Ready-Made Stories: the Rhetorical Function of Myths and Lore Cycles As Agents of Social Commentary Tiffany Yecke Brooks

Florida State University Libraries Electronic Theses, Treatises and Dissertations The Graduate School 2007 Ready-Made Stories: The Rhetorical Function of Myths and Lore Cycles as Agents of Social Commentary Tiffany Yecke Brooks Follow this and additional works at the FSU Digital Library. For more information, please contact [email protected] THE FLORIDA STATE UNIVERSITY COLLEGE OF ARTS AND SCIENCES READY-MADE STORIES: THE RHETORICAL FUNCTION OF MYTHS AND LORE CYCLES AS AGENTS OF SOCIAL COMMENTARY By TIFFANY YECKE BROOKS A dissertation submitted to the Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Degree Awarded: Spring Semester, 2007 Copyright © 2007 Tiffany Yecke Brooks All Rights Reserved The members of the Committee approve the dissertation of Tiffany Yecke Brooks defended on March 19, 2007. ____________________________ W.T. Lhamon Professor Directing Dissertation ____________________________ Nicole Kelley Outside Committee Member ____________________________ John Fenstermaker Committee Member ____________________________ Nancy Warren Committee Member Approved: _______________________________ Nancy Warren, Director of Graduate Studies, Department of English The Office of Graduate Studies has verified and approved the above named committee members. ii This is for my wonderful husband Aaron, whose unwavering patience and support truly made this possible. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I am grateful to my parents for their constant encouragement and to all of the teachers and professors who have challenged and inspired me to think differently, write better, and work harder. You are all the giants who have supplied your shoulders and I cannot thank you enough. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Abstract…………………………………………………………………………. vi INTRODUCTION Thrice-told tales: The Re-emergence of Myths and Lore Cycles ……….. 1 PART ONE: THE GENESIS COMPLEX 1. “Eve” is not a palindrome: The Myth of the Fallen Woman in Charlotte Brontё’s Jane Eyre….. 12 2. “Sin and Death for the Young Ones”: Reconsidering the Myth of the American Eden in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!............................................................ 32 3. Capitalism’s Fortunate Son: The Trope of Cain and Abel in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden And Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman…………………………. 48 PART TWO: ADAPTATIONS AND NEGOTIATIONS 4. Cain, Caliban, and Crow: The Outcast Speaks..................................... 71 5. “You won’t recognize it/It’s a surprise hit”: Jack Sheppard’s Slips, Slides, and Sidesteps into and out of Popular Culture ......................................................... 96 CONCLUSION Dawkins, Duchamp, and the Persistence of Memories………………… 140 END NOTES…………… ................................................................................... 145 REFERENCES…………. ................................................................................... 155 BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH .............................................................................. 165 v ABSTRACT This study is a two-part examination into the various ways that English and American cultures reclaim particular stories or images for the sake of social, political, or economic commentary. I explore the manner in which maturing societies create transitional rhetorics by reforming earlier myths and how specific stories, images, or icons function as “carriers” of cultural themes, crucial values, memories, ideals, and anxieties. The first section, entitled “The Genesis Complex,” examines three specific myths from Genesis that modern authors purposefully refigured to shape issues in the current cultural context. I introduce each textual theme by examining its reception history and the manner in which interpretations have accumulated meaning from each myth. My primary discussions are Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre and the myth of the fallen woman; Willa Cather’s O Pioneers! and the myth of American Eden; and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman paired with the myth of Cain and Abel as economic competitors. The second section of Ready-Made Stories, entitled “Adaptations and Negotiations,” examines two lore cycles – that is, iconographic elements or gestures that emerge and re-emerge in certain contexts. The first is that of Cain, as we see bits of his character connected with medieval monsters and the eventual invention of Shakespeare’s monster-man Caliban, as well as Trans-Atlantic blackface performances in the nineteenth century. The second lore cycle we examine is that of Jack Sheppard as he progresses from a proletariat hero to a popular character of novel, stage, and modern music. Ready-Made Stories thus scrutinizes the specifics of cultural adaptation and textual evolution. These ready-made stories stand not as testaments to the archetypal memory of culture, but as reminders of the inherent contradiction and backwards glances of cultural production. In essence, we see both how and why very much of the old consciously and purposely sustains the new. vi INTRODUCTION Thrice-told tales: The Re-emergence of Myths and Lore Cycles “With both ready-made stories and his own inventions, the poet should lay out the general structure and only then develop the sequence of episodes.” –Aristotle, The Poetics Book XVII1 “Ready-made stories” – the tales and the images that appear throughout the cultural history of a people and are embedded on the collective consciousness – these are the stories that help to define, identify, unite, and perpetuate the culture that preserves and transmits them. Anthropologists and scholars of cultural studies have come to call these stories “organizing myths,” for they are archetypal images that found a common experience. Most discussions of myth are concerned with either how these organizing myths function as sign posts and boundary markers in the formation of a collective identity, or with how the myth originated: Freudian psychoanalysis, Jungian ideas of the collective unconscious or hero archetype, Campbellian religious drives, comparative linguistics, and so forth. While both of these aspects of myth in culture are essential to the field of myth theory, they do not focus this study. Rather, the goal here is to explore the conscious and purposeful application of myths outside of their original contexts as tellers deliberately assign them new meanings and, in some cases, as they evolve into completely new forms. This reforming of myths and mythic elements is a perennial act which has served to record the history of such archetypal images because their changing receptions reflect the cultural context of the people who composed them. As Pierre Bourdieu points out in Outline of a Theory of Practice, the mere exposure of artists to such culturally-embedded concepts necessarily directs subsequent cultural output. Inevitably, however, those concepts come to accumulate meaning from prior uses of them in culture and can either expand their original applications, narrow them, or change them completely. In Cultural Selection, Gary Taylor makes the argument that: All memory depends upon a system of representations; collective memory depends upon a system of representatives who, in our attempts to abolish the geographical and mental distance between the members of a social group, are entrusted with the reproduction and circulation of representations. Collective memory, then, the memory of culture, depends upon systems of representation and systems of representatives. But those systems are never stable. They change, too.2 1 The reception and incorporation of older stories and gestures is an intrinsic part of human progress – the basis for the proverbial shoulders of those giants on which all of us, especially the producers of cultural matter, stand. R.W.B. Lewis examines one particular facet of this phenomenon in The American Adam, which he describes in the following passage: Every culture seems, as it advances toward maturity, to produce its own determining debate over the ideas that preoccupy it: salvation, the order of nature, money, power, sex, the machine, and the like. The debate, indeed, may be said to be the culture at least on its loftiest levels; for a culture achieves identity not so much through the ascendancy of its peculiar and distinctive dialogue . Intellectual history, properly conducted, exposes not only the dominant ideas of a period, or of a nation, but more important, the dominant clashes over ideas . For what is articulated during the years of debate is a comprehensive view of life, in an ideal extension of its present possibilities. And while the vision may be formulated in the orderly language of rational thought, it also finds its form in a recurring pattern of images – ways of seeing and sensing experience – and in a certain habitual story, assumed a dramatic design for the representative life . The imagery and the story give direction and impetus to the intellectual debate itself; and they may sometimes be detected, hidden within the argument, charging the rational terms with unaccustomed energy. But the debate in turn can contribute to the shaping of the story and when the results of rational inquiry are transformed into conscious and coherent narrative by the best-attuned artists of the time, the culture has finally yielded up its own special and identifying “myth.”3 It is the cultural debate through images that this study seeks to explore: not what goes into the creation of these identifying or organizational myths, but what allows them to maintain their influence even if their relevance

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