished male population of the post-Civil War New England that she may travel without a male companion without provoking at least a sense of surprise. Well-organized, she is a typical tourist traveling for pleasure. (We remember that Poe’s narrator has a mission: he comes to the rescue of his friend and the reader is not supposed to care about the logistics of his errand.) At the end of the 19th century, tourism was already a popular way of spending free time and the tourist infrastructure, including “fashionable hotels” and busy guesthouses available to individuals willing to enjoy “new people and new scenes,” flourished not only in the historic locations along the east coast or near Niagara Falls. Significantly, the direction taken by the female tourist is “eastward,” contrary to the standard west-oriented itinerary of most American literary characters even long after Jewett’s times. One might say that going east is not only moving in space, but also in time – against the current of the U.S. history, towards its colonial prologue. There are three more interesting details in the opening paragraph of “The Landscape Chamber,” at least two of which can probably be read as metatextual clues, particularly at the second reading. First, the narrator complains that “[o]ne is always doing the same things over and over” and wants to break that vicious circle; second, to amuse herself, she takes a copy of Sterne’s Sentimental Journey, and third, she realizes that “autumn would be the best time” for her journey, but because of the longest days in early summer – a practical reason – she chooses that time of the year. Autumn, most likely late autumn when the weather is not congenial at all, is exactly the time when Poe’s protagonist goes on his errand, mentioning a book, a work of fiction, draws the reader’s attention to textuality, while the idea that one would like to avoid repetition points both to repetition itself and to the wish to put an end to its disheartening rule. Jewett’s story is divided into three parts. It is at the beginning of Part II that the reader learns about the setting, which is New England, and this, of course, makes another crucial difference between her text and Poe’s. Thus, “The Landscape Chamber” acquires both spatial and temporal coordinates – a double geographical and historical horizon, distinctly lacking in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” an apocalyptic parable with no specific reference. Riding her horse with no particular destination in her mind, Jewett’s narrator comes across a house in the middle of nowhere by accident. Her animal has lost a shoe and is unable to run or even walk so that she is quite happy, seeing high chimneys quite nearby, although upon a closer look the building turns out rather shabby:

It was disappointing, for the first view gave an impression of dreariness and neglect. The barn and straggling row of outbuildings were leaning this way and that, mossy and warped; the blinds of the once handsome house were broken, and everything gave evidence of unhindered decline from thrift and competence to poverty and ruin. A good colonial mansion … abandoned by its former owners, and tenanted now by some shiftless outcasts of society, who ask but meagre comfort, and are indifferent to the decen- cies of life. (Jewett, 187)

The residents of the mansion, like in Poe’s tale, are two, but they are a father and his daughter, not siblings. This certainly invites speculation in terms of the Freudian Oedipus complex or Klein’s rejection of the hostile mother Marek Wilczyński The Rise of the House of Usher 81

(Church, 161 – 179), but also, through the generation gap, installs in the family relationship the dimension of time, i.e. history – the present and the future, when the father is finally no more. The house provokes in the visitor “the haunting sense of poverty” since “the floor [is] carpetless and deeply worn,” the furniture barely holds together, and the supper consists of just “some thin, crisp corn bread” and “a dish of field strawberries” oddly served with “some pieces of superb old English silver and delicate china.” (Jewett, 193) On her way to the guest bedroom, the title “landscape chamber” with a magnificent view, the narrator learns from the hostess that her father suffers from an “inherited monomania” which makes them live in self-imposed poverty even though they actually have resources and could afford at least some renovation, not to mention more abundant food. In the afternoon, her privacy is clandestinely violated by the old man who sneaks into the room to double-check that his savings kept in the closet strongbox are safe. The woman is quite shocked and next morning asks him to explain his strange behavior, which he does, apologizing and trying to dispel her anxiety. He admits to be “in bondage” of a hereditary “power” that restrains his natural “impulses” and cannot be resisted despite his lifelong effort:

We are all in prison while we are left in this world, – that is the truth; in prison for another man’s sin. … If there were an ancestor of mine, as I have been taught, who sold his soul for wealth, the awful price was this that he lost the power of using it. He was greedy for gain, and now we cannot part with what we have, even for common comfort. His children and his children’s children have suffered for his fault. He has lived in the hell of watching us from generation to generation; seeing our happiness spoiled, our power of usefulness withered away. Wherever he is, he knows that we are all misers because he was miserly, and stamped us with the mark of his own base spirit. He has watched his descendants shrivel up and disappear one by one, poor and ungen- erous in God’s world. We fight against the doom of it, but it wins at last. Thank God, there are only two of us left. (Jewett, 200)

The father’s confession reads not so much like Roderick Usher’s, but like that of some protagonist of Hawthorne’s tale, who suffers under the burden of “sin.” Yet what matters is his interlocutor’s response: she considers him “insane,” in the language of modern psychiatry, and identifies his self-torture in terms of a “malady of unreason.” Since unlike Usher, he is not aggressive, her sug- gestion to the daughter is to move him “to some place where he would forget his misery among new interests and scenes.” (Jewett, 200) Unlike in Poe’s tale, then, the solution is not to succumb to a supernatural catastrophe or run for one’s life, but a proper medical treatment. The house does not fall and is expected to have a future that belongs to the girl, obligated by her mother to take care of the father for as long as he remains alive. What is perhaps particularly significant is the composition of Jewett’s story. Poe’s tale includes the famous “Haunted Palace” poem, a nutshell recipe for genuinely American gothic that draws on incurable madness. In “The Landscape Chamber,” the role of Poe’s embedded poem is played by a picture 82 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

which the narrator finds in the room where she spends the night. Apparently, it shows the past colonial glory of the mansion, long gone and with time replaced by its present opposite:

The colors were dull, the drawing was quaintly conventional, and I recognized the subject, though not immediately. The artist had pleased himself by making a study of the old house itself, and later, as I dressed, I examined it in detail. From the costume of the figures I saw that it must have been painted more than a hundred years before. In astonishing contrast to the present condition, it appeared like a satirical show of the house’s possibilities. Servants held capering steeds for gay gentlemen to mount, and ladies walked together in fine attire down the garden alleys of the picture. Once a hospitable family had kept open house behind the row of elms, and once the follies of the world and the fashions of brilliant, luxurious life had belonged to this decayed and withering household. ( Jewett, 195)

In this way, history once again invades Jewett’s narrative – this time it is the past. While Poe’s House of Usher is suspended in the eternal present, undermined only by the rumors that “the entire family lay in the direct line of descent, and had always, with very trifling and very temporary variation, so lain” (Mabbott, 399), Jewett’s house is located in time that has all the three dimensions: the documented, glorious past, the miserable present, and the open future. Since most likely the father will die first, the daughter may still get a chance to have the inherited mansion restored and, as she does not seem to share the old man’s obsession, she may also enjoy her future in the company of the visitor who promises to come back, as well as that of other people who will provide her with new, unpredictable opportunities. Hence, it appears that “The Landscape Chamber” is a deliberate intertextual polemic with Poe. Under the circumstances, his text is a genuine hypertext working like a pragmatic filter through which the audience may interpret Jewett’s story as a realistic, gendered, specifically localized, and carefully historicized palimpsest scrawled upon a romantic-gothic hypotext that ignores all the above characteristics. (Genette, 7 – 10) In psychoanalytical terms (the Freudian version), the death of the father will literally put an end to Electra’s imprisonment in a devastating relationship, while the return of the female narrator (the Kleinian version) will allow the surviving daughter to find reconciliation with the caring mother. But the palimpsest in which, contrary to Poe’s tale, history has been pushed to the foreground may have still another meaning. In his comprehensive study of turning points in the New England colonial and antebellum past, New England’s Crises and Cultural Memory. Literature, Politics, History, Religion 1620 – 1860, John McWilliams examines a number of pivotal events and their textual representations, from famine in Plymouth, the destruction of Merry Mount, King Philip’s War, and the trial of Anne Hutchinson through the political tensions in 1760 – 1775 and the ensuing Concord-Lexington skirmish. My argument is that McWilliams’s perspective may as well be prolonged to include a major socio-economic crisis that hit the region after the Civil War, after the heavy war losses had decimated its male population and almost all Marek Wilczyński The Rise of the House of Usher 83 its former sources of wealth, including maritime trade and the cooperation between cotton plantations in the South and textile factories in Massachusetts, had significantly dried up. (Westbrook, 161 – 186) The far-reaching consequences of that crisis, the most serious in the whole history of the former northeastern colonies even though not as spectacular as those referred to by McWilliams, were perhaps best described in a nutshell by the Southerner Allen Tate in his classic essay on Emily Dickinson, published in 1928:

But by the 1850 great fortunes had been made (in the rum, slave, and milling industries), and New England became a museum. The whatnots groaned under the load of knickknacks, the fine china dogs and cats, the pieces of Oriental jade, the chips off the leaning tower of Pisa. There were the rare books and cosmopolitan learning. It was all equally displayed as the evidence of a superior culture. … But culture, in the true sense, was disappearing. Where the old order, formidable as it was, had held all this personal experience, this eclectic excitement, in a comprehensible whole, the new order tended to flatten it out in a common experience that was not quite in common; it exalted more and more the personal and the unique in the interior sense. Where the old- fashioned puritans got together on a rigid doctrine, and could thus be individualists in manners, the nineteenth- century New Englander, lacking a genuine religious center, began to be a social conformist. (Tate, 283 – 284)

That particular state of affairs – social conformity mixed with individual oddi- ties – was represented by Mary E. Wilkins Freeman in her novel Pembroke (1894), a small-town catastrophic replica of The House of the Seven Gables, in which reconciliation always comes just a little too late, interpersonal communication is no longer possible, and characters pay for their own or their relatives’ strong convictions with their lives or well-being. If there is any late nineteenth-century literary text published in the north of the United States that can be called decadent, it is most certainly Wilkins Freeman’s somewhat forgotten masterpiece, inconspicuous because of its plain language and misleading down-to-earth realism. Interestingly, written and published after the Civil War, Pembroke portrays a post-Puritan community before the national conflict, in the 1820s or 1830s, as though the causes of the downfall could become visible only ex post, when their effects were already too obvious and devastating to be opposed. Still, the open-endedness of “The Landscape Chamber” and Jewett’s cultural translation of nowhere in particular into eastern New England, a mysterious unsuccessful rescue mission into a tourist excursion, and, perhaps the most notably, hypersensitivity and madness into a clinically definable mental disease give hope of a way out of the region’s predicament. There is no such hope in “The Fall of the House of Usher” since there is no place to come back to for the narrator, and no future for the Usher siblings who both die at the same time, neither of them leaving behind any progeny. Poe’s catastrophe, like that in “The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion” or “The Masque of the Red Death,” is absolute and irrevocable, total and final. On the contrary, Jewett, the first canonized local color woman writer from New England, portrays in her 84 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

story, and other works of fiction, a documented historical process with all its ups and downs. Even if the Golden Age, painted by an eighteenth-century artist whose picture decorates the landscape chamber, cannot be repeated, the house, which was once its scenery, needs only some repairs and can still be used as a comfortable abode, maybe a cozy hotel for tourists who wish to take a rest far from the madding crowd. The same direction – adjustment to the modern market of services to support life – has been indicated, for instance, in Wilkins Freeman’s short story, “The Blue Butterfly,” arguably a polemical hypertext of Hawthorne’s “The Artist of the Beautiful.” (Reichardt, 180 – 196) The protagonist Marcia Keyes successfully competes on a small town “dressmaking” market, and her composite “butterfly,” a gown worn by a girl on the occasion of her first ball, sharply contrasts with the mechanical, easily destructible butterfly made by the clockmaker Owen Warland only to satisfy his ambition. While Warland, immersed in his project, decided to ignore the pleasures and duties of family life, and consequently excluded himself from the local community, Keyes, a service provider rather than an artist, works mainly for the benefit of others, and, too old to get married and have children, indirectly, through her sartorial craft, contributes to the cycle of life anyway. In his famous review of Hawthorne’s tales, Poe did not approve of allegory as a literary device – “In defence of allegory, (however, or for whatever object, employed) there is scarcely one respectable word to be said.” (Poe, 582) – but Jewett used in her fictional dialog with him in “The Landscape Chamber” just that mode of representation. After all, hypertextuality is a kind of temporalized allegorical relationship since one text definitely refers to another, usually an earlier one, and can be understood only in such reference. New England writers of the late 19th and early 20th century, mostly women, widely employed allegory both to present the socio-economic and cultural crisis of the region after the Civil War, and to point to the ways of its possible overcoming. One might also say that through their short stories and novels Hawthorne, their unacknowledged literary mentor, posthumously responded to Poe’s criticism.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Church, Joseph. Transcendent Daughters in Jewett’s Country of the Pointed Firs. London & Toronto: Associated University Presses, 1994. Genette, Gérard. Palimpsests. Literature of the Second Degree. Trans. Channa Newman and Claude Doubinsky. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1997. Jewett, Sarah Orne. Deephaven and Other Stories. Ed. Richard Cary. New Haven: College and University Press, 1966. Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, ed. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. II. Tales and Sketches 1831 – 1842. Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard Uni- versity Press, 1978. McWilliams, John. New England’s Crises and Cultural Memory. Literature, Politics, History, Religion 1620 – 1860. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. Poe, Edgar Allan. Essays and Reviews. Ed. G.R. Thompson. New York: The Library of America, 1984. Tate, Allen, Essays of Four Decades. Chicago: The Swallow Press, 1968. Marek Wilczyński The Rise of the House of Usher 85

Reichardt, Mary R. The Uncollected Stories of Mary Wilkins Freeman. Jackson & London: University Press of Mississippi, 1992. Westbrook, Perry D. The New England Town in Fact and Fiction. London & To- ronto: Associated University Presses, 1982. The House of Usher Never Fell

86 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54) Paweł Pyrka The House of Usher Never Fell: Impossible Escapes and the Dark (K)night of the Soul

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0011.6723 The House of Usher Never Fell

Paweł Pyrka The House of Usher Never Fell 87

Paweł Pyrka is a lecturer I. The Unseen Comedown at the SWPS University of Social Sciences and In a sense, the narrator of “The Fall of the House of Usher” has always been Humanities inWarsaw, teaching courses in the most unreliable of Edgar Allan Poe’s voices, more suspect than the wife- American literature, killer of “The Black Cat”, the obsessed murderer in “The Tell-Tale Heart”, cultural theory, and or even Ligeia’s apparently addle-brained husband. Perhaps the reason for English. He holds a Master’s Degree in this impression of enhanced artifice and deeper, more elaborate trickery is English and a PhD in the very fact that the narrator character makes it out of the House alive, and cultural studies. His interests include American relatively unscathed in a psychological sense. Having witnessed the complete fiction, popular culture disintegration of the Usher family, Roderick’s psyche, and the physical and media studies. structure that has been the House of Usher, he manages to “flee aghast” and live to tell the tale (Poe, 108). It is not unusual to read Poe’s story as a metaphor for the degenerating mind (Roderick’s, most frequently), an enclosed mental space collapsing upon itself from the burden of personal history of transgression and guilt (Wilbur, 264). It is equally common to see the twin characters of Roderick and Made- line as incomplete fragments of a familial soul, made whole (and ultimately undone) by their connection to the ancestral mansion. Such interpretations are invited by Poe’s narrator: the structure’s “eye-like windows” watching their own twisted reflection in the waters of the tarn in a grotesque version of the Lacanian mirror stage the “sentience of all vegetable things” which, Roderick believes, move and direct the House of Usher, and finally the hasty, almost forced and yet unconscious burial and re-emergence of Madeline, her climb from the depths of repression back into her twin brother’s awareness – all these point to the image of the house as a mental space with its occupants in the roles of psychological forces and thought-content, all bound by the mechanics of the psyche. And thus, in this sense Roderick must always attempt to contain and repress, effectively bury, his sister, who is a sign and sin of incest, while Madeline must always try to break out and return from the prison of the unconscious. Poe’s use of twins to evoke the uncanny in the narrator in a pre-Freudian context is even more telling of the symbolic dimension of this narrative process. But if the house is but a mind, and its occupants merely thoughts, then who does it belong to? Throughout the story, the narrator serves as an observer and a listener. His role is mostly to describe and discourse with Roderick, occasionally to provide an extra level of narration as with the heroic tale of Ethelred. He is in fact at his most active when called upon, supposedly by Usher, to assist with the entombment of Madeline, the moment in which he seems to be inclined to literally get his hands “dirty”. In addition, it is the narrator who cannot, or perhaps pretends he cannot, hear the sounds accompanying Madeline’s return (unlike Roderick with his illness-augmented senses). His denial of the truth about his involvement is therefore apparently complete and absolute, and so when faced with its re-emergence, all he can do (if indeed he can, assuming he does not lie to both himself and the reader) is „flee aghast”, followed by the radiance of the blood-red moon and the tumultuous collapse of the House. The act of flight, the impossible escape from the burdens of sin and madness, is shown to be successful, with no unnecessary words of explanation as the narrative voice ceases. Like the Ethelred of the story within the story, he conquers the dragon of his conscience and emerges victorious. This almost too perfect closure of the story, along with the unsatisfy- ing resolution of the psychological situation and its consequences, is why I propose to read Poe’s tale as an escape fantasy, a narrative constructed by 88 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

the narrator-character, utilizing externalization, dream logic and open denial, in order to speculate and fantasize about escaping the constraints of one’s identity, history and psychology. The story of “Mad Trist” (itself an invention) is included to enhance the credibility of the narrative, posing as a fictional counterpart to “real” events. Like a “reveller upon opium” invoked in the opening lines of the story, trying to flee the harsh burdens of reality, Poe’s narrator destroys his house of sin and guilt, buries it in the dark waters of the tarn, and ends his tale in the comforting, if illusive, peace of mind. However, isn’t all that we see or seem but a dream within a dream, to use Poe’s own poetic discourse? As readers, we are not allowed to glimpse the comedown from the revelry provided by the narrative fantasy, but we are given a powerful description of what it feels like to the narrator, curiously, though in a sense appropriately, at the beginning of the story: “with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveller upon opium -- the bitter lapse into everyday life -- the hideous dropping off of the veil” (Poe, 90). This powerful passage is how the narrator describes his first impression of the House of Usher, indicating a much more personal attitude than his (apparently) casual relationship with Roderick would suggest. But this is also how I believe the text hints at the possibility that the fantasy was never real, the narrative exorcism never complete – that the House of Usher never fell. II. The Dark Knight of the Soul

As a companion text to Poe’s tale I’ve chosen a Batman graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth (1989) written by Grant Morrison and illustrated by Dave McKean. It is a story of Batman’s visit to the infamous asylum for the criminally insane, which houses many of his enemies, among them his arch-nemesis – the Joker. As befits a postmodern work, the graphic novel, as befits a postmodern work, is marvelously rich in symbols and references and, similarly to Poe’s text, contains a story within a story, in this case a diary of Amadeus Arkham, the historical founder of the asylum. From the pages of the diary, Arkham emerges as a Norman Bates-like character who decides to devote his life to helping the insane, following his mother’s mental dissolution and death, but who also begins his own descent into madness after his wife and daughter are murdered by a patient. Arkham’s obsessive need to understand the causes and nature of madness and to conquer (or transform) it becomes the driving force behind the asylum’s operation. Arkham’s narrative alternates with and parallels Batman’s intervention in the asylum, following a riot led by Joker. For the Caped Crusader, the visit to Arkham becomes a journey into the depths of his own fear and the heart of his own darkness. As if echoing Poe’s thematic pattern, Arkham Asylum emerges from the visual narrative as both a physical location and a mental space, its foundations anchored within both Batman and Bruce Wayne’s identity and psyche. Shortly before entering the Asylum, Batman articulates his position:

Afraid? Batman’s not afraid of anything. It’s ME. I’M afraid. I’m afraid that Joker may be RIGHT about me. Sometimes I… QUESTION the rationality of my actions. And I’m afraid that when I walk through those asylum Paweł Pyrka The House of Usher Never Fell 89 gates… When I walk into ARKHAM and the doors close behind me… It’ll be just like coming home (Morrison and McKean, 10, original emphasis).

The fear is that of “coming home”, of allowing for the possibility that someone who spends their nights dressed in a bat costume, hunting psychopaths and madmen, belongs in the Asylum. It is the terror of uncertainty about the categories of sanity and lunacy and the way they are applied and understood both within and outside Arkham. For Batman, the night in the asylum is the act of gazing into the abyss and holding a twisted mirror to the actions that define and have defined him. It is as much a trial, as an act of becoming, of attempted reconciliation with one’s insecurities and weaknesses. Joker, in a typical Trickster-like manner, stands ready to test the Dark Knight, trying at the same time to tear down any illusions he might have about the reality outside the madhouse. As a result, while inside the asylum Batman goes through a series of encounters resembling a journey into the underworld of one’s own unconscious with a homicidal clown for a guide. Early on, Batman speaks to a pair of “civilians”: Arkham’s administrator, Cavendish, and a doctor responsible for treating Joker, Two-Face and the rest of the patients. Among other things he learns that the psychotherapist, Ruth Adams, has “weaned” Two-Face off his coin fetish and moved him first to a six-sided die and later on to a deck of Tarot cards, with a plan to introduce him to I-Ching as the final “cure” for his obsession with duality. Batman is at a loss trying to see the therapeutic value of stripping the criminal of delusions of “black and white absolutes” – he is in fact uncomfort- able with the confusion it must cause: “But right now, he can’t make a simple decision, like going to the bathroom, without consulting the cards? Seem to me you’ve effectivelyDESTROYED the man’s personality, Doctor” (25 – 26, original emphasis). To which Adams responds in the following manner: “Sometimes we have to pull down in order to REBUILD, Batman. Psychiatry’s like that” (26). The comment resonates with Batman, as it expresses his own concerns, both of ethical and psychological nature. Instead of clear-cut identity he is presented with a chaotic labyrinth of complexity and relativity. The psychotherapist’s professional assessment of Joker is even more disconcerting:

It’s quite possible we may actually be looking at some kind of super-sanity here. A brilliant new modification of human perception. More suited to urban life at the end of the twentieth century. Unlike you and I, the Joker seems to have no control over the sensory information he’s receiving from the outside world. He can only cope with the chaotic barrage of input by going with the flow. THAT’S why some days he’s a mischievous clown, others a psychopathic killer. He HAS no real personality. He creates himself each day (27 – 28, original emphasis).

While to Adams, Joker is a post-modern mind, to Batman he remains a mad- man. But Joker himself offers insight into the significance, and perhaps the real causes for Batman’s presence in Arkham, when he refuses the inmates’ call to take off his enemy’s mask and discover the hero’s “real” face. “ThatIS his real face” (32, original emphasis), he says and instead uses doctor Adams to engage Batman in a word association exercise, the result of which clearly 90 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

points to the character’s origin story involving murdered parents, but at the same time through the very same process of association connects the reader to the narrative structure of Amadeus Arkham’s diary. When Batman enters the depths of the asylum, a series of powerful flashbacks, one of seeing “Bambi” at the cinema and one of the fateful night after seeing “Zorro”, the very night he witnessed the murder of his mother and father, puts him into a sort of trance from which he emerges only through an almost shamanistic ritual of blood sacrifice, pushing a shard of glass through his palm to recover his connection to the physical reality. The flashbacks echo Arkham’s own relationship with his mother, while the bloody act brings the Dark Knight closer to “Mad Dog” Hawkins, the man responsible for murdering Arkham’s family and one who had claimed he must cut himself in order to feel. As he walks around Arkham, Batman encounters Clayface, portrayed as an embodiment of filth and pestilence and evoking the fear of AIDS, as well as unresolved sexual issues, to which Joker had alluded before, he hides from the wheelchair-bound Doctor Destiny, whose power is to turn dreams and nightmares into tangible reality, avoids the pitchfork-wielding Scarecrow and ultimately comes to face the twisted version of the Mad Hatter. The latter, apart from spewing pedophiliac allusions, explains to Batman his situation in the clearest possible way, at the same time echoing the memory of the House of Usher: “Sometimes... Sometimes I think the asylum is a HEAD. We’re inside a huge head that dreams us all into being. Perhaps it’s YOUR head, Batman. Arkham is a LOOKING GLASS. And WE are YOU” (62, original emphasis). From that encounter Batman proceeds to the room reserved for Elec- troconvulsive Therapy (ECT), where Maxie Zeus, haunted and tormented by messianic delusions, offers him the gift of “true power”. Maxie’s cell bears a scratched inscription: [“KNOW THYSELF”]. Batman runs off. The final encounter is with the bestial Killer Croc and is far more violent and visceral. In the twisted version of the mythical hero’s journey, this is the low point, the ordeal, the abyss. Batman must face the Dragon and defeat him. Inci- dentally, for this purpose he uses the spear taken off of Archangel Michael’s statue. Wounded but alive, he finally reaches the “secret room” where Amadeus Arkham kept his journal. Here, administrator Cavendish, haunted by Arkham’s memories, is revealed to have instigated the riot in order to lure Batman into the asylum. Cavendish has turned into a reflection of Amadeus Arkham, to the point of donning his Mother’s wedding dress, all to take vengeance upon the Bat, which had tormented her. As in Poe’s text, this is where the surface and underlying story come together, but in Arkham Asylum the connection is more psychological, since it does not respect chronology or causality. It seems as if, at least in Cavendish’s mind, it is Batman’s visit to the hospital that becomes the very terror which had haunted Arkham’s mother in distant past. The two struggle, but it is doctor Adams who saves Batman by slashing her boss’s throat. Cavendish thus dies the same way Arkham’s mother did, with the word “Mommy” on his lips (94). Serving as a surrogate Amadeus Arkham, Cavendish is the reflection of Bat- man, as much as he is the architect and creator of Arkham Asylum. And should we believe the Mad Hatter, he too is all contained in Batman’s head. This is the point of transformation, of rebirth, the moment when the Bat, which had symbolized madness and torment is absorbed by and reconciled with the Man. Just before this final struggle, the reader is also allowed a glimpse of the asylum’s structural plans pinned on the walls of the secret room, erected according to sacred geometry and mystical principles, to allow Arkham to transcend Paweł Pyrka The House of Usher Never Fell 91 the limits of sanity. The man himself can be seen scribbling on the room’s floor, singing “The Star-Spangled Banner”. In his journal, he writes: “I see now the virtue in madness, for this country knows no law nor any boundary. I pity the poor shades confined to the Euclidean prison that is sanity” (90). Whether they apply to the House of Arkham, to Batman’s Gotham City, or to America as asylum, the words must be comforting to Batman, as he tells Joker that he’s free, along with the other inmates. “Oh, we know that already”, Joker answers. “But what about you?” (99). Batman’s puts the decision regarding his final fate in the hands of Two-Face, to whom he has returned his coin, symbolically reinstating the black-and-white duality of his imagined world, but at the same time surrendering to the mad logic of Arkham. As he is let go (Two-Face lies about the face of the coin) Joker says: “Enjoy yourself out there. In the asylum. Just don’t forget – if it ever gets too tough... There’s ALWAYS a place for you here” (102). No discussion of Morrison and McKean’s work would be complete without a closer look at the visual layer of the novel. After all, comic books and graphic novels rely as much on the writing as on the graphic representations of their narrative’s building blocks. In this respect Arkham Asylum once again stands out as tour de force of imaginative pursuit. McKean’s signature style of mixed media, combining ink, paint, typography, photography and photomanipulation techniques, give the novel its distinctive and unforgettable look. If Arkham Asylum (as well as Poe’s tale) is a story of crossing thresholds, traversing mental spaces, of raising and bringing down textual edifices, then the visual aspects of the book do a perfect job in reinforcing its themes and structures. The colors are dark, with dominant shades of grey, brown, blue and dirty green, but interspersed with vibrant crimsons of blood and fiery oranges when appropriate. The characters’ silhouettes seem to emerge from the panels in a fluid fashion, without clear points of origin or delineations, sometimes almost dissolving into darker backgrounds. The style enhances the oneiric, unrealistic atmosphere of the narrative. The panels are frequently placed on visually astonishing, full-textured and at times photorealistic backgrounds, which seem to form the mosaic of thoughts, impressions, glimpsed situations and half-recollected memories. The interplay of foreground and background content creates a unique tension between the novel’s composite narratives. The presentation and layout of the panels themselves is especially striking in the light of the novel’s main theme: the extensive use of long, vertical panels, resembling tall windows or mirrors, invites the reader’s eye to travel up and down Arkham Asylum, at the same time exploring the underlying background imagery. The panels’ borders are straight and clear, (albeit thin), except for specific, emotionally charged scenes in which they become blurred, bent and even broken, as in the dramatic final encounter with Killer Croc. McKean’s art serves as a perfect vehicle for Morrison’s writing, carrying the reader through the powerfully visualized corridors of the mental/psychological institution/space complex. The images are composed and laid out in a conscious effort to correspond to the architecture of text:

I like it when you got a defined place even though it was a labyrinthine kind of woolly space. I like it when you got something that sort of hangs around and then it becomes more of a psychological space. So, to make it different you have to not just draw what it looks like but what the feelings in the room are. (McKean, par. 20) 92 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

The artist’s approach is expressionist, as it “builds” an additional layer of symbolic meaning over the structured and rich legacy of Batman comics. It is at once an homage and an escape from this tradition, a visual interrogation of the icon, accompanying and blending with Morrison’s textual one. III. The Flights of Fancy

Joker’s final words express the sentiment which remains unspoken both by Poe’s narrator and by character of Batman. Their infinite capacity for fantasy, or perhaps rather self-delusion, allows the former to externalize and bury his fears and guilt beneath the ruins of the House of Usher, and the latter to contain and seemingly “cure” his insecurities and doubts within the walls of Arkham Asylum. Both enter and explore the mental structures that they have erected for themselves, to escape the reality, the “unredeemed dreariness of thought” (Poe,90) in the place which “knows no law nor any boundary.” Both appear to emerge victorious and refuse or fail to see through their own illusion. But perhaps to them it is fortunate after all, since to pierce it, as we have attempted to do, would be to acknowledge and embrace the existence of some kind of super-sanity, which at once questions and reasserts an individual’s (in)ability to comprehend and express the roots and consequences of their thoughts, feelings, and actions. In the introduction to their book on Poe and the American Gothic, Perry and Sederholm write:

Finding a stable meaning within “Usher” will always be futile. After all, some of the more recent sophisticated critiques of the story, including deconstructive approaches, rely on the idea that the story not only refuses to be read but also helps us see language in terms of what it can’t do (3).

What Wilbur described as the effort of “poetic soul to escape all consciousness of the world in dream” (260) becomes, in a sense, an exercise in futility in Poe’s tale. However, the erection of the imaginary gothic edifice that is the House of Usher and the theatrical display of traumatic, yet in its purpose therapeutic role-playing contained within it, is a fascinating example of a literary attempt to reach the non-linguistic dimension of experience. In Arkham Asylum Batman enters the madhouse which in a sense is of his own making, with colorful, bizarre inmates representing different facets of his own psychological crisis. Animalistic violence, the need for power and control, both personal and social, along with the sexual ambiguity of the character’s relationships (including allusions to the accusations presented in Fredric Wertham’s infamous Seduction of the Innocent (1954), of Batman and Robin’s “inappropriate” liaison) form a landscape not unlike that of the House of Usher. Thus, for the Dark Knight, crossing Arkham’s threshold can be read as “coming home” and an attempt to “pull down in order to rebuild” the fantastical psychological safe space of superhero identity. In this regard, Batman fulfills the definition of “super-sanity” given by doctor Adams, (re-) creating himself each day under the mask in order to deal with the experience of Gotham City (and, in a larger sense, of America) as a place that “knows no law nor any boundary.” In Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human, Grant Morrison describes Paweł Pyrka The House of Usher Never Fell 93

Arkham Asylum as a story of “un-American exploration of an American icon. A story of the mad and excluded. A story not of the real world but the inside of a head—Batman’s head, our collective head” (Morrison, 225). The poignancy of this description inevitably brings the reader back to the House of Usher, identifying both narratives as tales of the limits of individual and collective psyche. As Poe’s narrator “flees aghast” the horror of madness and transgression which the structure embodies, and as Batman leaves the confines of the Asy- lum, re-establishing the status quo of stable categories of sanity/lunacy, the reader follows, finding comfort in the belief that one’s demons can forever be exorcised completely. The alternative, after all, would be to accept the fluidity of the self, inherent in what the graphic novel terms “super-sanity”. And that way Joker lies.

BIBLIOGRAPHY McKean, Dave. “Dave McKean interview from Łódź Comics Festival, Poland 2012.” Interview by Milán Kovács. Comic Conventions 27 Oct 2012, www. comicconventions.co.uk/dave-mckean-interview-from-international-festival-of-comics-and-games-in-lodz-2012. Accessed 2 Dec 2017. Morrison, Grant. Supergods: What Masked Vigilantes, Miraculous Mutants, and a Sun God from Smallville Can Teach Us About Being Human. New York, Spiegel & Grau, 2012. Morrison, Grant, and Dave McKean. Batman Arkham Asylum: A Serious House on Serious Earth. 25th Anniversary Deluxe Edition. New York, DC Comics, 2014. Perry, Dennis R., and Carl H. Sederholm. Poe, „The House of Usher,” and the American Gothic. New York, NY, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009. Poe, Edgar Allan. The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings: Poems, Tales, Essays and Reviews. Ed. David D. Galloway. London, Penguin Books, 2006. Wilbur, Richard. “The House of Poe.”The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Eric W. Carlson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1970. “Uncanny Domesticity”

94 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54) Jelena Šesnić “Uncanny Domesticity” in Contemporary American Fiction: The Case of Jhumpa Lahiri

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0011.6724 “Uncanny Domesticity”

Jelena Šesnić “Uncanny Domesticity” 95

Jelena Šesnić is As- Even though Jhumpa Lahiri, a contemporary US writer, demurs at her work sociate Professor in the being designated as “the immigrant fiction”—which might rightly be seen as English Department, a current PC successor to the formerly widely used label of ethnic fiction—the University of Zagreb. Her teaching and research fact remains that her writing steadily and skillfully registers the rifts, crises range from nineteenth- and estrangement resulting from the act of immigration, and extending into century to contemporary intergenerational conflicts and misunderstandings. Still, anyone following topics related to Ameri- can literature and culture. her work in recent years cannot but agree with Susan Koshy, who has recently She is the author of two commented on the lack of attention for Lahiri’s work in contemporary criticism books; editor and co- editor of two collections (354), even though the themes she tackles are the texture of contemporary of essays; a co-founder U.S.-American experience set in a global mold. To reframe this observation and currently a secretary a bit, it would seem that Lahiri imagines scenes and scenarios in which her of CAAS; and vice- president of the AASSEE. mobile characters affirm their aptitude to claim America but also delves into costs of the way “Indian new immigrant families” are situated in American multiethnic—first liberal and then neoliberal—contexts (Koshy 348 – 49). The thing that struck me as illustrative of a certain type of effect observable in Lahiri’s fiction—that in my argument I try to identify and analyze as the uncanny—stems from a revealing statement Lahiri made in her auto- biographic sketch contributed to The New Yorker, where she explained how her early attempts at writing sprang from a sense of anxiety that she might be a “stranger” to her parents, being “an American child” (“Trading Stories”). I would like to claim that this captivating metaphor exemplifies well what I argue is an on-going sense of being (feeling) strange or estranged from the people closest to you and, ultimately, from yourself that in turn finds outlet in her fiction as the uncanny effect. This effect is compounded by Lahiri’s next acknowledgment—that most of her characters are struggling to belong and feel at home somewhere (“Trading Stories”). This indicates how her vision proceeds from a sense of anxiety, displacement and (incipient) estrangement that are somehow locatable at home. My reductive definition of domesticity implies the trappings of the middle-class, American way centered around the family, emotional sustenance derived from it, and the site of home (both in the sense of haven and of property). In recent public appearances and essays Lahiri has, it seems, deepened her ambivalent attitude towards America as home, but such a one that has been suffused by feelings of otherness, distance, and strangeness. This underlying sense of the unhomely comes forth in an essay written in Italian and translated into English (and compiled in her recent collection originally published in Italian, In altre parole), where Lahiri explains how she deliberately moved away from English which contained her parents’ experiences as immigrants and her own complex and demanding adjustment to America:

Why am I fleeing? What is pursuing me? Who want to restrain me? The most obvious answer is the Eng- lish language. But I think it’s not so much English in itself as everything the language has symbolized for me. For practically my whole life, English has represented a consuming struggle, a wrenching conflict, a continuous sense of failure that is the source of almost all my anxiety. It has represented a culture that had to be mas- tered, interpreted. I was afraid that it meant a break between me and my parents. English denotes a heavy, burdensome aspect of my past. I’m tired of it. (“Teach Yourself Italian”) 96 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

Lahiri locates the sense of anxiety in a “burdensome” past, a rift and a conflict in a culture and a language that would have been her “own.” 1 This conjuncture readily calls to mind the oft quoted account of the uncanny (as a psychological symptom and an epistemological notion) provided by Sigmund Freud. 2 One of the possible readings of his essay “The Uncanny” rests on noting a persistent link between the individual and the collective, where the individual is often already structured by prior exigencies of the species’ mental development (Freud 152). The hereditary logic is constitutive of, but not exclusive for, Freud’s explication of this peculiar affect. The second general observation derived from Freud’s piece concerns a certain anthropological bent of his psychoanalysis evident not least in a number of examples that he draws on in order to support his theory and that derive from the cultural field, including literature. Having thus established literature as a helpful source of information regarding the apparently important pattern of psychological behavior both in individuals and collectivities (since, according to Freud, it is observable also in dreams, folk tales and myths indicating a shared experience or is to a degree attributable to children or so-called primitive peoples [139, 142, 147, 153 et passim]), this essay will further contend that Lahiri’s work so far (two short-story collections and two novels) shows deep and sustained concern with elements of American culture and society that evince the effects of the uncanny precisely in the sense outlined by Freud. In other words, these texts taking place in ordinary, domestic and familiar surroundings, and in unmarked cultural spaces, often register the intrusion of a strange, unfamiliar and alien element made so due to the effect of inexplicable and uncontainable recurrence, which, by virtue of its repetition, suggests something already known or familiar but subject to repression or deliberate forgetting (Freud 147 – 48). That the incursion of the uncanny is almost inevitable is testified on the level of the plot by a rather simple indicator: the characters simulating the American middle-class ideal are doing it right and achieving an almost perfect balance until something happens that ruffles the surface, from a seemingly innocuous quotidian interruption or a light family crisis to the most harrowing experience. 3 Going back to Freud, we will say that the unknown that intrudes into the text is not simply either an individual neurosis or disturbance but a symptom of a larger cultural and social malaise attending some of the most cherished of America’s self-images, which centers on that of a self-sufficient, upwardly mobile, balanced national family. Lahiri is intent on showing how American domesticity works as a regime that requires of her Indian-Bengali characters a degree of adaptation and accommodation that in turn relies on

1 In a recent interview Lahiri makes several claims that foreground the semantic play between the self and the other, the homely and the unhomely, and thus, in my view, produce a slippage that evokes the uncanny. She is overwhelmingly inspired by the literature that registers „a sense of displacement,” which arises as a character moves from one country to another, from one’s language/culture to a „foreign” one; from country to city. She confesses to have had a strange relationship to her „home state,” Rhode Island. Even though the place ought to have been familiar, she talks about her uneasy perception of it. Finally, she explicitly places her parents’ immigrant experience as a focal point of her life and creativity: „I was living that experience. That was my whole experience. That was my whole life” („Conversations with Tyler”). All these strands I find as potential triggers unleashing the uncanny effect in her work, as I try to contend in my argument. 2 For an outline of the varied contexts in which the concept has been placed by critical theory and cultural studies in recent times cf. Masschelein. 3 This is evident in Lahiri’s short stories, which pivot on the motifs such as emotional crisis, settling into a new house, a family visit, a tourist visit to the old country to the loss of a child or a parent, to name a few. Jelena Šesnić “Uncanny Domesticity” 97 the conscious or subconscious work of repressing the distressing content. Her texts, therefore, are keen to register the moment of the release of the repressed material. The situational equivalents for the process of repression are emigration, assimilation, adaptation, racialization, estrangement from the family, solitude, abandonment, ruptured family relations, illness, and death, among others. This would refer to the uncanny part of my argument; the other part being that this affective process actually takes place in what we deem typical domestic settings and in a family circle—therefore my phrase of “uncanny domesticity.” However, in my argument I will also provide a proposition that at least part of the anxiety results from the attempts of migrant (here, South Asian, Indian, or Bengali) characters to successfully replicate and mimic the ideal of American middle-class domesticity. Their being very successful in the process is not meant in the least to disparage them, but to indicate a certain gap or loss that is irreplaceable. A very general sense of such an affective dynamics is aptly summed up by Gogol Nikhil Ganguli, a protagonist of Lahiri’s first novel The Namesake, who reflects on the costs and benefits of his family’s transoceanic mobility: “He wonders how his parents had done it, leaving their respective families behind, seeing them so seldom, dwelling unconnected, in a perpetual sate of expectation, of longing” (281); “And yet it was for him, for Sonia, that his parents had gone to the trouble of learning these customs” (286). In fact, in order for the middle-class, upwardly mobile Bengalis to emulate their middle-class US counterparts, a certain forgetting or even repression has to occur. Koshy warns that “the production of familiarity,” especially when proceeding in diasporic families (almost exclusively featured in Lahiri’s works), must necessarily show that the costs of reproduction of model minority citizenship—ascribed to the Asian minorities—are shared unevenly, cutting across gender and generational lines (cf. 352). Useful initial categorization of Lahiri’s fiction is provided by Caren Irr’s comprehensive critical model, which will be used as an important analytical mold, allowing us to place Lahiri’s writing in the set of “domestic novels that explore psychic conflicts of traditionally minded, middle-class professionals” and reinforce the ranks of “the canon of Indian American immigrant literature” (58 – 59). It is in the interstice of “domestic” and the psychological crisis specifically caused by immigration that I would like to place my reading. This cultural recoding takes place by way of Lahiri’s “use of a common American narrative, such as the upwardly mobile immigrant story” (Irr 11). If, to use the above wording, “a common American narrative” now features a set of alien characters, this points principally to apparently successful globalizing of South Asian diaspora, as propounded by Inderpal Grewal. Pointing to South Asian Indians’ spectacular mobility and achievement riding on the wave of the demand for skilled workers, Grewal further proposes that “knowledge formations” enabling such agency are both “national and transnational” (1). In the next instance, however, we need to take heed of what Koshy has recently termed costs of neoliberal exigencies that are often hard to grasp beneath the veneer of the “model minority thesis,” a catch-phrase designating the phenomenal rise of various Asian minority groups in their seemingly unequivocal embrace of middle-class American values (cf. 345 – 46). Other critiques have addressed more sinister aspects of the appellation, suggesting how it was used to adjudicate social and civic worth among different minority groups in twentieth-century America (Palumbo-Liu). The slogan’s very cogent recent dismantling comes from Helen Heran Jun, who places the phrase within the context of a comparative ethnic studies scholarship by 98 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

looking at the parallel strategies of racialization of African American and Asian American populations in nineteenth- and twentieth-century United States (3). The history thus revealed and summoned from oblivion testifies to what is perhaps the key—if according to the Freudian model appropriately muted and ineffable—factor of the uncanny transcribed as (non)belonging: the country’s looming tradition of extending or withholding of citizenship on account of complexly intersecting ideas of race ( Jun 1). Koshy takes over and carries on an approach similar to Jun’s historical reading by placing the scenes depicted in Lahiri’s and host of other South Asian diasporic and transnational writers’ works in the context of the 1965 sweeping reform of the immigration laws that have suspended more heavy- handed racial considerations, until then an important assessment grid for the incoming people. Grewal notes correctly how US immigration laws display the cross-section of “biopolitics and geopolitics” (1). In other words, what Lahiri’s texts juggle with is a meticulous imagining of South Asians accession to US- American citizenship by their clever and deft appropriation of the native ideal of middle-class domesticity. This is what her first generation immigrants had to “forget” (having accomplished that task) while their offspring, the second generation, struggles with recurrences of the scenes of trauma for the generation of their parents. Koshy aptly casts this affective mechanics as a “reinscription of the intergenerational narrative as filial gothic” (355). Not the least of reasons for the insistent operations of the strange behind the domestic are the intense, on-going and massive processes of globalization that, as many observers agree, are put in motion by America but are not entirely controlled by it. (As Koshy contends, the unintended effects of the immigration reform are a case in point; cf. 350.) So even when the nation-state activates yet another globalizing strategy (whether military, political, economic or cultural in provenance), the end point is far from secure, creating a situation of denial, repression or forgetting of the country’s implication in a process happening outside the domestic bounds, far from the homeland. Yet Lahiri’s plots remind her American and global readers that history works in uncanny ways refusing to put to rest the haunting (what Freud calls the involuntary return of the repressed content—precisely the source that emanates the uncanny; cf. 148) that accompanies it. In contemporary American fiction and cultural production in general, there are two ways broadly speaking of dealing with the burden of the United States’ overwhelming presence in and influence on global affairs. One is disparagingly evoked by John Carlos Rowe, a leading Americanist nowadays, who wryly notes a preponderant tendency on the part of the US nation-state to exercise a great degree of obliviousness to its past actions leading consequently to the forgetting (if not quite repression) of the undesirable content as a result of the state’s previous acts (as in the relation of the First Gulf War to its successor, the 2003 invasion of Iraq; cf. 61). This penchant for oblivion is then compounded by what Rowe further criticizes as the hypernationalistic inclination, evident in the drive to domesticate the global by reducing it to US standards (107). 4

4 One instance is the imposition of US democratic standards on foreign nations across the globe; the other is the less ominous but no less encompassing Hollywood-ization of the entertainment and culture industry that often can be harnessed for suspect foreign politics goals. Witness the case of Ben Affleck’s fairly recent critically acclaimed filmArgo (2012), covering an episode from the Iranian Revolution at a time when Iran is portrayed by the US as an intransigent nation. The film is inevitably read through the lenses of the current US political stand. Jelena Šesnić “Uncanny Domesticity” 99

The other, more rewarding procedure, as I have already pointed out, has recently been outlined by Caren Irr in her valuable study of the tendencies in early 21-century American novel that she situates precisely at the cross-section of the domestic and the foreign, the local and the global, the native and the non-native, while she follows the emergence of a kind of global literature, written in English but not restricted to a single national terrain. Unlike the previous hypernationalizing impulse, this one seems to opt for a de-territorialization, even when the epicenter is situated in the United States, which is seen more as a router for various global currents than their single or most important generator (for this expression, cf. Irr 28). Having provided in the first part a tentative critical frame for the discussion, I will next consider Lahiri’s two novels to date: The Namesake (2003) and The Lowland (2013). The first is a family-centered and eerily coincidental (as Freud would point out, there are no pure coincidences) text, in which the uncanniness is already implied in the novel’s central conceit—that the protagonist’s life (the main character being Gogol Ganguli) is somehow paired up with and doubled in his namesake’s existence, the namesake being the troubled Russian-Ukrainian writer, Nikolai Gogol. The mysterious connection, that is meant to have saved the protagonist’s father’s life in a devastating railway accident years ago in India, extends to the next generation, even if the rest of the family cannot know the debt the father, Ashoke Ganguli, presumably owes the long dead writer (The Namesake [N], 21). This beyond-the-grave connection literally sustains the life of the protagonist since it has guaranteed his father’s survival and thus also his own. The debt of survival is not easily repaid, however, and is therefore transferred to the next generation, to Ashoke’s American-born son Gogol, who becomes the dubious benefactor of his father’s secret legacy that simultaneously contains the mystery of his origin. That Gogol is unwill- ing to read the pages of Nikolai Gogol’s collection of stories—the book that literally saved his father’s life by indicating to the rescue team that he is still alive amidst the train wreckage and scattered bodies—until the very end of the novel accounts for an inverted temporal structure of his identity search (N, 18, 289). Literally, the book and the father’s secret contained in it has been as close to him as his father’s graduation gift, tucked away on the shelves in his room where he soon forgets about it, that this situation of obliviousness chimes with the feeling of the familiar that ought to remain hidden (a central idea permeating the Freudian concept of the uncanny; cf. Freud 132). Although Gogol Ganguli eventually learns the story of the train accident and his father’s second birth (by Ashoke’s testimony, his third birth happens upon his arrival to America), he refuses to honor the portentous bond with Nikolai Gogol and the debt that both his father and he himself have incurred by it. As Koshy argues, the debt contracted in a sustained emotional effort of maintaining family ties from one generation (the immigrant parents) to the next (their Americanized children) is, in fact, unsettling (357). In Gogol Ganguli’s case, it is both haunting and resisting settlement since the creditor is dead. Gogol initially submits to the economy of indebtedness. Later on, however, he refuses to keep on carrying his name, which he even changes by a formal procedure to the more neutral Nikhil, a fact that contains a betrayal of his father and his whole family—turning him into an estranged son adrift in the irrepressible current of New York life. At a certain point he is literally placeless (his family can’t reach him at his New York residence), while trying to reinvent himself as a fully assimilated young professional in his relationship with an upper-class New Yorker, Maxine. As he inhabits American 100 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

middle-class identity apparently without effort and appropriates features of highbrow urban culture, Gogol (now turned Nikhil) commits a symbolic frat- ricide—he’s forsaken his parents, his family and their quaint Indian/ Bengali ways for the sake of belonging to an American family (and literally so, since he is likely to become their son-in-law). In a house full of artefacts that testify to their owners’ superior taste accumulated by the generations of the family and displayed in a very nonchalant but subtly deliberate way, however, Nikhil/ Gogol’s background becomes racialized, foregrounded only to the extent that it fits in with other appurtenances of his emergent social status. As an upstart he must support his social ambition by credentials such as his elite education and a promising career: “They are at once satisfied and intrigued by … his Mediterranean looks” (N, 134). By erasing Gogol, Nikhil pretends that an identity make-over in the vein of a successful neo-liberal agent is within his grasp. By doing so, however, he turns his back on the lifeline his name has come to embody, while his repudiation of the name given to him by his parents signals his sinking into the void where his identity remains adrift (N, 158). The death of his father follows upon this symbolic renunciation of him by Nikhil. This causes the estranged Nikhil to turn back to his family, which he is able to do in a symbolic way, by participating in the mourning process that will jolt him back into remembering the bonds and debts that have formerly constituted his identity (N, 180). Getting back to India, performing a funeral rite for his father, shaving his hair and participating in a religious ceremony performed in commemoration of the deceased parent, restores his self that was cracked and fragmented. This reconstitution suggests an abiding effect of trauma that is transmitted through generations but also shows that cultural rituals are devised in part to forestall the shattering effect of death, loss or separation. The novel is replete with the procedures that anchor the Bengali characters in their place and time, relate them to other individuals, and point to their social status; equally so, when they no longer perform them, this omis- sion signals the acquisition of an American middle-class identity (marriage, honoring one’s parents, burial, the wake ceremony, rice ceremony, festivals). Additionally, the slippages attending the original performance of the rituals and their reiteration in the American context imbue the otherwise stabilizing effect of the act with certain open-endedness. So is the rice ceremony tweaked in a way that it may reflect the American context (N, 63); additionally, Gogol’s traditional marriage tries to recreate the density of Indian mores, but fails to ensure the same kind of stability for second-generation characters (N, 276). Once in America, presumably one is no longer bound by the obligations incurred in India, so that Gogol can indeed change his name as he wishes, but the deferred effect of repudiating the name bestowed by the father begins to haunt Gogol so that eventually he will come to understand that his identity is irrevocably linked to the point of trauma, the act in which his father almost ceased to be. Since that very act is commemorated by his name, Gogol, it is not entirely up to him or his boundless sense of individual freedom to interfere with the name: in his case, the name is the destiny. Choosing a new name is thus unsettling his sense of self—“he doesn’t feel like Nikhil” (N, 105)—making him momentarily estranged from himself. The narrative underlying the father’s affinity with Gogol (the writer) is a repressed content that re-activates the other momentous occasions, his re- births: his real birth, his survival in the railroad accident, and his immigration to America against great odds. When the son learns about the father’s past, for which the name of Gogol is an encryption, a feeling of estrangement sets Jelena Šesnić “Uncanny Domesticity” 101 in—he sees his father no longer in domestic, familial terms but literally as “a stranger, a man who has kept a secret, has survived a tragedy, a man whose past he does not fully know” (N, 123). The attribution of it to the son is thus an attempt to ensure the continuity that has been shattered by the act of leaving India over and against the explicit wishes of his parents, precisely the act of filial disobedience, the rupturing of intergenerational bond that Gogol, the son, will repeat in his own instantiation of the filial rebellion. The psychic economy of the name thus comes to signal what above has been termed the interrupted intergenerational ties due to the “filial gothic” (Koshy 362). It is important that in the final scene of the novel the son begins to read the book, a collection of stories by Gogol, to which his father owed so much, and so to imaginatively re-enact the father’s life in a gesture of reconnection beyond time and death. By reclaiming Gogol the writer and thus acknowledg- ing the bond with the now deceased father (whose act of reading Gogol—his beloved author—literally saved his life), in this recurring act he is in fact coming back to himself after a period during which the name (his parents’ legacy) was diminished, obscured and hidden. This recurrence suggests that an anxiety still attends the fate of immigrants’ children, even when their process of acculturation is seemingly perfect, suggesting the usurpation of domesticity by the uncanny. Thus the story of Gogol’s naming, his attempts to rename himself, and dire consequences of such an act stand for a literary equivalent of psychological and cultural costs not only of belonging in America but of doing so on the foil of the maintenance of a diasporic family (Koshy 352). The potential of the name Gogol to signal a traumatic residue testifies to the underlying ruptures in the story of setting up a new immigrant family against the globalizing US-Indian backdrop. Lahiri’s shift in focus is observable in her latest novel, The Lowland , which more intentionally than her previous fiction pays attention to what Irr terms, “the interconnected global environment of the new millennium” that gives rise to “a concerted movement toward a new literary form: the geopolitical novel” (2). In more direct terms, in this novel “a political problem [is] fundamental to the story,” while the writer’s focusing of attention to the 1970s Indian political movement of the Naxalites signals the novel’s intention to represent “an active social process in which new political positions and attitudes are emerging” (Irr 3). Even if Irr’s term of the new geopolitical novel as an exemplary form of early 21st-century US fiction might be taken up as a matrix for Lahiri’s novel, this should not foreclose other avenues of reading, in particular those that still engage US middle-class domesticity codes when re-interpreted by immigrant characters, but should nevertheless reorient our reading of the novel in terms suggested by Irr as being key questions posed by this new genre: “how assimilation comes about in a media-saturated environment, … what safe spaces the nation provides in the context of neoliberalism, when and how revolutions happen, or how we might recognize the hero of globalization” (4). In The Lowland Lahiri thus sets out to present the dubious heroes and heroines of globalization. Locating part of the action of her two novels, as well as of some of her short stories, in particular places in India, the city of Calcutta figuring prominently among them, Lahiri is not simply paying a due tribute to the old country, but is additionally infusing the stories with a surplus meaning that is likely to be missed even by an attentive Western reader (I find myself vicariously occupying that position for the purpose of my argument), and yet is a supplement to the story’s intent. Calcutta as a capital of Bengal and 102 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

erstwhile the capital of British India thus suffers layered historical interven- tions and sustains a mingling of myth and history. Its locations and sights in The Lowland evince the uncanny effect, made so by forgetting or repression of the events which have occurred in various locations in the city. In addition, Calcutta is situated in the swamps creating the terrain particularly resilient to all modernizing or public health efforts on the part of the colonizers and later national administrations. This is partly why a recent reader calls it a site of “unreasoning modernity” (Chattopadhyay 3). The swamps were also nests of poverty and political radicalism, as seen in The Lowland. On the level of spatiality, the novel graphically pits the “abject” and “undis- guised” (Chattopadhyay 1) poverty that the city shamelessly and openly sports against the spaces of refinement, luxury and (post-colonial, independence) privilege. Considering an interesting account of Calcutta’s urban history given by Swati Chattopadhyay, we should note the city’s persistent refusal to submit to endless British and subsequent national government’s efforts at modernization and urbanization in the Western vein (cf. 1 – 2). Rather, the city with its complex national and regional politics, together with its uncontainable urban face, creates a dense backdrop against which the dramatic action evolves, while its materiality haunts the characters even when they emigrate and make a new life in the United States. The mingling of the domestic and the political here also creates an uncanny effect since the repercussions of historical events are played out against a backdrop of the story of two brothers, the elder of whom, Shubash Mitra, immigrates into the States and adopts the trappings of US middle-class domesticity, while the younger, Udayan, remains in India, gets involved in the radical Naxalite movement in the 1970s and gets murdered as a result. However, the haunting continues sustained by further family at- tachments. Namely, Gauri, the killed brother’s wife finds herself pregnant with Udayan’s child, accepts the elder brother’s offer of marriage and follows him to the States as his wife conveniently hiding the child’s real origin. After a while Gauri chafes under the pressure of the familial and domestic routine, the result of her disaffection being that she launches her own, independent process of upward mobility leaving her family behind for an academic career in California. This bold if controversial reinvention is marred by the intrusions from the past—as a character that bridges the States and India; the domestic and the political; ultimately, the two brothers separated by immigration and politics, she is the one that maps the history of her emotional attachment, courtship and eventual marriage to the younger brother onto the spaces of Calcutta, the memories of which trail her in the States. According to Koshy, she carries the burden of the second(ary) (usually gendered) immigrant (352) further exacerbated by her previous history. As stated above, the geopolitical bent of the novel is often relayed by the mapping of space and places in the novel. Early on, we learn that Tollygunge, the Calcutta neighborhood from which the Mitra brothers come, sprang into being by the British efforts of subduing the swampy land; while the period of the British reign is appropriately closed off by the scene of the bloody Partition in the wake of the Indian emancipation (The Lowland [L], 13). Still, the space of the city is even in the national period marked by the remnant of colonial times, the intrusive presence of the walled-in golf club standing apart from its modest, working and lower middle-class Indian neighborhood. The space of post-independence Calcutta is additionally striated by districts—we learn further that northern Calcutta is a home of wealthier and more respectable strata of Indian professional and administrative echelons, the home of Udayan’s Jelena Šesnić “Uncanny Domesticity” 103 girlfriend, Gauri. Even though it would be preposterous to simply transpose the social structure of the United States onto that of India, it is safe to say that the fact of Udayan and Gauri’s matrimony marked a breach not only of familial but also of social decorum, so that Udayan’s parents barely stood her presence as their daughter-in-law (L, 114). However, the places in the US to which the characters migrate hoping to reach safety and immunity from the social and political disorder of 1970s India rent by civic unrest, incipient revolution, and the state of emergency, are no less susceptible to their own unrestful past. This I will show on the examples of Shubash and Gauri, who both indicate the abiding interest that Lahiri has for the intersection of the domestic and its hidden counterpart, here cast as radical postcolonial politics. When Shubash, who unlike his brother has no interest in domestic Indian upheavals, arrives in the States to pursue his doctoral degree in New England, he finds many reminders of his native land superimposed onto a foreign, American landscape (L, 34). As time goes by, the sense of what is foreign and what is homely will change for him as he revisits his native city of Calcutta after years of residence in the States and finds the place uncannily different—both familiar and unknown (L, 112). Even though it is the features of Rhode Island that now seem familiar to Shubash, the place itself is burdened with history, layered with the usually unacknowledged traces of the former inhabitants, the extinguished Indian tribes that used to thrive there until the arrival of the white settlers (L, 244). However, even when he learns much later on about the native Indian presence in his New England town followed by their violent uprooting, there is no simple way for him to digest this repressed, and now reactivated, history—he himself belongs to the latest wave of “settlers” that have symbolically claimed this place from its original inhabitants. Interestingly, his acquaintance with the distant history of the place that he now sees as an alien locality peopled by ghosts of vanquished Indians, makes him both a native and a stranger at his second home (L, 253). On the surface, Shubash’s immigration story features him as the ideal model minority subject first as a bio-chemical student and, later, as a successful researcher—the trajectory resonates with the post-1965 South Asian high-achieving immigrants ambivalently welcomed by America. If the level of social integration lags behind, the one that has remained operational is the mechanics of “the liberal democratic state” that not only profiles some types of immigrants as good and desirable but also embraces them as consumers, rather than as political subjects (Grewal 7). Shubash is congenitally predisposed against any political action, one surmises not because he condones, say, the American actions in Vietnam as a student in the 1970s, but because hewing to “the American way of life” is seen as paying off the unspoken debt that he owes America for taking him in. Grewal reads this disciplining of a new immigrant in the way that “the new consumer culture produced gendered and racially marginalized subjects also as consumers” (7) (and we might add, as desirable and assimilable professionals), thus muting their political agency. Gauri’s example is even more indicative of the shift that Lahiri’s discourse of the new South Asian global diaspora has assumed in The Lowland. Gauri apparently welcomes the bland and levelling hand of a depoliticized and hyper-commercial America: everything is on display—from commodities to university courses so that a knowledge-hungry philosophy graduate can choose for herself, exercising her newly gained agency in America. In contrast, the wife and mother Ashima of The Namesake is originally an exponent of, what Koshy terms the assiduous, vigilant maintenance of the family ties in the context of 104 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

new immigration and the spectral influence of the model minority family (cf. 351, 352). In The Lowland, Gauri’s character is much more complex since her history in India is revealed to us in flashbacks of first and third person narration. We see how she is upon her arrival to America turned into a dutiful and obedient wife wrapped in a shawl marking her marital status, and then literally enclosed in her cramped American home (L, 123). Unlike other women immigrants in Lahiri’s fiction (but more like their second-generation, Americanized daughters), Gauri negotiates her American spaces always with her interior eye upon Calcutta during the revolutionary upheaval following her and her husband’s intense and morally dubious involvement in it; it becomes so that the American space for her (both New England and later more intensely California) is a blank slate where she literally inscribes her memories of the past in India, refusing to acknowledge Udayan’s death (L, 275). The landscape that she recreates is phantasmatic, peopled by ghosts and sunk in the past to the point where she almost loses the capacity to distinguish the past from the present, the debt to the dead (husband) from the obligation to her living daughter. This haunting brings her almost to the brink of suicide, but at the last point she is able to face up to the past, recognize her guilt and strive for atonement (L, 323). Both The Namesake and The Lowland show us characters caught up in an intensely globalizing world. Even though they may seem to successfully manage the codes of acculturation and adaptation in the United States—as shown by their adoption of upward mobility and US middle-class domesticity—still, they have to contend with the intrusions of the uncanny bestowed by their personal, family, and (trans)national pasts that belie the stability they have found in their new culture. The conveniently broad Freudian model, fruitfully combining the findings of individual and collective psychology and enmeshing them with bold, far-reaching anthropological and ethnological speculations, is used here to provide a sustaining argument that due to the current and deepening processes of globalization, US society is undergoing huge changes that often defy clear conceptualization. More often than not, US citizens, especially in the genres of the geopolitical novel (Irr) or the “new immigrant fiction” (Koshy) or “the South Asian diaspora novel” (Grewal), find themselves at a loss to account for the effects of the processes way out of their control but certainly emanating from the homely and familiar spaces of the homeland that, therefore, can be traced back to the uncanny effect. Recent US literature mixing the domestic and the foreign (conveniently speaking) strives to make sense of the increasingly dehumanizing, complex and unhomely world—even when it seems so close to home.

BIBLIOGRAPHY Chattophadyay, Swati. Representing Calcutta: Modernity, Nationalism, and the Colonial Uncanny. New York and London: Routledge, 2005. “Conversations with Tyler. Ep. 17: Jhumpa Lahiri on Writing, Translation, and Crossing Between Cultures.” 11 Jan. 2017. https://medium.com/conversations- with-tyler/jhumpa-lahiri-books-novels-in-other-words-6271de0ac8d9. 12 Dec. 2017. Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. 1919. Trans. David Mclintock. London: Pen- guin, 2003. Grewal, Inderpal. Transnational America: Feminisms, Diasporas, Neoliberalisms. Durham and London: Duke UP, 2005. Jelena Šesnić “Uncanny Domesticity” 105

Irr, Caren. Toward the Geopolitical Novel: U.S. Fiction in the Twenty-First Cen- tury. New York: Columbia UP, 2014. Jun, Helen Heran. Race for Citizenship: Black Orientalism and Asian Uplift from Pre-Emancipation to Neoliberal America. New York and London: New York UP, 2011. Koshy, Susan. “Neoliberal Family Matters.” American Literary History 25.2 (Summer 2013): 344 – 80. Lahiri, Jhumpa. The Lowland. New York and Toronto: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013. --- . The Namesake. Boston and New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. --- .. “Teach Yourself Italian.” The New Yorker. 7 Dec. 2015. 12 Dec. 2017. --- .. “Trading Stories: Notes from an Apprenticeship.” The New Yorker. June 13, 2011. 18 Oct. 2015. Masschelein, Anneleen. The Unconcept: The Freudian Uncanny in Late-Twen- tieth-Century Theory. Albany: SUNY P, 2011. Palumbo-Liu, David. Asian/ American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Stanford: Stanford UP, 1999. Rowe, John Carlos. The Cultural Politics of the New American Studies. Ann Ar- bor: U of Michigan Library, 2012. Open Humanities Press. 26 Oct. 2015. http://openhumanitiespress.org/the-cultural-politics-of-the-new-american- studies.html. A Home on the Range

106 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54) Tadeusz Rachwał A Home on the Range and the (Near) Extinction of the American Bison

DOI: 10.5604/01.3001.0011.6725 A Home on the Range

Tadeusz Rachwał A H o m e o n t h e R a n g e 107

Tadeusz Rachwał Oh, give me a home where the buffalo roam, is professor of English Where the deer and the antelope play. at University of Social (My Western Home and A Home on the Range) Sciences and Humanities in Warsaw. He published books and articles on The still popular song “A Home on the Range” may well be read as an implicit British and American praise of America seen as a dreamland without Indians. In the 1876 version of culture and literature, literary theory, and cultural the song titled “My Western Home” written by Brewster Higley, Indians do studies. His academic not appear at all while the land is populated not only by the roaming buffalo interests concentrate on the cultural and ideologi- and the playing deer and antelope, but also by other creatures large and small cal aspects of labour and (the graceful white swan, the beaver, the salmon). The landscape described the metamorphoses in the song can hardly be called wild or sublime and could well have been of its ethos in different discursive formations. painted by John Constable rather than by Asher Durand:

Oh, give me the land where the bright diamond sand Throws its light from the glittering stream Where gli- deth along the graceful white swan, Like a maid in a heavenly dream. (Higley: 219)

In the 1910 version of the song modified by John A. Lomax and titled “A Home on the Range” Indians are mentioned, though their presence in the text figures only as a distant appearance which simultaneously brings a hope of their remaining distant forever:

The red man was pressed from this part of the West He’s likely no more to return, To the banks of Red River where seldom if ever Their flickering camp-fires burn. (Lomax, 39)

Brewster Higley’s version of the song, the one without Indians, was adopted as the official state song of Kansas as late as 1947, though not without reservations. The disagreements, however, concerned not so much Indians as the roaming and playing of American antelopes whose presence in the text did not faithfully reflect their already extinct status in Kansas:

Supporters claimed that the song was written in the state and portrayed an earlier time in the state’s history. Detractors said that the song was erroneous since antelope no longer roamed the plains and antiquated in its portrayal of the state. (Kansapedia)

There were no objections as to the roaming buffalo. In 1947 a few herds of the reintroduced species lived in state parks and on private land. At the beginning of the 20th century, however, there were only about 500 buffalo left in the whole of the United States, and when Lomax published his version of the song they were still almost extinct, at least in comparison with the estimated number of 20 million populating the Great Plains before the arrival of settlers. Throughout the twentieth century the American bison kept being reintroduced to the country, to become the national mammal of the United States in May 2016, when President Barack Obama signed the National Bison Legacy Act – 234 years after the bald eagle became the country’s national bird. The bald eagle itself still faced extinction in the 1950s and was only removed from the federal government’s list of endangered species in 1995. With the Bison Legacy Act, 108 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

as John Cavelli (the Executive Vice President for the Public Affairs Division of the Wildlife Conservation Society) phrased it, bison took “a place alongside the bald eagle as a national symbol to be revered” describing the species as “an ecological keystone, cultural bedrock and economic driver” which “conveys values such as unity, resilience and commitment to healthy landscapes and communities” (American Icon). Though almost exterminated throughout the nineteenth century, bison is thus symbolically revived to be revered no longer as a wild creature of the past, but as a breed which only carries some traces of the buffalo roaming the prairies in the text of “My Western Home.” One peculiar aspect of the American westward movement throughout the nineteenth century seems to have been precisely the bringing to near extinction not only of Indians, but also of certain animal species, some of which, like the roaming buffalo and the playing antelope, were simultaneously creatures symbolizing the milieu of the imaginary new western home, not only in “My Western Home.” Regardless of the symbolic impact, the animals, and especially the buffalo herds, were chased and massively killed by soldiers and white buffalo hunters (or “buffalo runners” – as they liked to call themselves) mainly for skins and meat, but also in order to starve American Indians into submission and abandonment of their nomadic ways of living. In 1872 the then Secretary of the Interior Columbus Delano clearly formulated this idea in his annual report writing that “The rapid disappearance of game from the former hunting-grounds must operate largely in favor of our efforts to confine the Indians to smaller areas, and compel them to abandon their nomadic customs and establish themselves in permanent homes” (Delano, 5). The efforts to diminish the Indian territories were in fact efforts to somehow bring them home, to make them accept the American home as their home by way of confining their freedom to move firstly to the territories of reservations and then of diminishing the reservations themselves to the area of a farm, a project clearly speaking through Delano’s report:

The policy of confining the wild tribes to smaller reservations is regarded as of the utmost importance; and carried forward to its full, extent, will result in restricting them to an area of sufficient extent to furnish them farms for cultivation, and no more. […] So long as the game existed in abundance there was little disposition manifested to abandon the chase, even though Government bounty was dispensed in great abundance, affording them ample means of support. When the game shall have disappeared, we shall be well forward in the work in hand. (Delano, 5)

Home for Indians figures here as a diminished reservation, the work of diminishing being the function of the state which considered famine to be an important weapon of war, the extermination of the bison population constituting a crucial part of it. Though, as Alex de Waal notes, “political famines seem scarcely to register in our collective imagination” (Waal, 11), the issue seems to be relevant in thinking about the complexities of the idea of American western home not only as regards the domestication of Native Americans, but also as regards the creation of free space for white settlers who, perhaps like Indians, also wanted buffalo to roam near their new homes. What Delano called the “disappearance of game from the former hunting-grounds” in the above quotation was a part of the political project in which military Tadeusz Rachwał A H o m e o n t h e R a n g e 109 intervention was not always direct, and the actual work of slaughtering the animals was as it were delegated to the hands of hide hunters who “worked” in the name of the market rather than that of the state. David D. Smits insightfully discusses the cooperation between the army and civilian hunters on the southern plains, showing various reasons for which soldiers restrained from the massive slaughter. Yet the slaughter was strongly encouraged, and Colonel Dodge’s encouragement to extend the hunting territory beyond Kansas is illustrative of the urgency of the “buffalo problem” in the 1860s:

[A] young runner named Steel Frazier proposed that the hidemen send a delegation to Fort Dodge to ask its com- mander, Lieutenant Colonel Dodge, what the penalty would be if the hunters crossed into the Texas Panhandle, where they knew buffalo still abounded. The runners need not have feared opposition from Dodge, for despite his own sportsmanlike unwillingness to squander buffalo, he, like most of his comrades-in-arms, believed that the Indian problem would be resolved as soon as the buffalo were gone. Indeed, back in 1867 when Sir W. F. Butler had penitently admitted that he and his party had killed over thirty bulls on a hunt near Fort McPherson, Dodge had responded: „Kill every buffalo you can! Every buffalo dead is an Indian gone.” (Smits, 328)

This identification of Indians with buffalo was not quite rhetorical, and Smits ascribes it also to some of the soldiers who found in the killing of buffalo a substitute for the killing of Indians whose speed and mobility were frustrat- ing, while the buffalo constituted a more easily accessible target:

Frustrated bluecoats, unable to deliver a punishing blow to the so-called “Hostiles,” unless they were immobilized in their winter camps, could, however, strike at a more accessible target, namely, the buffalo. That tactic also made curious sense, for in soldiers’ minds the buffalo and the Plains Indian were virtually inseparable. (Smits, 318)

Smits gives an example of an actual attack on a herd of buffalo in which the creatures are targeted as redskins, a scene strongly reminiscent of Don Quixote’s charge on windmills. Here is how Chalkey M. Beeson, a person hired as a guide, describes an encounter of soldiers led by general Custer with a herd of the animals:

Custer, who was in charge of the hunting party, stopped and said, ‘Boys here’s a chance for a great victory over that bunch of redskins the other side of the hill. Major B., you will take charge of the right flank, I will attend to the left. General Sheridan and the infantry will follow direct over the hill. Ready! Charge!’ (Carter, ix, quoted in Smits, 318).

This imaginary metamorphosis of buffalos into Indians is not simply a rhetorical slip revealing the projection of animality upon Indians, but a reflection 110 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

of a more complex blend of the vision of Indian animality with a prospect of their future regeneration to being Americans, a civilized and home-loving kind people whom, as yet, they are not. The living generation of Indians, like buffalo, had to be brought to near extinction within the diminishing spaces of reservations because, as Delano phrased it in his report, it is “certain that but little progress can be made in the work of civilization while the Indians are suffered toroam at large over immense reservations, hunting and fishing, and making war upon neighboring-tribes,” simultaneously claiming that there “is little in the past to encourage the belief that the adult Indian of to-day can be very thoroughly civilized” (Delano, 6 – 7, italics added). The home where the buffalo roam is thus to be a domestic space where the roaming of both Indians and buffalos is somehow held in check, a civilized and controlled kind of roaming which functions as reminder of the nearly gone wildness and freedom. The war with the roaming buffalo is thus simultaneously a war with roaming Indians, and Delano’s policy seems to be directed against roaming and unwillingness to settle down, the unwillingness which in the case of Indians was to be overcome through confinement to reservations and in the case of wild animals through the parallel gesture of firstly eliminating them as food for Indians, and then bringing the remnants back to existence in national parks and on some private areas. It is also a kind of war which is also the work of civilization preparing Indians for homely ways of living in the future. Thus in Colonel Dodge’s “[e]very buffalo dead is an Indian gone” the verb “gone” does not necessarily mean dead, but moved away from the homely territory and, perhaps paradoxically, bred as a relic of the free and wild spirit which the settlers as it were inherit as a trait of American freedom. What makes an American home on the range really different from the home inherited through the colonial tradition is its access to wildness, to indigenous animals which, unlike game animals in England, “could not be reduced to absolute property since they were, at law, ferae naturae, or ‘wild by nature’” (Smalley, 2). Free, democratic access to wild indigenous animals, as Andrea Smalley argues, was posited in opposition to British class-based restrictions imposed on hunting and “served as a clear marker of American exceptionalism” (Smalley, 38). Wild animals thus constituted a challenge to the process of Anglo-American colonization and its legalities (Cf. Smalley, 6) and took part in the formation of the idea of the American home as different from the European legacy, as one surrounded, and partly inhabited, by the wildness of roaming creatures, however imaginary this free roaming may have been. American wildness, embodied not only in forests and sublime landscapes but also in indigenous animals, is seen as exceptional precisely because it carries no traces of Europe, and though through the time of colonization those traces have been partly erased, they can be recovered and revived so as to ensure Thoreau’s “preservation of the world,” a world which is clearly an authenti- cally American world. Though the near annihilation of numerous species of indigenous animals seems to be incompatible with the Thoreauvian love for the wild, what it seems to have awakened was a certain nostalgia for the wild and the roaming, a nostalgia to rebreed, recreate and reproduce creatures which will, as it were, stand for the free spirit of America. This spirit somehow “wildened” American civilization for whose creation the extermination of “the monarch of the plains” was perceived only as a necessary step to pacify Indians and keep them away from the homes on the prairie. General Nelson A. Miles, one of the distinguished performers of this step in the 1870s, did Tadeusz Rachwał A H o m e o n t h e R a n g e 111 see some wastefulness of the endeavor and, years later, wrote in his Personal Recollections that the extermination of buffalo “might seem like cruelty and wasteful extravagance.” Yet, he explained, the buffalo, like the Indian, stood in the way of civilization and in the path of progress, and the decree had gone forth that they must both give way. [...] The same territory which a quarter of a century ago was support- ing those vast herds of wild game, is now covered with domestic animals which afford the food supply for hundreds of millions of people in civilized countries. (Miles, 135, I quote after Smits, 333).

The replacement of buffalo with cattle is seen as a sign of progress in which animals are transformed into food abundantly covering the land. What General Miles’s phrasing also performs through the idea of land’s being covered by domestic animals is their immobilization, the stoppage of roaming which is recalled in the ideal western home praised in the song. For Miles, as it seems, a home where the buffalo roam was not a perfect living space and his soldierly work in the name of civilization was done in the name of the eastern homes of Massachusetts where he was born and where he returned having done the job. Neither was the idea of a home on the range attractive to civilian buffalo hunters whose attitude is neatly expressed in numerous folk songs from that time. In “The Buffalo Skinners” version of 1873, for instance, home is the place of return and escape from the west, from “the buffalo range” to which the hunters would rather never return:

Oh, it’s now we’ve crossed Pease River and homeward we are bound, No more in that hell-fired country shall ever we be found. Go home to our wives and sweethearts, tell others not to go, For God’s forsaken the buffalo range and the damned old buffalo. (Lomax, 161)

This withdrawal from the west seems to be a gesture directed against what Frederic Jackson Turner’s saw in his much discussed essay “The Significance of the Frontier in American History” (1894) as the movement defining the becoming of America. American progress was heading west in Turner, and he saw the movement of the frontier as a natural movement of civilization which he, at one point, compared to the movement of glacial moraines:

Moving westward, the frontier became more and more American. As successive terminal moraines result from successive glaciations, so each frontier leaves its traces behind it, and when it becomes a settled area the region still partakes of the frontier characteristics. Thus the advance of the frontier has meant a steady movement away from the influence of Europe, a steady growth of independence on American lines. (Turner, 201) 112 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

A withdrawal from that movement, a look eastward – to Europe, but also to the east of America – meant to remain dependent and colonized, and Turner criticizes not only the English, but also George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and James Madison for their “desire to limit the advance of the frontier’ (224). “Even Thomas Benton,” he wrote

the man of widest views of the destiny of the West, at this stage of his career declared that along the ridge of the Rocky mountains “the western limits of the Republic should be drawn, and the statue of the fabled god Termi- nus should be raised upon its highest peak, never to be thrown down.” (Turner, 224)

The confinement of America to the limit of the Appalachian Mountains made up a territory fully controlled by the East, a finished and petrified state which stood against the expansive nature of the new settlers driven, as Turner phrases it, by “the demand for land and the love of wilderness freedom” which “drew the frontier ever onward” (Turner, 215). Their mobility paved the way for the truly democratic spirit which, once put in motion, returned back to the East of America and to Europe by way of undermining the “localism” of the sedentary politics of the state:

Mobility of population is death to localism, and the western frontier worked irresistibly in unsettling population. The effect reached back from the frontier and affected -pro foundly the Atlantic coast and even the Old World. But the most important effect of the frontier has been in the promotion of democracy here and in Europe. (Turner, 221)

The American progress is exemplary for others, and one of its important aspects may be, in the context of this text, called roaming – a tendency to change places which, for Turner, has turned into habit in the West: “Migra- tion has become almost a habit in the West: “Hundreds of men can be found, not over 50 years of age, who have settled for the fourth, fifth, or sixth time on a new spot. To sell out and remove only a few hundred miles makes up a portion of the variety of backwoods life and manners” (Turner: 221). This oxymoronic sedentary mobility may be seen as a trace of the gone wildness of the roaming bison. What enables such a reading is not only the fact that the presentation of Turner’s essay 1 coincided with the already mentioned near-extinction of bison whose number declined from about 600,000,000 at the end of the 18th century to 541 in 1889 and 300 in 1900, (cf. Quora). What is also marked, though somehow hiddenly, in Turner’s essay is that what prompted the movement away from the East was somehow initiated by buffalos. This interpretative possibility is hidden in the accessibility of salt which he saw as an important aspect of the initial localism of the East. The early settlers, Turner claims, were tied the Atlantic coast “by the need of salt, without which they could not

1 The essay was first was presented in 1893 at special meeting of the American Historical Association in Chicago, three years after the American frontier was officially closed in the bulletin of the Superintendent of the U.S. Census for 1890 as an area where settlements were already too dispersed to form a line. This end of the frontier, according to Turner, also closed „a great historic movement” of American development. Tadeusz Rachwał A H o m e o n t h e R a n g e 113 preserve their meats or live in comfort” (Turner, 212) ). Those who lived away from the coast traveled eastward for the supplies of salt, thus also constantly communicating with America’s colonial beginnings and learning America’s old ways and upholding her localism:

An annual pilgrimage to the coast for salt thus became essential. Taking flocks or furs and ginseng root, the early settlers sent their pack trains after seeding time each year to the coast. This proved to be an important educational influence, since it was almost the only way in which the pioneer learned what was going on in the East. (Turner, 212).

The turning point was the discovery of salt springs in Kanawaha and Holston in the west. It was then that “the West began to be freed from dependence on the coast” and the crossing of the mountains was enabled (Turner, 212). Salt was one of the attractions which transformed border into frontier, and what prompted this change was the finding of salt licks which Turner ascribes to Daniel Boone’s crossing of the Appalachians through what is now called the Wilderness Road. The event coincided with Boone’s first encounter with buffalo in 1767 when he and two companions followed a buffalo trail to the salt springs near the present-day site of the city of Prestonburg, Kentucky, where a snow storm forced them to camp. Here they learned the strategic value of a salt spring as they were able to secure all of the buffalo meat needed without hunting for it. Undoubtedly many other early hunters had a similar experience. (Collins: 151)

Salt licks and game trails which led to them were of course already well known to Indians, and Boone in fact followed Indian ways in his chase of buffalos. In his essay Turner makes a strong use of the idea of the trail in order to show that the westward movement of the American progress was inscribed in the history of the land, and Boone only “helped to open the way for civilization, finding salt licks, and trails, and land” (Turner, 213) thus initiating American participation in the process of civilization in which the advancing culture follows the traces of the predecessors among whom buffalos stand as civilization’s initiators who are posited as the originary finders of salt springs. At one point he offers a perspective upon the whole process, offering a look at it from the perspective of Cumberland Gap:

Stand at Cumberland Gap and watch the procession of civilization, marching single file – the buffalo following the trail to the salt springs, the Indian, the fur trader and hunter, the cattle-raiser, the pioneer farmer – and the frontier has passed by. (Turner, 208)

The cattle-raiser and the farmer close this list, and the final result of this natural progression is the independent American home on the range for which the buffalo are but traces, perhaps the Derridean ones, of the non-American past of America as the creators of trails followed both by Indians and by the subsequent waves of pioneers. Turner repeats this sequential vision of progress 114 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

claiming that it was the Indian trade that pioneered the progress of civilization by way of retracing buffalo trails through tracing Indian trails which followed the trails of buffalo. What was thus created was a system of access to places which gradually changed into a system of transportation culminating in the construction of railroads: “The buffalo trail became the Indian trail, and this became the trader’s ‘trace;’ the trails widened into roads, and the roads into turnpikes, and these in turn were transformed into railroads” (Turner, 209). The home where the buffalo roam was thus a construct carrying within its image the traces of the beginning located in the natural movement of animals (deer also made use of salt licks). Though the animals became nearly exterminated, the buffalo trails and traces kept alive the spirit of wildness which haunts the image of the western home in the lines of “My Western Home,” and which, slightly paradoxically, finds its embodiment in Thoreau’s vision of domestic animals going west and regaining their wildness:

I love even to see the domestic animals reassert their native rights — any evidence that they have not wholly lost their original wild habits and vigor; as when my neighbor’s cow breaks out of her pasture early in the Spring and boldly swims the river, a cold grey tide, twenty-five or thirty rods wide, swollen by the melted snow. It is the Buffalo crossing the Mississippi. (Thoreau 1862, 669)

General Custer, as we have seen, turned buffalos into Indians, seeing in their free coexistence a physical obstacle to the progress of American civilization. In Thoreau, domestic animals are turned into buffalos crossing the symbolic line between East and West, thus as it were refusing to be born to be tame. The dream of a home on the range may thus be seen as a reflection of some environmental paradoxes of wildness and civilization, of wilderness and technology, in which the desire to be born to be wild may, nowadays, also mean, as in the well-known Steppenwolf’s song Born To Be Wild, to freely ride a motorcycle. The call to “Get your motor runnin’/Head out on the highway” does not contradict the declaration that “Like a true nature’s child/We were born, born to be wild.” Robert Harrison in his essay written for New York Review of Books on the occasion of Thoreau’s bicentennial birthday quite rightly notices that the search for a “true” Americanness is inevitably bound to face contradictions and paradoxes. American “environmental conscientiousness,” he writes

is outmatched only by our environmental recklessness. We are outlaws obsessed by the rule of law, individualists devoted to communitarian values, a nation of fat people with anorexic standards of beauty. The only things we love more than nature’s wilderness are our cars, malls, and digital technology. The paradoxes of the American psyche go back at least as far as our Declaration of Inde- pendence, in which slave owners proclaimed that all men are endowed by their creator with an unalienable right to liberty. (Harrison, 14)

“Nature’s wilderness” was becoming extinct already at the time when Thoreau went to live in the forest, and, as he put it in his Journal on March 23, 1856, Tadeusz Rachwał A H o m e o n t h e R a n g e 115 the extinction and extermination of “nobler animals” made America an “emasculated country,” a country in which the study of nature is comparable to the study of “a tribe of Indians that had lost all its warriors” (Thoreau, not dated, 421). What American progress has mutilated is the authentic book of nature. The original has become a translation in which even the seasons of the year are inauthentic:

I take infinite pains to know all the phenomena of the spring, for instance – thinking that I have here the entire poem – & then to my chagrin I learn that it is but an imperfect copy that I possess & have read – that my ancestors have torn out many of the first leaves & grand- est passages & mutilated it in many places. (Thoreau, not dated, 422).

Nature is almost extinct and, perhaps like Walden in Staley Cavell’s reading of Thoreau, already gone: “Walden was always gone, from the beginning of the words of Walden” (Cavell, 119). Though the buffalo still roam in America, the space where the they roam seems now to have been relocated to the vicinity of Fermilab, a particle physics and accelerator laboratory near Chicago, where a small buffalo herd is maintained. The buffalo are quite free there, and the advertisement addressed to potential visitors informs that “although they look placid, buffalo have the undomesticated personality of the wild.” They are also “like physicists, they have been described as ‘cantankerous’ by those who have tried to herd them” (Fermilab Bison). This affinity between scientists and -buf falos brings to mind yet another near extinction, the one about which Thoreau remarked in “Walking” neatly summarizing, and perhaps also prophesizing, the puzzling ways of American progress: “There is plenty of genial love of nature, but not so much of Nature herself. Her chronicles inform us when her wild animals, but not when the wild man in her, became extinct” (Thoreau 1862, 667).

BIBLIOGRAPHY American Icon: Congress Passes Bill to Make Bison Our National Mammal (2016), National Bison Association. 23 June 2017 https://bisoncentral.com/press- release/american-icon-congress-passes-bill-to-make-bison-our-national- mammal/. Carter, R.G. Capt. On the Border with Mackenzie; or, Winning West Texas from the Comanches. Washington DC, 1935. Collins, Robert F. A History of the Daniel Boone National Forest, 1770 – 1970. Winchester, Kentucky: US Forest Service, 1975. Cavell, Stanley. The Senses of Walden. San Francisco: North Point Press, 1981. Delano, Columbus. Annual Report of the Secretary of the Interior on the Op- erations of the Departmnet for the Year 1872. Washington: Government Printing Office, 1872. 12 April 2017 https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ Report_of_the_Secretary_of_the_Interior/1872. Fermilab Bison and Prairie Info. 23 July 2017. http://www.fnal.gov/directorate/ announcements/prairie.html%20%5b23 . Harrison, Robert P. “The True American.”The New York Review of Books, LXIV, No. 13 (2017): 14 – 17. Higley, Brewster. “My Western Home.” Ed. Amanda Rees, The Great Plains Region. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2004, 219 – 20. 116 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

Kansapedia. Kansas Historical Society. 01 August 2017. http://www.kshs.org/ kansapedia/home-on-the-range/17165. Lomax, John. “A Home on the Range.” In: Cowboy Songs and Other Frontier Ballads. New York: Sturgis and Walton Co, 1911, 39 – 40. Miles, Nelson A. Personal Recollections and Observations, Chicago: Werner, 1896. Quora. What effect would the bison have if they went extinct? 25 July 2017. https:// www.quora.com/What-effect-would-the-bison-have-if-they-went-extinct. Smalley, Andrea L. Wild by Nature: North American Animals Confront Coloni- zation. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2017. Smits, David D. “The Frontier Army and the Destruction of the Buffalo: 1865 – 1883.” The Western Historical Quarterly, Vol. 25, No. 3 (1994): 312 – 338. Thoreau, Henry David (not dated), Journal (Manuscript April 23 – September 6, 1856). The Writings of Henry David Thoreau. 26 June 2017. http://thoreau. library.ucsb.edu/writings_journals21.html. Thoreau, Henry, David. (1862), “Walking.”The Atlantic Monthly 9, No 56 (1862), 657 – 674. Turner, Frederic J. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.”An- nual Report of the American Historical Association for the Year 1893. Wash- ington DC, 1894, 199 – 227.

118 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54) Abstracts

The paper focuses on the category of resilience Tomasz Basiuk as it refers to the capacity of socio-political Homeland systems to withstand stress or to adapt to it. Invoking resilience enables a multifaceted read- and Resilience: ing of the TV series Homeland that looks beyond the show’s readily apparent propagandistic Immunitas, Katechon, function. Resilience is posited as being partly at odds with the category trauma, which the the Uncanny, show also invokes. Unlike trauma, resilience is conceptualized as taking place in the present and Trauma’s moment, and an analogy thus obtains between Displacement resilience and the uncanny. Resilience is further linked to biopolitics with a discussion of Roberto Esposito’s immunitas and with a discussion of katechon, a category called upon by Esposito and by Paolo Virno. The latter identifies the katechon in the multitude which arises with the state of exception. Thus, the shift from trauma to the uncanny reflects not only the series’ generic conventions as a political thriller but corresponds also to a conceptual shift from the biopolitical immunitas to the more directly anarchic katechon of the multitude. Keywords: Homeland, resilience, the uncanny, immunity, katechon a b s t r a c t s 119

The paper discusses the ways of domesticating the feeling of sublime homelessness when Kornelia contemplating the realm of outer space in Carl Boczkowska Sagan’s revolutionary television series Cosmos: The Homely Sublime A Personal Voyage (1980) and its present-day sequel Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014) hosted by in Space Science: Neil deGrasse Tyson. Following World War II, a novel trend emerged in the science docu- Documentary Films mentary film fueled by “popular science boom” or the “post-war bonanza” (Gregory and Miller, Domesticating 37) and characterized by a gradual tendency to the Feeling move toward more complicated representational extremes. Its form, best exemplified by the late of Homelessness 1970s and 1980s space science documentaries, relied on the scientist-hosted and stunningly in Carl Sagan’s realist format as well as a mediated experience of the astronomical and dynamic sublime. Partly Cosmos contrary to this conception, the new ways of deriving spectator’s pleasure also involved both and Its Sequel domesticating and trivializing the productions’ content, observable in references to domestic surroundings as well as familiar cultural and historical conventions, such as the frontier myth or urban sublime of New York City. The paper argues that examined documentaries, seen as multimedia spectacles, tend to domesticate outer space through reconciling the cosmic sublime with the notion of a homely, lived-in place. Keywords: Carl Sagan, popular science, science- fiction, the sublime, domestic space

The article discusses how central themes of Alison Aleksandra Bechdel’s graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic are reflected in her portrayal of the Kamińska home she grew up in. The main focus is put “I Was Modern on the analysis of Bechdel’s father’s obsession with renovating the house in the context of his to His Victorian”: queerness. The article examines the relationship between Alison Bechdel and her father, and House expressions of their gender identities, in relation as a Reflection to their aesthetic preferences. Keywords: Alison Bechdel, labyrinth, graphic of the Father- memoir, queerness, gender identity Daughter Relationship in Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home 120 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

This paper presents an analysis of Nathaniel Maria Kaspirek Hawthorne’s novels The Scarlet Letter and The The Home House of Seven Gables regarding his depiction of the nineteenth-century ideals of femininity: and the Asylum. the cult of true womanhood and domesticity. Drawing primarily on original material, it will Antebellum be shown that emerging nineteenth-century psychiatry – asylum medicine – has strongly Representations corroborated American ideals of femininity and their presumably restorative influence in cases of True Womanhood of mental derangement. Hawthorne’s portrayals in Nathaniel of women and madmen negotiate antebellum concepts of femininity and psychiatry, juxtapose Hawthorne’s the asylum against the home, and emphasize the author’s embeddedness in nineteenth-century The House medico-psychological theories. Keywords: Hawthorne, insanity, mental institu- of Seven Gables tion, mental hygiene, femininity

The article explores similarities and divergen- Zofia Kolbuszewska cies in how The Nutshell Studies of Unexplained The Nutshell Studies Death, doll-house style dioramas built by Frances Glessner Lee in the 1930s and 1940s in order to of Unexplained Death, train homicide detectives, and miniature crime scenes crafted by a protagonist of the season Doll-house Homicides, 7 of the TV show CSI: Las Vegas modelled on them, figure female frustration connected with Foster Families, the traditional shape of family and domesticity. The dioramas reveal and simultaneously contain and the Subversion the foundational Derridean darkness underlying of Domesticity in CSI: the concept of domesticity. Keywords: doll-house, miniature, simulacrum, Las Vegas crime investigation, forensic TV shows, gender identification

The article discusses the controversial nature of Marta Koval home in Marilynne Robinson’s novels Home and Home as Emotional Gilead. Family histories of two aging ministers – the Rev. Ames and the Rev. Boughton – are narrated Space in Marilynne in a way that brings together transcendentalist admiration of human uniqueness, political urgencies Robinson’s Diptych of the mid-20^th^ century, theological dilemmas, and ideas of domesticity, identity and belonging. about Gilead The concepts of uprootedness (Simone Weil) and home as an asylum and prison (Tadeusz Sławek) are used to analyze Robinson’s novels. The article views the representation of home as a place that challenges the alleged American tolerance and open-mindedness and subverts traditional patterns of domesticity. a b s t r a c t s 121

Keywords: home, imprisonment, uprootedness, family place, domesticity

Among the abundance of possible readings of Paweł Pyrka Poe’s short story, one of the most intriguing is The House its treatment as an escape fantasy – the image of the unnamed narrator delirious, flight from of Usher Never Fell: the collapsing structure at his back seems almost too fortuitous, and invites questions as to the Impossible Escapes sole survivor’s relation to “the house of Usher”. As the structure’s suspected sentience could be and the Dark seen to relegate its occupants to the position (K)night of the Soul of psychological forces and manifest thought- content, the house is transformed into a combination of physical and mental spaces, akin to the twin “prisons” of body and mind which the narrator fantasizes about being freed from. The article examines the (im)possibility of Poe’s narrator’s escape, using Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s graphic novel Arkham Asylum: A Seri- ous House on Serious Earth as a companion text. Read alongside each other, the two narratives “construct” their “houses” by a superimposition of their characters’ mental landscapes onto the skeleton of physical (textual) space, in order to perform the fantasy of escape from psychological conflict, whether by tearing down the house as in Poe’s tale, or by restoring the externalized order as in the Batman novel. Keywords: E.A.Poe, Batman, degeneration, mental space, escape fantasy, dream

Fredreric Jackson Turner’s seminal essay on the Tadeusz Rachwał significance of frontier in American culture in- A Home on the Range terestingly posits the development of railways as extension of the buffalo trail. The presentation and the (Near) of his ideas in 1893 not only followed the an- nouncement of the closing of the frontier by the Extinction superintendent of the U.S. Census (1890), but was also the time of the near-extinction of bison of the American Bison whose number declined from about 600,000,000 at the end of the 18th century to 300 in 1900. In the paper I will try to tone the Indian traders’ transformation of the buffalo trail into a railway with the replacement of buffalo herds by cow droves as well as the popularity the song “Home on the Range” which in a way mythologized the domestic coexistence of people with the roaming buffalo. Drawing from Thoreau’s hypothesis that cows are buffalos within and capable of 122 kultura popularna 2017 Nr 4 (54)

reasserting their “native rights,” I will look at some examples of the return of the buffalo in the 20th and 21st centuries as, however simulated, attempts at a return to homes on the range, and at living on the frontier, even if the frontier has been relocated to the vicinity of the Fermilab bosons where a small buffalo herd is maintained. Keywords: frontier, American bison, salt licks, wildness, progress

The argument contends that Jhumpa Lahiri’s Jelena Šesnić fiction – in particular her two novels to date, “Uncanny The Namesake (2003) and The Lowlands (2013) – features a combination of the elements of homeli- Domesticity” ness and estrangement, domestic and foreign, ultimately, self and the other, that evokes the in Contemporary Freudian concept of the uncanny. Placing it in the context of the diasporic family dynamics, American Fiction: prevalent in Lahiri’s fiction, the uncanny effect may be seen to reside in the unspoken secrets The Case and repressed content passed on from the first of Jhumpa Lahiri to the second generation and disturbing the neat acquisition of the trappings of middle-class domesticity. Drawing on recent models of the “geopolitical novel” (Irr), the “new immigrant fiction” (Koshy) and the “South Asian diasporic novel” (Grewal), the reading engages with the irruption of the unhomely into the domestic space, sustained by immigrant families in the face of local and global disturbances. Keywords: Jhumpa Lahiri, immigration, immigrant fiction, domesticity, Americanization, minority

The paper examines and compares some of the Piotr Skurowski 1960s’ most representative expressions of social Betty Friedan, critique: Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, Jane Jacobs’s The Death and Life of Great American Jane Jacobs, Cities and Richard Sennett’s The Uses of Disorder, in an attempt to demonstrate how each of those Richard Sennett intellectuals, social critics and visionaries, in their own distinct way, called for a radical departure and the 1960s’ from the established notions of the social and spatial order amidst the growing public fears of Challenge insecurity stimulated by the rising crime rate, to the Suburban the spread of racism and xenophobia, and the continuing “white flight” to the suburbs. Era Mystique Keywords: suburbia, city, order, urban space, of Security and Order racism, anarchy a b s t r a c t s 123

The paper is an analysis of an intertextual rela- Marek Wilczyński tionship between “The Landscape Chamber”, The Rise a story by Sarah Orne Jewett of 1887, and Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” in terms of Gérard of the House Genette’s theory of the literary palimpsest. As it turns out, a number of details in Poe’s gothic of Usher: tale have their functional equivalents in Jewett’s realistic story even though the gothic underpin- The Landscape ning of the latter does not seem explicit. Poe’s ahistorical romantic apocalypse is translated Chamber by Sarah in “The Landscape Chamber” into a gendered Orne Jewett interpretation of New England’s post-Civil War history as a period of cultural crisis possibly to as a Textual be overcome by the succession of generations. Paradoxically, Jewett’s story demonstrates the Palimpsest continuity of the US literary tradition by a revi- sionist misprision of a “strong” writer’s exemplary hypotext. Keywords: Sarah Orne Jewett, tourism, travel, repetition, allegory W 2017 roku artykuły recenzowali prof. Rachel F. Brenner, Ph.D., University of Wisconsin-Madison prof. dr hab. Wojciech Józef Burszta, Uniwersytet SWPS prof. dr hab. Sławomir Buryła, Uniwersytet Warmińsko-Mazurski prof. William Decker, Ph.D., Oklahoma StateUniversity (USA) prof. Benjamin Dorfman, Ph.D., AalborgUniversity (Denmark) prof. Jody Myers, Ph.D., California State University Northridge prof. dr hab. Halina Parafianowicz, Uniwersytet w Białymstoku prof. Arthur F. Redding, Ph.D., York University (Toronto CA) prof. Christina Schoux Casey, Ph.D., AalborgUniversity (Denmark) prof. Na’ama Sheffi, Ph.D., Sapir College dr hab. Mariusz Czubaj, Uniwersytet SWPS dr hab. Dagmara Drewniak, prof. UAM, Uniwersytet im. Adama Mickiewicza dr hab. Dominika Ferens, prof. UWr, Uniwersytet Wrocławski dr hab. Mirosław Filiciak, Uniwersytet SWPS dr hab. Brygida Gasztold, prof. PK, Politechnika Koszalińska dr hab. Krzysztof Jaskułowski, Uniwersytet SWPS, wydział zamiejscowy we Wrocławiu dr hab. Edyta Lorek-Jezińska, prof. UMK, Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika dr hab. Ewa Łuczak, prof. UW, Uniwersytet Warszawski dr hab. Lena Magnone, Uniwersytet Warszawski dr hab. ShoshanaRonen, prof. UW, Uniwersytet Warszawski dr hab. Katarzyna Więckowska, Uniwersytet Mikołaja Kopernika dr Anita Basińska Uniwersytet SWPS, wydział zamiejscowy w Poznaniu dr Tomasz Bielak, Akademia Techniczno-Humanistyczna dr Radosław Bomba, Uniwersytet Marii Curie-Skłodowskiej dr Paweł Dobrosielski, Uniwersytet Warszawski, IKP dr Grzegorz Gawron, Uniwersytet Śląski dr Łucja Iwanczewska, Uniwersytet Jagieloński dr Karol Jachymek, Uniwersytet SWPS dr Agnieszka Jeran, UAM, Instytut Socjologii dr Marek Krajewski, Uniwersytet Adama Mickiewicza dr Ewa Macura, Uniwersytet Śląski dr Mikołaj Madurowicz, Uniwersytet Warszawski dr Dawid Maria Osiński, UniwersytetWarszawski dr Igor Piotrowski, Uniwersytet Warszawski, Instytut Kultury Polskiej dr Paulina Rojek-Adamek, Uniwersytet Pedagogiczny im. KEN dr Monika Rosińska, Uniwersytet SWPS, wydział zamiejscowy w Poznaniu dr Katarzyna Skórska, Uniwersytet Warszawski, Katedra Italianistyki Kultura Popularna nr 4/2017 (54), Homely Spaces / Przestrzenie domowości

ISSN 2391 6788

Kultura Popularna Redaktor naczelny: Wiesław Godzic Zastępca redaktora naczelnego: Mirosław Filiciak Sekretarz redakcji: Małgorzata Bulaszewska Redakcja: Małgorzata Kowalewska, Lidia Rudzińska-Sierakowska, Paweł Wieczorek Koncepcja, przygotowanie i redakcja numeru: Agnieszka Pantuchowicz

Opieka wydawnicza: Andrzej Łabędzki

Layout: Edgar Bąk | www.edgarbak.info Skład i łamanie: Marcin Hernas | www.tessera.org.pl, Grzegorz Laszczyk | www.grzegorzlaszczyk.pl

Redakcja: „Kultura Popularna” Instytut Kulturoznawstwa Uniwersytet SWPS ul. Chodakowska 19 / 31 03 – 815 Warszawa [email protected] http:// kulturapopularna‑online.pl

Wskazówki dla autorek i autorów są dostępne na stronie internetowej pisma. Redakcja zastrzega sobie prawo do wprowadzania zmian w nadesłanych tekstach.

Rada Naukowa: Barbara Czerniawska (Uniwersytet w Göteborgu), Andrzej Gwóźdź (Uniwersytet Śląski), Tomáš Kulka (Uniwersytet Karola), Wacław Osadnik (Uniwersytet Alberty), Andrzej Pitrus (Uniwersytet Jagielloński), Roch Sulima (przewodniczący, Uniwersytet SWPS)

Treść numeru jest dostępna na licencji Creative Commons. Uznanie autorstwa – Na tych samych warunkach 3.0 Polska. Pewne prawa zastrzeżone na rzecz autorek i autorów oraz Uniwersytetu SWPS. Treść licencji jest dostępna na stronie: http:// creativecommons.org / licenses / by‑sa / 3.0 / pl / legalcode. Wersja elektroniczna pisma jest wersją pierwotną.

Wydawca: Wydawnictwo Uniwersytetu SWPS ul. Chodakowska 19 / 31 03 815 Warszawa tel. (+48) 22 870 62 24 e‑mail: [email protected]

The thematic issueHomely Spaces has been generously sponsored by the USA Embassy in Warsaw.

Numer tematyczny Przestrzenie domowości uzyskał dofinansowanie Ambasady Stanów Zjednoczonych w Warszawie.