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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
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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 is being challenged. The inclusion of myths in these later works is much more extensive than mere allusions to the story; rather, the story forms an essential element of the structure of the narrative or the characterization of the figures. What prompts cultural producers to turn almost inevitably to traditional, “ready-made” stories as a means of argumentation? How is the language of mythic stories used by later authors as a tool for social commentary? Further complicating the debate is the fact that sometimes, it is not even an entire story that is passed along, but simply a gesture; it is not a recognizable character that survives but rather, specific traits. When the terms of a myth are still under negotiation within a culture that is – consciously or unconsciously – perpetuating the elements separate from the whole, the term “myth” or “archetype” seems inadequate. Here, the cultural memory does not preserve the unit intact but rather, that later context selects a few threads that it revives in a new and contextually
2 unique manner. In Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop, W.T. Lhamon dubs these wayward elements “lore cycles” because they tend to survive and develop in the intangible ideas of a culture, and re-emerge newly-formed in radical, rebellious, and often revolutionary cultural productions. Taylor also recognizes the fact that human culture often seems to contain a number of non-sequiturs: “Every human culture, after all, is a dynamic nonlinear system – a collection of interrelated parts, never standing still, and never repeating itself exactly.”4 Philip Fisher approaches the issue in a similar manner in his discussion of the shift he has dubbed “from myths to rhetorics.” Here, he writes: Myth is a fixed, satisfying, and stable story used again and again to normalize our account of social life. By means of myth novelty is tamed by being seen as the repetition or, at most, the variation, of a known and valued pattern. Even where actual historical situations are found to fall short of myth or to lie in its aftermath, the myth tames the variety of historical experience, giving it familiarity while using it to reaffirm the culture’s long-standing interpretation of itself. Rhetoric, on the other hand, is a tactic within the open questions of culture. It reveals interests and exclusions. To look at rhetorics is to look at the action potential of language and images, not just their power or contrivance to move an audience but also the location of works, formulas, images, and ideological units of meaning within politics. Rhetoric is the place where language is engaged in cultural work, and such work can be done on, with, or in spite of one or another social group. Rhetorics are plural because they are part of what is uncertain or potential in culture. They are the servant of one or another politics of experience.5
Fisher’s distinctions are significant because of their acknowledgement of the place of pre- existing stories in the production of culture. The idea that myth functions as a kind of domestication of the foreign by translating it to more familiar form is evident in the examination of myths to follow. Where this study is inherently different, however, is in the treatment and classification of the myths in question. While Fisher’s mythic concerns are focused upon the function of myths as a belief system, I am interested in examining them at the point (or at least, a point) where they simultaneously break free from being part of such an ideology and re-enter the cultural dialogue as self-aware stories with a rhetorical purpose rather than representative modes of thinking. Each of the works to be discussed in this study seeks not merely to explain a new circumstance by connecting it with the past but rather, seeks to pass judgment upon specific
3 contemporary conditions by means of metaphor and/or analogy: for example, the eighteenth century American frontier is to the emigrating European what Eden was to Adam. Fisher’s theory of rhetorics is more pertinent to this study because of his interest in “the location of works, formulas, images, and ideological units of meaning within politics.” These elements form an independent lineage of cultural descendancy related to but necessarily distinct from conventional mythic transmission. Their persistence is not typically carried in the culturally dominant mores of art and literature of the politically powerful class that each successive cultural movement inherits. Rather, because they do not conform to the organizing myths of the hegemony, these traits tend to disseminate among the lower classes and reappear in later folk beliefs, superstitions, traditions, and entertainments. Like spin-off television programs that bring marginal characters to the forefront of their own series of misadventures, these lore cycles (and they are often cyclical in their re-emergence) are individual traits and gestures remembered and revived by a culture in new social, political, or historical contexts. This recollection is not primarily due to the potency of their original source – that is usually long since forgotten or rendered unrecognizable by the accumulating changes in meaning – but because of the impact and relevancy of each element’s independent presence in a cultural setting. The purpose of this study, therefore, is to examine succinctly the various ways that people evoke both myths and lore cycles for a specific rhetorical purpose within a specific cultural context. Three basic questions guide this discussion: First, what are the specific ways in which myths and lore cycles are invoked as social commentary? Secondly, how does the cultural context determine the shape that these stories and gestures assume? And finally, why are these the cultural products that portend, contribute to, or simply survive the seismic upheaval of political, economic, societal, and ideological shifts? The answers to the first two questions will emerge in the discussion of each individual text; the answer to the final question should become apparent after analyzing the study as a whole.
The Genesis Complex The first section of the study is entitled “The Genesis Complex,” and it is here that we will examine more closely the various ways in which ancient myths are evoked in modern literature for political, social, or economic purposes. Within the first four chapters of Genesis,
4 there are a number of stories that have formed the basis for several of the most persistent organizing myths in western culture, though each has enjoyed a very distinct reception history. There are three distinct trends that emerge with the reception of each story, however; and it is these patterns that we will explore for the sake of elucidating the general transference of myths in literature.
An ancient myth that has remain constant: Eve as the Fallen Woman Beginning with the figure of Eve, we will explore her representation and her story from the ancient world forward to modern texts, with specific focus on the women’s suffrage movement of the nineteenth century – perhaps the most significant challenge to the myth in its history. Eve’s character, however, undergoes very little change up to this period as she is presented and re-presented in various media throughout history. The masculine hegemony of western political and religious systems that often condoned misogynistic policies as orthodoxy turned to the story as a justification and means of maintaining the existing hierarchies of power. It is important to stress, of course, that such evocations are rarely the result of individual chauvinism but rather, evidence of the complex network of influences and cultural lenses of each commentator’s own context – Bordieu’s theory of habitùs at its most basic. One scholar describes the revealing nature of Eve’s historical reception thus: A close look at the way that verse has been commented on, elaborated and paraphrased in various authors down through the ages gives striking insight into the process of interpretation. Inasmuch as interpretation always involves setting a text into relation with the cultural background of the interpreter, such a close look also furnishes information on the cultural backgrounds of the Christian theologians who have done the interpreting.6
Significant a point as this is, however, our discussion seeks to elucidate the lifespan of the myth itself more so than the psychological agendas of the authors who evoked it. For our purposes here, it is the constancy of the myth that is so remarkable. The same arguments and terminology regarding the same issue are used for more than two thousand years, and it is precisely because the interpretation of the myth has changed so little despite its varying contexts that it is able to be countered as effectively as it is in Charlotte Brönte’s Jane Eyre, which stands as the central text of this first chapter. As some myths are reformed by later cultures for rhetorical purposes, there are others that remain virtually unchanged – a remarkable study in
5 longevity and testament to the pervasiveness of the myth and its significance in shaping Western cultural thought.
An ancient myth newly applied: American Eden Some myths make purposeful, self-aware changes in their application; such was the case with the development of the American literary tradition. From some of the earliest texts regarding the New World, there was a recognition of the proverbial clean slate offered up by the American continent that was naturally identified with the pre-Lapsarian Paradise of Judeo- Christian tradition. As each successive wave of writers and rhetoricians embraced the myth, they further shaped the idealized American identity into a cultural casting of Adam and his manifest destiny as steward of creation. Lewis notes that the acceptance of this trend was vast, situating it as one of the most influential modes of thinking in the nineteenth century: I am interested in the history of ideas and, especially, in the representative imagery and anecdote that crystallizes whole clusters of ideas; my interest is therefore limited to articulate thinkers and conscious artists. A century ago, the image contrived to embody the most fruitful contemporary ideas was that of the authentic American as a figure of heroic innocence and vast potentialities, poised at the start of a new history.7
Yet as the ancient myth reformed itself for a new context, it also began to shift within itself, changing not the original terms of its existence, but the newly-applied ones. While the concept of Eden remained fixed, writers began to question its relationship to America and Americans. Was it indeed an apt comparison? Was America an Eden that they had to seek in an outdoors communion with nature, or within one’s own soul? Was the American agrarian a blessed Adam committed to his stewardship, or a fallen Adam, living out his curse? And what of the American city that was replicating the same social ills of industrialized Europe? As Willa Cather brilliantly demonstrates in O Pioneers!, the evocation of this myth came to be in dialogue with itself in American culture. As cultural producers consciously applied the ancient myth to a new situation, it began a new cycle of change and adaptation so that the self- contained debate became part of the myth itself.
6 An ancient myth gradually reformed: Cain and Abel There are some myths that remain self-aware, but whose emphasis gradually shifts from one aspect of the story to another in certain societal contexts. All elements remain in place, but the meaning comes to take on a new or more specific significance. Such is the case with the story of Cain and Abel. Long recognized as a story of fraternal rivalry – in the literal sense as well as a symbolic one – the text is a testament to humanity’s acute awareness of the tensions present in both the physical and spiritual realms. One such tension that came to be of great importance in subsequent treatments of the story is that of economic demands. In social contexts where reciprocal fealty was marked by the offering of agricultural products or where religious tithing was demanded for the sake of the community’s spiritual life, the figure of Cain began to take on a new significance: that of the grudging giver. An understanding of such political situations is essential to the interpretation of the story’s presentation in cultural productions. As one critic observes: Ignorance of a work’s social milieu can lead us into two kinds of error: either we remain blind to the possibly oblique commentary the poem, play or novel is making on the contemporary world and concentrate entirely on its form, or we ignore form altogether and reading imaginative literature as if it were a transcript of actual social situations. We need to understand the economic, social and political developments to which a writer has responded and which he has helped to define before we can judge the degree to which he has exploited or distorted those developments for his own aesthetic or tendentious purposes.8
It is with this significance – that is, Cain and Abel as players in an economic commentary – that the story was addressed by two twentieth century American writers in their own statements on war and post-war American capitalism. John Steinbeck reforms the story of Cain and Abel in East of Eden as he considers the tension between fate and choice, undeserved love and misplaced devotion; meanwhile, in Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller questions the pursuits of the modern Cain who travels the world (or maybe just the city) seeking material gain rather than humble fulfillment. As these texts explore the myth of Cain and Abel, we will come to see how their interpretation of the myth as a whole is evidence of their own cultural values and anxieties over economic dictates within their society.
7 Negotiations and Adaptations The second part of the text seeks to explore an alternate facet to the reception of myths: that of lore cycles. These cycles are stories that take on new forms depending upon the cultural slot that they are filling; and yet it is erroneous to refer to them as “stories,” per se. They are not preserved tales whose narrative elements re-emerge in later stories; neither are they characters who form archetypal molds for subsequent figures. Rather, lore cycles are the continued development of certain traits, gestures, symbols, or images that are readily observable in cultural productions, but whose origins are much more obscure. The stories may be new or they may have much older roots, but the elements have shifted and taken on new guises so that they are no longer readily apparent as their original selves. Because they are occupying a previously unoccupied cultural space that is now demanding representation (what Taylor would term a “niche”), the reappearance of such cycles usually signals a shift in cultural ideas or portends a growing undercurrent of social change.
A lore cycle from an ancient source: Cain The varying figure of Cain is the first lore cycle we will examine. While most studies of this character have looked at it in its archetypal context as in my previous section, it also has a distinct life as a lore cycle – a feature that should help elucidate the difference between the two branches of myth. This chapter, “Cain, Caliban, and Crow: The Outcast Speaks,” examines how the story of Cain has held the interest of religious scholars and cultural producers for centuries and as a result, encountered change and re-figuration in different social contexts. Rabbinic traditions and many early Christian writers assigned Cain demonic sympathies, if not parentage. The ambiguity of the precise nature of his curse in biblical texts led to myriad independent traditions of various afflictions. By the early Middle Ages, Cain’s lore cycle had shifted and re-formed itself enough to establish his character in myriad different forms including any number of exotic, speechless monster-creatures (including fetishized dark-skinned foreigners) who resided both within and beyond the political boundaries of Europe. After discussing the evolution of Cain’s traits into various cycles, the study will focus upon Shakespeare’s treatment of many of these cultivated anxieties as they are present in The Tempest through the character Caliban, and what the treatment of this character reveals about the
8 social context in which he was first brought to stage. In the figure of Shakespeare’s island monster, we can clearly see a Cain figure who stands at a crucial junction – Caliban has effectively blended the various fragmented representations of Cain that have been developing, but also stands as the prism which once again scatters the elements of the character into myriad directions. One of the cycles that results, in part, as a shift from Caliban is the black-faced comedian of the 1830s and 1840s Atlantic stage. Like his literary ancestors, the Jim Crow character is a politically powerless entity under the command of a dominant presence. Nevertheless, he seizes control of the action through his manipulation of the language of the ruling authority. Lhamon discusses the Cain-Crow phenomenon in Raising Cain, but this study develops his theories by closely examining the character of Ginger Blue in T.D. Rice’s play The Virginia Mummy and how his personage exhibits the language-as-defiance pattern. Just as the doctor hopes to resuscitate the monster-mummy, so too is the figure of Caliban (and ultimately, Cain) resurrected as Ginger Blue-as-dummy-mummy controls the action on stage based upon his harnessing of speech and subversive language.
A lore cycle from a modern source: Jack Sheppard The figure of Jack Sheppard also illustrates the workings of a lore cycle. Literature immortalized his story from almost the moment of his real-life demise in 1724. That same year, Defoe published The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard; John Gay followed with his operatic version (though the characters’ names are admittedly changed) in The Beggar’s Opera in 1728 and Polly in 1729. Though the fascination with the figure of Jack never fully waned, William Harrison Ainsworth re-stoked it in 1839 with his melodramatic novel Jack Sheppard: A Romance. This text spawned dramatized spin-offs even before Ainsworth’s installments were complete. The second chapter in this section will revolve around the precursors and posterity of Jack Sheppard’s shifts, slides, and changes just outside of the hegemonic sensibilities of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The intense popularity of the character of Jack Sheppard, especially among the working class, helped to create a kind of cultural revolution in which the preferences of the proletariat functioned more as hegemonic forces than did the dictates of bourgeois society or the church. In this chapter, we will explore how Ainsworth, specifically, played upon common mythic images
9 of the past to tap into a kind of collective memory from which he could launch his character, fully-formed, into the current collective imagination. We will also examine the various ways in which the lore cycle shifted in the following years and found itself a part of everything from black-faced minstrel shows in 1850s America to socialist theatre in 1920s Germany and modern popular music. The various lore cycles of Jack Sheppard function as testimony to a variety of social changes ranging from the policies of the Corn Laws from 1815-1846, to issues of racial tension and worker empowerment, and in our own time as an early establishment in popular youth culture.
In the prologue to The Past is a Foreign Country, David Lowenthal explores the way that re-evocations of the past can affect their reception in the future, writing: Culture and circumstance shape their relative worth and specific form. But they all stem from qualities felt to inhere uniquely in the past as distinct from the present or the future: traits linked with antiquity, such as precedence, primordiality, and ancientness; the sense of continuity and accretion engendered by relic and memories and chronicles; and termination – the fact that the past is over and hence can be summarized and summed up as the present cannot.9
By evoking the past, whether through complete stories or individual elements, authors are inevitably tapping into a set of images and associations. Sometimes the re-presentation is intentional, reflecting a specific and deliberate choice on the part of the author to address an element of a common cultural history. Sometimes authors extend tradition, unaware of the lineage, but merely conscious of the impact that certain shapes, signs, and symbols can have. What unites these actions of cultural production is a recognition of the power of remembered and transmitted elements of a common past, a shared repertoire of images that persist not just because they meant something in their original context, but because of their innate irony. They are simultaneously malleable and constant, these myths and lore cycles, these ready-made stories – and this inherent tension is what keeps them at the forefront of the social, political, and cultural imagination.
10 PART ONE:
THE GENESIS COMPLEX
11 CHAPTER ONE “Eve” is Not a Palindrome: Reversing the Myth of the Fallen Woman in Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre
Then the Lord God said, "It is not good that the man should be alone; I will make him a helper as his partner."
. . . So the Lord God caused a deep sleep to fall upon the man, and he slept; then he took one of his ribs and closed up its place with flesh. And the rib that the Lord God had taken from the man he made into a woman and brought her to the man. Then the man said, "This at last is bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh; this one shall be called Woman, for out of Man this one was taken." Therefore a man leaves his father and his mother and clings to his wife, and they become one flesh. And the man and his wife were both naked, and were not ashamed.
Now the serpent was more crafty than any other wild animal that the Lord God had made. He said to the woman, "Did God say, ‘You shall not eat from any tree in the garden’?" The woman said to the serpent, "We may eat of the fruit of the trees in the garden; but God said, ‘You shall not eat of the fruit of the tree that is in the middle of the garden, nor shall you touch it, or you shall die.’ " But the serpent said to the woman, "You will not die; for God knows that when you eat of it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil."
So when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that it was a delight to the eyes, and that the tree was to be desired to make one wise, she took of its fruit and ate; and she also gave some to her husband, who was with her, and he ate. Then the eyes of both were opened, and they knew that they were naked . . .
[The Lord] said, "Who told you that you were naked? Have you eaten from the tree of which I commanded you not to eat?" The man said, "The woman whom you gave to be with me, she gave me fruit from the tree, and I ate." Then the Lord God said to the woman, "What is this that you have done?" The woman said, "The serpent tricked me, and I ate.”
. . . To the woman [God] said, "I will greatly increase your pangs in childbearing; in pain you shall bring forth children, yet your desire shall be for your husband, and he shall rule over you."
And to the man he said, "Because you have listened to the voice of your wife, and have eaten of the tree about which I commanded you, ‘You shall not eat of it,’ cursed is the ground because of you; in toil you shall eat of it all the days of your life; thorns and thistles it shall bring forth for you; and you shall eat the plants of the field. By the sweat of your face you shall eat bread until you return to the ground, for out of it you were taken; you are dust, and to dust you shall return."
The man named his wife Eve, because she was the mother of all living.
12 Genesis 2:18-3:201
Reception History of Eve A comprehensive examination of Eve’s historical reception is a logistical impossibility. From the earliest times in the Christian era, Eve has been singled out as an example of female treachery and a reason for feminine submission. Though there are a number of early female martyrs, and canonical evidence of women leaders in early churches, the explicit stance on female leadership by the composers of the Christian Bible is that it is unnatural and displeasing to God. The author of I Timothy, traditionally deemed as the apostle Paul, writes one of the most damning passages regarding a woman’s place in the church: “Let a women learn in silence with full submission. I permit no woman to teach or to have authority over a man; she is to keep silent. For Adam was formed first, then Eve; and Adam was not deceived, but the woman was deceived and became a transgressor.”2 This absolute stance was also the belief of many of the early church theologians. In the late second century, Tertullian wrote De Cultu Feminarum (On Female Fashion), a two-volume work that opens with a telling reminder to his female readership. He warns, “You are the devil’s gateway” and states that it was Eve’s transgression that introduced sin into the world and therefore, woman’s fault that Christ had to be crucified.3 Though Tertullian eventually founded a heterodox sect, his earlier writings remained hugely influential in developing later Christian philosophy and liturgical doctrines. In the late fourth century, Ambrose of Milan made clear his regard for woman’s place in the created order when he wrote: “The male endures your defects and your feminine levities . . . Adam was deceived by Eve, not Eve by Adam. It is right that he whom the woman enticed to do wrong should assume the office of guide, lest he fall once more because of feminine instability.”4 A generation later, Augustine of Hippo likewise took a condemnatory stance towards women in the model of Eve throughout his writings. As theologian Kim Power summarizes in her exhaustive study of Augustine’s views of women, “Eve then stands for the independent, decision-making, sexual woman, who threatens the submissive model of Mary, and reminds humankind that it is mortal.” She later adds, remarking upon Augustine’s strict views on male dominance in the household, that “The corollary of this was the control of female assertiveness through the discourse of Eve’s pride. Any woman who exercised authority, who asserted any claim to autonomy, was vulnerable to condemnation as proud, [and] therefore insubordinate.”5
13 Modern theological apologist Elaine Pagels writes in her study on early Christian gender relations, Adam, Eve, and the Serpent, that Augustine’s ultimate stance was understood by subsequent scholars to mean that: Being closely connected with bodily passion, woman, although created to be man’s helper, became his temptress and led him into disaster. The Genesis account describes the result: God himself reinforced the husband’s authority over his wife, placing divine sanction upon the social, legal, and economic machinery of male domination.6
In fact, many (if not most) of the early Christian theologians offer harsh condemnation of Eve while lessening their censure of Adam or even excusing him altogether as a misled or hen- pecked husband. As Jean Higgins writes in précis of the Church Fathers’ spiritual treatises, character studies, and scriptural commentaries: We have seen that Eve tempted, beguiled, lured, corrupted, persuaded, taught, counseled, suggested, urged, used wicked persuasion, led into wrongdoing, proved herself an enemy, used guile and cozening, tears and lamentations, to prevail upon Adam, had no rest until she got her husband banished and thus became “the first temptress.”7
Augustine was also instrumental in developing the doctrines of Original Sin (the belief that all humanity is innately depraved because of the sin of Adam and Eve) and predestination (the assertion that certain souls are preordained by God to be called away from the fallen state of man to a life of salvation through Christ). As these ideas became firmly entrenched in Christian theology, they added to the perceived significance of Eve’s act of disobedience. The first sin not only caused the man and woman to be banished from Eden but permanently and irrevocably removed all subsequent men and women from the presence of God. Though the son of Mary would eventually reverse this blanket condemnation and offer reconciliation between God and man, it was woman who necessitated Christ’s appearance because it was woman who brought damnation upon the human race.
The medieval mystery plays offer similarly-toned condemnations of Eve’s actions. In the York Fall of Man, Adam cries, “A! Eve, thou art to blame./To this enticed thou me;/Me shames with my lyghame,/ . . . This werke, Eve, hast thou wrought,/And made this bad bargaine.” He then blames Eve again in presence of God, who responds in kind: “Say, Eve, why hast thou garte thy mate/Ete fruit I bad[e] thee shuld hinge stille,/And comaunded non of it to take?”8
14 In the Harrowing of Hell scenes, Eve is also often reminded of her actions and her punishment, despite Christ’s liberating seizure of their souls. Her first line in the Wakefield play emphasizes her subordination as she appeals to, “Adam, my husband heynd.” Later, the author makes a pun upon Eve’s sin of biting the fruit, as she says to Jesus, “Lord, we were worthy more tormentys to tast.” 9 Even in her holy acquittal through Christ, Eve is mindful of her transgressions and their repercussions. In 1558, the Scottish Calvinist John Knox published a work entitled The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. Composed largely in reaction to Elizabeth’s coronation, the text is a harsh condemnation of all women who would seek social or political power or any individual authority. He summarizes God’s judgment of women thus: As God shuld say: forasmuich as thou hast abused they former condition, and because thy free will hath brought thy selfe and mankind into: the bondage of Satan, I therefore will bring the in bondage to man. For where before, thy obedience shuld haue bene voluntarie, noew it shall be by constraint and by necessitie: and that because thou hast deceiued thy man, thou shalt thefore be no longer maistresse ouer thine own appetites, over thine owne will nore desires. For in the there is nether reason nor discretion, whiche be able to moderate they affections, and therefore they shall, be subject to the desire of they man. He shall be Lord and gouernour, not onlie over they bodie, but euen ouer thy appetites and will. This sentence, I say, did God pronounce against Heua, and her daughters, as the rest of the Scriptures doth euidentlie witnesse. So that no woman can euer presume to reigne aboue man, but the same she must nedes do in despite, of God, and in contempt of his punishment and maledictjon.10
Knox also praised the stance of several of the early church fathers, including Chrysostom, Augustine, and Tertuillian, for whom he had special praise. He relies heavily upon Tertullian’s arguments in De Cultu Feminarum, reiterating: By these and many other graue sentences, and quicke interrogations, did this godlie writer labour to bring euerie woman in contemplation of her selfe, to the end that euerie one depelie weying, what sentence God had pronounced against the hole race and doughters of Heua, might not onely learne daily to humble and subiect them selues in the presence of God, but also that they shulde auoide and abhorre what soeuer thing might exalte them or puffe them vp in pride, or that might be occasion, that they shuld forget the curse and malediction of God. And what, I pray you, is more able to cause woman to forget her owne condition, then if she be lifted vp in authoritie aboue man? It is a thingverie difficile to a man, (be he neuer so constant) promoted to honors, not to be tickled some what with pride (for the winde of vaine glorie doth easelie carie vp the drie dust of the earth). But as for woman, it is no more possible, that she being set aloft in authoritie aboue man, shall resist the motions of pride, then it is able to the
15 weake reed, or to the turning wethercocke, not to bowe or turne at the vehemencie of the vnconstant wind. And therfore the same writer expreslie forbiddeth all woman to intremedle with the office of man.11
The rhetoric of Knox is extreme, but the ideas he recorded were not atypical. Regiment stands as an accurate, if concentrated, compendium on the prevailing attitudes towards Eve and all women as they were to be viewed in a God-fearing society and by the British churches. Free will was not a human right to be entrusted to women as the result would be inevitable failure and the further sin and degeneration of mankind.
A less severe but hardly less liberating interpretation of Eve’s character appears in what is arguably the most notable and influential literary manifestation of Eve’s plight during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries: Milton’s 1674 epic poem Paradise Lost. Here, the narrator describes the first woman as she confronts her temptation as “much deceav’d, much failing, hapless;”12 and though Adam discerns God’s commands more wisely, he willingly sins so as to enter into exile with his wife rather than to be separated from her. “She gave him of that fair enticing Fruit/With liberal hand: he scrupl’d not to eat/Against his better knowledge,no deceav’d/But fondly overcome with Femal charm.”13 The idea that Adam deliberately disobeyed God in order not to be separated from his help-mete was a common one in medieval theology, but as Higgins writes, “Milton is probably the best-known exponent of this view of the heroic Adam.”14 In this almost chivalric interpretation of the Biblical story, Adam chooses to leave Paradise in the first act of human leadership as he sacrifices his own proximity to God in order that he may remain with his disobedient wife.
It is in these ways that Eve was firmly ensconced in the pious English imagination but there have always been, of course, women who have sought to defy these societal and religious restrictions. The late Middle Ages was an especially prolific period, as a large number of female spiritualists such as Birgitta of Sweden, Julian of Norwich, and Catherine of Sienna came forward publicly with their insights, visions, and instruction. In 1405, Christine de Pizan, daughter of an Italian scholar and raised in the court of Charles V of France, wrote The Book of the City of Ladies, in which she presents an allegorical vision of heaven – a paradise constructed and inhabited solely by women. Translated to English in 1521, this work offers a fascinating
16 look at medieval feminist thought. As if in anticipation of objections to the challenges she poses to patriarchal theology, Pizan includes the following justification of women in her first chapter: And if anyone would say that man was banished because of lady Eve, I tell you that he gained more through Mary than he lost through Eve when humanity was conjoined to the Godhead, which would never have taken place if Eve’s misdeed had not occurred. Thus man and woman should be glad for this sin, through which such an honor came about.15
This passage, which clearly espouses the Aquinian notion of the felix culpa, or “happy fault” – the belief that the introduction of sin into the world was a fortunate occurrence because it allowed for man’s reconciliation with God – does so with explicit attention given to women’s role in the redemption. Though it was a common philosophy to venerate Mary as the antithesis of Eve, Pizan’s charge that “man and woman” alike should view Eve with thankfulness stands as an unusual assertion, though logical extension, of such a philosophy. When translations of Pizan’s work, as well as those of other female continental mystics reached England, their reception was mixed but their influence was notable, especially in major transit and commerce centers such as Lynn. Here, where the wool trade resulted in regular contact with continental ideas, movements, and texts, religious dissention and heterodox denominations began to develop. Around 1430, The Book of Margery Kempe was composed and recounted the mystic experiences of this middle-class housewife and mother of fourteen as she vocalized during mass and challenged the authority of a number of clergymen in the church at Lynn. As the aptly-named Lynn Stanley writes in her introduction to the work: Margery’s disengagement from conventional female roles and duties – and consequently her daring rejection of the values of her fellow townspersons – is a response to her growing commitment to her spiritual vocation. Her attempt to gain personal, financial, and spiritual autonomy is a tale of radical reversal . . . Margery does what few are able finally to do, and the fact that she does so as a woman enhances the force of her story – she breaks away.16
These vocal women of the middle ages were just part of a growing tradition of female dissenters whose voices would become increasingly louder in the following centuries. In 1589, a pamphlet entitled Her Protection for Women circulated throughout England and its title page attributed the work to “Jane Anger, Gentlewoman at London.” Certainly a pseudonym, Jane Anger took full advantage of her unknown identity to assert extreme views on the political, social, and religious treatment of her sex. “Fie on the faleshood of men,” she writes in her
17 introduction, “whose minds so oft a maddening, a whole tongues can not so soon be wagging, but the fall a tattling. Was there ever any so abused, so slandered, so railed upon, so wickedly handled undeservedly, as are we women.” As the text goes on, it reveals a classical education and training in rhetoric as Anger structures her arguments around mythology and philosophy. In one particular passage, where she turns to the biblical argument for women’s subjugation, she asserts: The creation of man and woman at the first, he being formed In principio of dross and filthy clay, did so remain until God saw that in him his workmanship was good, and therefore by the transformation of the dust which was loathsome unto flesh, it became purtified [sic]. Then lacking a help for him, GOD making woman of man’s flesh, that she might be purer then [sic] he, does evidently show, how far we women are more excellent then men . . . A woman was the first that believed, and a woman like wife the first that reverd of him.17
In 1617, two similar pamphlets appeared in London, both written in response to The Arraignment of Women, a condemnatory piece intended to satirize the character of the contemporary woman. Published in 1615 under the pseudonym “Thomas Tell-Troth,” it was actually the handiwork of Joseph Swetnam, an English fencing master, and used the traditional arguments from Genesis to assert the inferiority of the female gender. Employing such terms as “necessary evils” when describing women, The Arraignment of Women quickly gained popularity throughout Britain and the continent. The female response to this work was venomous. Rachel Speght’s pamphlet included the subtitle: “an Apologeticall Answere to that Irreligious and Illiterate pamphlet made by Io. Sw and by him Intitled, The Arrangement of Women.” In her work, Speght counters Swetnam’s arguments from Genesis by asserting that “we shall find the offence of Adam and Eve almost to parallel” and blames Adam for not asserting the authority he proudly claims over Eve’s actions. She further insists: For man was created of the dust of the earth, but woman was made of part of a man, after he was a living soule: yet was shee not produced from Adams foote, to be his too low inferiour; nor from his dead to be his superiour, but from his side, nreare his heart, to be his equall; that is where he is Lord, she may be Lady: and therefore saith God concerning man and woman jointly, Let them rule over the fish of the Sea, and over the foules of the Heaven, and over every beast that moveth upon the earth: By which words, he makes their authority equal, and all creatures to be in subjection unto them both.18
18 Esther Sowernam’s pamphlet took a similar stance against Swetnam’s writings, but in a more pugnacious manner, evident from her title: Ester hath hang’d Haman: Or An answer to a lewd Pamphlet entitled The Arraignment of Women. With the arraignment of lewd, idle, forward, and unconstant men, and Husbands. The first two chapters of her work are devoted entirely to refuting the as-goes-Eve-so-go-all-women argument. She insists that any corruption present in the female character is a direct result of her having been formed from the body of man. “Woman was made of a crooked rib, so she is crooked of conditions. Joseph Swetnam was made as from Adam of clay and dust, so he is of a durty [sic] and muddy disposition: The inferences are both alike in either . . . That which giveth quality to a thing, doth more abound in that quality.” She goes on to argue, “yet Adam was not so absolutely perfect, but that in the sight of God, he wanted a Helper” and adds that Eve was “assaulted with a Serpent of the masculine gender.”19
Social Setting of Brontё’s World In 1792, Mary Wollstonecraft published her now-famous feminist manifesto, A Vindication on the Rights of Women. In the second chapter, she lays forth the following statement against the contemporary argument for women’s necessary submission and relinquishing of free will: Probably the prevailing opinion, that woman was created for man, may have taken its rise from Moses's poetical story; yet, as very few it is presumed, who have bestowed any serious thought on the subject, ever supposed that Eve was, literally speaking, one of Adam's ribs, the deduction must be allowed to fall to the ground; or, only be so far admitted as it proves that man, from the remotest antiquity, found it convenient to exert his strength to subjugate his companion, and his invention to show that she ought to have her neck bent under the yoke; because she as well as the brute creation, was created to do his pleasure.20
The main source of Wollstonecraft’s frustration was discrepancy between the availability and quality of male versus female education in Britain at the time, and that such a distinction was forcing women into roles dictated by the blind adherence to tradition rather than reason. The text was widely received by the early proponents of women’s rights in the nineteenth century, but faced opposition in its own day. Wollstonecraft’s writings prompted a great deal of discussion, but it was not until almost forty years later that the first notable action in the British Women’s Suffrage movement took
19 place. A Brief Review of the Women’s Suffrage Movement Since Its Beginning in 1832, a booklet published in London in 1911, notes: “In 1832, Mary Smith of Stramore, Yorkshire, petitioned Parliament for a measure of Women’s Suffrage.” During that same year, the text points out, “the word ‘male’ introduced into the Reform Act (before ‘person’) restricted the Parliamentary franchise to men, and debarred women from its use.”21 The issue of gender, which had long been a topic of debate in some circles and a mere curiosity in most others, was beginning to rise in prominence, urgency, and recognition. As the Industrial Revolution continued to change the population patterns of Britain as more and more rural families moved from the country to urban manufacturing centers, so too did the demographic of the workplace begin to change. No longer were women contained within the domestic sphere. They were now beginning to turn to factory work, which drew them out of the traditional shelter of the home or away from the family fields. As the division of labor along gender lines began to blur, there rose a sense of indignity at the continued devaluation of a woman’s labor and soon, the demand of equal work for equal pay began to be heard among the working classes. The women’s rights movement was not especially organized at first. Unions were still a relatively new creation and the presence of women in such groups was especially novel. But the sheer number of women in the industrial workforce could not be ignored and the advocates for social justice knew that labor unions offered the power of numbers to the movement. By the late 1860s, Women’s Suffrage Societies existed in most of the United Kingdom’s largest cities and petition drives among various labor groups bolstered the numbers of suffrage supporters even more. It was the goal of these groups not only to establish voting rights and fairer employment conditions for women, but also to do away with the very cultural traditions that heretofore had justified such a segregation of rights along gender lines. The Reverend Charles Kingsley of London, author of the classic children’s novel The Water-Babies, published a treatise on the subject in 1869, entitled “Women and Politics.” In this article he insisted that it is necessary to shed the social restraints inflicted upon women in the name of Eve, as such repressions are man-made theological perversions of the message of the Bible. He writes: Truly ‘the whirligig of Time brings round its revenges.’ To this point the reason of civilised nations has come or at least is coming fast, after some fifteen hundred years of unreason, and of a literature of un-reason, which discoursed gravely and
20 learnedly of nuns and witches, hysteria and madness, persecution and torture, and, like a madman in his dreams, built up by irrefragable logic a whole inverted pyramid of seeming truth upon a single false presmiss. To this it has come, after long centuries in which woman was regarded by celibate theologians as the ‘noxious animal,’ the temptress, the source of earthly misery, which derived – at least in one case – from ‘femina’ from ‘fe’ faith, and ‘minus’ less, because women had less faith than men; which represented them as of more violent and unbridled animal passions; which explained learnedly why they were more tempted than men to heresy and witchcraft, and more subject (those especially who had beautiful hair) to the attacks of demons; and, in a word, regarded them as a necessary evil, to be tolerated, despised, repressed, and if possible shut up in nunneries.22
Rev. Kingsley succinctly (though not undramatically) summarized the reigning argument for female submission in political, social, and religious circles. The sentiment of “Look to Eve!” was the fundamental tool in refuting any public assertions of leadership, authority, or judgment that stemmed from women and it was this rhetorical structure against which the suffragists had to contend. It was also in this political context – situated between Mary Wollstonecraft and the rise of the suffragists – that Charlotte Brontё composed her proto-feminist novel Jane Eyre in 1847.
The Novel The hegemonic portrayal of Eve throughout the Victorian era was the traditional image of her as a deceiver whose very nature betrayed her into making a poor choice that would seal the destiny of all women as subservient, dependent, and not to be trusted with their own lives. As one scholar notes, for centuries the figure of Eve functioned in English society “symbolizing the disastrous consequences of female weakness and justifying women’s inferiority and subordination”23 – a notion that was necessarily coming into question with the assumption of the throne by a female heir in 1837. Though Victoria was not a supporter of the women’s rights movements, her mere figure and presence in British government offered enough of a challenge to the traditional order to inspire many to act. Charlotte Brontë also was hardly an outspoken feminist, but a reading of her work within its social context reveals a quiet yet forceful expression of religious and political arguments for the moral authority of women. She puts the Eve trope to work in Jane Eyre, first by seeking to argue against the belief of predestination advocated so strongly by the nineteenth-century Anglican church. She deliberately approaches the trope from the angle of humanity’s own role
21 in individual salvation; specifically, she explores how the will of woman can save rather than condemn her. This situates Brontë’s work within one of the great religious and philosophical debates of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries – free will versus predestination – and subsequently leads to her ultimate purpose for the use of the myth: a reversal of the traditional presentation of Eve. Her goal is to posit the assertion that women are not necessarily the fallen daughters of a fallen mother, and if left to their own judgment, can make sound moral decisions even when the men around them cannot. Such an idea was revolutionary but not unheard of in early Victorian England. In 1840, a radical reform paper that eventually reached a subscription of almost 400,000 began circulating. It was called The New Moral Jerusalem and its Socialist founder, Robert Owen, was a firm believer in dispelling the idea of the “Fallen Daughters of Eve” by granting women the right to choose freely for their own lives. Only in this way, he felt, could a moral order be re-established in the world.24 Brontë was certainly not an active socialist, but the cultural context in which Jane Eyre was composed had definitely been primed for such a reading of the Eden myth. The mindset Brontë was seeking to change was two-fold: that predestination trumps free will, and that predestination is the fate of a fallen world thanks to one woman’s irresponsible choice. It is necessary to begin first with the Calvinist idea of humanity’s inherent fallibility, as evidenced by the conduct of Adam and Eve in the garden. Religious historian Gregory I. Molvias writes of the theological debate regarding the exact nature of free will that erupted in the eighteenth century and carried on through the nineteenth. He notes: the language of natural rights was largely dominated by the idea of free will, and the typical assertion when speaking of natural rights was that God created man with reason and free will. But what was meant by ‘free will’? It was meant that man had been created free to act according to his will, or that man’s will was free in the sense that its resolutions were not determined by God or any cause extraneous to the agent of “self.”25
This belief was by no means universal and was, in fact, considered sinfully humanistic in some Anglican circles. Growing up as the child of a clergyman, Brontё was certainly aware of this ideological conflict and prominently features in Jane Eyre two devout Calvinists who seem to hold this view: Brocklehurst and St. John Rivers. These two men both offer Jane a “choice,” but present the matter in such a way that her only option is obedience. Brocklehurst has already determined that Jane shall attend Lowood and subjects her to a series of questions merely to
22 ascertain whether her character and theology are in agreement with his own grim and fatalistic ones. He inquires: “Do you know where the wicked go after death?” “They go to hell,” was my ready and orthodox answer. “And what is hell? Can you tell me that?” “A pit full of fire.” “And should you like to fall into that pit, and to be burning there forever?” I deliberated a moment; my answer, when it did come, was objectionable: “I must keep in good health, and not die.” “How can you keep in good health? Children younger than you die daily. I buried a little child five years old on a day or two since, – a good little child, whose soul is now in heaven. It is to be feared the same could not be said of you, were you to be called hence.”26
Even Jane’s honest response to her Biblical reading choices is deemed unacceptable, as Brocklehurst tells her that her lack of interest in the Psalms, “‘proves you have a wicked heart; and you must pray to God to change it: to give you a new and clean one: to take away your heart of stone and give you a heart of flesh.’”27 Jane’s free will is clearly discounted and disallowed by Brocklehurst’s perverted interpretation of religion. Like the literal advocates of predestination, Brocklehurst believes that there is only one path towards salvation and Jane’s reckless behavior clearly demonstrates that she has not been called to it. A similar rejection of free will is evidenced in the character of St. John. To him, belief in the right to choose one’s own path is the lowest form of a subservient existence; submission to a predetermined destiny is the only true freedom. He remarks on the change in his mental anguish following his acceptance of the fate laid out for him: “‘From that moment my state of mind changed; the fetters dissolved and dropped from every faculty, leaving nothing of bondage but its galling soreness.’” When he preaches, Jane notes that “[t]hroughout there was a strange bitterness; and absences of consolatory gentleness: stern allusions to Calvinistic doctrines – election, predestination, reprobation – were frequent; and each reference to these points sounded like a sentence pronounced for doom.” St. John believes staunchly in the predestination not only of his own soul’s path, but also that of others’, such as when he asks Jane to accompany him to India as his wife: “And what does your heart say?” demanded St. John. “My heart is mute, – my heart is mute,” I answered, struck and thrilled. “Then I must speak for it,” continued the deep, relentless voice . . .
23 But I was not apostle,– I could not behold the herald,– I could not receive his call… He continued: – “God and nature intended you for a missionary’s wife . . . You were formed for labor, not for love. A missionary’s wife you must – shall be. You shall be mine: I claim you.”28
The notion of a free will is reprehensible and utterly unacceptable to St. John. He rejects even Jane’s assertion that, “I am ready to go to India if I may go free.”29 It is not a choice he has set before her; it is an artificial destiny he has created and now insists that she accept in order to maintain a place in his life. These scenes contrast greatly with the moments of genuine choice when Jane asserts her own free will to act. One of the most notable features of her character is her independence and assertive control of her own life, despite the more passive beliefs of those around her. As one scholar notes, “Jane Eyre appears to be a bildungsroman . . . Jane Eyre can be regarded as a self- made woman who shapes her destiny through individual industry, a rise that is set against the backdrop of genteel families whose fortunes are in decline.”30 Her first major choice comes when the kind Mr. Lloyd asks if she would like to go and live with other relations and further, if she would like to attend school. Though she answers negatively to the first inquiry in fear that she would be forced upon poor, unkind peasants, she answers in the affirmative to the second question, which serves as the impetus for her departure from Gateshead. In this scene, Brontë subtly employs Biblical language to evoke images of Eden. When a sympathetic apothecary asks the cause of Jane’s illness: “She had a fall,” said Bessie, again putting in her word. “Fall! Why that is like a baby again! Can’t she manage to walk at her age? She must be eight or nine years old.” “I was knocked down,” was the blunt explanation jerked out of me by another pang of mortified pride: “but that did not make me ill.”
Here, the “fall” is clearly not the source of Jane’s affliction and indeed, the blame is not hers. Rather, she was a passive agent unfairly accused of a crime she did not commit. Though passionate and unrestrained, Jane is not an inherently bad child and when presented with the opportunity to make a choice, she opts for the course that “implied a long journey, an entire separation from Gateshead, and entrance into a new life.” Unlike the traditional Eve, Jane’s choice results in a voluntary and welcome escape, not banishment, which is made possible by a “fall” that was not her fault.31
24 As an adult, Jane is obviously aware of her autonomy to choose, as she asserts quite forcefully when Rochester tries to detain her from leaving for Ireland before she is made aware of his love for her. She insists: “‘I am a free human being with an independent will; which I now exert to leave you.’” The symbolic significance of her forceful statement is emphasized by the setting of the scene: a garden tableau imbued with Edenic imagery. Immediately after Jane’s pronouncement that “alas! never had I loved him so well” she describes her walk in Rochester’s orchard of which “[n]o nook in the grounds [was] more sheltered and more Eden-like; it was full of trees, it bloomed with flowers.” Shortly after, when Rochester introduces the idea of marriage, the two are seated beneath a chestnut tree in that same orchard, clearly a link to the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil. There, Jane’s soon-to-be-fiancé remarks, “‘I sometimes have a queer feeling with regard to you – especially when you are near me, as now; it is as if I had a string somewhere under my left ribs, tightly and inextricably knotted to a similar string situated in the corresponding quarter of your little frame.’” An obvious reference to the creation of Eve from Adam’s rib from Genesis 2:21, the allusions continue as Rochester later remarks how one of his first impressions of Jane was that her smile seemed to say: “‘I have a rosy sky, and a green flowery Eden in my brain.’”32 As Jane asks questions about Rochester’s past he cries, “‘for God’s sake, don’t desire a useless burden! Don’t long for poison – don’t turn a down right Eve on my hands!” and indeed, Jane asserts her free will in a manner opposite of Eve – rather than partake of that alluring thing which she knows to be wrong, she fights the temptation and rejects the sin by fleeing the estate and the presence of Rochester. Jane denies her desires as she instead asserts her moral determination against Rochester’s pleas: “It would be wicked not to love me.” “It would be to obey you.” “ . . . Then you condemn me to live wretched, and to die accursed?” His voice rose. “I advise you to live sinless, and I wish you to die tranquil.” “Then you snatch love and innocence from me? You fling me back on lust for a passion – a vice for an occupation?” “Mr. Rochester, I no more assign this fate to you than I grasp at it myself. We were born to strive and endure – you as well as I: do so.”33
Here, Brontë is flinging the Eden trope back on those who believe its message is one of unavoidable sin spearheaded by the easily-corruptible woman. Jane is not cast out of the garden;
25 rather, she imposes on herself a voluntary exile that strips her bare of all physical and emotional comforts for the singular purpose of shunning evil. The irony of this act, however, is that Jane- as-Eve is not leaving paradise behind but rather, is leaving the already fallen world for an eventual re-admittance into a true paradise. The name of Rochester’s estate, Thornfield, seems to be a reference to Adam’s curse, which states: “Cursed is the ground because of you; through painful toil you will eat of it all the days of your life. It will produce thorns and thistles for you and you will eat the plants of the field.”34 The decayed state of the mansion, which Jane’s naivety does not permit her to see, further emphasizes this point. “You cannot discern that the gilding is slime and the silk draperies cobwebs,” Rochester tells her. “That the marble is sordid slate, and the polished woods mere refused chips and scaly bark. Now here (he pointed to the leafy enclosure we had entered) all is real, sweet, and pure.” And like Adam, Rochester too is eventually driven out of his home; Rochester, however, has not been forced into a troubled, mortal world but rather, is granted respite from it. When Jane is finally reunited with her lover, he is residing at “[t]he manor house of Ferndean,” a name that features a lush, living plant of a garden rather than a sharp and choking one of a wild field. The myth of the fallen woman has, in fact, been reversed. Here with Rochester in their rustic, pastoral estate, Jane confides to her reader: “No woman was ever nearer to her mate than I am: ever more absolutely bone of his bone, and flesh of his flesh,”35 clearly echoing Adam’s contented sigh: “This at last is bone of my bones/and flesh of my flesh;/ this one shall be called Woman.”36 Even the ending of the novel exhibits the contrast between the fallen world Jane has left behind and the pure one that she has finally reached. The novel ultimately closes on St. John’s words, and his impending death.37 Jane and Rochester, however, live happily on. This is the final reminder to the reader of what has just happened – the curse of man’s mortality has been reversed for Jane. Unlike Adam and Eve, who are denied eternal life as a result of Eve’s sin,38 Jane and Rochester are still living at the end of the novel because of Jane’s choices and only St. John with his looming mortality is living in the shadow of fallen man’s curse. The trope of Eden has been reversed and Jane has exonerated women by proving that the story of Eve is not the same for every woman. Some of her sex, if left to their own devices, can actually choose not only wisely but better than the men around them. Through her crafting of language and image, Brontë is arguing that women must be allowed free will rather than being subjected to the destinies laid out for them by a patriarchal order who misinterpret a patriarchal God.
26 Victorian scholar Micæl M. Clarke argues that “by incorporating elements of allegory and the Bible, Bronte deploys elements of the Judeo-Christian religious tradition, such as its thorough and perceptive analysis of moral judgment and freedom of will and its inclusion of the supernatural as an active form in human life.” This assertion certainly seems true by the manner in which she presents the trope of Eden and the ramifications – good or bad – of a choice freely made. Problematic, however, is Clarke’s following statement: “Brontë adhered to the Anglicanism that her father, Patrick, preached in St. Michael’s Church, next door to their home in Haworth, but her work demonstrates considerable ambivalence regarding Christianity’s cultural legacy in reference to women.”39 Clearly, this is the exact opposite of what Brontё has done – she has not embraced the concept of predestination as the only true way to conduct one’s life, submitting fully to the dictates of supernatural guidance; and certainly, she is not ambivalent towards traditional female roles as assigned by Western Christianity. It is true that Jane is serving the needs of her husband at the end of the novel, but this is an act willingly performed, not dutifully demanded. By presenting the story of Eve backwards – that is, Jane in a fallen world and making a series of choices that eventually lead her into, rather than out, of a life in paradise, Brontë is seeking to dispel the traditional myth of Eve and prove that women are responsible agents of free will. The desire to punish all women for Eve’s actions has robbed the world of centuries of female contributions. What Brontё proposes is that there is nothing to fear when Eve speaks her mind for she has shown herself to be in possession of discernment and wisdom as well as devotion and loyalty. As Jane reminds Rochester, “‘We stood at God’s feet, equal – as we are!’”40
The motif of Jane-as-Eve is bolstered, too, by the presence of a Bertha as a Lilith figure. Originally a malevolent night-spirit in Ancient Near Eastern mythology, the character of Lilith has a rich textual tradition in Jewish writing. She was greatly developed by medieval writers into the first wife of Adam who flew out of Paradise after refusing to submit to her husband, and came to be regarded as a demon who preyed upon male babies and innocent solitary sleepers. The traditions and legends of Lilith as a night-devil in female form are evidenced in a number of early sources, including The Alphabet of ben Sira, a Jewish text dating between the eighth and eleventh centuries C.E., and the Zohar, a twelfth-century C.E. Jewish mystical work purporting
27 to date from the Roman persecution, and which greatly influenced the Kabbalah in the fifteenth century. The Christian interest in the story seems to have developed much later – perhaps after the seventeenth century, when Johannes Buxtorf, a German Rabbi and Hebraic scholar compiled the Lexicon Chaldaicum, Talmudicum, et Rabbinicum that was posthumously published by his son. This voluminous work, which chronicled the important writings of Jewish history, incorporated the Jewish traditions regarding the figure of Lilith, and helped to gain her notoriety in the Christian European imagination – an interest that flourished in Britain during the nineteenth century when she was featured in a number of Pre-Raphaelite paintings and even found a prominent place in mythopoeic literature, such as Scottish writer George MacDonald’s wildly popular 1895 novel which bore her name. The rise of scholarly interest in folktales and traditional stories – a movement influenced perhaps mostly notably by the Grimm Brothers’ publication of Kinder- und Hausmarchen (Children’s and Household Tales) in 1812 (with subsequent volumes following in later years) – was certainly on the rise in the first part of the nineteenth century. As academic curiosity in vernacular legends grew, so too did the influence such stories had on cultural output. “It has been suggested on several occasions,” Howard Schwartz writes in Lilith’s Cave: Jewish Tales of the Supernatural, “that the Golem-cycle of legends may have inspired Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein . . . since all indications are that the stories in Suppurim are based on authentic folk sources, there is every reason to assume that an oral version of this tale . . . was current at the time Mary Shelley wrote her famous novel – and probably a century or two before then.”41 The developing interest in these folk-legends, and especially the intrigue surrounding the enigmatic figure of Lilith, was sure to have been of interest to Brontё, who has long been noted for the use of folklore in her writing. Jane herself is enchanted by the “old fairytales and older ballads”42 told by her nursemaid at Gateshead and recalls them often as an adult. When she first encounters Rochester, she says she “remembered certain of Bessie’s tales wherein figured a North-of-England spirit, called a ‘Gytrash.’”43 Jane admits fear of “imps”44 and also seems to have had an other-worldly aura about her, as Rochester often repeatedly refers to Jane as a “spirit” or “sprite,”45 “changeling,”46 “fairy” or by a traditional fairy’s name,47 “elf” or “elfish,”48 and even “a fairy, and come from Elf-land.”49 Jane, in turn, jests back at Rochester with further folklore evocations, pronouncing,
28 “You talk of my being a fairy; but I am sure, you are more like a brownie.”50 Brontë even allows her narrator to allude to eastern mythology, when she refers to Blanche as a “Peri”51 a fairy- figure of Persian legends. It is not unreasonable, therefore, to suggest that Brontë could have had another folk-tradition in mind when she wrote the figure of Rochester’s violent, hidden first wife. The physical resemblance between the two characters is notable: Lilith is traditionally depicted as a dark-featured, likely because of her association with the night; Bertha is of mixed African and European ancestry and her physical description is a reflection of the dominant Anglo attitudes towards racial physiognomy and miscegenation – she is dark-complected and bears striking features. It is undeniable, however, that the behavior of the two women is certainly parallel. Like Lilith, Bertha’s violent exploits always occur during the night: her efforts to burn Rochester in his bed, her attack upon Mason, and her romp among Jane’s wedding trousseau. Preceding Jane’s most personal encounter with Bertha, she has the second visitation of the dream in which she must struggle to protect an infant. In this second version of the dream, however, she is not able to protect her charge and just as the dream ends, “the child rolled from my knee.” What has caused Jane to awake is the presence of Bertha Mason in her chambers – the malevolent night-demon has come to threaten the new wife and her children. This visit has been foreshadowed, however. As Jane suffers her unjust punishment as a child in the Red Room of Gateshead, she has a vision from what she imagines is a supernatural creature: Shaking my hair from my eyes, I lifted my head tried to look boldly round the dark room: at this moment a light gleamed on the wall. Was it, I asked myself, a ray from the moon penetrating some aperture in the blind? No, moonlight was still, and this stirred; while I gazed, it glided up to the ceiling and quivered over my head . . . prepared as my mind was for horror, shaken as my nerves were my agitation, I thought the swift-darting beam was a herald of some coming vision from another world. My heart beat thick, my head grew hot; a sound filled my ears, which I deemed the rushing of wings: something seemed near me; I was oppressed, suffocated: endurance broke down – I uttered a wild, involuntary cry.52
As the authors of the quintessential work on feminist literary criticism, Madwoman in the Attic (named, of course, in honor of Bertha Mason), note: “that Charlotte Bronte quite consciously intended the incident in the red-room to serve as a paradigm for the larger plot of her novel is clear not only from its position in the narrative but also from Jane’s own recollection of the experience at crucial moments throughout the book.”53 Just as the Lilith of Jewish legends preyed upon the souls of children and the sexual vulnerabilities of solitary adults by flying into
29 their rooms and suffocating them in their sleep, so too is Jane pursued by a demonic figure, whether it be physically (as she later perceives with Bertha) or just within her own mind. The “rushing wings” and suffocation that Jane senses prefigure not only her later experience with her own Lilith figure, but also add to the overall horror of Lilith’s place in the cultural imagination the West. Lilith’s wings and her shape-shifting ability have long caused her to be associated with another frightening personage of legend. Throughout Jewish folklore she is depicted as a night-predator who often drinks the blood of her victims, a quality also granted to her in MacDonald’s text. Howard Schwartz, echoing numerous anthropologists and literary historians, makes note of several traditional Lilith stories throughout Europe and the Middle East that correspond so closely with later blood-sucking figures that, “it can be speculated that the Lilith legend may have given birth to the vampire myth.”54 It comes as no surprise, then, that Jane compares her unwelcome midnight visitor to “the foul German spectre – the Vampyre” and Bertha ascribes to this appellation by biting her brother in her attack upon him at Thornfield. Addressing the assembled group of Rochester, Jane, and the doctor, Mason announces, “‘She sucked the blood: she said she’d drain my heart.’”55
This first wife of Rochester is also foil to Jane on both a literal level as well as a symbolic one: Bertha-as-Lilith serves to illustrate the dangers of unwise and uncontrolled behavior. Jane struggles continually throughout the novel to rein in her temper and check her impulsive nature, an effort which ultimately wins her the moral vindication she has sought. Through these women, the reader is reminded that with power comes responsibility. Eve has been absolved, but she must maintain the vigilance over her conduct and her life that centuries of patriarchal order have insisted she is incapable of doing. As one scholar notes, “Eve and Lilith form a continuum . . . There is little doubt that the obsession with Lilith, from earliest antiquity to the twentieth century, is a projection of human fears and desires. She is as much a state of mind as she is a demon.”56
Conclusion The myth of the fallen woman is one of the most influential organizing myths in western history, and the world over. As the women’s suffrage movement sought to vocalize its beliefs, it logically turned to what it viewed as the root of the problem – the traditional portrayal of the
30 archetypal woman. In order to reverse the centuries of arguments, customs, laws, and beliefs that had accumulated around this myth, it would be necessary not only to attack it for its flaws but to prove its error by demonstrating a better reading of the story. It is this alternative that Jane Eyre offers through the subtle crafting of the plot and details, and the not-so-subtle crafting of the language and characters. Jane’s vindication from Brocklehurst’s public pillory of her character is set right by Miss Temple; Brocklehurst’s arrogant hypocrisy is contrasted by the true Christian humility of Helen Burns; Jane’s own moral conviction and self-denial in the face of temptation are what set her apart from Rochester; her resistance to manipulation and coercion separate her from St. John. Throughout the novel it is women who demonstrate wisdom, temperance, and moral rectitude and women whose choices and actions are clearly those in the right. The daughters of Eve have demonstrated that the true curse of woman is the unfair judgment of their own intellect, abilities, and character. The one exception, of course, is Bertha but it is she who stands as the exception that proves the rule. Bertha is a woman who must be restrained because she is unwilling and unable to function in normal human society; Jane is a woman who must be granted personal freedom because she is more capable of moral judgment than are the men around her. Bertha, like Lilith, must live outside society because of her untempered passion and rage. Jane, however, is calculated and acts with wisdom as she reverses the myth of the fallen woman. Lilith never eats from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil but Eve does. Bertha belongs to a world apart from the domesticated English ideal and Jane employs the inherent knowledge of Eve to invert the myth of the fallen woman and exonerate her gender from the restraints of its societal sentence.
31 CHAPTER TWO “Sin and Death for the Young Ones”: Reconsidering the Myth of the American Eden in Willa Cather’s O Pioneers!
And the Lord God planted a garden in Eden, in the east; and there he put the man whom he had formed. Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. A river flows out of Eden to water the garden, and from there it divides and becomes four branches. The name of the first is Pishon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Havilah, where there is gold; and the gold of that land is good; bdellium and onyx stone are there. The name of the second river is Gihon; it is the one that flows around the whole land of Cush. The name of the third river is Tigris, which flows east of Assyria. And the fourth river is the Euphrates. The Lord God took the man and put him in the garden of Eden to till it and keep it.
And the Lord God commanded the man, "You may freely eat of every tree of the garden; but of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil you shall not eat, for in the day that you eat of it you shall die."
. . . Then the Lord God said, "See, the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil; and now, he might reach out his hand and take also from the tree of life, and eat, and live forever"— therefore the Lord God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from which he was taken. He drove out the man; and at the east of the garden of Eden he placed the cherubim, and a sword flaming and turning to guard the way to the tree of life.
Genesis 2:8-17, 3:22-24
Reception History of the American Eden That American literature has often rallied around the theme of the land as a second Eden is hardly a new contention; in fact, it’s hardly a contention at all, but rather, a simple statement of readily observable fact. Environmental law professor Eric T. Freyfogle makes the point that the traditional America-as-Eden portrayals took one of two paths: America was either a virgin paradise with “lush, fertile land, wonderfully designed and so abundant in its yield” or America was “the wilderness where Adam and Eve were banished when they misbehaved. This wilderness had much potential to it, but the colonists needed to transform it with their labors, taming and controlling it, before the land would be habitable.”1 As another scholar has pointed out, from “the fallen wisdom of Adam’s disillusionment [that] inspired the deeper ironies of Melville and Hawthorne” to “the primitive America of Adamic innocence [that] inspired the optimistic realism of Emerson and Whitman” to “the modern literature of
32 industrialism and internationalism, exemplified by Faulkner and Hemingway, [there] has developed this ironic wisdom of the fallen Adam.”2 Because the trope of the American Eden is so firmly a part of the organizing myth of the country, it is almost impossible to say anything new about the subject. Even more difficult, perhaps, is an original examination of how the concept developed and manifested itself in various literary and philosophical movements. It is this very conundrum, however, that will prove the assertion to follow: that an ancient myth, newly applied to a specific context and readily accepted in its new circumstances, can reach a point of saturation so that it actually begins to carry on a dialogue or debate with its own metaphors and terms of expression.
The Potential From the earliest accounts of the New World, it was supposed to be a place of wonder that would serve as a pristine, primitive sanctuary from Europe’s increasingly industrial development and oppressive political structure. And of course, it was viewed as an untapped quarry of resources, all waiting to be discovered, uncovered, and shipped back to Europe for the betterment of mankind’s existence. Even the appellation of “New World” reflects the novelty and freshness with which this previously unknown continent was regarded. In 1689, English philosopher John Locke published his Two Treatises of Government, which would prove to have incredible ramifications on British colonial history. Long before these works inspired the American revolutionaries, however, they also made significant contributions to the American mythology. Many of Locke’s observations about the colonial continent are tied to Genesis imagery. In his second treatise, Locke writes about the missing simplicity of contemporary British property rights, praising the minimalism that new life in the colonies provided: “For supposing a Man, or Family, in the state they were at first, peopling of the World by the Children of Adam, or Noah; let him plant in some in-land, vacant places of America.” As his discussion continues, he makes the assertion, “Thus in the beginning all the World was America.”3 The new continent was unquestionably held up as a paragon of natural virtue and unspoiled opportunity in Locke’s model for effective governmental rule; and this image of the new paradise would only grow as the settlement and discovery increased on its shores.
33 Nearly a century later, another work was published that echoed many of the same ideals. In 1782, Letters from an American Farmer by the French-born settler Hector St. John de Crèvecouer appeared as a series of collected dispatches describing the new continent. While he does acknowledge the failures and short-comings of the land and its people – his ninth letter describes a slave market in Charleston, South Carolina with unmistakable disdain for the practice – nevertheless, Crèvecouer praises his adopted homeland with a distinct sense of purity and tremendous potential. He describes the metamorphosis each settler undergoes as he or she becomes a part of the landscape, writing: He is an American, who, leaving behind him all his ancient prejudices and manners, receives new ones from the new mode of life he has embraced, the new government he obeys, and the new rank he holds. He becomes an American by being received in the broad lap of our great Alma Mater. Here individuals of all nations are melted into a new race of men, whose labors and posterity will one day cause great changes in the world . . . The American is a new man, who acts upon new principles; he must entertain new ideas, and form new opinions. From voluntary idleness, servile dependence, penury, and useless labor, he has passed to toils of a very different nature, rewarded by ample subsistence.—This is an American.4
And this new creature, this American, can expect to find a completely foreign mode of life, but one that captures the spirit of freedom that has so long been oppressed by European establishments: He is arrived on a new continent; a modern society offers itself to his contemplation, different from what he has hitherto seen. It is not composed, as in Europe, of great lords who possess everything, and a herd of people who have nothing. Here are no aristocratic families, no courts, no kings, no bishops, no ecclesiastical dominion, no invisible power giving to a few a very visible one; no great manufacturers employing thousands, no great refinements of luxury. The rich and the poor are not so far removed from each other as they are in Europe. Some few towns excepted, we are all tillers of the earth . . . We have no princes, for whom we toil, starve, and bleed; we are the most perfect society now existing in the world.5
The American continent was clearly viewed as a clean slate, a place for second chances and new beginnings – and not just for individuals, but for the entirety of the human race. The metaphorical apple was placed back on the tree and the serpent was unwound from the trunk. This time, it was supposed, humanity just might get it right.
34 The Realization By the beginning of the nineteenth century, it was apparent that the Eden designation would stick. David W. Noble writes in The Eternal and the New World Garden that: In the history of America’s popular imaginations, the precise coming of this heaven on earth has a political date – 1828. It is the election of Andrew Jackson that symbolizes the triumph of democracy and the common man. And with this end of America’s relationship to the European past. The human condition of mankind, it is proclaimed, hitherto always tragic or comic, has given way to an earthly millennium of perfect harmony in the New World Garden.6
Even if there was a tangible break with the European past, however, the cultural vibrations of Europe could still be felt on the American continent, and their current literary movement had certainly helped to prime American authors for this glorious praise of the natural condition of man and his surroundings. Noble notes further: In the new American nation the romanticism of the developing bourgeoisie, the myth of the self-made man, came to be accepted as the reality rather than the dream of human existence. It was proclaimed, in the United States of 1830, that every man had transcended the human condition to achieve perfect harmony with redemptive nature. Ironically, it was the thrust of romantic ideology in Europe which made possible this concept of American exceptionalism.7
These lingering cultural vibrations were problematic for Hawthorne, however, who took a slightly divergent interpretation of the myth. To him, the story of the New World Eden was a tragic tale precisely because it looked to the past for inspiration rather than to the future for hope. Matthiessen observes rightly that “Hawthorne seldom portrayed his characters in a state of grace, since he was too thoroughly aware of how the heart as well as the head could perversely go astray.”8 Instead, he strategically placed his characters in moments of crisis, when a choice must be made. Lewis observes that the forest for Hawthorne was not a natural paradise but rather, “It was the ambiguous setting of moral choice, the scene of reversal and discovery in his characteristic drama. The forest was the pivot in Hawthorne’s grand recurring pattern of escape and return.”9 Indeed, as Lewis elaborates, it is the forest where Dimmesdale and Hester finally speak freely of their love; it is also the forest where Young Goodman Brown must make his choice of immortal allegiance. Hawthorne’s Adam is not the man basking in the eternal sunshine of a benevolent God; rather, he is the Adam, fruit in hand, weighing his options. In The House of the Seven Gables we see that Hawthorne is acutely aware of the pressing question of time: what is man’s responsibility to time and can he break out of the pattern of
35 repeated oppression represented by the cyclical hands of “the great world-clock of Time” that “still keeps its beat” even if human hands neglect to wind their own instruments?10 “Clifford . . . wants to make that leap from memory to hope,” Lewis writes, “his Adamic ambition is an ingredient in the novel.”11 In fact, is it not until Clifford and Hephzibah run away to the train headed west that they finally feel a sense of freedom and liberation, short-lived though that sense may be. Hawthorne’s belief, it seems, is that the American Eden must be sought in what lies ahead. In the prologue to that novel, Hawthorne writes: The point of view in which this tale comes under the Romantic definition lies in the attempt to connect a bygone time with the very present that is flitting away from us. It is a legend prolonging itself, from an epoch now gray in the distance, down into our own broad daylight, and bringing along with it some of its legendary mist, which the reader, according to his pleasure, may either disregard, or allow it to float almost imperceptibly about the characters and events for the sake of a picturesque effect.12
More American authors, however, fully embraced this “legendary mist” and the prospect of being the stewards of a great new paradise, and their cultural productions reflected this attitude. In 1834, William Cullen Bryant reflected upon the prairies he had seen on his travels to Illinois, and opened his tribute to them with the lines: “These are the Gardens of the Desert, these/The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,/And fresh as the young earth, ere man had sinned.”13 But it was not right for the land to exist in this Edenic state without an Adam to declare mastery over it. Therefore, we see in the novels of James Fenimore Cooper a celebration of American purity in the unblemished landscape of both earth and soul. Lewis succinctly notes, “If there was a fictional Adam here unambiguously treated – celebrated in his very Adamism – it was the hero of Cooper’s The Deerslayer: a self-reliant young man who does seem to have sprung from nowhere and whose characteristic post, to employ Tocqueville’s words, was the solitary stance in the presence of Nature and God.”14 The full realization of America as Eden and the American as Adam, however, emerges with the Transcendentalists. Ralph Waldo Emerson’s ideals inspired the next generation of American authors to realize the self-reliant Adam within, necessarily divorcing themselves from unnecessary social and political restraints, and returning instead to nature as the source of moral and behavioral dictates, and personal communion with God. In 1836, he wrote in Nature:
36 In the woods, too, a man casts off his years, as the snake his slough, and at what period soever of life, is always a child. In the woods, is perpetual youth . . . In the woods, we return to reason and faith. There I feel that nothing can befall me in life, -- no disgrace, no calamity, (leaving me my eyes,) which nature cannot repair. Standing on the bare ground, – my head bathed by the blithe air, and uplifted into infinite space, – all mean egotism vanishes . . . The currents of the Universal Being circulate through me.”15
It was Emerson’s disciple Walt Whitman who declared Americans the “Children of Adam,” praising the free spirits of the growing continent in his collection of the same name in 1860. His poetry explored the reawakening of the human spirit in the brilliant newness of America with an exuberance that is only possible for one who truly believes himself present in a garden of rapturous joy. Leaves of Grass was published in 1855, and in it Whitman included the poem “Ages and Ages, Returning at Intervals” in which he declares himself the: “chanter of Adamic songs,/Through the new garden, the West.”16 Matthiessen remarks that Whitman: believed that the fresh opportunities for the English tongue in America were immense, offering themselves in the whole range of American Facts. His poems, by cleaving to these facts, could thereby release ‘new potentialities’ of expression for our native character . . . He there reveals the joy of the child or the primitive poet in just naming things . . . Whitman’s excitement carries weight because he realized that a man cannot use words unless he has experienced the facts that they express, unless he has grasped them with this senses.17
While Whitman was busy sounding his “barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world,”18 Henry David Thoreau was examining the practical side of Emerson’s philosophies of existentialism and developing his own notions of modern man’s place in time. He writes in the first chapter of Walden: “We should live in all the ages of the world in an hour; ay in all the worlds of the ages. History, Poetry, Mythology!”19 In perhaps his most commonly-quoted passage from Walden, we see Thoreau seeking the Eden he has been promised but feels he has yet to realize. “I went to the woods because I wished to live deliberately,” he writes: to front only the essential facts of life, and see if I could not learn what it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, discover I had not lived . . . to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to the lowest terms, and, if proved to be mean, why then to get the whole and genuine meanness out of it, and publish its meanness to the world; or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, and be able to give a true account of it in my next excursion.20
37 Clearly, the existentialist paradise that comes from moral clarity and self-reliance is the virgin territory in which he finds himself a pioneer. Such an existence is achievable, but it must be actively pursued. And this enlightenment is not one that comes from eating of the forbidden fruit; rather, it stems from the rejection of the temptations of institutionalized authority.
Failure As America emerged from the War Between the States, the American Eden and its idealistic steward took on a new dimension. No longer was the American the uncorrupted child of the New World; now, he represented the fallen ideal, the corruptible man, the failed perfection – he was sinful Adam on a blighted earth. Mark Twain recognized, as Noble notes, that: [t]he faith of the people of the United States is redemption by nature and focused on the valley of democracy as the citadel of the American Garden. And at the heart of the valley was the river, the Mississippi. Escaping from the land which failed him, Twain fled to the river to find surcease from the discordant rhythms of progress. Although ambitious men changed its banks, the river itself could not be altered. Here was a symbol of nature that flowed with an everlasting sameness, where man’s dream of innocence could find constant renewal and confirmation. Here was Twain’s last chance to provide immortality for the American Adam.21
When Huck and Jim float down the Mississippi and through various cross-sections of American life, they are seeking refuge from their own unfortunate circumstances. But there was no refuge to be found among the cities and towns of middle America, and Huck chooses his own expulsion from a state of grace when he decides to keep Jim’s whereabouts a secret. Like Adam hiding from God in Genesis 3:8, Huck attempts to hide Jim from the view of his legal owners. He describes his defiant act: “I took [the letter] up, and held it in my hand. I was a-trembling, because I'd got to decide, forever, betwixt two things, and I knowed it. I studied a minute, sort of holding my breath, and then says to myself: ‘All right, then, I'll go to hell’ – and tore it up.”22 Likewise, Huck is rejecting the boyhood naïveté that he lost along the river and that Tom’s re- appearance represents. His choice at the end of the novel, when he writes, “I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest,”23 demonstrates that he is still cognizant of the promise of the American continent, but it is elusive, and one must actively search for it.
The Americans of Henry James also represented this failed experiment when they exposed themselves to the sin and scandals of the Old World. The reader traces the corrupting
38 power of European sensibilities on Daisy Miller and Lewis Lambert Strether, while Chad Newsome is seeking a way out of his corruption; Isabel Archer’s morally bankrupt compatriots abroad destroyed her own ambitions and goals. James’ model is the American Adam and American Eve in moral decline; once they leave their wonderfully naive garden, they become vulnerable to the sin of humanity. This was the manner in which many Americans at home viewed the expatriates in Paris, London, and Geneva. As Bill Gorton would quip via Hemingway’s pen thirty years later in The Sun Also Rises: “You're an expatriate. You've lost touch with the soil. You get precious. Fake European standards have ruined you. You drink yourself to death. You become obsessed by sex. You spend all your time talking, not working. You're an expatriate, see? You hang around cafes.”24 The American and his continent were no longer infallible, but the traces that were left from the fostering of such a vision were indelible, and the promise of America and its proverbial Dream were firmly entrenched in the national psyche and identity. And even though the fall is as much a part of the Eden myth as is the innocence, there is present in the writing of the later nineteenth and early twentieth centuries an apparent disappointment at the failed second chance.
Social Setting of Cather’s World In 1893, at the American Historical Society meeting in that great city of the plains, Chicago, Frederick Jackson Turner presented his study “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Based upon his studies of current population trends and land usage, he famously declared that the western frontier was “closed.”25 Horace Greeley’s oft-repeated admonition of “Go West, young man and grow up with the country” no longer held the promise for American youths that it once did. The westward expansion that had driven the settlement of the United States had, for all intents and purposes, died. There was nothing left to explore; there was no terra incognita to discover. Kurtz notes the inherent conflict present in the Old World and New World economic structures and futures. “Ironically,” he writes, “although it had been industrialization that had freed the individual from feudal, agrarian social and economic structures, the American image of freedom was a predominately agrarian vision. The hero of the New World was the self-reliant individual, carving a personal niche out of the wilderness.”26 The problem, of course, is that the wilderness will ultimately be tamed and as had become apparent with the 1890 census, the great American Garden was settled.
39 As the nineteenth century came to a close, the surge into industrialism was inevitable. As the railroads increased, so too did opportunities for manufactured goods to traverse the continent. Even the rural farms of the prairies and isolated mountain homestead towns could order goods from Montgomery Ward or the Sears and Roebuck catalogue. But even while America was making the inevitable move towards modernity, it was nevertheless maintaining its identity as the land of new beginnings. Through the words of Emma Lazarus, the Statue of Liberty boasts, “I lift my lamp beside the golden door.”27 As waves of immigrants – an estimated 10,121,940 between 1905 and 1914 alone (almost double the number of the previous ten years)28 – continued to pour through American ports and into the American cities and countryside, there was a persistent hope that the continent still offered fresh starts, the promise of second chances, and the opportunity for a man to realize his full potential without the Old World constraints of lingering memories, restrictive traditions, or prejudiced history. There was a hope, but America was no longer new and her histories were already being written.
The Novel The notion of an American Eden persisted well into the twentieth century. Fitzgerald writes of “the old island here that flowered once for Dutch sailors' eyes – a fresh, green breast of the new world”29 – though Eden had passed away from the East it was still existent, perhaps, as one moved inland from the coast; Hemingway’s Nick Adams finally reclaims his humanity in the Michigan wilds. As part of such a tradition and context, it hardly seems remarkable, then, that Willa Cather employs Edenic imagery in her 1913 novel O Pioneers! In their study of Cather’s writing, entitled “Willa Cather’s Novels of the Frontier: A Study in Thematic Symbolism,” Edward and Lillian Bloom write that “Willa Cather writes purposefully in all her novels of the frontier, directing her talents in each to the exposition of one lofty theme and always arriving . . . at her ultimate moralistic goal.” This “moralistic goal” is more than just didactic sermonizing, however; it is often a story of universal importance and application. As the Blooms further note: Cather is interested primarily in the broad outline of human destiny, not in the motivation of individual quirks and foibles. Her people and places are mainly convenient vehicles for ideas . . . The idea is the thing, and once the reader has grasped the intellectual motif, all the other elements fall into readily perceivable patterns. 30
40 It is Cather’s particular use of one such pattern with which this study is primarily concerned: the portrayal of Emil as an Adam in the garden of moral conflict. What is striking about Cather’s use of Eden imagery, however, is that she breaks from both earlier traditions and does not connect it with her novel’s central narrative – that is, man’s battle against and life on the frontier farm. Cather’s Adam-figure is not Alexandra as one might suppose, though she is the story’s protagonist and the most dedicated worker of the land. Rather, Cather concentrates her Genesis allusions on the sub-plot story of Emil and Marie, consequently casting Emil as the new manifestation of the Adam archetype in a story whose ending has been doomed since the beginning of time. The novel’s opening scene depicts a five-year-old Emil, crying over the flight of his kitten up the telegraph pole. Though a seemingly unimportant image at first, it later becomes clear that as Emil takes on the role of Adam, this first introduction to his character is an allusion to Adam’s first responsibility in the Garden: stewardship of the animals.31 Following this scene, Alexandra sees her brother “sitting on a step of the staircase that led up to the clothing and carpet department. He was playing with a little Bohemian girl, Marie Tovesky.” This is Emil’s (and the reader’s) first introduction to the girl who will later be of such significance and already there is foreshadowing of the outcome of their relationship. First, it is said of Emil that “[h]is black cloth coat was much too big for him and made him look like a little old man” and of Marie that “her poke bonnet, gave her the look of a quaint little woman.” Just as Adam and Eve lost their chance at a perpetually innocent existence and faced death as a consequence for their sin, too do Emil and Marie exhibit the progression of age even as they are the youngest characters in the novel. Further, the location of Emil and Marie’s first exchange is symbolic: “the step of the staircase that led up to the clothing and carpet department.” 32 The immediate action of Adam and Eve after they have eaten of the forbidden fruit is to become aware of their nakedness and attempt to make clothing to cover it.33 Obviously, at five and seven years old respectively, Emil and Marie have not yet succumbed to temptation, but this meeting is the first of many that ultimately lead to their destruction – thus it is the first “step of the staircase that led up” to their own realization of sin. This imagery is evoked again later, when the two grown lovers speak openly of their love for the first time and Marie is said to have “sat down on the top step” of the stile. 34 The climb begun as children is completed in adulthood.
41 Following their first meeting, the reader’s next encounter of Emil and Marie in one another’s company is roughly sixteen years later. Though the two friends have interacted before the narrative resumes, this is the first time the story depicts them together since their first meeting in town as children. Again, amongst Edenic imagery the ultimate outcome of their relationship is foreshadowed. The scene takes place on a June morning in a peaceful, outdoor setting which is, ironically, a cemetery. Even as the young adults converse, Emil is cutting down the tall grass from around the graves. He states, “‘Alexandra sent me to mow our lot, but I’ve done half a dozen others, you see.’”35 Here among the gravestones is a reminder of the transience of life that accompanied the initial sin of man.36 It is significant, too, that Emil is employing a “scythe,” the traditional symbol of Death as a reaper – a visual reminder of human mortality. The description of Marie also heightens the Edenic imagery: “Emil mowed vigorously and Marie sat sunning herself”37 as is the typical behavior of a snake. This is not to imply that Marie is an evil figure– quite the contrary, in fact. What she does symbolize, however, is temptation. The two are encountered together again several days later, this time in the pasture of Frank and Marie’s farm and again there is a somber reminder of mortality. Emil has just shot five ducks and retrieves them for Marie who first laughs at the excitement of it but then: [a]s she stood looking down at them, her face changed . . . “They were having such a good time, and we’ve spoiled it for them . . . Ivar’s right about wild things. They’re too happy to kill. You can tell just how they felt when they flew up. They were scared, but they didn’t really think anything bad could hurt them.”
The role of the ducks in this scene is two-fold in that they not only provide another example of death-in-life, but they also function as symbols of Emil and Marie precariously poised between purity and forbidden knowledge and soon to share an identical fate with the wild ducks, too involved in the bliss of their companionship to “think anything bad could hurt them.”38 The next time Emil and Marie meet is again in a pastoral scene. In what is widely recognized as the most overtly Edenic scene in the novel, the reader finds the couple conversing in the orchard. Marie has come “to pick cherries” and laughingly remarks to Emil, “I’ll call you if I see a snake.” As the two young people talk about the indigenous religions of their homelands, they unwittingly allude to serpent’s presentation of the fruit to Eve:
42 “Emil,” she said suddenly – he was mowing quietly about under the tree so as not to disturb her – “what religion did the Swedes have away back, before they were Christians?” Emil paused and straightened his back. “I don’t know. About like the Germans’, wasn’t it?” Marie went on as if she had not heard him. “The Bohemians, you know, were tree worshipers before the missionaries came, Father says the people in the mountains still do queer things, sometimes – they believe that trees bring good or bad luck.” Emil looked superior. “Do they? Well, which are the lucky trees? I’d like to know.” “I don’t know all of them, but I know the lindens are. The old people in the mountains plant lindens to purify the forest, and to do away with the spells that come from the old trees they say have lasted from heathen times. I’m a good Catholic, but I think I could get along with caring for trees, if I hadn’t anything else . . . I like trees because they seem more resigned to the way they have to live than other things do. I feel as if this tree knows everything I ever think of when I sit here. When I come back to it, I never have to remind it of anything; I just begin where I left off.” Emil had nothing to say to this. He reached up among the branches and began to pick the sweet, insipid fruit.39
Again, though the conversation is devoted to the subject of nature, the rhetorical intent of the words is not only to draw a connection with Adam’s post-fall curse to work the land but also to draw attention to the temptation facing the lovers in this seeming paradise. The highly sensual language of fortune, religion, and “insipid” fruit, along with the allusion to trees having knowledge, is instead intended to steer the reader’s awareness towards the moral crisis Emil-as- Adam faces and the physical hardships of fallen-Adam-as-agrarian that already surround them. The only time that this pattern of meeting in the outdoors is broken is at the Catholic carnival, the site of Emil and Marie’s first kiss. Though this turning point seems to break with the pattern of Edenic imagery, it still maintains an important thread. First, it is a forbidden action on hallowed ground – that is, within the church building itself. Secondly, it involves the elimination of all light – the prank that the French boys plan so as to have a moment to kiss their girls, and in which Emil is a participant, as he is asked by Amédée to blow out Marie’s candle when the switchboard is unplugged. This scene clearly plays on essential symbolic imagery from Genesis chapter one – not only is God’s separation of the light from the dark in verse three a physical parting, it is a metaphor for the division of good and evil. Here, as Emil willingly
43 extinguishes the final bit of light from the church, the separation of the permitted from the forbidden in his own life comes crashing down: [E]very one looked toward the red blur that Marie’s candle made in the dark. Immediately that, too, was gone. Little shrieks and currents of soft laughter ran up and down the dark hall. Marie started up, – directly into Emil’s arms. In the same instant she felt his lips. The veil that had hung uncertainly between them for so long was dissolved.40
The staircase towards sin and consequential mortality has almost been scaled. Now that the unspoken line of physical affection has been transgressed between Emil and Marie, there remains only their final encounter again in the Shabata’s orchard for the story of man’s fall to fully play itself out. Again, a scene of death contrasted with life frames the encounter between Emil and Marie. In the Mass that marks both the first communion of one hundred children as well as ushering in the funerary proceedings for Amédée, Emil take notice of Marie’s absence, and in an epiphany “felt as if a clear light broke upon his mind, and with it a conviction that good was, after all, stronger than evil, and that good was possible to men. He seemed to discover that there was a kind of rapture in which he could love forever without faltering and without sin.” In this brief moment of liberation and transcendence, Emil realizes “[h]e coveted nothing that was Frank Shabata’s” and rides forth from the church feeling powerful, invincible, and not afraid of anything: As he rode past the graveyard he looked at the brown hole in the earth where Amédée was to lie, and felt no sorrow. That, too was beautiful, that simple doorway to forgetfulness. The heart, when it is too much alive, aches for that brown earth, and ecstasy has no fear of death. It is the old and poor and the maimed who shirk from that brown hole; its wooers are found among the young, the passionate, the gallant-hearted. It was not until he had passed the graveyard that Emil realized where he was going.
In this rush of pride and self-determinism that has seized Emil, he hurries to find Marie, who is “lying on her side under the white mulberry tree.” Disregarding what they know to be sin, the two lovers finally partake in that final temptation that has lured them since either one can remember.41 It is in the narration of Frank’s discovery and shooting of the pair, however, that the Eden imagery is truly at its height: “He peered again through the hedge, at the two dark figures under the tree. They had fallen a little apart from each other, and were perfectly still.” Not only are the
44 figures now described as “dark,” a symbol already shown to be of moral significance, but Cather’s choice of words, that the two lovers “had fallen,” is a final acknowledgement of the story that was spinning towards its tragic end throughout the narrative. Ivar announces the news to Alexandra as “‘[i]t has fallen! Sin and death for the young ones! God have mercy upon us!’” The temptation and fall of man have occurred again, even to the special brother, chosen and set apart by Alexandra to be the heir and fortunate son spared bondage to the land. As Carl Linstrum remarks much earlier in the story: “‘Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes over thousands of years.’”42 The story of O Pioneers! is undeniably of the American Eden tradition, but it is not of the same strain as so many others before and after it. By shifting the primary focus of the Eden myth from man’s struggle with the land to man’s struggle with himself, Cather has succeeded in reminding her readers of two essential truths. The first is that the promise of a paradise to be realized once again is not in the earth itself, but in the souls of the men and women who work it. She is focused on the timelessness of the struggles of man’s quest for dominion over his environment and himself. As the Blooms note: “Cather searches beyond contemporary society. Instead, she examines man’s trials in other eras.”43 In so doing, she is able to present her story – and America’s – as part of the timeless continuation of the human story. After all, as Cather tells us, “the history of every country begins in the heart of a man or a woman.”44 Secondly, and more significantly, we see that the elements of the Eden story were all in place from the beginning. Emil and Marie never had a chance to break free from the patterns of mankind’s history, even in the New World. Regarding her inclusion of the word “Pioneer” in the novel’s title, Robert H. Footman notes in “The Genius of Willa Cather” that “[w]ords today are having so many new authorities delegated to them and as a result are acquiring such new values, that she has to pick her way cautiously in her effort to preserve her own valuation.”45 So, too, does it seem that Cather sought to reclaim the image of the American Eden from those who would assign it “new authorities” by focusing on the newness of the land instead of on the souls of the people. Cather recognized that the American tragedy was not that the Second Eden experiment had failed, but that it had never even had a chance, despite the best efforts of all of the would-be Adams. As Alexandra says to
45 Carl in the final scene of the novel, “You remember what you once said about the graveyard, and the old story writing itself over? Only it is we who write it, and with the best we have.”46
Conclusion In 1964, Leo Marx would observe this trend in his aptly-titled The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. He concludes: The power of these fables to move us derives from the magnitude of the protean conflict figured by the machine’s increasing domination of the visible world. This recurrent metaphor of contradiction makes vivid, as no other figure does, the bearing of public events on private lives. It discloses that our inherited symbols of order and beauty have been divested of meaning, It compels us to recognize that the aspirations once represented by the symbol of an ideal landscape have not, and probably cannot, be embodied in our traditional institutions . . . The resolutions of our pastoral fables are unsatisfactory because the old symbol of reconciliation is obsolete.47
As the American myth grew with such tremendous alacrity in the virgin soil of a new democracy, it became the victim of its own success. The trope became so prevalent in its various manifestations, that it actually triggered a resistance to its notions and an eventual rejection of its boasts. The progression of such a fall is evident, as we have seen; and the development of the myth was one that was perhaps too blinded by its hubris to consider the whole extent of the analogy: in the end, Adam dies. While some authors approached the metaphor with caution and others with disappointment, the fact remains that whatever aspirations the American Edenists may have held, the story of Eden is essentially and fundamentally a story of failure. So widely applied, the myth ultimately lost its own inherent significance and the symbols were essentially rendered impotent as each author read a new significance into the shared myth that they all still held as static. The reception history of the American Eden myth functions, in many ways, as a microcosm for broader mythic change: A story or character is introduced, assigned cultural significance, and perpetuated as source of identity and inspiration. As social circumstances change, so too does the myth’s significance. When the change occurs very rapidly and with such broad divergence in interpretation, however, the myth can lose its unifying nature and stand instead as testament to the disjointed fragments of a misunderstood ideal.
46 Cather’s interpretation of the trope in O Pioneers! is clearly in response to this variance and ultimate breakdown in meaning. The culminating lesson is not that man could somehow get it right this time with the wisdom of the ages on his side. Instead, the moral of Cather’s Eden story is that human history is cyclical and myths can only carry meaning so far as they acknowledge that reality. As T. S. Eliot would write in 1940, in his opening line of “East Coker” in the Four Quartets: “In my beginning is my end.”48
47 CHAPTER THREE Capitalism’s Fortunate Sons: The Trope of Cain and Abel in John Steinbeck’s East of Eden and Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman
Now the man knew his wife Eve, and she conceived and bore Cain, saying, “I have produced a man with the help of the LORD.” Next she bore his brother Abel. Now Abel was a keeper of sheep, and Cain a tiller of the ground. In the course of time Cain brought to the LORD an offering of the fruit of the ground and Abel for his part brought of the firstlings of his flock, their fat portions. And the LORD had regard for Abel and his offerings, but for Cain and his offering he had no regard. So Cain was very angry, and his countenance fell. The LORD said to Cain, “Why are you angry, and why has your countenance fallen? If you do well, will you not be accepted? And if you do not do well, sin is lurking at the door; its desire is for you, but you must master it.” Cain said to his brother Abel, “Let us go out to the field.” And when they were in the field, Cain rose up against his brother Abel, and killed him. Then the LORD said to Cain, “Where is your brother Abel?” He said, “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” And the LORD said, ‘What have you done? Listen; your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand. When you till the ground, it will no longer yield to you its strength; you will be a fugitive and a wanderer on the earth.” Cain said to the LORD, “My punishment is more than I can bear! Today you have driven me away from the soil, and I shall be hidden from your face; I shall be a fugitive and wanderer on the earth, and anyone who meets me may kill me.” Then the LORD said to him, “Not so! Whoever kills Cain will suffer a sevenfold vengeance.” And the LORD put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him. Then Cain went away from the presence of the LORD, and settled in the land of Nod, east of Eden. Cain knew his wife, and she conceived and bore Enoch; and he built a city, and named it Enoch after his son Enoch. Genesis 4:1-17
Reception History of Cain and Abel Gary Taylor asserts that just like in the natural world, the continued existence of cultural productions is also largely dictated by their adaptability: “The more interpretations, the more likely that some will seem particularly relevant and important to the unpredicatable changing cultures of the future. The more variously interpretatable a work is the more adaptable it is – and the more likely to survive.”1 In 1906, esteemed medieval scholar and eventual MLA president Oliver F. Emerson published a comprehensive study that illustrates this claim by tracing the literary development of
48 particular persistence: Cain. Despite its unassuming title, “Legends of Cain, Especially in Old and Middle English,” Emerson tracked the changes of this intriguing character of western mythology by examining apocryphal Christian writings, Rabbinic literature, and a variety of Anglo-Saxon, Middle English, and continental texts. He notes in his opening remarks that while “a few scattered notes on Cain in our literature” had been published in years past, his belief was that “there was still room for a somewhat more thorough investigation of the subject.”2 The story of the brothers is an intriguing one but the textual story provides only a limited number of details. For that reason – or perhaps, despite that obstacle – numerous oral traditions developed first among the Jewish people and later among Christian and Muslim adherents to explain elements of the story that the biblical text omits. Four in particular stand out as the most popular subject of later texts: 1) the brothers’ motives for the sacrifices; 2) the act of the murder; 3) Cain’s wandering and subsequent city-building following the exile from his family; and 4) the nature of his curse and mark. This chapter will examine the first three of these themes. (The fourth is explored in chapter five.) Each concept has developed over a series of centuries through religious texts and popular folk-versions of the story, until their images have become part of the iconography of the story. And though the story has had myriad thematic developments and traditions with which it has become associated, few seem as persistent in their cultural reception and transmission as the issue of economic struggles and tributary rejection by the dominant system of power.
The Sacrifice This tension was noted as early as the first century C.E., when the Jewish philosopher Philo composed his exegesis of the Tanakh account of the story. Though he does include some of these extra-textual traditions among his interpretive assumptions – that Cain delayed in making his offering to God, waiting several days after Abel’s initial sacrifice, before he brought some of his own produce3 – Philo’s primary concern is not to retell the story but to interpret its metaphorical applications. He argues, for example, that Abel demonstrated a reliance on God because his livelihood of shepherding left him utterly dependent upon the blessings of good grazing and ample water, and at the mercy of punishments of predators or harsh weather that may find his flock. Cain, on the other hand, showed a lack of faith in God’s provenance because he manipulated the soil to his own intentions rather than merely tending that which was already
49 available to him.4 The violence of Cain, therefore, extends from the envy born from his selfish, self-centered nature – a trait which Philo considers central to the man’s character.5 It is this arrogance towards the benevolent nature of God that Philo then extends beyond the story in order to make commentary upon the humanists of the ancient world. He condemns Protagoras, who believed “that the human mind is the measure of all things” as “being a descendant of the folly of Cain.”6 He writes shortly afterwards, “They therefore who say that all thinking, and feeling, and speaking, are the free gifts of their own soul, utter an impious and ungodly opinion, and deserve to be classed among the race of Cain.”7 The value of the story for Philo came not from its place in the religious history of his people but rather, from its rhetorical properties in practical application. Later in the first century C.E., the Hellenized Jewish apologist Flavius Josephus again revisited the story of the two feuding brothers in his Antiquities of the Jews. Josephus offers no real commentary on the story but does take pains to point out that Cain was not wholly evil. Rather, according to Josephus’ reading, Cain was merely intent upon obtaining things – be they tangible (such as land), or intangible, (such as divine favor).8 The finer arguments of Philo’s treatise are not present in Josephus’ account. Josephus’ concern is on recounting the organizing myths of Jewish religion and people, though with a passing warning against the perils of greed inserted for good measure. The early Christian reception of the story is similar. Ambrose dealt with the story in his treatise Cain and Abel, arguing that economic motivations caused Cain to withhold the first fruits from sacrifice.9 He also drew symbolic importance from the story elsewhere in his writings. In On The Holy Spirit, he urges Christians to practice their faith with pure motives, noting that both the sacrifice of Cain and the kiss of Judas were ostensibly pious acts.10 A generous attitude in sacrifice and tithing, it seems, is the ideal of Ambrose; anything less is akin to the self-serving desires to withhold a few sheaves of wheat from the Lord or to gain thirty pieces of silver by selling his Son.
The medieval mystery plays of the English cycle also made much of the economic concerns of Cain’s theology. The N-Town Banns, which served as an advertisement for and preview of the coming cycle, cast the show as a lesson in tithing. The word appears three times in the thirteen lines pertaining to the play about the feuding brothers, and the Cain and Abel
50 section concludes with the pronouncement: “Of trewe tithing this may wel be/Example to every man.”11 According to the characterization of the N-Town Cain and Abel, Cain is a materialist who is more concerned with amassing wealth than showing gratitude for it and he advises his brother to embrace a similar mindset. Cain takes a similar tone in the Chester Creation where, as the appropriately-named John Gardner points out in his study of these plays, “Cain’s purpose is impure: He will sacrifice in order to get God to send more.”12 The Cain of the York cycle grudgingly offers his sacrifice, complaining about the lack of thrift and not desiring to waste the effort of one’s work in a burnt offering. It is the Wakefield Killing of Abel that most fully develops the idea of Cain as a shrewd businessman. Cain complains that the sacrifice will take him away from his work, saying to Abel incredulously: “Shuld I leife my plogh & all thing/And go with the[e] to make offering? / Nay, thou findys me not so mad!” Later he remarks on the fact that giving the choice sheaves of his crop to God could potentially leave him in want, stating: “For, had I giffen away my goode/then myght I go with a ryffen hood;/And it is better hold that I have/then go from doore to doore and crave.”13 Gardner argues that the economic tone of the play reveals it to be a commentary upon medieval feudalism “both here on earth and in heaven,” where Cain is the unwilling worker and ungrateful vassal.14 Cain’s complaints center around the question of debt – he owes nothing to God because: “Yit boroed I never a farthing / Of him” and firmly asserts: “My winningys ar bot meyn.” 15 This theme, as Gardner rightly points out, makes the play “not only religious but also – and profoundly – social.”16
Early modern sermonizers continued to point to Cain’s actions as economically driven, be they an avaricious attitude toward tithing or a profit-driven blindness from God’s saving mercy. In 1562, Thomas Paynell published a work on the epistles of Paul in which he makes note in Chapter Five: “By fayeth Abell offered vnto God a more plenteous sacrifices then Cain.” A similar sentiment is expressed in George Carleton’s treatise upon tithing, published in 1606: It is expressly noted in the text, that Abel offered the best of his flock, de primogenitis, & pinguissimis, the first, fairest, and fattest, which shewed the sinceritie of his heart. In Cain no such thing is noted, but the contrary vnderstood, whether Cain did offer one tenth of the profit of his ground, and Abel the tenth of his sheepe, that question I moue not here, there is nothing expressly eyther for it, or against it; but out of these words this I obserue. First, that to offer to God of such goods as God doth blesse men withal, was from the beginning accounted a
51 part of the seruice of God, for Cain and Abel both offered, knowing it was looked for at their hands. Secondly, it is hence manifest that they who offer their goods to God, may not offer the worst . . . [for] they who serue not God with the best of their goods, are found to be followers of Cain.17
One moralizer took particular issue with Cain’s city building and subsequent commerce, using it as an example to warn other souls away from vain, earthly distractions that may hinder true repentance. Writing in 1672, he insists: Many, because they have been troubled in conscience for their sins, think well of their case; miserably mistaking conviction for conversion, With these, Cain might have passed for a Convert, who run up and down the world, like a man distracted under the rage of a guilty conscience, till with building and business he had word in away.18
Through the elaborations in antiquity, the vernacular fleshing out of the characters in medieval performance, and the moral reasoning of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the connection of Cain with self-serving labor and material collection was established as a fixed part of the western lore regarding the ancient figure.
The Murder The possessive nature of Cain was central not only to his treatment of the sacrifice, but also to his motives in committing fratricide. Driven by envy stoked by God’s favor of Abel’s burnt offerings, Cain kills his brother in a jealous rage – a heinous act elaborated upon and sensationalized in later accounts of the story and a standard metaphor for rivalries and blood feuds in other contexts. One work, which some scholars date to as early as the first century B.C.E., began to receive broader reception in late antiquity and early middle ages. The text was called Vita Adae et Evae (The Life of Adam and Eve) and seems to be Jewish in origin, though later versions show evidence of later Christian additions. It is a collection that incorporated a number of traditional stories involving the first family, including the story of Cain and Abel. In the Vita, whose stylized presentation proved highly influential in later medieval depictions of the story, one startling detail is included that cast the murder of Abel in an even more sinister light: Eve’s dream of Cain drinking and regurgitating the blood of his brother.19 This image may echo the divine charge in the biblical text in Genesis 4:11, which states: “[Y]our
52 brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground. And now you are cursed from the ground, which has opened its mouth to receive your brother’s blood from your hand,” may have given rise to the occasional medieval depiction of Cain biting his brother to death.20 In the Vita, the murder is not only pejorated by its cannibalistic overtones, but it also plays upon a literal interpretation of Cain as one who seeks to consume, be it in the hoarding of a sacrifice or the drinking of his brother’s blood. One of the most common medieval twists upon the story is Cain’s use of an ass’ jawbone as the murder weapon, a tradition of uncertain origin that began to emerge in the British Isles in the eleventh century, and spread quickly to the continent. The most obvious possible source is the story of Samson slaying the Philistines with the same sort of found weapon, as is told in the book of Judges. As a number of scholars have pointed out, however, there seem to be no other parallel elements to link the stories thematically and thereby justify the transposing of the later tradition onto the earlier one. Noted art historian Meyer Schapiro presents a number of possible sources, including the oral theme of Eve’s dream in the Vita and also the ubiquitous Hell-mouth of medieval demonic iconography. He also makes the point that the choice of a jawbone as a weapon might not have been a choice at all but rather, a misinterpretation by one artist of a drawing depicting Cain, as a farmer, wielding a sickle.21 Schapiro lends little credence to this last scenario, but it does introduce an intriguing notion: the idea of the weapon as having a connection to the brothers’ professions. Possibly, the tradition of the jawbone appeared as a kind of ironic statement to Cain’s sense of justice: killing his brother with part of the very sacrifice that won God’s favor for Abel. It makes an interesting economic commentary, too, that the tools of one’s livelihood are truly his means of survival in the realm of competition. The choice of a remnant of a sacrificial burnt offering gives the crime that much more of a sinister slant, as well – Cain chose to use something consecrated as a vehicle of evil. Whatever the means of murder, the story is inherently one of perceived competition and the struggle between two opposed ways of life under the same system. In his Freudian exploration of rivalries entitled “Fratricide and Fraternity,” Donald Clark Hodges points out that “the struggle between Cain and Abel reflects the conflict between pastoral nomads and sedentary agriculturalists, which is key to much of the history of the ancient Middle East.”22 Indeed, the conflict between the shepherding god, Dumuzi and the farming god, Enkindu was a central story
53 in Sumerian mythology and the very nature of the rivalry was obviously a universal one and certainly not contained to the lore of the ancient Near East. Three millennia later, the competing ways of life between the rancher and the farmer was recognized as one of the fiercest conflicts in the settlement of the American continent. The establishment of land claims in grazing land and the erection of barbed wire fences around crops was blamed for the decline of the livestock market and free-range cattle drives in the 1880s. The rivalry between these two competing groups is illustrated in the Rogers and Hammerstein musical Oklahoma! In the playful song “The Farmer and the Cowman,” each group vents its frustrations with the other in a musical feud. The following exchange highlights the conflict between the sedentary ways of the men who work the earth and the free-spirited ramblings of the men who drive the livestock: Chorus: Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends. All: One man likes to push a plough, The other likes to chase a cow. But that's no reason why they can't be friends . . . Territory folks should stick together; Territory folks should all be pals.23
Though more a display of friendly banter between neighbors than an actual debate on the issue, “The Farmer and the Cowman” encapsulates the inherent conflict between two of the organizing myths of the burgeoning American economy: the gentleman farmer and the free- range cowboy. The battle for resources and for a way of life is a universal one inherent in human biology. Two thousand years prior to Rogers and Hammerstein, Philo also recognized a universal theme regarding human rivalry. He calls his reader’s attention to the archetypal antipathy that is a focal part of the Cain and Abel saga, pointing out that whether the competition is friendly (such as a sporting meet) or unfriendly (such as a war), the realization of competitive acts nearly always takes place outdoors, in a field of some kind. The nature of the land, he argues (that is, the platform for competition) is what truly sparks the inherent rivalry between men rather than any misanthropic feelings harbored against another human being.24 This is also the view espoused in Darwinism – that the scramble for resources (and ultimately, survival), is the true catalyst for all real and symbolic competition. In the case of Cain and Abel, the field of competition was, quite literally, the field of production marked by an
54 altar. That the offering of one figure should receive favor without explanation, generates in the other figure a sense of threat, and the “flight or fight” response is triggered. In animals, such a reaction stems from a survival instinct. This is true for humans, as well; additionally, however, human emotion can also elicit feelings of inadequacy, failure, or jealousy that can also trip the switch and generate a violent reaction to a perceived rivalry.
A Life after Death In a fit punishment for viewing his brother as a competitive entity rather than as a human life, God banishes Cain from the presence of his family and presumably, the whole of the human race. It is in this state of exile that the biblical account gives us our last tantalizing glimpse at the dynamic life of Cain and in this passage, we see his attempt to establish a human community, thus recreating a personal order out of his isolated chaos. In Genesis 4:15-17, the text states that Cain must leave Eden for the Land of Nod, and that he later builds a city and names it after his son Enoch – a passage that encapsulates the paradox of Cain. He is simultaneously a wanderer outside the fold of his family and the father of communal living and therefore, civilization. Augustine relied heavily on the trope of Cain and Abel in Book XV of City of God. Here, he asserts that Abel’s pleasing sacrifice was evidence of his citizenship in God’s heavenly city, while the rejection of Cain’s (and Cain’s subsequent violence) betrayed his allegiance to the earthly realm, or the “city of men.” He considered the literal importance of Cain’s biblical credit as a city-builder, as well. In chapter eight of the same book, Augustine justifies the establishment of a city so early in human history by noting the exceptionally long lives and remarkably prolific progeny-making abilities of the antediluvian men, noting that the exponential nature of human reproduction would have quickly necessitated the need for a communal center amongst a people who had rejected a more nomadic life.25 This particular aspect of Cain’s story proved to be especially significant to later cultural theorists. In his article “The Myth of Cain: Fratricide, City Building, and Politics,” George M. Schulman notes important links between the urban tradition of Cain and the development of modern political theory. He gives special attention to the development of American urbanity, applying the myth of the two brothers to the sentiment first articulated for the field of American studies in Philip Fisher’s Hard Facts that: “In America the first losers are the nomadic natives whom white men call ‘our red brothers’ as they dispossess and slaughter them. America, the
55 proverbial ‘city of the hill,’ the modernizing nation par excellence, is built by Cains on the graves of Abels.” The caveat that Schulman then makes to this statement is significant, however. He notes that: The fratricide makes possible the expansion of the market and the growth of cities on the coast. In a modernizing country, who Abel is shifts with the development of productive forces and classes, but always Cain is the exemplar of a modernizing class against what is represented by Abel . . . Whether as a ruling class or immigrant builders, Cain represents the historical process of modernization that destroys the traditional world and creates the city.26
The American city, therefore, is an entity of this same tradition – a concentrated nucleus of commerce and exchange built out of the unorganized wilderness to combat the inherent human dread of isolation. With the tradition of the American Eden firmly ensconced in the mythology of the continent, the emergence of industrial urban centers in the eastern forests, Midwestern prairies, and Pacific mountains showed that the mark of Cain was not only fixed upon his brow, but also upon the face of the land.
The Social Context of Steinbeck’s Text These varying motifs form a significant economic tradition for the story; in modern terms, Cain is the prototype for the profit-driven, competition-savvy, urban capitalist. God’s reasoning to Cain, “If you do well, will you not be accepted?”27 echoes ironically in the ear of free-market economists – there is no guarantee of success, no promise that the market will treat all offerings with favor. In American Literature and Social Change, Michael Spindler makes note of how economic shifts are reflected in the literature of their era. He cites numerous economic studies on patterns of manufacturing and purchasing among the American public, and divides the economic history of the country into two phases: production-oriented and consumption-oriented. The two world wars mark the most significant changes in economic attitudes, with the first war issuing in the consumption-oriented phase and the second war solidifying its place developing it into full-blown consumerism. Spindler notes: H.T. Oshima has shown that in the American economy of the post-First World War period producer or fixed-asset production ceased to dominate the total production of durables and structures, and was replaced as the leading characteristic of the economy by the formation of consumer assets, that is, the purchasing of dwellings and durables by households corresponding respectively
56 to the purchase of factories and machinery by business. In his conclusions he propounded the view that this development of the consumer sector was “a natural outcome of the maturation of the business sector of the capitalist economy.”28
War was not the only aspect of social change that spurred on such a shift, however. Certain well-timed industrial innovations, such as Ford’s introduction of the assembly line in automobile manufacturing in 1914 greatly increased output, decreased cost, and made a previous luxury far more-accessible to the average person. As Spindler points out, the changes in the automobile industry (as it could now justly be termed) was a catalyst for a major shift, since it sparked an across-the-board increase in demand for “capital goods such as steel and heavy machinery and [promised] rich possibilities for capital absorption.”29 This new-found factory efficiency gave America the edge it needed to enjoy an industrial explosion when war broke out in Europe. Though the country remained politically neutral for several more years, its production sympathies were certainly aligned with the British and French. Between 1914 and 1915, for example, the dollar amount of foreign exports jumped from $34,895,123 to $52,410,857. As the war progressed, the imports to allied nations continued to rise, while imports to Germany and Austria-Hungary tapered drastically. By the end of the war in 1918, the amount of American foreign exports was up to $81,059,314 annually.30 American industrialization was an unquestioned beneficiary of the war as the national production and exportation continued to develop. The gain was not all to be had in the manufacturing sector, either. Both private and government-sponsored purchasing agents poured into America from Britain, seeking to buy anything from grain to vegetables to meat in order to provide rations for troops. The demand, of course, drove the prices up as American farmers found a new market desirous of large quantities. The politically savvy anticipated such a buying trend, and made speculative investments as well as handsome profits. There was criticism among some camps for this corporate and individual war-time profiteering, but as the American government was not yet involved in the conflict, most people regarded these actions merely as business ventures. With America’s entrance into the conflict in 1917, however, the market was facing another set of demands. This was to be the first large-scale foreign war for the United States – the Spanish-American War had been fought much closer to home than France, and was far more limited in its troop engagement. As recruiting stations and draft boards sprang up around the
57 country, so too did the country’s own demand for a non-perishable, easily transported food supply. Agricultural centers with a favorable climate and extended growing season were especially well-positioned to meet this demand. Even California could enter the fray because of the efficiency of the transcontinental rail system, which could move a shipment of freight from the edge of the Pacific to the docks of the Atlantic (and from there, onto to Europe) in less than a week. The shifts in agricultural production markedly changed the west coast, including the Salinas Valley, Steinbeck’s own beloved home. The dramatic (and rather sudden) upswing in the American economy had another effect on the national psyche – the conflict of socialist labor parties and capitalist business owners that was sweeping Europe was threatening to make in-roads in the United States, as well. Those individuals who had profited during the war years, according to the argument, had only done so on the backs of the common worker and why should one man prosper while another starves? The result of this unsettlement was a series of violent strikes and socialist demands, more ideologically and politically forceful than those that had occurred at the close of the nineteenth century. In 1919, nearly one fifth of American workers were striking in protest of the economic injustice that free market policies seemed to perpetuate.31 The shift in America’s economic orientation was a change that sparked the fear of rejection under the capitalist system.
The Novel In 1952, John Steinbeck released a quasi-autobiographical novel which narrated an imagined history of his hometown, and in which a young Steinbeck himself appears as a minor character. East of Eden, whose title makes clear its intentions to stand as a re-figuration of the story of Cain, traces the movements of a family from immediately after the Civil War to their settlement in the Salinas Valley at the beginning of the twentieth century. It is here that the lives of the aptly-named twins, Aaron (Aron) and Caleb (Cal), and their father Adam Trask, weave into the American narrative of growth and struggle, and culminate in the cultural upheaval of the First World War. The story the novel tells, as the narrator insists throughout the text, is not a new one. The emotional realities are an inherent part of human nature and the ancient ties are part of a memory-based inheritance genetically imprinted upon the human psyche. When the book’s homegrown philosopher, Samuel Hamilton, arrives at the farm (at the summons of the Trask
58 family servant, Lee) to assist the abandoned Adam with the naming of his sons, he makes the wry suggestion of naming them after the Bible’s first sons, Cain and Abel: Adam said, “No, we can’t do that.” ‘I know we can’t. That would be tempting whatever fate there is. But isn’t it odd that Cain is maybe the best-known name in the world and as far as I know only one man has ever borne it?” Lee said, “Maybe that’s why the name never changed its emphasis.”32
The discussion centers around the ancient brothers because the three men cannot seem to reconcile the obsession of the human race with such a violent and terrible story. Adam, emerging from his depression and engaging actively in conversation for the first time in a year voices his own frustration with the story: “I remember being a little outraged at God. Both Cain and Abel gave what they had, and God accepted Abel and rejected Cain . . . Why did God condemn Cain? That’s an injustice.”33 The men can find no motivation for God’s actions in the biblical text, and Lee makes the following observation about the story’s appeal through the universal frustration of perceived rejection: “Of course, people are interested only in themselves. If a story is not about the hearer he will not listen. And here I make a rule – a great and lasting story is about everyone or it will not last. The strange and foreign is not interesting – only the deeply personal and familiar.” Samuel said, “Apply that to the Cain-Abel story.” And Adam said, “I didn’t kill my brother – “Suddenly he stopped and his mind went reeling back in time. “I think I can,” Lee answered Samuel. “I think this is the best-known story in the world because it is everybody’s story. I think it is the symbol story of the human soul. I’m feeling my way now – don’t jump on me if I’m not clear. The greatest terror a child can have is that he is not loved, and rejection is the hell he fears. I think everyone in the world to a large or small extent has felt rejection. And with rejection comes anger, and with anger some kind of crime in revenge for the rejection, and with the crime, guilt – and there is the story of mankind. I think that if rejection could be amputated, the human would not be what he is. Maybe there would be fewer crazy people. I am sure in myself there would not be many jails. It is all there – the start, the beginning. One child, refused the love he craves, kicks the cat and hides his secret guilt; another steals so that money will make him loved; and a third conquers the world – and always the guilt and revenge and more guilt. The human is the only guilty animal. Now wait! Therefore I think this old and terrible story is important because it is a chart of the soul – the secret, rejected, guilty soul. Mr. Trask, you said you did not kill your brother and then you remembered something. I don’t want to know what it was, but was it very far apart from Cain and Abel?”34
59 The motif of acceptance versus rejection comes to fruition in the lives of the twins at climax of the novel, when Cal proudly presents to Adam the forty thousand dollars he has saved through poker bets and savvy investments. He expects his father to be thrilled that the family fortune, which was lost in a bad business venture, can now be restored. Instead, Adam is repelled by the offer, since most of it resulted from war-time profiteering in vegetable sales. He tells his son: “I don’t want it ever. I would have been so happy if you could have given me – well, what you’re brother has – pride in the thing he’s doing, gladness in his progress. Money, even clean money, doesn’t stack up with that . . . Have I made you angry, son? Don’t be angry. If you want to give me a present – give me a good life. That would be something I could value.”
In Steinbeck’s story, the murder of Abel is less direct than the biblical account – Cal reveals to his seminarian brother that their mother Kate is the madam of a local cat house. This action prompts Aron, out of shame and disgust, to enlist in the army and head to his death on the front lines of Europe. In the days following Aron’s secret enlistment, Adam asks Cal why his brother has not been home; Cal replies in the timeless words of Cain: “How do I know? . . . Am I supposed to look after him?” It is only after this exchange that Cal then makes his burnt offering, as “he lifted one of the crisp bills, creased it down the middle so that it made an angle, and then he scratched a match under his desk and lighted the bill. The heavy paper curled and blackened, the flame ran upward . . . He stripped odd another bill and lightened it.”35 Rejected by his father for a reason he cannot comprehend and tormented by the jealousy and hatred he does not wish to feel against his brother, Cal must face the same emotional punishment of Cain. The difference is that Cal has no Land of Nod into which he can retreat. America is already east of Eden – the territory of the rejected and the criminal, the ambitious and the industrious builder of cities. And for those who came to America and still sought to wander, they had a whole continent before them in which to do so, until they hit California and ran out of land. The Cains of Steinbeck’s Salinas Valley have no retreat save for their own souls and their continued struggles in the world. Adam’s final word of “Timshel” reiterates in Hebrew the theme of the novel and the imperative of God to Cain that though “sin is lurking at the door . . . you must master it.”36 The men and women of America’s post-World War One society were faced with this same challenge – how to master the workings of a system that surrounds and dominates them, yet seems set against them.
60 The Social Context of Miller’s Text A generation after America’s first major shift from a production to consumption-based economy, Steinbeck was able to reflect on the change, and detect in it the ancient strains of humanity’s own labor against the seemingly-fickle dominant powers. His hindsight was probably triggered, at least in part, by the final vaulting into what Spindler terms the “consumption-oriented phase of the American economy.”37 In the years immediately following the Second World War, a new social awareness of economic confidence had spread among the American middle class, and that class was growing. Close to sixty percent of the American population now fell under this classification, and the average household income grew by nearly 300% from the beginning of the war to 1955. In The American Century, Harold Evans notes these statistics as part of the dramatic upswing of American fortunes and adds, “America, with 6 percent of the world’s population was consuming one third of the world’s goods and services. But at that same time 6 percent was making no less than two thirds of the world’s manufactures.”38 In 1947, former Navy Seabee and veteran of the Pacific theatre Bill Levitt launched the first of the building projects that were to bear his name, build his fortune, and change the face of the American landscape. Each home promised 800 square feet of living space, modern appliances like refrigerators and washing machines, and the comfortable lifestyle of the new American middle class – all for under $7000. Mortgages were offered and special loans were made available specifically for returning servicemen. Levittowns appeared in New York, Pennsylvania, and eventually even in the U.S. territory of Puerto Rico, and there were similar projects popping up elsewhere across the country. Evans notes that, “some 13 million homes were bought in the decade after 1948.”39 Suburban consumer bliss was born. “Fuelled at first by large personal savings accumulated during the war years,” Spindler writes, “the consumer boom of the late 1940s established those features of a consumer society which emerged during the 1920s in a much larger scale.”40 As resources such as rubber and plastic were freed from rationing restrictions, industrial output and mass production capabilities could transfer from wartime necessities to items that were erstwhile luxuries such as automobiles and children’s toys.
61 It is not merely the physical presence of wealth that directed this shift, however, but the recently-acquired national confidence in American exceptionalism and the developing dichotomy of capitalism versus communism that created a new divide between “us” and “them” in the years immediately following World War Two. Fascism was eradicated in Europe by the combined efforts of the Allies and their home-front. But now a different kind of enemy loomed and the foreseeable battleground would be an ideological rather than physical one. The socialist trend had been contained to the radical fringes in America but its rally in the years following the First World War remained a political fear. It is in this context that Arthur Miller’s first major production, All My Sons (1947), made its Broadway debut. A professional and commercial success, it explored a crumbling family facing an ethical dilemma as they face the capitalist conundrum of war-time profiteering and letting go of the past. It is in his second play, Death of a Salesman (1949) – which, ironically, is usually considered to be a character piece rather than a social commentary – that Miller tackles some of the deeper issues of the free market economy. For this reason, Spindler labels Salesman as a play about “Consumer man in crisis”41 but the conflict is much deeper, and older, than American capitalism.
The Play The broken myth of the American bucolic ideal had become apparent – the manufacturing boom during the war years had firmly established urban industrialism as the wave of the future. The Great Depression of the 1930s effectively marked the end of the independent American agriculturalist, as family farms and ranches were abandoned out of necessity or repossessed by force. The pre-war industrialism and post-war affluence only sealed the fate of the rural, pastoral existence that had been a staple of the American vision since its inception and created in its place the new promise of consumer- and competition-driven happiness. As Spindler writes, “The spirit of independence and self-reliance declined and a hierarchical status system created an anxiety-producing interpersonal assessment of social worth.”42 Throughout his career, critics hailed Miller as the poet of the common people in pursuit of the elusive American Dream: the voice of the middle-class, self-made man who questions the very self he made; the conscience of the working man who just wanted to keep up with the proverbial Joneses. It was in his concern for the state of the American everyman that Miller
62 found another archetypical figure as the most compelling source for inspiration – two figures, in fact: Cain and Abel. Miller often alluded to the story of these brothers in his writings. Many critics saw strains of the ancient conflict in his play The Price, with the fraternal conflict between Victor and Walter; others found it in After the Fall, in Quentin’s struggles with guilt and responsibility; and Miller addressed this theme very literally in his rarely-studied and critically-panned 1972 play, Creation of the World and Other Business. We see his interest in the figures of Cain and Abel in his non-dramatic writings, as well, such as when Miller specifically evokes Cain’s question of “Am I my Brother’s Keeper?” in his essay of the same title, in which he questions his own place as a pacifist American Jew during the Holocaust. Miller often remarked that he regarded the Genesis account of Cain and Abel as the “first real story” because it involved choice, responsibility, morality, and purely human conflict.43 There is little question that elements of the story are present in several of his works, but I propose that we can see him begin to explore the motif in several of his earlier works, perhaps most notably, in his 1949 masterpiece, Death of a Salesman. An initial reading of Salesman in this light reveals a number of fairly obvious parallels. There is fraternal competition and paternal anger; men make offerings and cultivate jealousy. And there are character parallels. For example, Biff, like Cain, is a wanderer who has left home after his father hurts him. Yet despite his searching and inner turmoil, we are hopeful that Biff will be successful in the end by leaving the city and its meaningless pursuits behind him. We see a further connection to Cain through the character of Ben, who has also rejected the city and the penny-pinching existence that it offers and has become a wanderer himself, roaming everywhere from Alaska to Africa and leaving a trail of financial successes in his wake. And Willy, like Abel, conveniently dies. But upon deeper examination, this premise seems flawed; it is a far too simplified application of the Cain and Abel motif – a reading based upon elements rather than themes. Yes, Biff certainly wanders, but why? And what is he doing while he wanders? And there is definitely jealousy, but on whose part? And while there was the requisite pair (or pairs) of brothers, is that really where the deepest conflict lies? While it is certainly not intended to be an obvious allusion, the story of Cain and Abel is unquestionably present in Death of a Salesman, but it is not evoked in any kind of predictable
63 way. To read through it, one can still understand the underlying tragedy and overreaching moral of the text; but to read in light of it, one can come to appreciate those same themes in a new and slightly different manner. The initial obstacle is establishing and justifying the identities of the two main characters: just who are Salesman’s Cain and Abel? As numerous scholars of Miller’s work have pointed out, the play is truly Willy’s, shared occasionally by Biff. The other characters are obviously important, but it is the interaction between Willy and Biff and the internal conflict that Willy faces alone that ultimately give Salesman its Aristotelian-decreed plot movement. It is therefore upon these two characters that the roles of Cain and Abel are projected. It is true that it may seem a bit of a stretch to connect the relationship of father and son with that of two brothers – especially when there are several sets of brothers already present in Salesman. However, the parallel does not seem as unlikely when one considers that the conflict between the two men is not rooted so much in their relationship of father and son as in their differing views of what is an acceptable role for a man in the world of business, and according to Willy, “the man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead.”44 It is in their relationship to the professional world that they are paired, and I shall discuss this issue further below. At the moment, however, let us first consider Biff in the role of Abel. Abel, of course, is the favorite son who works with livestock. His ultimate demise is important, too, of course, but it is his notable aspects while living that make the most obvious connection to Biff, because Biff, too, is the favorite son, the golden boy who can do no wrong in his father’s eyes. Even when he steals a football from the high school and cheats on his homework, Willy (as the doting father) encourages Biff rather than punishes him. Willy does not reject the lesser son, Happy, but he does not praise him in the same way. As an adult, Biff further embodies the character of Abel by working on a ranch, in animal husbandry, a profession his father sharply contradicts not once, but twice. Turning to the character of Willy it is his hubris – his pride and capacity for envy – that, like Cain, provides his primary characterization. His perceived inadequacy haunts him, as does his lack of acceptance, and it is this that drives him to kill. And as a kind of final nudge to the audience regarding Willy’s archetypical identity, we see at the play’s climax his sudden desire to plant a garden. The last time that we see Willy alive, he is in the backyard, cultivating a
64 vegetable patch in a clear visual link to the first gardener, Cain, and an obvious contrast to his cattle rancher son. It is important, too, to take note of the tradition from which Willy comes. His father, as Ben tells us, “was a very great and very wild-hearted man. We would start in Boston, and he’d toss the whole family into the wagon and then he’d drive the team right across the country; through Ohio and Indiana, Michigan, Illinois and all the Western states. And we’d stop in the towns and sell the flutes that he’d made on the way.”45 It is possible that through the unseen character of Willy’s father, Miller is tapping into the stereotype of the Jewish peddler, a solitary figure who is forced to roam about the country side – ever entering into the community but never accepted as a part of it. And now, though Willy feels the encroaching city is trapping him, he is no more stationary as an adult than he was as a child, because Willy, too, has accepted his inheritance in the more modern form of the proverbial “traveling salesman.” Post-War America was certainly a hospitable climate for such a profession. Spindler notes that in the late 1940s, “recruitment into white-collar occupations and the service trade continued to increase, as selling became a pervasive activity directly involving over three million people, some 38 percent of whom were mobile salesmen.”46 By embracing the rules of this figure, by immersing himself in this archetypical role, Willy has marked himself symbolically just as God placed a mark upon Cain, which denotes him as a wanderer, a traveler in the liminal reaches of society – a part of, but apart from, all he encounters. We see the adherence of this label when Willy approaches Howard to ask for a position in New York. “You’re a road man, Willy” Howard tells him. “And we do road business.”47 Howard is right when he tells Willy that there is no place for him in New York – Willy, like Cain, is destined to wander. The irony, of course, is that New York is no Eden. The stage directions demonstrate that the cityscape is dominating, immense, and inescapable; and like his ancient counterpart, Willie is living in a world that is already fallen and his work is already cursed, so while he may travel long distances from his family, he has never known a Paradise of rest and permanence. Nevertheless, his travels stand as a kind of banishment from the now-gone happiness of his home circle. He must work to pay the mortgage and the home repairs, and he must travel to work. Again, like Cain, Willy has only ever known labor, and it is this that he offers up…but to whom? Just who is God in this post-Lapsarian America?
65 Miller’s cynical answer is, of course, the American economy – the overarching force that has created a new morality and affluence, which has in turn created a new breed of human: the American businessman. Ben tells Biff, “Never fight fair with a stranger, boy. You’ll never get out of the jungle that way.”48 As Spindler points out, “‘Jungle’ is used here, of course, as the stock Social Darwin metaphor for the city under laissez-faire capitalism.”49 In this view then, is Willy’s offering of an urbanized, salesman’s life not a more pleasing gift to the deity of Capitalism? Is not pursuit of wealth the new worship of the new god in the post-war American prosperity? Would not Willy, then, be the son upon whom Fortune would smile, while rejecting Biff’s outdated, and painfully obsolete offering of agricultural labor? Is Willy not truly the favorite son of our new American religion? It is with this very conclusion that Miller convicts both his characters and his audience: this may be a fallen world, but God is still God and no man-made economy – no matter how far- reaching or universally dominant – can replace ultimate truth. Transcendent of time and place, a simple existence enjoying nature and quiet contentedness is still a purer form of truth than a dog- eat-dog, nickel-and-diming-it-to-pay-for-luxuries kind of life. Biff and Hap demonstrate this conflict in their first scene. Biff admits that he is afraid that his work on the ranches is a waste because it’s not “makin’ my future.” Helplessly, he turns to his brother and asks: Biff: Are you content, Hap? You’re a success aren’t you? Hap: Hell no! Biff: Why? You’re making money, aren’t you? Happy (moving about with energy, expressiveness): All I can do now is wait for the merchandise manager to die. And suppose I get to be the merchandise manager? He’s a good friend of mine, and he just built a terrific estate on Long Island. And he lived there about two months and sold it, and now he’s building another one. He can’t enjoy it once it’s finished. And I know that’s just what I would do. I don’t know what the hell I’m working for. Sometimes I sit in my apartment – all alone. And I think of the rent I’m paying. And it’s crazy. But then, it’s what I always wanted. My own apartment, a car, and plenty of women. And still, goddammit, I’m lonely.50
Mammon may be king in this fallen world, but it is not and cannot replace God, though the American business man may now self-deify his own figure into the angelic purveyor of Wall Street’s blessings by viewing himself in the role of Provider rather than at the mercy of the One who Provides. Men may lose sight of Truth, but that does not alter or destroy it in any way.
66 It is Biff therefore, who, like Abel, is the one who makes the offering most pleasing to the Lord. Because this is a fallen world, the offering must be made in the form of work – but Willy has misunderstood the rules. He believes that the offering to be made is in the end result rather than the effort. While this worldview is not unlike that of Camus’ Sisyphus, consider what Willy holds as the pinnacle of what his career has to offer: Dave Singleman, a legendary salesman who, according to Willy: drummed merchandise in thirty-one states. And old Dave, he’d go up to his room, y’understand, put on his green velvet slippers – I’ll never forget – and pick up his phone and call the buyers, and without ever leaving his room, at the age of eightyy-four, he made his living. And when I saw that, I realized that selling was the greatest career a man could want.51
What Willy has misunderstood, however, is that the work of Dave Singleman is not work – it is profitable leisure, which is a privilege only afforded to those who came before the fall of man. Consider his last name, after all – Singleman. It was only when Adam was the single man on earth that he was granted the luxury of self-sufficiency without effort. The introduction of woman to the world and their subsequent sin, put an end to those days forever. What Willy and all capitalists seek – a financial windfall as a result of their efforts that can put end to their daily work – in Miller’s view, is an offer displeasing to God because it denies and defies man’s God- given punishment. Working toward a goal of ease, of respite; working for a financial master be it a mortgage or appliance repair or a car payment, is not a recognition of God’s curse and sovereignty; working for survival, for sustenance, such as being a farmhand, is an acknowledgement of the true nature of work and therefore, redemption – because there is redemption to be found in this world – but not in sales to be made or deals to be closed. Biff has found it on the ranches out west and Willy, on the brink of madness, seeks it in his vegetable garden – his return to a simpler time, to a better time. But the catch is that Biff is a member of a dying breed, after all. Though Willy-as-Cain is the one who dies in the play, it must also be noted that he is the murderer, too; and Biff-as-Abel is hardly granted longevity. As has already been established, the plight of the American farmer was bleak in the post-war era, as a business-based economy had showed itself to be the future of the country. Willy may not survive, but the profession he embodies – or wishes to – does. And it is Cain, in the end, who was the city-builder.
67 Ultimately, Willy and Cain ask the same pointed question: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” But whereas Cain asks this to avoid responsibility for his wasting of a life, Willy asks it in an attempt to embrace responsibility for his past failures, or as Miller once wrote, “he gave his life, or sold it, in order to justify the waste of it.”52
In his famous essay “The Salesman has a Birthday,” which commemorates the one-year anniversary of the play’s opening, Miller writes that: “A time will come when [future generations] will look back on us astonished that we saw something holy in the competition for the means of existence.”53 His view of America’s future was not a wholly optimistic one, but like God’s promise in Genesis to Cain that he possesses the inherent ability to sin, so too does Miller foresee a time when competition and envy and jealousy will no longer cloud the offerings humanity puts forth. Death of a Salesman is ultimately a tragedy not only because it is Willy’s coming to terms with his own broken life, but because the characters fail to recognize themselves as players in a kind of farcical Genesis. In this new world, this great American Eden, humanity has repeated its same tragic story.
Conclusion Though East of Eden explores the social situation of an earlier era than does Death of a Salesman, both works reveal a similar sense of economic awareness. Roughly contemporary texts (Salesman preceded Eden by three years), they express similar anxieties about the current American situation and the seemingly random successes and failures of the capitalist system. Though Steinbeck is much more overt about his refiguring of the biblical story of Cain and Abel than is Miller, the evocation of the myth and the traditions it has accumulated across time and culture, is significant move in the pattern of mythic rhetoric. The ideas encapsulated by the story – the fear of failure and rejection – are the inherited memories of countless generations of people working to survive in the face of seemingly fickle forces. America is the land of economic freedom – the freedom to profit (as Ben and Cal did) and freedom to fail (as Willy’s futile selling efforts and Adam’s refrigerated lettuce shipments did). What both Miller and Steinbeck recognized in the story of Cain and Abel was the same thing that was Philo and Augustine observed, the medieval playwrights recognized and, (most
68 importantly) by the men and women who preserved these ideas and developed them with each successive political change. The story can represent so much more than simply a blood feud between brothers. It gives a voice to the ancient and universal struggle for dominance, power, and security. The curse of an unyielding ground is the same fear that has haunted the self- sufficient in every economic system throughout history. As Steinbeck reminds us, the story is not new; rather, it repeats itself throughout the pageant of human history because of our own willing blindness to the Cain that lurks inside of all of us. Samuel makes note of this fact, observing, “Cain lived and had children, and Abel lives only in the story. We are Cain’s children.”54 The elimination of Abel did not resolve the conflict, but instead guaranteed its perpetuity – this is the unfortunate truth that the central characters of both East of Eden and Death of a Salesman fail to recognize. Competition will always exist, and those who deny the lessons of the past will ultimately become unwary Cains projecting their insecurities and anxieties upon unsuspecting Abels.
Even in modern, industrial America the story had a place. Miller and Steinbeck understood the power of the myth – a power that existed in its ancient and universal themes. And as the focus of the American identity shifted from its agricultural reliability to its capitalistic might, these authors sought to resurrect the myth in order to create a connection between their modern situation and the timeless plight of man. With the help of Miller and Steinbeck, the figure of Cain – still marked by the guilt of fratricide – reaches across the centuries to offer fraternity to those who know the frustration of a failed offering and the sting of rejected effort.
69 PART TWO:
ADAPTATIONS AND NEGOTIATIONS
70 CHAPTER FOUR Cain, Caliban, and Crow: The Outcast Speaks
“You taught me language, and my profit on’t Is, I know how to curse. The red-plague rid you For learning me your language!” – Caliban, The Tempest
“I spect you gwan to make a show of me.” – Ginger Blue, The Virginia Mummy
The character of Cain has undergone an incredible series of metamorphoses throughout the western literary tradition. In Chapter Four we explored the development of the myth of Cain as it came to have political and economic interpretations in successive retellings of it. The previous discussion hinged upon the constancy of the story across time and space and its elemental sameness despite thematic change and differing agendas of the author or commentator. This chapter is dedicated to the reception of another important facet of Cain’s character – its changing form as it developed in new traditions separate and apart from its original narrative context. This study will focus on just one of those manifestations: the character development of Cain as the vocal other. As already discussed, the nature of a lore cycle is, in some ways, akin to genetic biology. The curly hair or violet eyes of an ancestor may not show up in the descendants for several generations until some undetectable force or a particular combination of triggers re-activates those traits to re-emerge and speak to an all but forgotten or unrealized link between the generations. With a lore cycle, those traits come in the form of gestures, images, themes, ideas, and symbols. Unlike the intentional evocation of myths explored in the previous chapters, these traits are not consciously invoked and embedded in the text for the sake of fulfilling a specific agenda. For one thing, these traits are often unrecognizable in their current form, bearing little resemblance to the original through the convoluted and complicated history of human reception, usage, interpretation, and elaboration. Secondly, these lore cycles are not incorporations of the whole: we do not see the full story enacted or a recognizable character re-formed. Instead, they pull out only certain aspects of the iconography to pass on; they only tug at certain strings rather than the entire fabric. The selection of these elements may be seemingly arbitrary – perhaps is, in many cases. But for many of the persistent traits there seems to be a buried justification
71 somewhere, an obscure but nevertheless logical connection that explains the pieces of older stories and figures in later ones that bear no obvious connection. And finally, these lore cycles are almost always the exclusive domain of vernacular culture. I would argue against the conventional notion that creative production is the realm of the leisure class that has the time to devote to a cause other than survival. This may be true to a degree, but it is hard to examine, say, a collection of African-American spirituals composed in the cotton fields and slave quarters of antebellum plantations and stand by such an assertion. Just as there is cultural output that stems from the need to fill a life marked by ease, so too is there cultural output that emerges in the midst of survival struggles. A text produced by hegemonic forces historically betrays its own reception awareness and the cultural tradition of which it is a part and that it helps to continue. That is not to imply that “low” culture is not also part of a continued chronicle of production, but there are more ambiguities in this family tree than that of “high art” because the habits of history and advantages of a predominantly written versus an oral culture have generally only preserved for us the hegemonic cultural lineage. We will, therefore, be looking at the lore cycle of Cain as it emerges in two very distinct cultural contexts. The first is in Renaissance England, where the works of William Shakespeare were revolutionizing the stage and the audiences were a heterogeneous conglomeration of laborers, middle class, and nobility. The second context is that of the mid-nineteenth century trans-Atlantic stage, in which blackface minstrelsy was simultaneously re-enforcing the racially- defined social strata and shaking their very foundations.
Caliban It may seem a bit of a stretch to classify Shakespeare’s works as “vernacular” when they are generally held up as the pinnacle of high culture in modern public schools. It is essential to remember, however, that the Bard was a tradesman with little formal education and no family connections to the upper crust. What we must remember, too, is that Shakespeare’s writing was a radical break from conventional and hegemonic notions in its time. The shift away from strictly liturgical drama in the early sixteenth century had only strayed so far as moralizing dramas that were less allegorical than actual church-sanctioned morality plays. Formal stages – not simply ale house platforms – were a thing only of classical memory. This is a very significant fact, as Gary Taylor points out,
72 since the first European theatres built since the decline of Rome were constructed in Madrid in 1575 and in London the following year.1 The niche was new but what was more important, the niche was disruptive. There is no question that the staging of many medieval morality plays would shock puritanical American religious sensibilities, but the plays always remained within the watchful eye of the clerical authorities. Even when the language and gestures veered more towards the Anglo-Saxon and less toward the Norman-French, they only offered commentary upon the world of sinful human nature and not upon the hegemonic forces of church and crown. In short, they were both contained and containable. We see a very different relationship between the Renaissance dramatists and the socio- political forces in control of their society. As Taylor writes, “Literary historians remember, within the niche of their genres, the playwrights of early modern England because they created new forms of vernacular drama from classical models and fundamental to the way subsequent generations conceived of theatre, poetry and personality.”2 At times, the companies were very much in favor and were graced by the patronage of the Queen and sponsored by various of her courtiers. At other times, the companies were received less graciously and had to figure out new ways to adapt to the various new legal sanctions and limitations placed against them. When the church forbade the performance of any holy rites on stage, dramatists adapted by including such characters as the Roman wedding-god Hymen or Circe, his female counterpart, to oversee the festivities, facilitate the union, and encourage procreation. The same actions, ideas, gestures, and ultimate result were all present but they took a new form in order to keep their cultural carriers alive.
It is not surprising, then, that we should see something similar occurring in the character of Caliban. Though his development was clearly not facilitated by any legal restrictions, it is apparent that his voice incorporates many of the same complaints, motivations, and traits as an earlier counterpart. It could be argued that Cain serves here as an archetype but he is actually less – or more – than that. He has provided an array of gestures from which subsequent cultures have picked and chosen to preserve and incorporate into their own forms. Eventually, the reproduction is at best only partially aware of its own copying. True to Bourdieu’s concept of
73 habitus, it is merely preserving and transmitting the elements of its own context because that is what it knows. Shakespeare’s construction of Caliban the Other is no exception. The Age of Exploration recognized new-found continents and established imperial colonies, and in so doing prompted a distinct rise in nationalism among the colonizers. The tendency of European adventurers to record their experiences with foreign people as monstrous encounters with the antithesis of European ideals was a clearly established precedent by the Renaissance; as contact with new races, customs, and behaviors increased, so too did an identity forged from a sense of “what we are not.” Native peoples living outside the confines of western Christian civilization were regularly accused of human sacrifice, undomesticatable wildness, and cannibalism. These traits, long-associated with the fiendish children of Cain, became the conceptual lexicon through which the indigenous people were translated to European minds and the pattern upon which their Otherness could be portrayed – in other words, the manner in which the unfamiliar could be made understandable. And the poster child for this issue of cultural translation who has been at the center of the colonialist debate since at least the eighteenth century is Caliban, the monstrous native of Shakespeare’s Tempest who mars the otherwise utopian island that Prospero claims. This intriguing character, whose name is clearly an anagram for “cannibal” is clearly part of this trend of Othering the native. Shakespeare takes pains to assure the audience that Caliban is certainly no human but rather, a “freckled whelp, hag-born[,] not honor’d with/A human shape” whose mother was “This damn’d witch Sycorax.” Despite the best efforts of the politically dominant Prospero and Miranda to assimilate the creature into their civilized world by teaching him to speak human language, Caliban bitterly remarks, “My profit on’t/Is, I know how to curse.”3 Quinones asserts that the attributes of isolation, cannibalism, cursing, physical deformity, and demonic patronage all point to Caliban as a direct literary descendant of Cain. He further notes, “although he has no brother, he nevertheless figures prominently in Shakespeare’s last great brother drama, The Tempest, where his function, like Cain’s, is once again to disturb visions of community and harmony.”4 Quinones is right to label The Tempest as a “brother drama” but his failure to elaborate upon the idea leaves an important point undiscussed – the motif of fraternal violence driven by jealousy. Such an act is, in fact, the precipitating event for
74 the action of the play. It was Antonio’s unsuccessful attempt to steal the Dukedom by killing his brother Prospero and Prospero’s infant daughter Miranda by starvation/drowning in a leaky and provision-less vessel that causes the still-living Prospero to conjure up the storm that washes up Alonso and the rest of the ship’s passengers onto the shores of the magician’s island home in order to enact revenge and to restore the divinely-ordained order of things. Antonio proves that twelve years have not changed his nature when he convinces Sebastian to kill his own brother in order to obtain his title, lands, and power. The rivalry is not confined to the human players, either. Though the spirit Ariel was the servant and not the son of Caliban’s mother Sycorax, the two have nevertheless found themselves as rivals for Prospero’s benevolence and power upon his assumption of the island. Though sometimes a bit audacious, Ariel is the dutiful lackey of their new master, promptly does his bidding, and willingly offers his services for exploitation according to Prospero’s plans. Caliban, however, is the grudging servant who curses his master and challenges his authority: As wicked dew as e’er my mother brushed With raven’s feather from unwholesome fen Drop on you both! A south-west blow on ye, And blister you all o’er! . . . This island is mine by Sycorax my mother, Which thou tak’st from me. . . . All the charms Of Sycorax, toads, beetles, bats light upon you! For I am all the subjects that you have, Which first was mine own king.5
With rivalry and revenge oozing from the motives of so many characters, it is difficult to ignore the thematic ties to the same undercurrent in the Cain and Abel legend.6 Indeed, despite some thematic links and perhaps a veneration of Cain’s character on Caliban’s part, one would be hard-pressed to argue that Caliban is intended to be read as a Cain figure. He offers no scorned sacrifice – in fact, the offering he does make of his island home is accepted far too readily by Prospero; he plans a murder for Stephano to carry out but the act is never committed; he is never cast away from society and never wanders – rather, as Prospero reminds him, he is “Deservedly confin’d into this rock;”7 he curses more than he is cursed; and he certainly never builds a city. The link to his mythic predecessor is simply not one of story or of character. Instead, the connections that we sense between Cain and Caliban are the elements of a lore cycle still weaving its way in and out of human awareness. He was not written as a Cain-
75 figure in the sense that he is espousing the archetypal form. Instead, he merely incorporates various features of Cain that have been remembered and transmitted with associated ideas, and emerged in the mind of an author who recombined these elements into a new and distinct figure. The memory that he represents is not one of thematic ties – the commonalities are incidental ones that abound in western literature. Rather, it is the memory of traits. We see that Caliban is prone to disruption and defiance of order. We acknowledge that he is the firstborn of the island who knows its lands and possesses a sense of birthright as well as indignancy. We witness his rage and his defiance and we (as a modern audience, at least) recognize his anger at an unexplained injustice as warranted. In this we see elements of many stories and figures. But it is in Caliban’s monstrosity that we see Cain.
While the narrative in Genesis states that Cain was the first born of post-lapsarian sexual union between Adam and Eve, one of the foundational elements of Cain’s later literary forms is the tradition that he was the son of Satan or a high-ranking hellion rather than of Adam. This tradition was developed first in Jewish folklore, but was readily absorbed into Christian beliefs as well, probably because it not only helped to defame an already unsympathetic character but also because it furthers the image of Eve as morally debased, if not a temptress. In recording the Rabbinic roots of this legend Oliver Emerson points out that the assertion is made explicitly in a number of rabbinic writings.8 He even cites an important passage from Legends of the Patriarchs and Prophets by Baring-Goulds, which was originally published in 1881. In giving voice to the ancient Hebrew legends of the first murderer, the authors write: “According to some Rabbis, all good souls are derived from Abel, and all bad souls from Cain. Cain’s soul was derived from Satan, his body alone from Eve; for the evil spirit Samael according to some, Satan according to others, deceived Eve and thus Cain was the son of the evil one.”9 Friedman makes the point, as well, stressing in his comprehensive study Monstrous Races: Rabbinic tradition . . . developed a suitably evil lineage for Cain. Whereas Genesis tells us simply that Cain was the firstborn of Adam and Eve, the Zohar, a thirteenth century collection of midrashim, explains the difference between the two sons of Adam as follows: “When the serpent injected his impurity into Eve, she absorbed it, and so when Adam had intercourse with her, she bore two sons – one from the impure side and one from the side of Adam . . . Hence it was that
76 their ways of life were different . . From [Cain] originate all the evil habitations and demons and goblins and evil spirits in the world.”10
Emerson points out that belief in Cain’s demonic origins may even appear in Christian traditions quite early with the first recorded instance possibly occurring in the Christian New Testament, where the author of I John writes, “We must not be like Cain who was from the evil one and murdered his brother. And why did he murder him? Because his own deeds were evil and his brother’s were righteous.”11 While never a mainstream element of orthodox beliefs, the idea that Cain was the progeny of Satan became an accepted part of some of the early heterodox sects. Whether a literal child of the devil himself or merely the first recipient of tainted human seed, the figure of Cain is generally portrayed as an inherently evil figure forever in need of grace but always keeping himself removed from its reaches. We see this same origin assigned to Caliban. Whether meant literally or merely as exasperated hyperbole, Prospero often reminds the monster that he was “got by the Devil himself upon thy wicked Dam” and remarks to himself that Caliban is “A devil, a born devil on whose nature/Nurture can never stick.”12 Demonic origin, an essential part of later Cain legends, is also a defining trait of Caliban’s supposed physical, mental, and emotional nature, rendering him depraved and presumably beyond the reaches of any kind of social or spiritual redemption. The physical malformation can also stem from another source than demonic parentage. There was a hugely popular medieval belief that the mark God placed on Cain was one of monstrosity that would be passed to each successive generation, resulting in a race or multiple races of grotesque creatures, all the posterity of Cain. Friedman asserts that “In the course of time, apocryphal accounts of his legend added many features that made him an ideal ancestor for the monstrous races in hostile Christian treatments. They stressed Cain’s violent nature, his association with the devil, and his degradation from human status, often figured by his ugliness or physical deformity.”13 These bodily afflictions ranged from such demonic iconography as red eyes or horns to physical maladies or monstrous characteristics resulting in sub-human forms. Among the English traditions, the most notable discussion occurs in the text of Beowulf, as the narrator describes the physical deformity placed upon Cain that resulted in a monstrous nature that is perpetuated through his offspring. As the monster descends upon the banquet hall, the scop tells us: So times were pleasant for the people there
77 until finally one, a fiend out of hell, began to work his evil in the world. Grendel was the name of this grim demon haunting the marshes, marauding round the heath and desolate fends; he had dwelt for a time in misery among the banished monsters, Cain’s clan, whom the Creator had outlawed and condemned as outcasts. For the killing of Abel the Eternal Lord had exacted a price: Cain got no good from committing that murder because the Almighty made him anathema and out of the curse of his exile there sprang ogres and elves and evil phantoms and the giants too who strove with God.14
It is from this miserable land that Grendel hails, and later in the text, as his mother plans her own attack, the audience is reminded: Grendel’s mother, monstrous hell-bride, brooded on her wrongs. She had been forced down into fearful water, the cold depths, after Cain had killed his father’s son, felled his own brother with a sword. Branded an outlaw, marked by having murdered, he moved into the wilds, shunned company and joy. And from Cain there sprang misbegotten spirits, among them Grendel the banished and accursed.15
There is some debate as to whether these sections belong in the original text of the epic due to their obvious Christian influences, but the outcome of such a debate is not significant for this discussion, as the presence of such passages clearly indicates that the beliefs were in existence and were being disseminated through the scops. In 1290, we see clear evidence of Cain’s connection with cannibalistic peoples in the English imagination in the creation of the Hereford world map. “Cain’s descendants, who retain his cannibal tendency,” Friedman writes, “are shown on the Hereford world map, where the author places the Anthropophagi in northeast Asia. Their legend reads, ‘Here are exceedingly truculent men, eating human flesh, drinking blood, cursed sons of Cain.’” Friedman asserts that the Cain-as-cannibal tradition seems most likely to stem from the same passage of Vita Adae et Evae as discussed in this work in chapter four. Here, as Eve dreams of watching Cain consume
78 the blood of Abel, there is a clear cannibalistic overtone with no explanation offered, which leaves little room for doubt that the Vita simply recorded an older tradition into a tangible form.16 Cain’s presence as the father-of-monsters is present in another medieval figure, the Wild Man. This character also traces its roots back to the early Christian era, when hermits and desert-sages were often described to have gone so far in their desire to separate from the vanity of the world and sinfulness of man that they traded their civilized way of life for an undomesticated, almost animalistic one. In the Middle Ages, however, the wild man figure took on a different significance. As the tradition developed, he came to be viewed as a hairy creature, encrusted in leaves, mud, moss, and other forest trappings. He separated himself from society and, as Timothy Husband points out, “lived only in places unfit for human habitation, in fens and woods, in water and in mountains, in caves and in bushes.” His choice of habitat was not the only thing that made the wild man an outcast. Husband continues: By every account the wild man’s behavior matched his primitive surrounding. Strong enough to uproot trees, he was violent and aggressive, not only against wild animals but also against his own kind. His brutish, contentious nature expressed itself in a natural combativeness against which neither beast nor man was equal, though his club – and sometimes only his bare hands – was his only weapon . . . By many accounts, the wild man also indulged in cannibalism. By the sixteen century this habit brought him into association with werewolves and other flesh-eaters . . . Incapable of speech, the wild man muttered only unintelligible sounds or none at all.17
Still a real and developing concept in the early Renaissance, Shakespeare clearly drew upon the wild man tradition for the creation of Caliban. The alleged cannibalism has already been established, but we see connections in other traits, as well. Friedman points out that in the Lebor Balála, a twelfth century Irish text pertaining to Biblical expansion and national history, God afflicts Cain with large lumps about his head and body, then he: “dwelt, a wild fugitive, in the eastern border of the land called Eden.”18 In this tradition, the city-builder trope is lost and Cain becomes, instead, the prototypical wild man. Perhaps more intriguing is the presence of the club, significant in that it was a part of the iconography of the wild man and a visual connection to the figure of Cain. Also forced to live outside of societal boundaries, Cain shares the iconographic symbol of the club as a reminder of his violent murder. Friedman concurs, pointing out that a number of monstrous figures were depicted wielding such a weapon in medieval bestiaries, providing a visual link to Cain who either used a club proper or fashioned
79 the previously mentioned ass’ jawbone into a club of opportunity.19 Caliban himself possesses no such weapon in Shakespeare’s script – it may be inferred that Prospero disarmed him or even that the presence of a club would provide too much of a visual connection between such a prop for Caliban and Prospero’s ubiquitous staff. It cannot be ignored, however, that when Caliban describes to Stephano the best way to kill the magician, he opens with the suggestion of bludgeoning, stating: “[t]hou mayst brain him,/Having first seize’d his books; or with a log/Batter his skull.”20 Significant, too, are the speech patterns exhibited by this feral creature. Like Caliban, the wild man possesses no inherent language. In fact, human speech was a trait often noted as conspicuously absent from the various monstrous peoples of the world.21 The reason for this lack of rational verbal communication could extend back to Cain, as well. According to the Genesis account, following their transgression, Adam and Eve admit their sin to God and wordlessly accept their punishment from him. When confronted with his sin, Cain talks back to God, offering the defiant statement, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” and then protests his punishment and bewails his fate.22 Such an audacious use of language must surely have struck ancient apologists. It is not surprising, therefore, to see that later descendants of Cain who have been stripped of their humanity have correspondingly been stripped of their ability to speak. When Caliban is schooled in the tongue of his colonizer, we witness at first just the rudimentary uses of it for the sake of snarling curses and subversive epitaphs. As the play progresses, however, we see Caliban emerge as the true artist of the play as he seizes control of the action through his poetic recitations and wondering observations, such as when he famously enjoins his companions: Be not afeard; the isle is full of noises, Sounds and sweet airs, that give delight and hurt not. Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices That, if I then had waked after long sleep, Will make me sleep again: and then, in dreaming, The clouds methought would open and show riches Ready to drop upon me that, when I waked, I cried to dream again.23
This ironic turn is one of the most commonly-discussed aspects of this play, especially by post-colonial critics. Through the domination of the character of Caliban, according to this
80 critical approach, we see the eventual triumph of the subjugated peoples. He turns the language of the conqueror upon his enemy and uses his mastery of it to undermine the power structure which the language set into place. And in the end, it is only those who were native-born speakers of the language that leave the island; the Other has regained the land of his inheritance. Like Cain, however, his history is never told in the original version of the story and must only be supposed as it is usurped by the life of the new favored son, Seth. Even if this reading is an anachronistic interpretation of the events of the play, it nevertheless strikes upon the important point of language as a weapon of power and of subversion. Further, it introduces the important question of race. Clearly, there are certain cultural anxieties present in The Tempest. Caliban as a monstrous native is certainly one; Sebastian’s criticism of Alonso’s marriage choice for his daughter is another. “Sir, you may thank yourself for this great loss,” Sebastian remarks. “That would not bless our Europe with your daughter,/But rather loose her to an African.”24
Race in Society The issue of racial difference is an undercurrent in much of the literature of the British Isles, especially in the later Middle Ages and early modern period. The concept of “race” however, was a far more muddled category than one would suppose by its modern definition. The mutated humanoids of distant lands celebrated in sensationalized and highly imaginative writing were often termed as “races;” conversely, dark-skinned peoples were often considered “monstrous” variations on the human design. A commonality that connects many of these descriptions is the attribution of the grotesque elements to biblical figures, and most commonly, to the curse of Cain. Most scholars now concur that the European etiology of the foreign-ized Cain is actually the result of either intentional or unintentional interpolation of the curse of Cain onto the curse of Noah’s disrespectful son Ham, as recounted in Genesis nine. In this pronouncement, Noah condemns Ham and his descendants: “lowest of slaves shall he be to his brothers”25 – a pronouncement that situates this story a brother drama, as well. The following narration, which gives account of the genealogy of Noah’s posterity, attributes to Ham the people of Cush [Ethiopia], Egypt, Put [North Africa], and Canaan.”26 These genealogies were the source of the tradition that of the sons of Noah, Japheth was the father of the European peoples, Shem of the
81 Asiatic ones, and Ham of the Africans. “Cham” (as Ham’s name was often spelled in medieval texts) and “Chaym” (as Cain’s name was often written, among other creative spellings) could easily have been mistaken for one another in transcription or commentary error, a confusion further complicated by the thematic similarity between the cursing of a disobedient son. Whether the blending of the two traditions was deliberate or not, most scholars agree that it occurred and offered the impetus for later traditions, most notably that the enigmatic mark of Cain was the black skin of African peoples. Friedman explains the early evidence that such a blending of characters occurred and reflected racial anxieties, asserting: [J]ust as Ham and Cain were linked by the orthography of their names, they were also identified by both receiving a father’s curse. Ham’s curse connected him particularly with the Ethiopians, called the “dun-coloured one-footed people” in the [medieval] Rawlinson treatise. Perhaps the most sweeping account of the curse, and the one that reveals most strikingly the deeply rooted and early hostility toward black men on the part of Arab geographers, occurs in the work of the eleventh-century traveler Ibihim ben Wasif Sah. Entitled the Abregeg des merveilles by its modern editor, this work reports that Noah cursed Ham by asking God that all his reprobate son’s descendents be black and that they be the servants of Shem’s children in the future. Giving a vivid portrait of Ham’s son Nimrod as having black skin, red eyes, a deformed body, and horns on his forehead, he concludes that Nimrod the hunter was the first black man after the Flood.27
This mistaken belief was already viewed as justification for the enslavement of the darker races but the idea did not fully take hold among European travelers and traders until several centuries later. As the Age of Exploration established European colonies around the globe, there arose the need to people and work these newly-claimed lands. In some cases, the native population sufficed. In others, they were quickly decimated by the importation of diseases or were openly hostile and uncontrollable. As expeditions sailed farther and farther from European shores they had increasing contact with other races and provided a ready market for the already present slave trade on the African continent. The argument progressed: Because these native peoples were unaware of Christian theology, they were clearly living outside of the grace of God much as did their ancestor Cain. And as the monster and curse traditions came together, they seemed to indicate and validate the existence of the African slave trade in Europe and in the New World.
82 The slave trade between Europe, Asia, and Africa was an ancient and well-established practice. European slaves were prevalent in the Middle East and North Africa as a result of various unsuccessful crusades through the Middle Ages and in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries through the actions of the Barbary pirates of the North African coast. Likewise, African and Arabian slaves were common in the other’s territory as trade routes provided a market for goods as well as human trafficking. Warring tribes and clans habitually enslaved or sold their captives to other tribes or caravans. The importation of slaves from Africa to Europe and its American colonies arose in the seventeenth century with the need for labor and the breakdown of the indentured servant system. With more and more free men populating the colonies and leaving manual labor after the completion of their contracts, large property owners recognized the need for a more permanent and ample labor supply. The solution came in the form of a circuitous navigation of the Atlantic. Ships from Europe to Africa loaded with fabrics, dyes, and other commodities sailed southward to West Africa, unloaded their goods and bartered for slaves. With the ships restocked – this time with humans rather than goods – they set out across the Atlantic to the colonies of North and South America and the Caribbean. There, the slaves were unloaded, auctioned off, and the ships were crammed with grain, lumber, tobacco, and sugar before they headed back to the waiting ports of Europe. As these triangulated trade routes increased in popularity, efficiency, and profitability in the eighteenth century, debate ensued as to the moral justification for such callous regard for human life. Social awareness was growing in Britain, a movement largely influenced by the ever-growing industrial complex and wretched urban living conditions of the unskilled laboring classes. As the numbers of the urban poor in Britain grew and their hopeless situations became increasingly apparent, so too did the moral outrage against chattel slavery. Parliament officially outlawed the practice of slavery in 1833, but the American economy was far more dependent upon it than was Britain. The actual importation of slaves to the United States was outlawed in 1808, but ships continued to do so in a clandestine manner for several more decades and the American practice of keeping slaves enjoyed legal protection until the 1860s. In both nations, however, people of African descent were still denied citizenship and many basic legal protections until much later.
83 As unavoidable issues of racial identification emerged in nineteenth century society, so too did biblical justification for ethnic subjugation. As early as the colonial period in America, the connection between the enslaved races and Cain’s curse were part of the cultural production. Phillis Wheatley’s poem “On Being Brought from Africa to America” hails her captivity as a blessing because of the Christian conversion it allowed. She writes, “’Twas mercy brought me from my pagan land,/Taught my benighted soul to understand/That there’s a God, that there’s a Savior too.” As the short verse closes, she enjoins her white readership to remember that dark- skinned people also possess souls, “Remember, Christians, Negroes, black as Cain/May be refined, and join the angelic train.” 28
Race on Stage Fabricated blackness was not a new convention in European dramatic history. The staging directions for medieval English liturgical dramas often called for the demons and hell- minions to be depicted with black faces to counter the spotless white of the angels and possibly also to provide a visual reminder of the smoke and ashes of the eternal flames. Traditional English morris dancers often paint their faces black in modern performances, but the practice is not intended to denote race and the tradition seems to have been a nineteenth century development. Blackness as a racial distinguisher was employed in Italian comedia dell’arte shows through masks, called vizards, which were usually covered with black leather or velvet. The practice was eventually abandoned in favor of makeup, however, because its full-face coverage limited expression and the mouth straps by which it was often held in place impeded vocalizing.29 It is interesting, however, that the practice of “blacking up” took so long to be fully absorbed into theatrical practice, despite the on-going artistic acknowledgment of epidermal pigmentation differences. This slow acceptance of staged ethnicity is apparent in the extant records of mystery plays. One historian points out that as the tradition of the African magus began to develop in Western iconography in the early Middle Ages, its inclusion on the stage was much slower and seems to have been shaped by rather than involved in shaping the racial differentiation: It is of course possible that even in the fourteenth century one of the Kings was blackened in productions of the Magi play, and it is even rather likely that this was at least occasionally done in the later fifteenth century, by which time the
84 black King was well known in literature and art. But the complete absence of pre- 1500 references to such a figure in drama makes it extremely improbable that drama played any real role in either engendering the black King in art, or in helping to encourage his adoption by artists in this period.30
It is significant to note, too, that though most early usage of blackface to denote African- ness was for servant characters, these were usually parts that had few or no lines, as the mouth straps of the comedia vizard indicate. The figure of the singing, dancing, joke-cracking, pun- making blackface character is the convention of the much later minstrel show. Further, as Kaplan takes pains to point out, throughout the Middle Ages, “European images of Ham, Canaan, or Chus as black are few and far between, and never openly allude to any pejorative connotation of blackness.”31 It is not until the eighteenth century that racist ideas, as a modern audience would recognize the concept, begin to develop fully and manifest themselves in cultural output. And it was not until the early middle of the nineteenth century that those ideas of racial difference and subversion would be realized on-stage first in America and later in England in the form of a grinning, jumping, slippery figure named Jim Crow. But despite the long history of the look in European performance, the beginnings of blackface theatre as racialized performance in America are problematic to identify with etiological certainty, as W.T. Lhamon points out in his study Raising Cain: Blackface Performance from Jim Crow to Hip Hop. Many of the dances and gestures that became signature elements of the later stage performances were part of the normal repertoire of slave songs and entertainments in the eighteenth century. By the early 1800s, New York City had an established tradition of African-American street performance that also incorporated certain moves and lyrics in the ethnically diverse and economically disadvantaged Catherine Market area. In other words, long before the ubiquitous black face of Jim Crow took the stage in a formalized performance, he was singing, dancing, and “wheeling” his way around the edges of hegemonic culture and social respectability. These street performances were widely viewed by the local residents, but were hardly recognized as legitimate entertainments by the societal elite. As Gary Taylor asserts, in order to survive as a cultural form, it is necessary to have a cultural space: “Artists must choose one of two strategies for survival: either they develop a niche that has never been occupied before, or they invade and conquer a niche developed by the occupant they will displace.”32 African-
85 American street performance of the early to mid-nineteenth century is remarkable in that it managed to do both. By the close of the 1820s, white performers done up in blackface were beginning to take the stage of the Chatham theatre to sing many of the songs that would eventually become part of the broader minstrel show tradition. This small, financially troubled theatre in a working class neighborhood was purchased by social reformers in 1832 and converted into a church in the hopes of establishing what would today be termed an inner-city mission. The area was already plagued with social unrest and riots and the Chatham conversion project was quickly given up. Just seven years after its makeover, the church converted back into a theatre and it was here in 1843 that, as Lhamon points out: Dan Emmet, Frank Bower, Dick Pelham, and Billy Whitlock joined together for their inaugural performance in New York City of the Virginia Minstrels on the stage of the Chatham. This performance is customarily described as the beginning of the classic minstrel show with its street stories in staccato rhythms, its rude interruptions and overlaps of market confrontation, and, perhaps above all, its flexibly short element that encouraged improvisation and interaction with the audience.33
The Virginia Minstrels were a sensation and the genre of performance in which their show was situated became one of the staple entertainments of nineteenth century vernacular entertainment. The only other major contenders for working class attentions within the theatre proper were melodramas and to a much lesser degree, the English tradition of slapstick pantomimes, though both of the latter were generally the realm of the more socially-conscious middle class. Burlesques and music hall shows would be later competitors and, as Lhamon points out, the circus was a popular training ground for many aspiring American performers; but blackface persisted for the not-so-simple reason that: Blackface was built up in the Atlantic markets and other working places where men and women rubbed against each other under the stresses that produce cultural form. This blackface form was a long time coming. It grew out of the way actors copied and adapted the dances of New York markets and plantation frolics. It grew out of the way they proved those gestures in theatres across all regions of the United States and, across the Atlantic, from London to Dublin. It grew out of the way the blackface figure always resisted, or did not easily fit into, other people’s forms – and so gradually forced a form that gave it room of its own.34
The shows were, indeed, revolutionary. And as they developed, constantly changing and adapting according to spectators’ reactions, audience expectations, and social circumstances, the
86 shows also provided an important venue for racial and cultural mingling. African-American traditions were lifted, reformed, and popularized by white performers. Audiences were often integrated and many of the anxieties dramatized, such as the villainous fat-cat northern business owner, were common among black and white working audiences alike. A number of African- American acting troupes also joined the movement, particularly after the Civil War. And as the genre grew from singular “Ethiopian melodies” to include one-act plays and eventually the full minstrel repertoire of variety acts, the “black” central character was often given license to speak subversively to his white counterparts on stage. This last convention was particularly significant because it presented as entertainment a cultural taboo. The form of the intentionally exaggerated character was here more important than ever. As Michael Pickering notes in “The Blackface Clown,” an essay contained in the exceptional study Black Victorians, Black Victoriana: “For medieval and renaissance fools and jesters, for example, their identity as clowns allowed certain transgressions of social codes and relations, such as those of deference and hierarchy, and frames what they said or did as comic rather than offensive.”35 Only because the character was a recognized hyperbolic parody was the blatant subversiveness permitted. Of course, the acknowledgment of such excused impertinence is not to imply that there were not racial problems with the show. The absorption of traditionally African-American material almost always resulted in a kind of erasure of authorship or source and the subversive words of the black-faced figure were usually the result of buffoonish misunderstandings or puns resulting in an idiotic butchering of language. And Pickering makes the important point that: [b]lackface clowning may seem most applicable to the form of the performance, for the specifics of blackface in themselves were predicated on the white adoptions of the mask of a black low-Other whose racialized inferiority was constructed in the interests of attesting to white racial superiority and imperial dominion . . . Blackface was always an effort at stabilizing uncertainty and ambiguities, at managing racial boundaries in the interests of polarizing their opposition rather than interiorizing them. Yet such management was never complete precisely because blackface entertainments were pivoted at the crossover points of these boundaries. The entertainment demanded a degree of risk, and the risk could then never finally ensure the success of the manipulation. Operating in the licensed space of in-betweenness, or even evoking it, calls into question that which lies on either side of the boundaries of ideologically constructed difference.36
87 But in many of the earlier shows that grew out of the urban playhouses of the proletariat, the radical and risky elements were there all the same, obscured by the presentation or diffused with a joke. Like Caliban and Cain before them, these characters identified and remarked upon the tension of their situation by using the gift of language to rebel against the dominant power. But was the seizing of center stage by these black-faced characters truly an invocation of Cain’s legacy? The story of Cain was commonly invoked in the goings-on of many minstrel shows. It appeared in farcical stump-speeches, in song lyrics about past crimes, and in subversive jokes that claimed the first family of Genesis were all black until Cain’s fear of God’s wrath rendered him pale like the white man, and his descendants all followed suit. Cain’s name, story, and character abounded in the texts of these performances for several significant reasons. As Lhamon points out: Cain was the first angry young man. As the earliest agent to take significant action after the banishment from Eden, Cain became talisman to those young workers suddenly driven from the country to cities to inaugurate the industrial era. Cain was the first person born of human sexuality. In his own throes of passion, Cain was the first in the line of men who have killed their brothers. Cain pioneered fraternal strife and its consequences. Cain was a farmer who founded cities. Cain nurtured roots, but he was uprooted. His licensed vagabondage, and the paradox by which he took it on, are keys to understanding Cain the way blackface performers and their early audiences did. Their Cain founded the very cities to whose complexity these youths were contributing. Like them, Cain was transient not sedentary within the city. Like theirs, Cain’s energy was more than unsettled. It was unseatable.37
There is, perhaps, one further common element that rendered Cain a sympathetic figure to an audience of displaced young men: his famous response to God, “Am I my brother’s keeper?”38 The unskilled laboring class of the industrial revolution was, indeed, its wealthy and fortunate brother’s keeper. Its backbreaking labor kept the factory in business, kept the owners’ pockets lined, and kept the privileged class in power. Cain denied the unavoidable relationship he despised. The audiences of the earliest minstrel shows could not have helped but to feel a kinship with Cain, as they desired to pose the same question with the same defiance. The evocation of Cain’s myth in these particular social settings served a precise cathartic purpose that reveals a great deal about the social context of the performances and the audiences
88 that were consuming them. Significantly, however, Cain’s story was not dramatized, was not reformed, and was not re-enacted. It was merely mentioned, acknowledged, and then set aside. His story was important for establishing a connection – “Early blackface actors invoke fratricide but sidestep the audience’s repulsion by framing it as a joke old as Genesis”39 – but his character was no longer bound by the old conventions. Let us now turn to a specific example of how we see Cain again sneaking bits of himself into a blackface performance. This is not a play in which his presence is explicitly acknowledged, as it is in many of the lyrics examined by Lhamon but rather, a performance in which his presence is merely felt – or maybe not felt at all. Perhaps his presence merely is.
Jim Crow Thomas Dartmouth Rice was a no-account New York actor at the same time that the Catherine Market were performers enjoying immense (if local) popularity and several years before the Virginia Minstrels crashed onto the Chatham Theatre stage with their burnt cork faces and lightly lifted lyrics, leaps, and leers. Beginning in the 1830s, during a period marked by small-to-moderate scale race and class riots in New York City, Rice began to enact the song-and- dance character that made him famous and that outlived its creator in reputation and notoriety: Jim Crow. Like the blackface genre that launched him into the mainstream consciousness, Jim Crow’s origins are difficult to pin point. He existed as a kind of trickster hero in slave lore, who, as Lhamon writes in Jump Jim Crow was: “a local figure whom rice and indigo workers down the coastal Carolinas to the Caribbean used to express and explore their hopes and fears.”40 In some musical versions of his life he is from tidewater Virginia and in others, from the same mountains of Kentucky where Harriet Beecher Stowe would set Uncle Tom’s Cabin in 1852. Sometimes he was a runaway slave, sometimes a free man, but he was always fleet of foot and able to dodge whatever force happened to be after him at the moment. And his impersonation by Rice only further proved his changeability. There are at least eight plays attributed to Rice that feature Jim Crow or a related character and more than a dozen songs that, if they did not originate from Rice’s pen, were certainly popularized by his blackface performance and the artistic license he took with them. The plays were often reflective of the social settings in which Rice found himself. For example,
89 Jim Crow in his New Place is set in London and was written in 1838 in anticipation of Rice’s own return to the London theatre circuit. Other plays feature elements that were also part of the contemporary popular imagination. Central to The Virginia Mummy, for example, was the Egyptology craze that had taken hold of a western world emerging from the neo-Classical era and caught up in the excitement surrounding the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, Jean François Champollion’s deciphering of the previously enigmatic hieroglyphics in the 1820s, and the new realm of scientific archaeology that such advancements were aiding. Such academic intrigue was accepted with great enthusiasm in the theatre as the push towards realism in “high art” performances increased. In Theatre in the Victorian Age, Michael Booth asserts: “Archaeology in the theatre was both pictorial and realistic, this admirably suiting the cultural tendencies of the age . . . When archaeology came together with spectacle on the stage, as it often did . . . it satisfied public taste twice over.”41 Rice’s play makes a mockery of such tastes, self-referentially calling itself “A Farce in One Act,” and playing upon the new-found fascination with Egyptian history and relics. The plot centers around the efforts of Captain Rifle to win the hand of Lucy, despite the protestations of her ward, an experimental doctor named Galen. Rifle hits upon his opportunity to enter Galen’s home and convince Lucy to elope when he reads a newspaper advertisement for mummies that the doctor has placed in the hopes of testing his newly-invented “elixir of life” and thus, resurrecting the corpse. Rifle convinces his “waiter,” a blackface character named Ginger Blue, to stand in as a mummy while Rifle woos his love and arranges for her escape. Ginger Blue agrees to the arrangement and, as a stand-in for a real mummy, has a series of slapstick mishaps before narrowly escaping being poisoned by the doctor’s concoction. A tantrum by Galen and a hearty laugh from the rest of the cast is shared as the curtain drops. A close reading of the play,42 however, reveals a number of significant elements, layered meaning, and buried impudence in this bit of theatrical tomfoolery. Here again, we see a link to the monstrous and the use of the hegemonic language by the Other at once to acknowledge and undercut the established authority – morsels of Cain’s own story that have emerged once again. The most obvious manifestation of the monster theme is in the central object of the play: the mummy. Rifle describes the object as, “a dead man preserved in spices, put away into a coffin, deposited in a tomb, and never molders away” and tells Ginger Blue that he will paint him, “like a mummy – white, black, green, blue, and a variety of colors.” It is here that Ginger
90 Blue makes an especially interesting request, stating “Massa, put plenty of turpentine wid de white paint so it won’t rub off. I like to make ’em believe I’m a white man, too.”43 Here, we see clearly that in the creation of the Other into the monster, there is also a desire to rid one’s self of Otherness. The irony, however, is that – just like the ten drops of blackness added to the white paint to make it superior a century later in Ralph Emerson’s Invisible Man – the idealized whiteness is a necessary part of the monster make-up, as well. There is also a joke present in the layers (literally) of meaning because the actor playing Ginger (presumably Rice himself) really was “painted” – white to black, as burnt cork allowed. The layers of difference become apparent again when O’Leary, one of Galen’s domestics announces, that the black and painted figure of Ginger “looks for all the world like a smok’d hog” and then attempts to hack off a souvenir toe. Lhamon points out in the notes that “in what may be Rice’s hand, the MS has ‘ham’ crossed out and replaced with ‘hog.’ ‘Hoggler’ or ‘hogler’ was an old word for a field worker of the lowest class; blacks were often said to be ‘smoked.’”44 Again, the intentional joke spoken by an unwitting character serves to highlight the racial distinction between the white (in this case, Irish) speaker and the objectified monster. Finally, we see the willing acceptance not only of the white characters to see Ginger as a monster, but of Ginger’s willingness to be one himself. The artist Charles, who formerly remarked that the Ginger-mummy had “such prodigious height – almost a giant” shouts with surprise when all is revealed: “Curse me if it isn’t Ginger Blue, the nigger that lives at the hotel.” There seems to be an embedded joke here upon the imperative statement “curse me” in the presence of a former mummy as well as in O’Leary’s statement that follows, “What a cursed scrape I’d got into, if I had cut his toe off!” Thus, in the very scene where we see Ginger’s power denied as his monstrous presence loses its value, there is still a linguistic nod to the supposed powers that such a monster was rumored to possess. Also significant is the unconscious parallel in those exclamations to the curse of Cain. Just as the ancient criminal waged a violent attack on his brother’s body and so merited the famous curse, so too did O’Leary seek to assault the physical form of Ginger Blue-as-mummy, and calls down a curse, in expletive form, upon himself for such an action. This scene is important, too, as we witness Ginger Blue’s willingness to re-embrace the character of the mummy, as he declares in the closing line of the play: “[s]hould any ob de faculty had occasion for a libe mummy again, dey hab only to call on Ginger Blue; when dey’ll
91 find him ready dried, smoked, and painted, to sarbe himself up at de shortest notice.”45 Cain asks God for the mark upon his body, crying, “Anyone who meets me may kill me;” the narration then tells us, “the LORD put a mark on Cain, so that no one who came upon him would kill him.”46 Likewise, Ginger is pleased to take the identity of the monster upon himself, offering his body to be marked by such a role. The subversive use of language and the tension between speaking and silence is especially significant in this play, as well. Throughout the work there is a repetition of point and counterpoint or, more accurately, a juxtaposition of straightforward language and a defiance of meaning. For example, in the play’s opening moments, Rifle sends Ginger on an errand and remarks, “[s]uppose I do not choose to pay you? What then will be the consequence?” Ginger responds, “It will be rather hard to hear you when [the bell] rings.” In another instance, Rifle asks whether Ginger Blue knows where he can get a dead man. Ginger responds, “I know where you can git a man dead drunk.” These witty responses and turns of phrase persist throughout the text in a way that serves quite the opposite function of painting Ginger entirely as the fool. Rather, as Rifle observes, “The rascal seems between the two – cunning as well as stupid.”47 We also see the riskiness of which Pickering writes in Galen’s gushing before the pseudo-mummy he believes he will soon revive with his elixir: Galen: But before I bow with reverence as Solomon did before the Great Sheba – Ginger: [aside] De same, to you, I hope you berry well. Galen: Could you but speak, what scenes you would relate about your anscestors, and wonders you would tell to this world, what happened in yours! Ginger: [aside] I’d tell you who eat up your breakfast. Galen: Those lips, that look so parch’d and dry, perhaps did seal the nuptial kiss to some fair princess, chaste and fair as the lilly beams of Bright Aurora. Ginger: [aside] De only Prince he kiss was old Aggs, and she’s a black as de debbil. Galen: Where now are your friends that mourned your loss, that saw you embalmed, and saw you laid in the mighty hetacombs of Egypt? Ginger: [aside] I guess some of dem gawn down de river.48
In this exchange we witness several shocking moments. First is the narrowly-averted spectacle of a white man prostrate at the feet of a black man, an image repeated in the invocation of Solomon and the Queen of Sheba – or as Ginger Blue later calls her, “de She nigga.”49 We also see a shocking proposition of miscegenation – a concept again introduced just a few lines later and commented upon by Ginger himself when Galen proposes that the revived “mummy” should
92 take Lucy as a wife. As the rebellious remarks accumulate, Ginger diffuses each one with a joke, even though the joke might be even more biting than the original remark, as we see in his response to the whereabouts of his friends. Because of his propensity to not only vocalize but to do so in a consistently disruptive manner (both situationally and socially), we see a concerted effort throughout the play to silence the voice of the oppositional Other. Rifle’s idea of a dummy-mummy played by Ginger Blue comes to him immediately following Ginger’s longest speech thus far in the text of the play. And the speech isn’t just a train of nonsensical manglings of the English language but rather, ends with a very undercutting remark as the black man remarks to himself: “I’ll be mighty careful how I drink de wine at de dinner table . . . Be careful, Ginger Blue, you isn’t fool’d like de white folks: get up in de mornin’ and wonder why dey can’t find demselves.”50 The joke, of course, is that Ginger Blue is nipping sips of his employer’s wine but the final remark does remind the audience that the servants of a household see the private goings-on and behind-the- scene behaviors of the privileged class after the public face at the banqueting table. Rifle’s immediate response to Ginger Blue’s comments is to ask, “How long can you hold your tongue without speaking?” Having struck upon the idea of using the waiter as part of his plan, Rifle is now concerned with his ability to control Ginger Blue’s speech and to control him by speech, as in the following exchange: Rifle: Can you shut your mouth – not speak without I tell you? Ginger: Yes. Spose you tell me to speak to people I don’t ’sociate wid – how I gwan to do den? Rifle: Suppose you don’t speak at all? Ginger: Den it de best way for me to say notin’. Rifle: So it will. Now, listen. [Ginger goes to door.] No, no, come here to me; I want now to make folks believe you are a mummy.51
Further emphasizing this value through silence is Galen’s promise “[y]ou must be silent as death and, if you succeed, I will give you a five dollar note.” Ginger, of course, is anything but silent, though most of his comments done in the mummy guise are made as asides to the audience and never acknowledged by those on-stage with him. Nevertheless, the ruse works, Rifle gets his girl and in a final ironic moment, we see a schoolmaster arrive onstage who was hired by Galen to transcribe the orations of the revived monster. O’Leary announces, “Here comes the schoolmaster, who is to write the life of the mummy.” Galen, having realized the deception and raging both at his own gullibility and Rifle’s success with Lucy, rages, “Write the
93 life of the devil!” and according to the stage directions: “knocks Schoolmaster down.”52 The one who would record the history of the monster is never used, never acts, and never speaks himself. He is useless because, like Cain and Caliban and the real-life black slave of the American economic system, the story will never be told. Langston Hughes perhaps best summarized the plight of the performed African-American a century later, in his 1949 poem “Note on Commercial Theatre.” He writes: You’ve taken my blues and gone – You sing ’em on Broadway And you sing ’em in Hollywood Bowl, And you sing ’em mixed up with symphonies And you fixed ’em So they don’t sound like me. Yep, you done taken my blues and gone.
You also took my spirituals and gone. You put me in MacBeth and Carmen Jones And all kinds of Swing Mikados And in everything but what’s about me.
The speaker dreams of speaking with his own voice and performing himself and he is hopeful that it will happen; but the outcast must still struggle for his voice and the speaker’s reality is that his dream is still in the realm of “someday.”53
Conclusion Cain, Caliban, and Jim Crow all share the plight of the rejected son. They all exist on the borders of mainstream society. Cain worked the fields that fed the family, Caliban hauled the wood that fed Prospero’s fires, and the Jim Crow figure engaged in all kinds of manual labor on behalf of his white bosses as he traipsed across the stages of the Atlantic. Cain first distinguished himself in the competition between two brothers – a competition that was not just about religious offerings but the emergent dominant human livelihood. He lent some of his traits to Caliban, who embodied the anxieties of an English audience in an era of expansion and colonization; and Caliban, in turn, passed them along to Jim Crow who sometimes defended and sometimes betrayed his own race by employing these traits again. The figure of the outcast viewed in terms of otherness, as the aberration from or mutation of the acceptable “norm;” the figure whose only weapon against the controlling powers of the
94 world is language and through this language does he assert his defiance, undermine the authorities, and seek to destabilize the system that has subjugated him – this figure is peeking at us from the margins of texts and the edges of maps; he is peeping out from beneath the Globe stage and the tattered curtains of many a Jacksonian working class theatre. In these new contexts, he has been given new life, new struggles, and old gestures. He is still the outcast but he is no longer voiceless. Cain has no longer been lost among the faceless crowds of the very cities he established but rather, has re-entered the mainstream society from which he was banished and is again demanding notice from the powers-that-be.
95 CHAPTER FIVE “You won’t recognize it/It’s a surprise hit”: Jack Sheppard’s Slips, Slides, and Sidesteps into and out of Popular Culture
The Lore Cycle In 1724, Jack Sheppard, the notorious eighteenth-century thief and escape artist, first entered the popular imagination during his widely-publicized crime spree and impossible escapes. Following Sheppard’s much-anticipated execution on November 16, 1724, John Gay composed The Beggar’s Opera in 1728 and its companion piece Polly at the end of that year, both sensationalized accounts (if such a thing were even possible) of Jack’s extraordinary life and times. Though Gay does rename Jack’s character as “Macheath,” the intentional resemblance was unmistakable to the audience. Ainsworth even crafts a meeting in his Jack Sheppard novel between Gay and Sheppard wherein they discuss plans for the production. The Beggar’s Opera was fantastically successful, much to the surprise of theatre critics and cultural purists who found its mockery of high art to be troublesome, to say the least.1 The sensational reception of this unconventional show kept the story of its rogue-hero alive in the popular imagination over the next century. Jack’s re-emergence in Ainsworth’s novel helped to stoke the embers of the legend, however. First published in 1839, Jack Sheppard: A Romance was an instant commercial success and quickly produced a number of spin-off Jack Sheppard plays, including the popular musical version by John B. Buckstone, which was performed regularly at the Theatre Royal - Adelphi in London for a number of years beginning in October of 1839. So pervasive were the catchy tunes of the show – especially the defiant “Nix My Dolly,” a nose-thumbing ditty directed at institutional authority – that they remained popular through the Victorian era. In 1869, James Greenwood conducted a study on the working classes entitled The Seven Curses of London in which he seeks out authentic experiences such as those his subjects might encounter. Greenwood writes of the great anticipation he felt before a Jack Sheppard show, stating that: It was one thing to hear play-actors on the stage, in their tame and feeble delineations of the ancient game of “high Toby,” and of the redoubtable doings of the Knights of the Road, spout such soul-thrilling effusions as “Nix my Dolly Pals,” and “Claude Duval,” but what must it be to listen to the same bold staves out of the mouths of real “roaring boys,” some of them, possibly, the descendants of the very heroes who rode “up Holborn Hill in a cart,” and who could not well hear the good words the attendant chaplain was uttering because of the noisy exchange of boisterous “chaff” taking place between the
96 short-pipe smoking driver, whose cart-seat was the doomed man’s coffin, and the gleeful mob that had made holiday to see the fun!2
The story of Jack was more than just a theatrical trend, however. The informal, “low- brow” productions which originally bore his name while dramatizing and elaborating his story grew greatly in popularity after Ainsworth’s book, and quickly became part of the rise of a cultural revolution. For the first time, the amusements of the lower classes were suddenly being accepted within the higher realms. This novel and its subsequent spin-off texts and various performances, mark a distinct and important shift as we first see the acceptance of the working class’ tastes and preferences by the public and then the eventual domination of such tastes and preferences over those of the gentry. Modern British pop culture was thus beginning to emerge. But why this time and why this figure? The first question is answered fairly simply. Due to the steady rise of the literate middle class over the previous two hundred years, traditional hegemony was breaking down as cultural output was no longer the sole domain of the aristocrats. Literacy had, to a large extent, become the great equalizer. And even for those who could not read, there were staged versions that told the stories and disseminated the legends just as, if not more, effectively. Though the Jack Sheppard novel was deemed “immoral” by many Victorian critics for its glamorized portrayal of criminal acts, its prominent placement of prostitutes, and its gratuitous violence it was still being printed, sold, and read by the literate and produced, performed and viewed by the less fortunate.3 The second question – that of “why this figure?” – is more difficult to answer. Certainly the colorful stories and charismatic characters account, at least in part, for the tremendous popularity enjoyed by the various retellings of Jack Sheppard’s story and the enduring traits that are the modern remnants of his hey-day in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. But these things alone could not account for the powerful cultural revolution that was spawned and the persistent strands of the story that have emerged as part of new lore cycles. The social, political, and economic factors in place at each major resurfacing of his story seem to be major factors in incubating the cultural Petri-dish in which we see echoes of Jack flourish again.
The Real Jack Sheppard The actual story of Jonathan Sheppard is difficult to discern, as his rather sensational exploits rendered him a larger-than-life character before his execution and prompted a series of
97 fictionalized accounts of his adventures for almost three centuries afterwards. The facts of his life – as much as can be verified by roughly contemporary documents, legal records, and historical studies – are as follows. Born some time in 1702, Jack (as he was most commonly called) packed an incredible amount of insubordination, lawlessness, and style into his twenty-two years of life. The son of a transient carpenter in one of the most economically depressed sections of London, he benefited from some basic education in a poorly-supported workhouse charity school. By most accounts, after his father’s death around 1708, Sheppard was fostered to his mother’s employer, a Mr. Kneebone, who employed the boy in his drapery shop until he was of age to be apprenticed. In 1717, he was granted an apprenticeship under a socially respectable carpenter named Owen Wood, who would teach Sheppard not only how to work with wood, but also another skill that would prove rather fortuitous: locksmithing. Sheppard was usually described as small, even for the time – just five feet, four inches tall – and was quite thin; but what he lacked in stature, he made up in charisma. According to one popular tradition, Sheppard fell under the corrupting influence of a pub called the Black Lion, which opened near his master’s shop in 1722 or 1723. It was here that Sheppard first fell prey to the temptations of strong drink and wayward women, whose attentions he easily attracted – most particularly, a prostitute named Elizabeth Lyon but commonly called “Edgworth Bess.” There are also indications that Sheppard had an older brother named Thomas who was already an established criminal and who helped foster the young man into the lifestyle. It seems likely, too, that he was simply an intelligent and energetic young man who needed more of a challenge and thrill than practical carpentry had to offer. Whatever the cause of his corruption, Sheppard’s first crimes seem to have taken place the same year that the Black Lion opened its doors, and were simple petty theft from customers’ homes where Sheppard was admitted while delivering completed carpentry orders. By the following year, Sheppard had left the Drury Lane shop and followed in his father’s footsteps as a journeyman carpenter but with an established habit of petty theft that soon graduated to full burglary in April of 1724 – an act that cost him his first arrest and subsequently, his first escape a mere three hours after he was imprisoned in St. Giles Roundhouse. The escape was the stuff of adventure stories – it involved a rope made from bedclothes and sawing through a wooden ceiling – but the freedom did not last long. He was apprehended in May and this time sent to
98 Newgate Prison, where he escaped again by sawing through his chains, using his bedding to rappel through a hole he had made in the wall, and scaling a twenty foot gate. This time, Sheppard and an accomplice robbed a tailor’s shop with the intention, as it was later reported, of stealing expensive and modish clothes. That they stumbled upon close to three hundred pounds of legal tender was merely an unexpected windfall.4 In July, Sheppard was arrested again, and again he managed an astounding and innovative escape – he filed through an iron window grille in his door and wriggled through the hole. This third arrest was a particularly stinging one for Sheppard, as he had been betrayed by Jonathan Wild, the famed thief-catcher who was known to the authorities of a kind of bounty- hunter but who managed a kingdom of criminals in the London underworld. (Wild himself was executed in 1725, only six months after Sheppard). He had hired Sheppard as part of his illegal empire but quickly decided that the young man was worth more in bounty money than the stolen goods he could provide. The trial had sentenced Sheppard to death and his escape had taken place just hours before the warrant was to be delivered to the prison. The duplicity of Wild and his underhanded betrayal of the dashing figure who was by now something of a rogue hero among his own laboring class, was to be a major factor in later accounts of Sheppard’s life. In less than two weeks, Sheppard was captured for the fourth time and placed in what would be termed today as Newgate’s “maximum security ward.” The “Castle,” as the cell was called, held Sheppard for over a month but eventually, even this could not contain him. In a study of resourcefulness and innovation, Sheppard used a small nail to pick the lock of his handcuffs, dislodged an iron bar set in the chimney to block the flue, used it to break through the ceiling, climbed through to an empty cell, the prison chapel, and the roof of the prison before returning to his cell for his blankets to craft a rope. Retracing his steps, he finally slid down the six story Newgate wall to a neighboring house, which he quietly entered and casually exited at street level. Still in leg irons, he managed to wander to a village outside of London and paid a shoemaker to remove them several days later. On November 2, 1724, just sixteen days after his latest miraculous escape, Sheppard was arrested and bound with several hundred pounds of iron chains and weights in Newgate. He was under constant observance for the sake of security, but it became something of an entertainment spectacle. He was visited by artists who sought to portray his likeness or story and paying
99 visitors who just wished to catch a glimpse of the famous figure before his scheduled hanging on November 16. The execution went as planned and Sheppard was hanged in front of a crowd reported to have numbered more than 200,000.5 The event was one of the most well-attended events ever to take place on Tyburn Hill, the scene where most death penalties were carried out in eighteenth century London. There was a sense of anticipation as to whether Jack might have some last spectacular escape planned – in fact, there seems to have been evidence of such a plan in the works but it never reached fruition – but also just a morbid curiosity in the final moments of a man who had seemed uncontainable. The hanging took place and the criminal was finally stopped, but his legend had just begun.
Setting the Stage: Daniel Defoe, John Gay, and William Hogarth According to most literary historians, the first half of the eighteenth century is a particularly notable period because it was at this time that the novel first began to emerge as a sustainable and acknowledged (if not respectable) genre. In 1719, one of the first significant texts of long fiction in the English language was published: Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe. The book purported to be a biographical account of the exotic happenings in the unfortunate life of a real traveler. The novel is punctuated throughout by remorse over youthful rebellion and memories of warnings against such rash actions as voiced by the narrator’s own father. The wages of Crusoe’s sins, however harsh they may have seemed to the narrator, are actually a thrilling series of suspenseful events and brilliant ingenuity, written in such a way as to instill in countless readers a longing for the uncharted thrills of a life adventuring. This unorthodox morality – that adventure and interest stem from a life of rebellion – became the backbone of many of the earliest novels. Such works as Moll Flanders (1722) also by Defoe, as well as Pamela (1740) and Clarissa (1748) by Samuel Richardson recounted the stories of individuals either born into poverty and crime or consumed by it due to the unfortunate circumstances of their lives – subjects that hardly helped the reception of the novel into the libraries upper classes. It was feared that the exposure to such morally debased characters would have a corrupting influence on the readers; but the authors of these crime texts found an eager and responsive market, which had been perhaps primed for such texts by the circulation of various magazines
100 offering summaries of notorious trials and The Newgate Calendar, which served up monthly accounts of the various trials and goings-on of London’s most prominent prison. It was from these lurid real-life dramas that many novel writers drew their inspiration, though some authors (such as Defoe) actually served as reporters for periodicals and thus were physically present at the hearings of the accused and privy to the most explicit and gruesome details. One scholar offers a particularly succinct description of the moral dichotomy the modern novel presented: [W]ithout the appearance of the whore, the rogue, the cutpurse, the cheat, the thief, the outsider, it would be impossible to imagine the genre of the novel coming about. The image of the criminal is complex and seems to serve at least two differing and opposing purposes. On the one hand, the criminal signifies sinfulness, evil, and degeneration. His life is to be avoided and his fate deplored. On the other hand, the criminal’s life, especially as it was depicted in criminal biographies and novels, serves as a means to lead the criminal (and the reader) to repentance and salvation. Thus, the criminal’s history serves a double function as both an example of a life to be avoided and an example of a self-scrutiny and repentance to be imitated.6
The criminal subject matter in which the modern novel is at least partially rooted was a logical catalyst for longer fiction. The imaginative writings of figures such as Bunyan and Swift in the previous century had certainly set the stage for the novel, but Christian allegories and socio-political satire only offered a limited scope. As one scholar notes in his examination of eighteenth century crime fiction: [T]he trials taught novelists that however much they might improve them by abridgement and proper editing, they could not speculate on what might have been going on in the minds of the parties involved without indulging in a form of fiction. At the same time they showed that there was a reading public that did not have to be amused by comic pieces, an audience that was fascinated by a situation involving life and death and turning on points of guilt and innocence. Because the trials were considerably longer than the usual Newgate Calendar entry, they also showed that interest in such subjects might be sustained for hundred of pages. Even the Newgate Calendar began to give more pages over to trials of particular interest, sometimes providing the psychological analysis that was beyond the scope of the trials.7
In short, in order to meet the demand for such stories, it became necessary to elaborate and embellish, speculate and fabricate, romanticize and fantasize – specialties in which Defoe was well-skilled.
101 Defoe exhibited an interest in the dynamic and attractive criminal in much of his work. In 1724 (a particularly prolific year for him), he published The General History of the Pyrates, a text which helped to launch the archetypal image of the swashbuckling free spirits on the high seas – a romanticized interpretation that persists to this day. Throughout the 1720s, he supplemented his longer writing with reporting work and in the fall of 1724, shortly after Pyrates was released, he was called upon by Applebee’s Magazine to cover the upcoming trial of one particularly intriguing figure: the now-famous house- and prison-breaker Jack Sheppard. What resulted was The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard, a fairly short but widely read text that included a biography of the criminal as well as a detailed accounting of his various crimes and escapes. In the prelude, Defoe offers a note of social commentary, remarking: “Crimes ever were, and ever must be unavoidably frequent in such populous Cities as yours are, being the necessary Consequences, either of the Wants, or the Depravity, of the lowest part of the humane [sic] Species.” The plight of Sheppard seems not to have been quite so dramatically unfortunate, however. His education, while rudimentary, still rendered him functionally literate, a trait highlighted in Defoe’s text by the inclusion of a letter from Sheppard to a friend, purported to have been composed “five Hours immediately after his escape from Newgate.”8 To say that the note is riddled with puns hardly does it justice; it contains well over thirty such linguistic twists. He makes a joke regarding another of London’s notorious prisons, Bridewell, remarking “Being a Batchelor, and not being capable to manage a Bridewell you know. I had no Business near St. Brides.” Elsewhere he includes some geographic word play, saying, “having gone a little way, Hefford’s-Harp at the sign of the Irish-Harp, put me a Jumping and Dancing to that degree that I could not forbear making a Somerset or two before Northumberland House.” As his recounted adventures conclude, he writes, “meeting by meer chance a Bakers Cart going to Turnham- Green, I being not Mealy Mouth’d, nor the Man being Crusty I wheel’d out of town.” He leaves directions for all mailed to be sent inscribed to one “Mr. Sligh Bolt” at a given address.9 The letter is an obvious fabrication – whether by Defoe or some sensationalist fan of the story is unclear – but its cleverness is undeniable. Taking the old slapstick mantra to heart that stepping on three rakes is funny, four tiresome, and fourteen funny again simply for sheer absurdity, the letter is an odd but intriguing addition to the text. It paints Sheppard as a charming, witty figure who is indeed a criminal but a good-natured and high-spirited one. The
102 impression created is not that of a cutthroat skulking about dark alleyways but rather, a light- footed, dynamic character dropping clues and laughing once again as he dances just outside of the reach of the law he has already defied so many times. It is important, too, to remember that at the time of this text’s composition (late October of 1724), Jack was again on the lam, after having recently amassed his astonishing third escape from jail – his second from the supposedly impervious Newgate and its execution orders. Thus Defoe writes before beginning his story: But here’s a Criminal bids Defiance to you Laws, and Justice who declar’d and has manifested that the Bars are not made that can either keep him Out, or keep him In, and accordingly hath a second time fled from the very Bosom of Death. His History will astonish! And is not compos’d of Fiction, Fable, or Stories plac’d at York, Rome, or Jamaica, but Facts done at your Door, Facts unheard of, altogether new, Incredible, and yet Uncontestable. He is gone once more upon his wicked Range in the World. Restless Vengeance is pursuing, and Gentlemen, ‘tis to be hoped that she will be assisted by your Endeavors to bring to Justice this notorious Offender. 10
It is important to note that Defoe takes pains to point out that this account of Jack’s life is not a fictionalized one. Nevertheless, it was received excitedly by a thoroughly engaged public, and consumed as if it were entertainment rather than reporting. We see evidence of such a reception the following year in 1725, in an article published in the Dublin Journal that railed against the middle class consumption of such texts. James Arbuckle, the author of the piece, tells the readers: “your Robinson Crusoes, Moll Flanders, Sally Salisburys and John Shepards [sic] have afforded notable instances how easy it is to gratify our curiosity, and how indulgent we are to biographers of Newgate, who have been as greedily read by people of the better sort as the compilers of last speeches and dying words by the rabble.”11 Jack, it seems, was still breaking into homes and disrupting the social order even after his death. And just as prison walls could not contain him, neither could the printed page. Within two weeks of his execution, a pantomime of his life by John Thurmond, entitled Harlequin Sheppard, was performed in Drury Lane – not far from the home of Sheppard’s former master Mr. Wood.12 It was not until 1728, however, that a dramatized version of his story really captivated the public all over again: it was John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera, and its impact was unprecedented.
103 Gay himself is an interesting figure. His parents passed away when he was still young, leaving him without family connections or much of an inheritance and while he spent most of his adult life in the company of intellectual and artistic elite, though not a university man himself. As a result, Gay was keenly aware of the inherent class system present in English politics and the sharp divisions between the social strata of society. He often tried to curry favor among the politically connected with varying success, but was befriended by such literary notables as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift, who recognized the young man’s talents for farce, parody, and satire. He acquired a number of patrons who enabled him to publish, which resulted in financial gain and a fair amount of critical acclaim. Unfortunately, this success was short-lived as he had invested heavily in the badly-managed but governmentally-backed South Sea Bubble just a few months prior to its collapse in 1720. This reversal of fortune drove Gay once again to try for a political position but the best offer he received was an appointment as Princess Louisa’s Gentleman-Usher, an offer he refused and regarded as a personal affront. Gay nursed this grudge against the political elite – both for the perceived professional insult as well as for the mismanagement of the South Sea Trading Company – and in 1728 sought his revenge against them in his production of The Beggar’s Opera. The production was an unusual one – rather than imitating the Italian opera style that was very much in vogue at the time, Gay chose to compose in English, using commonly-known folk melodies for his songs and thus introducing to the English stage the so-called “ballad-opera” form, which would grow steadily in prominence and popularity. And rather than portraying scenes of courtly intrigue and romance, he selected a very different cast of characters with which to make his statement. The story features highwaymen and double-dealers as its protagonists, purposely equating them with the aristocracy and current governmental powers. Meanwhile, the dialogue is laced with digs at the aristocracy, such as when Peachum pronounces matter-of-factly: “A lawyer is an honest employment; so is mine. Like me too he acts in a double capacity, both against rogues and for ’em; for ’tis but fitting that we should protect and encourage cheats, since we live by them.” There are passing remarks, as well, such as when Macheath murmurs romantically to Polly, “Is there any power, any force that could tear me from thee? You might sooner tear a pension out of the hands of a courtier, a fee from a lawyer.” 13
104 More significant for this study, however, is not the political commentary that Gay issues but rather, those criminals from whom he drew his inspiration – most notably, Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild. Roberts, discussing this commonly-recognized fact, writes “In part because of Defoe’s biographical accounts of them, these men captured public imagination as no rogues had previously done; they caught Gay’s imagination, too.”14 The double-dealing, backstabbing figure of Peachum was immediately recognizable as Wild. His cottage industry of thieving and thief-catching was well known to the upper class, theatre-going audience upon whom Wild’s employees preyed. The play even includes an exchange between Filch, a pickpocket-in-training, and Mrs. Peachum, who compliments him on his take of seven colored handkerchiefs from the wealthy crowd awaiting coaches outside the opera house. Meanwhile, the charismatic, well- dressed, and multiply-married figure of Macheath was an obvious portrayal of Jack Sheppard who was known not only for his charm and penchant for fine clothing, but also his retinue of women. Macheath, we see, is confronted by Lucy with her own matrimonial claims after she catches word that he has wed Polly and is then greeted by “Four more women, Captain, with a child apiece!” in his prison cell. These are an obvious exaggeration, but definite salute to Jack Sheppard’s own woman-juggling.15 However, Jack was most famous, of course, for his ability to find an escape from even the most impossible-seeming situations. The ending of The Beggar’s Opera is an often- discussed technique of the play in which the Player and Beggar from the play’s introduction reappear as the Player objects to Macheath’s implied hanging: “But honest friend, I hope you don’t intend that Macheath shall really be executed.” The Beggar argues that such an ending is the only morally permissible one, and that the impending punishment of all the criminal characters was to be understood. When the Player persists in his objections, however, the Beggar introduces a deus-ex-machina re-write with the following preface: Through the whole piece you may observe such a similitude of manners in high and low life that it is difficult to determine whether (in the fashionable vices) the fine gentlemen imitate the gentlemen of the road, or the gentlemen of the road the fine gentlemen. Had the play remained as I first intended, it would have carried a most excellent moral: ’twould have shown that the lower sort of people have their vices in a degree as well as the rich: And that they are punished for them.16
105 Thus, as the ending is changed, Macheath (like Jack) escapes from an inescapable scenario and is hailed the hero for it. And as the curtain falls on the assemblage of Macheath and his multiple wives, we see Jack Sheppard dance across the stage for merely the first time. The reception of the play was overwhelming. Even those political figures whom Gay lampooned attended the show and were reported to have acted amused by it publicly, though scandalized privately. On the heels of this unprecedented success, Gay attempted to produce the second half of The Beggar’s Opera, a similarly-written ballad opera called Polly. This play, which follows Polly Peachum’s incognito travels to the West Indies in an effort to reconnect with her slippery husband Macheath (now living as a black-faced pirate named Morano), possessed little of the political satire that its predecessor did. Nevertheless, it was banned from production by Prime Minister Robert Walpole who was still smarting from the thinly-veiled attacks lobbed against his administration in the previous Gay piece. Kept from the stages, Polly instead hit the presses, enjoying almost as wide a readership as it might have had viewers. As one critic notes, “Ironically, however, Gay’s sequel became imitated by history itself. For just as Polly Peachum and Macheath both don disguises and exist throughout much of the play in counterfeit roles, so, too, did the script go underground and become pirated by presses defiant of Walpole’s edicts, ensuring that it would enjoy enormous financial success and rival its predecessors in popularity.”17 Polly may be “a corrective satire, appropriating out of bankrupt European morality the crucial virtue of honor and relocating it among the ‘savages’”18 but it is more notable, perhaps, for its inclusion of the element of blackface. Macheath/Morano remarks to his new wife, Jenny: “Was it not entirely for you that I disguised myself as a black to screen myself from women who laid claim to me wherever I went? Is not the rumor of my death, which I purposely spread, credited through the whole country? Macheath is dead to all the world but you.”19 The disguise is not merely one of appearance but rather, Macheath has exchanged his entire identity, as the following dialogue between the shady business man Ducat and an indigenous Caribbean demonstrates: Indian: . . . The pirates are ravaging and plundering the country, and we are now in arms, ready for battle, to oppose ’em. Ducat: Does Macheath command the enemy? Indian: Report says he is dead. About twelve moons are passed since we heard of him. Morano, a Negro villain, is their chief, who in rapine and barbarities is even equal to him.20
106 Thus there is performed on this hypothetical stage (since the play was not actually produced for another fifty years after its textual release), both racial difference (the natives) and self-reflexive racial difference (Macheath/Morano). Gay’s use of such a disguise with Macheath seems to have stemmed from a recent series of laws recently passed in response to the new trend of black-face robberies. Between 1722 and 1723, there were groups of men assembled in the forests of several shires who would paint their faces black before ambushing travelers and demanding payment or goods for safe passage. As result of this activity, the so-called “Black Act” was passed under which, as Pat Rogers writes, “it became a felony without benefit of clergy to go abroad into woods in any form of disguise or with a blackened face.” The behaviors of the bands caught the popular attention to enough of a degree that in 1723, a pamphlet was published entitled The History of the Blacks of Waltham in Hampshire: and those under the like Denomination in Berkshire that purported to trace the events surrounding the robberies. Rogers makes the point that “the great Jonathan Wild was then at the very summit of his power. This is of more interest than it might appear, for one particular reason. The Blacks, to anticipate the story, prove to have been extortionists and protection- racketeers – as, in his more genteel and businesslike fashion, was Wild.” Wild was even rumored to have been in attendance at the trial of several of the Waltham Blacks, indicating that the London criminal world was cognizant, if not supportive, of the activities of their lawless brethren. 21 Though we have no reason to believe that Sheppard himself ever had assumed a burnt cork disguise in the commission of any of his crimes, this unusual gesture assumed by his stage persona only a few years later will prove to be a significant moment in the development of his lore cycle, as shall be demonstrated below.
The final figure of this first phase of the lore cycle is William Hogarth. A noted member of the eighteenth century satirist camaraderie, he chose to ply the technique through images rather than words. Hogarth was a notable artist in portraiture and painting who trained under royal portrait painter Sir James Thornhill, but it is for his editorial cartoons and satirical etchings that Hogarth is remembered. In 1721, he published a print mocking the South Sea Trading Company and its unethical practices. He also crafted scenes ridiculing the contemporary trends
107 of the British stage (which he felt had become more about spectacle than art), poked fun at various political figures, and skewered upper-class morality in his illustrations. His social commentary pieces, however, have been the source for much of the modern scholarship surrounding him. A Harlot’s Progress was a series of six illustrations completed in 1732, which trace a country girl’s life from her beginnings in urban prostitution to her misadventures, disease, and miserable death. A similar series of eight pictures was released in 1735. Entitled A Rake’s Progress, it follows a young man of privilege as he squanders his fortune on wild living and eventually lands in the infamous asylum, Bedlam. These, and other of Hogarth’s depictions of poverty-stricken scenes, have provided modern social historians with a unique lens into the world of the urban underbelly – a setting not otherwise widely recorded by artists of the mid-eighteenth century. In 1747, Hogarth completed a set of twelve prints that would prove to be one of his most famous works: Industry and Idleness. The pictorial narrative tells the story of two apprentices with common beginnings and vastly diverse endings. The first plate reveals the boys at work in their master’s weaving shop – one diligently practicing his trade and one already exhibiting signs of sloth and a fascination with the morally abhorrent (as illustrated by the page of Moll Flanders pinned to the wall above his head). Subsequent scenes depict the idle apprentice skipping church, whoring at sea, and being betrayed by his consort and a criminal accomplice. The industrious apprentice, on the other hand, wins the favor of those around him as well as the hand of his master’s daughter.22 In the end, the villainous young man is sent to Tyburn while the upright one gains an apprenticeship to the Lord Mayor of London. The etchings, which were received with a great deal of public interest, were widely understood to have been inspired by the life of Jack Sheppard. These moralistic graphic tales were not received with the universal concern that Hogarth might have wished, however. Thanks to the new mode of theatre ushered in by the success of Gay’s ballad-driven proletariat opera, many of the didactic sketches of Hogarth were quickly translated to the stage as pantomimes or farcical musical tableaux. Theatrical productions, such as Theophilus Cibber’s dramatization of A Harlot’s Progress at Drury Lane in 1733, launched a new and growing interest in the recreation of a popular work to the stage. Martin Meisel notes: Transformation, and especially the animation of the inanimate, were essential to the pantomime genre and as such would influence profoundly some of Hogarth’s literary and graphic successors, notably, Dickens and Cruikshank. In Cibber it
108 appears, not because it is derived from the actions of the spirit of Hogarth’s images, but because transformation was the genre-linked concomitant of the actions that normally constituted the pantomime dumb show.23
The images Hogarth records proved to be poignant as well as duplicatable (and in their re-creation, recognizable) and these short, dramatized parodies would eventually translate into broader, longer scripts when the staging principles were applied to the works of Hogarth’s artistic heirs a century later. Likewise, images introduced by his works would eventually find their way into later cultural productions.
Ainsworth and the Collective Memory (or, The Not-So-Good “Sheppard”) The mid-nineteenth century brought with it a spate of social reforms to help the blighted urban landscape that was groaning under the pressures of industrialization and a culture of dire poverty and criminal behavior. It also brought a new genre of fiction, often called “rogue fiction” or “Newgate novels” after the famed London prison in which many of the main characters in these works – usually victims of this inner-city penury themselves – were held. The reform legislation was not particularly successful; the Newgate novels were. Edward Bulwer-Lytton popularized this genre with the publication of Paul Clifford in 1830 and Charles Dickens transformed it into a more respectable form with Oliver Twist in 1839. This respectability was essential for its full acceptance by the increasingly literate middle and working classes. As one Ainsworth biographer, George J. Worth, has noted: The new rogue fiction of the 1830s and 1840s provoked a great deal of controversy, which – like comparable controversies today, surely did sales no harm. These novels were widely condemned for their violations of morality and good taste, for the immeasurable damage that might be done to impressionable readers by depicting a criminal as a human being rather than a monster – possibly even an attractive human being or one who might arouse sympathy. They were published in an age which was far more self-consciously moralistic than those which had preceded it – an age, moreover, of tremendous political and social unrest and change. They were obviously addressed to a growing reading audience, drawn from an increasingly wide social base, about whose susceptibility to contamination by literature was a real worry.24
It is in this delicate balance between despicability and pitiability that Ainsworth sought to situate his story of Jack Sheppard. Oliver Twist, with its morally redeeming ending, and Jack Sheppard were very much contemporary texts that shared four months of publication in
109 Bentley’s Miscellany in 1839 while Dickens’ serialized novel was concluding and Ainsworth’s was commencing. Interestingly, “Jack Sheppard soon became more popular than Oliver Twist” and was attacked by a number of critics – including Dickens himself – “as a threat to public morals and decency.” The novel was actually so popular that it was being reproduced for stage even before Ainsworth’s serialization had been fully published. Its form lent itself so well to the dramatic melodrama that was taking the stages of London’s second- and third-tier theatres that its popularity was instant and unstoppable over the following years – so much so, in fact, that it suffered ridicule in another novel whose run began in 1849. Worth writes, “Thackeray lampooned the storm scene in Jack Sheppard and the underworld ‘flash’ jargon sprinkled throughout that novel . . . in a passage, originally included in Chapter 6, which was omitted from Vanity Fair beginning with the edition of 1853.”25 Such a reception obviously begs the question as to why Ainsworth’s novel enjoyed such success while other works, much more memorable to modern audiences, were not greeted with the same enthusiasm. What was it about Ainsworth’s handling of Jack Sheppard that struck a chord with audiences in a way that other similar works did not? It seems that the enigma of Sheppard’s success stems, at least in part, from his connection with an older tradition present in religious practices of the proletariat. An avid historian who surrounded himself with people of similar interests, Ainsworth established a friendship spanning sixty-five years with James Crossley, who seems to have been the source for much of Ainsworth’s research and inspiration. “Crossley was an omnivorous reader,” Worth notes, “an ardent book collector especially interested in antiquarian, historical, and archeological works and the later Elizabethan and Jacobean poets and dramatists . . . Whenever Ainsworth had an idea involving knowledge of the past, he could always, even in his old age, turn to Crossley for advice and information.”26 Evidence of this shared interest in the cultural productions of the past is prominent in the Jack Sheppard novel. Throughout his fictionalized biography of the famed criminal, Ainsworth repeatedly employs phrases, images, and actions that mimic the medieval traditions of the peccadillo Christ child stories, visionary images of the nativity, and scenes of the passion from mystery plays. What Ainsworth seems subtly to be achieving is, in effect, a manifestation of the earlier traditions in the later ones. Sheppard was himself an interesting figure historically, but it is the interpolation of these popular medieval traditions onto his story that granted him a sense of familiarity with, and consequently a welcome into, the collective
110 memory and experience of his working-class audience. The subtlety Ainsworth employed necessitates a close reading of the novel to reveal the evidence of such a pervasive pattern.
In “The Christ of the Church,” Charles A. Briggs writes: “We must always distinguish between the Christ of the church and the Christ of . . . the people . . . The Christ of the church is always the Christ of the Bible, for the church always holds the divine authority of the Bible in her Christology.”27 While this is a fine assertion for a twentieth century theologian to make, it is not a universally applicable distinction. In the Middle Ages, for example, the Christ of the people was the Christ of the church. With the firm belief that Biblical texts were solely the realm of the priests and literacy rates near zero among the laity anyway, it stands to reason that the figure of Jesus that most people knew and worshipped was not one formed from their own study of the Gospels but rather, was a compilation of images and stories drawn from sermons, dramas, artwork, mystic writings, and oral traditions. This patchwork Christ was largely eliminated following the combined influences of the Renaissance and the Reformation, as literacy and the printing industry grew dramatically. With the scriptures now in the hands of the common man, the long-standing extra-Biblical traditions began to fall away in favor of the Jesus of the Gospel accounts, and no others. The older traditions did not disappear, however. Oscar Brockett, the renowned theatre historian, notes in his History of the Theatre that the medieval dramas did not cease until the second half of the sixteenth century. They enjoyed immense popularity through the reign of Henry VIII, when they were often actually “used as a weapon to attack or defend particular dogmas.” In an effort to quell religious animosity, however, Elizabeth ordered the performance cycles to cease not long after her 1558 coronation. Brockett stresses the point, however, that the plays did not completely end until after 1570. Even then, there were still occasional performances of the cycles, though on a much smaller scale. Thus, the liturgical dramas were a common practice in England as recently as Shakespeare’s lifetime, and as late as the seventeenth century in parts of the Continent.28
The number of allusions that seem to have been imported to the novel from vernacular medieval versions of the Christ story is too plentiful to pay them all due attention, so here the focus will rest primarily upon the use of vernacular and extra-Biblical texts either centered upon the holy Nativity or
111 else connected to the overarching story of the birth and childhood of Jesus, though we will take note of a few interesting moments later in his story. Admittedly, it is quite difficult to undertake such an endeavor without drifting into the Biblical allusions that permeate Ainsworth’s text and are heretofore unexplored by critics. However, the sheer number of images disallows such treatment at this time as an exhaustive discussion of the placement and function of each is a study far too broad for this particular context.
It is necessary, too, to focus only on the details crafted by Ainsworth himself with intentional creative license. His main resource seems to have been Defoe’s 1724 account, which was rooted more firmly in fact and contained far less embellishment of the story than Ainsworth eventually supplied. Because the similarities in Ainsworth’s work between Jack’s actual biography and the figure of Christ (except when otherwise noted) are the result of authorial choice and not factual coincidence, this further bolsters the argument that Ainsworth had deliberate intention in his presentational choices.
It is not a stretch to imagine that Ainsworth intentionally laced his novel with theatrical references. He began writing plays at the age of fifteen and while he ultimately made his name as a novelist, he retained a love for the theatre throughout his life. It comes as no surprise, then, that Ainsworth features John Gay and his visit with several distinguished curiosity-seekers to Jack’s prison cell rather prominently, wherein the playwright decides to: write an opera, the scene of which shall be laid altogether in Newgate, and the principal character shall be a highway man. I’ll not forget your two mistresses, Jack . . . my opera shall have no music except the good old ballad tunes. And we’ll see whether it won’t put the Italian opera out of fashion.29
Ainsworth seems to have included other, more subtle references to famous English theatrics, as well. He describes Caliban, the servant of Mrs. Spurling, as “a hideous, misshapen, malicious monster, with broad hunched shoulders, a flat nose, and ears like that of a wild beast, a head too large for his body, and a body too long for his legs. This horrible piece of deformity . . . was nicknamed the Black Dog of Newgate.”30 Shakespeare’s monster-man of the same name is described as: “a freckled whelp, hag-born,” “a puppy-headed monster,” and “as disproportioned in his manners /As in his shape.”31 Later, Jack encounters a gravedigger at work and inquires as to the person for whom the job is being completed. In a scene much akin to Hamlet at Ophelia’s grave, Jack is told that his actions drove his mother “out of her mind” and caused her to take her
112 own life.32 An author thus demonstrating his familiarity with the history of English performance from the preceding two centuries could reasonably and even predictably have a working familiarity with the texts still being produced with regularity through Shakespeare’s time. The trap in making such an argument regarding Ainsworth’s intentions to draw comparisons with his hero and Christ is that, as Richard B. Hauck has argued, the reader “expect[s] to reveal a complete set of parallels between the figure and Christ . . . If we try exhaustively to exploit the metaphors surrounding such a character, twisting the figure quite out of shape in order to win the game, then the joke is on us – and we will fail to get it.”33 Hauck’s insightful study of inverted or unconventional Christ-figures in literature raises a number of excellent points essential for the methodology of this study. He makes the point that “it may prove difficult for the reader to decide whether or not the figure is intended as an imitation of Christ or a parody of Christ figures” and even if a parody is intended, it is not necessarily, or even usually, intended to be sacrilegious. Rather, he argues, a comedic or parodic Christ-figure “disarms the reader and thus serves, not hinders the rhetorical purpose of drawing our sympathies” to the otherwise unsympathetic character and “since a parody is still an imitation, he is still-Christlike.”34 Hauck is referring specifically to presentations of a Christ-figure in ostensibly humorous situations. Though there is some humor involved in several of Ainsworth’s comparisons, it is certainly not maintained throughout. Hauck makes an applicable argument when he states: “To understand the use of the comic Christ . . . is to understand through experience a prime example of the literary fusion of the comic and tragic.” Thus the parallels between Jack and the medieval Christological traditions are not always simple and not always clear-cut. The goal of the author is not to walk the reader through every intentionally crafted connection or to have created so obvious a series of analogies that the work loses its own identity and becomes an allegory. Rather, the successful author of a skewed Christ-figure sometimes inverts, sometimes leaves intact familiar elements of the story, which are intended to spark a sense of recognition (either overt or subliminal) with the reader. The goal is not to create a doppelganger for Christ because, after all “no character can be Christ except Christ [but] any character can be Christ-like and something else besides.”35 Turning now to Ainsworth’s own set of written images, it is important to note that these stories, which either have no Biblical precedent or are greatly elaborated versions of otherwise
113 only incidental mentionings in the canonical Gospels, were accepted by the medieval laity as true and authentic happenings in the life of the central figure of the Christian faith. Their understanding of Christ was couched in these stories and images and, as been stated above, did not simply disappear with the Reformation. As will become apparent, Ainsworth seems to have employed a number of these traditions for the deliberate purpose of harkening his readers back to these common, older stories and thus granting his own hero a kind of vicarious sympathy and respect by association: because the audience is presumed respectful and sympathetic to Christ, it will be respectful and sympathetic to one who is like him, even if the resemblance is only superficial. Before we can begin to examine the specific instances of borrowing, however, it is necessary first to establish probable cause. What would prompt Ainsworth even to begin connecting between an infamous underworld figure and Jesus Christ? Ironically, the catalyst for his literary crafting, ironically, may have origin in the historical facts of Jack’s life. First, there is the issue of the main character’s name: Jack Sheppard. The family name is an obvious etymological derivative of the word “shepherd,” a vocation intricately laced with Christian iconography: Christ as the good shepherd,36 the parable of lost sheep,37 the shepherds present at the birth of Jesus38 – in fact, there are no less than twenty-nine separate passages involving sheep or shepherds in the New Testament alone. Shepherding is truly, as one set of art historians has stated, “one of the commonest symbols” in Christian iconography.39 Surely any person with even the most rudimentary education in Victorian England would have such associations with images of a shepherd. Even without purposely seeking out a connection, such a parallel would almost certainly be drawn by a man in Ainsworth’s social position (though the case studies of the factory children cited earlier certainly help dispel the universality of this claim). True to the nature of habitus, the world of ideas and images into which Ainsworth and his original audience were born would have necessarily influenced his own interpretations and representations of his chosen subject matter.40 Further, Jack was trained in the trade of carpentry by his foster-father, sparking an obvious recollection of the profession of Jesus and his relationship with his earthly foster-father. Thus, the happy accident of Jack’s last name and profession harken the reader automatically to make religious connections. Ainsworth, it seems, found the symbolism irresistible and just played upon those preexisting ideas to imbue his character with even more
114 similarities and to capitalize upon them with the goal of establishing an emotional connection between his readers and his subject. It is not too much of a stretch, either, to imagine that popular illustrations, like those in the Tring Tiles and Selden manuscript of the Christ child facilitating miraculous escapes from locked towers simply by pulling a friend by the pinky finger through a crack in the masonry, could have reminded Ainsworth of Jack Sheppard’s own seemingly miraculous escapes from various locked prison towers41 with an ease that Harry Houdini must have envied. Perhaps Ainsworth just detected a sense of irony in the fact that, in some circles, the popularity of this famous thief rivaled the popularity of a man crucified between two thieves. Whatever the motivation behind his decision, it is undeniable that Ainsworth did chose to make a series of connections throughout his work, beginning with the birth of the hero. At the opening of the York nativity play entitled The Birth of Jesus, Joseph complains that the family’s rudimentary dwelling will not stand up to the weather outside. He sighs, “if we here all night abide,/We schall be stormed in this steede:/The walls are doune ilk a side,/The ruffe is rayned aboven our hede.”42 When Mr. Wood ventures to the Mint to ask Mrs. Sheppard if he can raise her son as his carpentry apprentice, he takes note of the impending storm and is shocked by the rough nature of this “miserable habitation,” noting that it: had a sordid and miserable look. Rotten, and covered with a thick coat of dirt, the boards of the floor presented a very insecure footing; the bare walls were scorched all over with grotesque designs, the chief of which represented the punishment of Nebuchadnezzar. The rest were hieroglyphic characters executed in red chalk and charcoal. The ceiling had in many places given way; the laths had been removed; and where any plaster remained, it was either mapped and blistered with damps, or festooned with dusty cobwebs.43
These are hardly the circumstances under which one would expect to encounter an infant of (as is revealed much later) noble blood and linage. Indeed, Mrs. Joan Sheppard (later shown to be Lady Constance Rowland) is, by Wood’s surmise, “much too good for him [her late husband] and was never meant to be a journeyman carpenter’s wife”44 and indeed, her dignified air is a point of interest throughout the narrative. George Cruikshank’s illustration of this transposed nativity scene is the frontispiece for Ainsworth’s work. The triad of mother, swaddled child, and carpenter foster-father together form a tableau which, again simply on the basis of habitus, is the proper formula to evoke in any Victorian reader images of the Holy Birth.
115 The illustration goes beyond simply the Lukan description of the Nativity, however. It employs the prescription for manger scenes as was first established by the fourteenth century writings of St. Birgitta of Sweden. The narrations of her heavenly visions spread quickly, and by the late 1300s they had become a standard source for visual depictions of the birth of Christ. It was among the first widely disseminated texts to include a detailed account of what are now such standard elements as the posture of Mary and the presence of the animals.45 In Chapter 21 of her “Seventh Book of Revelations,” Birgitta describes in great detail how present with the Virgin Mary is “a very dignified old man and with them they had both an ox and ass. When they had entered the cave . . . the old man went outside and brought to the Virgin a lighted candle.”46 In Cruikshank’s etching not only are the man and the single candle central, the presence of the beasts of burden is even suggested in the background by the horse and rider which is situated immediately above the aforementioned pictorial re-enactment of Nebuchadnezzar’s divine punishment, described in the Book of Daniel thus: Let his heart be changed from man's, and let a beast's heart be given unto him; and let seven times pass over him. This matter is by the decree of the watchers, and the demand by the word of the holy ones: to the intent that the living may know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will, and setteth up over it the basest of men . . . and let it be wet with the dew of heaven, and let his portion be with the beasts of the field, till seven times pass over him; This is the interpretation, O king, and this is the decree of the most High, which is come upon my lord the king: That they shall drive thee from men, and thy dwelling shall be with the beasts of the field, and they shall make thee to eat grass as oxen, and they shall wet thee with the dew of heaven, and seven times shall pass over thee, till thou know that the most High ruleth in the kingdom of men, and giveth it to whomsoever he will.47
Ainsworth’s subtle yet readily identifiable joke here can be detected when one examines the picture carefully, noting that the king is wearing his crown while crouched on all fours over a patch of grass, opening his mouth as if to eat it. It seems that the cattle are present for Jack’s nativity, after all – just as Birgitta prescribed. Another distinctive feature of Birgitta’s narration that was adopted into the standard depiction is her description of Mary’s appearance. The Virgin was: most very beautiful, clothed in a white mantle and finely woven tunic through which I could clearly discern her virginal flesh. Her womb was full and much swollen . . . the Virgin then took the shoes from her feet, put off the white mantle that covered her, removed the veil from her head and laid these things beside her . . . with her most beautiful hair – as if of gold – spread out upon her shoulder
116 blades. She drew out two small cloths of linen and two of wool, very clean and finely woven, which she carried with her to wrap the infant that was to be born.48
On the contrary, Mrs. Sheppard seems to be a perfect negative of this celestial image, as she is said to have been: dressed in a tattered black stuff gown, discolored by various stains and intended, to it would seem, from the remnants of rusty crape with which it was here and there tricked out, to represent the garb of widowhood, and held in her arms a sleeping infant, swathed in the folds of a linsey-woolsey shawl. Not withstanding her emaciation, her features still retained something of a pleasing expression, and might have been termed beautiful, had it not been for that repulsive freshness of lip denoting the habitual dram-drinker; freshness in her case rendered the more shocking from the almost livid hue of the rest of her complexion. She could not be more than twenty; and though want and other suffering had done the work of time, had wasted her frame, and robbed her cheek of its bloom and roundness, they had not extinguished the luster of her eyes nor thinned her raven hair.49
So deliberate an inversion of Birgitta’s vision is this one of Ainsworth’s creation that the latter almost seems to function as a lampoon of the iconography of the Holy Birth. There are enough similarities to establish the parallel, but the reader is simultaneously placed in and yanked out of the traditional scene. For instance, the presence in Ainsworth’s narrative of the “linsey-woolsey shawl” that wrapped the infant compares to Birgitta’s “two small cloths of linen and two of wool, very clean and finely woven, which she carried with her to wrap the infant that was to be born;” but at the same time, there is a sharp difference in the treatment of light by the two authors. Birgitta writes that from the holy infant “there went out such great and ineffable light and splendor that the sun could not be compared to it. Nor did that candle that the old man had put in place give light at all because the divine splendor totally annihilated the material splendor of the candle . . . And then I heard the wonderfully sweet and most dulcet songs of the angels.”50 The concept of light as elemental in the nativity of the child Jesus also appears in a number of later liturgical dramas such as The York Cycle Birth of Jesus. When the candle appears near the child Jack in Ainsworth’s novel, however, he is “alarmed by the light” and “uttered a low and melancholy cry . . . as if imploring protection.”51 Again we see a reversal of the standard Nativity elements: while one child radiates light, the other hides from it. The medieval liturgical tradition could also parody holy scenes. Though the Holy Nativity was certainly treated with reverence, just three days after the Feast of Christmas fell the
117 Feast of the Innocents on which a Boy Bishop, “appointed for the day, was allowed to boss around his ecclesiastical superiors; outrageous lampooning of the service gave choristers the opportunity to make braying noises or grimaces.”52 This widespread tradition was a much- anticipated event in the post-advent season. Perhaps Ainsworth’s parody functioned in a similar way to the ribbing allowed by the Boy Bishop on a feast to mark the mass-murder of children. In Hauck’s words: “We laugh superficially at a number of jokes, but the real effect of the surface humor is to prepare us for a darker message.”53 A further connection between Jesus’ story and Jack’s may have existed for Ainsworth in the name of the hospital for the psychologically deranged, to which Jack’s mother is eventually committed in the novel. Founded in the mid-fifteenth century, the structure was originally built for the order of St. Mary of Bethlehem and their work with the mentally ill, but as the pronunciation of “Bethlehem” was abbreviated to “Bedlam,” the vernacular term came to be synonymous with the pandemonium and chaos of an asylum.54 Indeed, Ainsworth writes a kind of second nativity that takes place in the ramshackle cell to which Mrs. Sheppard is committed. Upon recognizing her adult son, she “strain[s] him to her breast” and as Wild and his thugs burst into the cell to capture Jack and lead him back to Newgate for hanging, Jack’s mother “clasped him in her arms.” Present at this nativity again are mock-elements of the sacred scene, this time in the persons of the asylum. Instead of Nebuchadnezzar, the role of the beast is now played by “a terrific figure . . . howling like a wild beast;” the Magi are represented by “a poor, half-naked creature, with a straw crown on his head, and a wooden scepter in his hand, seated on the ground with all the dignity of a monarch on his throne.”55 Another popular subject in both the drama and art of the Middle Ages is the so-called “Visitation” described in Luke 1:39-45 wherein Mary encounters her kinswoman Elizabeth, the mother of John the Baptist who is traditionally considered the cousin of Christ. This event, though rather short in its Biblical description, “was popular in the visual arts, being depicted as part of a nativity cycle as early as the sixth century, and finally claiming an independent position in pictorial history in the Late Middle Ages.”56 The scene was held in such regard, in fact, that the scriptural account expanded to form its own play in the Wakefield Cycle with its drama The Salutation of Elizabeth. There is present in Jack Sheppard, too, an event that seems to pay homage to the popularly re-created scene. Following the switched identity of the two babies (Jack and the as-of-yet-unnamed Thames Darrell), the two mothers meet and exchange children
118 in order to return each to its proper parent. Later the reader learns that the mysterious other woman in this scene is Thames’ mother, and Mrs. Sheppard’s long-lost sister, thus making the infants cousins. Though the relationship of the women is not known at the time, the exchange between them is still significant in that it bears a resemblance to the visitation element of the medieval nativity cycle. Further, it is interesting to note that in the chapter immediately prior to the meeting, Ainsworth first introduces a character known as “Baptist,” as if intentionally priming the awareness of his reader so as to goad him or her into making these same connections. The sub-plot surrounding the presence of Thames Darrell has liturgical overtones, as well. The second century Protoevangelium of James, which many scholars have noted was a highly influential text in the Middle Ages,57 at one point pits Elizabeth against Herod in an act of defiance of the so-called “Slaughter of the Innocents.” Whereas Joseph and Mary are warned by God and able to flee (as dramatized in the York cycle The Flight into Egypt), Elizabeth is left in Israel and must hide her child from Herod’s murderous rampage. This gruesome event featured prominently in medieval drama, appearing in the Fleury and Wakefield cycles, among others. In these plays, Herod is featured as a blustering, raging maniac terrified of losing his throne to an infant who is destined by birth to overthrow him. So, too, in Ainsworth’s novel is Sir Rowland, though later repentant for his murderous ways, fearful that he will lose his father’s estate to his sister’s son and therefore seeks to murder the child. The first eighty-three pages of the novel are dedicated principally to the way in which Jack came into the care of his foster-father carpenter, but the primary narrative ultimately becomes intertwined with the efforts of Rowland and Wild to kill both children indiscriminately. In an effort to save the babies, Wood is forced to flee across the river with the children, hiding them while hurrying towards safety and out of the reaches of the madmen bent on murder – an undertaking highly reminiscent of the actions of Mary and Joseph as well as Elizabeth. The presence of Jonathan Wild with Sir Rowland plays to another favorite moment in medieval drama, as well. Throughout the novel, Wild is referred to variously as “the tempter,” “a demon,” “the enemy of mankind . . . permitted to take human form,” 58 and many times simply “Devil.”59 Clearly these appellations coupled with his underground lair adorned by the “relics . . . in yonder cases,”60 which are actually bones of the people whom Wild has condemned and serve to make his hole a kind of twisted chapel, all function to connect Jonathan Wild with
119 Satan. Most interesting, perhaps, is Ainsworth’s inclusion of Wild’s Well Hole, into which Rowland is beaten and dragged by Wild and one of his minions to be violently killed.61 This scene is reminiscent of the staged damnation of Herod which occurred with some degree of regularity in medieval drama. David Bevington describes the scene in The Death of Herod, in which “the devils emerge from hell-mouth to drag away their prostrate victim.”62 Thus does Rowland’s own death – in which he is jumped by the Jew Abraham Mendez and murdered in the Well Hole – contain clear echoes of Herod’s own violent end in Hell’s Mouth; and Wild’s direction of the murder coincides with the role of the Devil/Death in Herod’s dramatic demise. Finally, there is the rather odd inclusion of Balaam in the nativity plays of the later Middle Ages. Though he is a somewhat obscure Old Testament prophet, the Numbers 22 story of his ass being spooked by an angel of the Lord invisible to Balaam and the subsequent conversation in human language that beast and rider share surely must have been a quirkily amusing tale for performance. Indeed, the figure of Balaam does seem to show up with some consistency in these dramas in the so-called “pageant of prophets.” Even in plays where he is not explicitly portrayed, his character is often invoked, such as in the The Shepherds and The Birth of Jesus of the York Cycle,63 and the Wakefield Cycle’s Offering of the Magi64 because Balaam’s presence in medieval liturgical drama was so indispensable. Ainsworth incorporates elements of Balaam’s story into the otherwise inexplicable opening to the novel’s chapter sixteen. The narration states: a horseman, mounted on a powerful charger, and followed at a respectable distance by an attendant, galloped into the open space front Newgate, and directed his course towards a house in the Old Bailey. Before he could draw in the rein, his steed – startled apparently by some object indistinguishable by the rider, – swerved with such suddenness as to unseat him, and precipitate him on the ground.65
Though we soon learn that this rider is none other than Sir Rowland himself, there is never any explanation offered for the strange behavior of the horse other than that it was “startled apparently by some object indistinguishable by the rider,” nor is any reason offered for its inclusion in the novel. Perhaps there is significance in Ainsworth’s blending of the story’s Herod figure with the figure of a prophet who predicts the coming of Christ to usurp Herod’s position as King of the Jews. Whatever the case, this incident serves as one more invocation of the medieval nativity pageant traditions in Jack Sheppard.
120 The ties to medieval traditions continue throughout the novel including several notable instances at the story’s climax. In his last and most dramatic escape from Newgate, Jack must fight his way through nine locked doors before he finally reaches freedom. Trapped in one particular cell previously occupied by a large number of insurrectionists, he remarks to himself, “I’ll let a little fresh air into this dungeon. They say it hasn’t been opened for eight years.” His plan is slightly deterred, however, as “stepping across the room, some sharp point in the floor pierced his foot, and, stooping to examine it, he found that the wound had been inflicted by a long rusty nail, which projected from the boards. Totally disregarding the pain, he picked up the nail and reserved it for future use.” Clearly, passion symbolism is being employed in this scene but the iconography becomes even more intense. After acquiring a long iron rail something like a crow bar, he carries it with him through the rest of the escape narrative. Ainsworth tells us that “during all this time, he had never quitted the iron bar” and later, upon retrieving his bedding so as to make a rope to ease himself down the prison walls, he is pictured as triumphantly “throwing the blanket over his left arm, and shouldering the iron bar.”66 This freeing of himself from prison and the ensuing imagery are clearly meant to reflect the common medieval iconography of the Harrowing of Hell, where Christ is pictured either draped in a cloak or still wrapped in his grave clothes and is virtually never without his stave, which he uses to pierce the gates of Hades and usher the Patriarchs towards paradise. These two elements are “the immediate visual clues to art historians that a scene is one of the Harrowing.”67 As Bevington points out, despite the fact that the scene is “mentioned nowhere in the Bible [it] forms an essential part of all Corpus Christi plays.”68 Though the only physical freedom Jack secures is his own, the iconography is especially potent when one considers the upheaval of cultural liberation that Jack’s chronic defiance spawned. Also undeniable is the subtle crafting of language in Jack’s execution narrative, which employs three images in particular that cause the reader to do a double-take, having mistaken the scene on the page for a scene very much embedded in his or her iconographic literacy. As Jack is led to the “fatal tree” for hanging, “the owner of the Crown [Tavern] . . . issued from the house, bearing a large wooden bowl filled with ale, which he offered to Jack.” This scene is obviously paralleling the scriptural event recorded in every gospel but Luke’s and a popular moment in the medieval passion plays, featured in the York Death and Burial, among others; further, Ainsworth subtly includes the symbol of the thorny crown. Further, during Blueskin’s
121 failed rescue attempt, “the body of Jack Sheppard, meanwhile, was borne along by that tremendous host,” an attempt to remind the reader of the Catholic doctrine of Transubstantiation. And finally, as Thames examines Jack’s corpse, he discovers that “it had been cut down before life was extinct, but a ball from one of the soldiers had pierced his heart.” 69 As at Christ’s crucifixion when “one of the soldiers with a spear pierced his side”70 – arguably one of the most essential scenes in medieval passion iconography – so too does Jack ultimately defy his persecutors one last time by surviving their execution tactics, necessitating more extreme measures finally to defeat him.
Jack Sheppard, both as a historical and literary figure, emerged at a time of cultural flux in England. In the 1720s, when his real-life exploits first won him infamy, Jack represented not just a charming, savvy thief, but also a man who was able to defy authority and humble the hegemonic sphere by his continual triumph over their restrictions. His boldness and audacity symptomized the shift towards democratic rule and the elevation of the individual spirit that was beginning to take shape both across the Atlantic and across the Channel. Jack’s role in literature functions in much the same way. Just as Macheath charged onto the eighteenth century stage and caused proponents of highbrow culture and patrician rule to question the sanctity of their sphere, so did Jack Sheppard, through Ainsworth’s book and the street plays it spawned, cause the Victorian ruling class much trepidation at the pervasiveness that working class culture was beginning to have. Engels and Marx recognized the coming of this trend and were writing on it soon after Ainsworth was putting pen to page to elevate the life of one of England’s most infamous figures and make him something of a tragic hero. Thus, the literary Jack is representative of his cultural context and the pending sea change in the empowerment of the lowest classes; and yet, he also is representative of cultural history. By intentionally seeking to invoke images of medieval vernacular spirituality, Ainsworth is able to do more than just gain sympathy by association. He is also able to remind the reader of a time when the common people created traditions for themselves from restricted texts. Though the Catholic Church of the Middle Ages still had a large hand in the production and performance of the liturgical plays, the iconography, and the dissemination of visionary manuscripts, the traditions themselves persisted by means of the masses through such routes as the trade guilds’ adoptions of various dramas and simple oral tradition. Bourdieu would consider Ainsworth’s
122 evoking of tradition as “the system of disposition – a past which survives in the present and tends to perpetuate itself into the future by making itself present in practice structured according to its principles.”71 The authorial decision to create a figure who both invokes and revokes earlier traditions of Christ gains Ainsworth admittance to the realm of recognition within his readership’s experiences. By playing not just to allusions to Christ but vernacular perceptions of Christ, he is creating a kind of inside joke to which the ever-growing pool of literate working class men and women might have access. Hauck writes about a similar concept, stating “Many jokes are fairly complicated metaphors, and our response to a joke is similar to our response to a literary metaphor: we have to get it, we are surprised by the analogy, and we are pleased, amused, and satisfied to have been surprised and to have been bright enough to get it.” Like a skilled housebreaker, Ainsworth has created his own entrance into the collective experience of his audience. The religious allusions are respectable enough for middle class prudence, but at times are also rebellious or irreverent inversions. He has not only played to a broad demographic but he has also empowered his audience by setting up allusions to which they all might be privy. The newly-literate working class, too, can be “satisfied to have been . . . bright enough to get” his tactics.72 A literary shape-shifter like its central figure, Ainsworth’s Jack Sheppard novel is able to take on the character of whatever or whomever it needs to for survival. And indeed, survival is Jack Sheppard’s ultimate accomplishment. The plays and music inspired by this work not only opened the gates to other popular products to be consumed first by the lower classes and then the higher ones, but they also evolved into new forms of entertainment and manifested themselves in new products of the emerging popular culture. Thus Ainsworth’s text, like Jack’s spirit itself, “was launched into eternity.”73
From Page to Stage It would be a gross exaggeration and mischaracterization, of course, to imply that Jack Sheppard was viewed as Christ figure by the general public. Rather, it is those iconographic manipulations that assisted Ainsworth’s text in striking upon familiar, comfortable elements in the vernacular imagination. There was another element, however, that truly launched the story and figure into the realm of popular phenomenon.
123 In January of 1839, Bentley’s Miscellany ran its first episode of William Ainsworth’s new novel, Jack Sheppard. Though it was slated to complete its serialization in February of 1840, the novel was released in its entirety in October of 1839 and by the end of the month, a dramatized version of the novel by J. B. Buckstone opened in London at the Adelphi Theatre. (The novel did complete its obligation to the magazine, however, running its final installation in early 1840.) The popular chord that the novel had struck among its readership was soon to become a full orchestration of melodramas, pantomimes, ballad operas, and common ditties. Ainsworth’s writing had certainly enabled the text’s initial reception, but the illustrations of Cruikshank are what enabled it to cross effectively from the printed page to live-action re-creations. Meisel details the ways in which Cruikshank’s sketches were used in advertising the various plays, with a pictorial series of images forming a narrative sequence of events on playbills and posters. Meisel includes the telling words of William Makepeace Thackeray (who bore little love for Ainsworth) that the one element of the novel that stays most with the reader is “George Cruikshank’s pictures – always George Cruikshank’s pictures.” Thackeray goes on to pen: “[I]t seems to us that Mr Cruikshank really created the tale, and that Mr Ainsworth, as it were, only put words to it.”74 Despite the well-known dislike between the authors, Thackeray’s assessment of the situation seems fair and accurate – it is the visual genius of Cruikshank’s work that breathes life into the story. It is significant, too, that such vivid illustrations were received with such widespread excitement. As print reproduction technology developed, it enabled the cheaper, easier, and therefore wider dissemination of graphic images. And since the illustrations offered such sequential narration, they were able to convey the story of Jack’s adventures and triumphs even to the least literate of the urban poor who saw the images emblazoned on theatre advertisements and in shop windows. Thus, the text was “read” by far more than those who possessed the complete volumes or a subscription to Bentley’s, and this familiarity translated to the stage. Tableau vivant, the nineteenth century parlor game and theatrical entertainment that assembled famous artistic scenes from living people and real items, found a new form of realization via these illustrations. It had already developed alongside Hogarth’s etchings, but it was now popularized in the mainstream so as to be a standard part of staging melodramas. Matthew Buckley points out the essential link that a real-life enactment of a textual image created for the working class audience of these earliest Jack Sheppard plays:
124 Dramatic realization of such images as tableaux allowed a theatrical audience unfamiliar with the book, but possessed of some acquaintance with its illustrations, to assign a narrative to the visual skeleton offered by Cruikshank’s prints. Dramatic realization, however, in its achievement of a familiar illustration in living form, also elicited the complex, sensational pleasures of pictorial recognition.75
As each familiar scene took to the stage, these “sensational pleasures of pictorial recognition” produced a kind of gratification for the audience – there was a mutual understanding between director, actors, and audience. It was a kind of cultural inside joke that the proletariat audience got but that simultaneously represented a kind of cultural and visual literacy closed to those who normally availed themselves only to “high art.” Buckley also notes that “Jack Sheppard mania,” as he calls it, was the result of “that hybrid ‘book’ which served as a primary mechanism, and not simply a literary articulation, of the modernity it describes.”76 And as the mania surrounding this figure and the popularity of his plays rose, the class distinction grew even greater. Jack, who was one of the lumpenproletariat in real life and gained notoriety by repeatedly defying the social order in place, was once again emerging as the hero of the underprivileged and the bane of the upper-crust. One of the earliest and perhaps the most famous example of the anxieties caused by this play is the May 5, 1840 murder of Lord William Russell by B.F. Courvoisier, his valet. The case was well-publicized and the defendant famously remarked afterward that he had been influenced by both Ainsworth’s novel and a production of Jack Sheppard by J.T. Haines at the Surrey theatre. The public reaction to this confession was tremendous in part because of the extremity of this crime but also because, as was rapidly becoming evident, it was not the only response elicited by the popularity of Jack’s story. As Buckley notes, the songs, catch phrases, and attitudes of Jack were all quickly catching on; “the working class population had reason to be angered, and the Jack Sheppard mania offered a wonderful set of gestures and signs, attitudes and postures through which a servant, beggar, or a petty laborer could make anger evident.”77 The upper-class insisted that this merely proved what they had suspected all along – that the popular literature and entertainment of the working class were dangerous, unhealthy pastimes that would only lead to violence and revolt. A new effort was launched to prevent future productions of Jack Sheppard on London stages and would stay on the books until 1880, but it had little effect. The playwrights simply adapted their works as theatre historian George Taylor
125 points out, “by renaming the play The Stone Jug. Other titles adopted included The Idle Apprentice [after Hogarth’s illustration], The Boy Burglar, Thames Darrell, and The Storm in the Thames.”78 The Stone Jug is an especially significant title, as it comes from the opening line of the plays’ most popular song, “Nix My Dolly.” Jack opens the song with the following pronouncement: “In a box of the stone jug I was born” – implying that his birth took place in a prison cell. The song continues with a cheerful recounting of Jack’s early peccadilloes and criminal beginnings that, ironically, are contrary to Jack’s childhood in Mr. Wood’s care, as the audience has just witnessed. But the dramatized Jack makes it abundantly clear that he has chosen to ally himself with the lower class, even while he is still living a respectable middle- class life. In the opening scene of Buckstone’s second act, the curtain lifts to reveal a tableau of Cruikshank’s “The Name on the Beam” illustration. Here, the audience witnesses a twelve-year- old Jack carving his name into the crossbeam of Wood’s workshop while singing a fortuitous song to himself about the carved names in Newgate’s walls. In his second spoken line of the play, he remarks to himself: “Tut, tut! what a fool I am. I ought to have cut John not Jack; but it don’t signify, everybody calls me Jack, perhaps I was christened so, who knows?” After singing a few more bars he steps back to admire his work and bemuses, “I’ve half a mind to give old Wood the slip and turn highwayman.”79 Thus we see an immediate and deliberate choice for the vernacular – he rejects the more decorous form of his name and wants to shake off the respectable profession for which he has been trained. The effect is the same as his lyrics in “Nix My Dolly” – his desire is an association with the lower classes and is a desire that will be realized in both the fictionalized performance of his story and in the real-life demographic of his audience. Jack’s alliance with the lower classes extended beyond the realm of his dramatized life, as well. The early Victorian era was marked by its inheritance of several seismic social shifts from the Regency period (1811-1820) and the intervening years to Victoria’s coronation in 1837. It was during this time that cultural output was marked by a rise in social consciousness. Sir Walter Scott popularized idyllic scenes of royal leisure; Jane Austen penned novels driven by class standing and social decorum; and manners guides crystallized the practices and gestures of the upper class for an increasingly status-conscious middle class. Even more significantly, however, was the passage (and subsequent repeal) of the Corn Laws and the introduction of the
126 Parliamentary Reform Act of 1832. The Reform Act extended parliament election rights dramatically, almost doubling the number of men deemed eligible to vote. The restructuring of the districts also heavily favored the densely populated manufacturing centers around London and in the north, thereby granting significant political power to urban residents and signaling a cultural shift in self-perception: England was now a country of modern industry rather than agrarian dependence. The Corn Laws also affected the condition of the urban working classes, but in a very different way. In 1815, a series of tariffs were enacted to limit foreign imports of such staples as wheat. The goal was supposedly to preserve the jobs of British farmers and harvesters but since British colonies were already the most profitable producers of grain, the perceived competition was a governmental fabrication and the measure only succeeded in keeping prices artificially high – all to the benefit of wealthy British landowners. The issue was one of the most hotly contested issues through the early and middle decades of the nineteenth century. When the potato famine began in Ireland in 1845, the need to revoke the Corn Laws became apparent to bring down the cost of bread but the debate continued until 1846, when the restrictions were finally lifted. The policy change was viewed as a tremendous blow against the landed aristocracy and the decades-long debate was considered another sign that the British laborers – from the harvesters to the dock hands to the processing and production workers – were speaking up and grasping at political, economic, and social power. In a trend that caused the upper classes some concern for their hegemonic status, the culture was beginning to shift in favor of the little man and Jack Sheppard, with his defiant maneuverings and subversive triumphs, was emerging as their spiritual leader. That is not to say that Jack summarily rejected all objects representative of wealth. Peter Reed points out that “Buckstone’s Jack Sheppard instead exhibits a marked fascination with clothing and sumptuary display” and rightly recognizes this tendency for finery through dishonest gains as a consistent trait throughout Jack’s performed adventures in various media.80 The display of such lavish consumption does not seem to be a tip of the proverbial (and in this case, “smartly cocked and edged with feathers”81 hat to the tastes and habits of the bourgeois but rather, is a mockery of such consumption. He does not clothe himself in items purchased by his earnings but rather, pilfered by his profession. The gesture is not imitation as much as it is defiance of social restrictions and sumptuary regulations. This audacity is much the same as that
127 Macheath displays in The Beggar’s Opera. Reed makes the additional note that Jack’s costume changes “culminat[e] in the ‘Scarlet hunting coat, trimmed with gold lace, high boots, and feathered hat’ made famous by early stagings of Macheath.”82 Though the figure is changing as his story is reworked, certain iconographic elements are inherited, marking the progression of the cycle. The Ainsworth/Cruikshank/Buckstone Jack Sheppard is very self-aware of its borrowings from John Gay, even inventing for the audience an incident whereby Gay, Hogarth, Thornhill, and several other notables visited Jack in his Newgate cell. In the play’s version of this scene, Jack and his visitors have the following exchange that imagines a jumping off point from which the lore cycle might have launched: Jack: And so you’re Mr Gay, the playwriter, eh? I saw your Captives at the Drury Lane one night. Poll, Bess and I went into the gallery; we were highly entertained. The Prince of Wales was there too. Gay: And pray who may Poll and Bess be? Austin: His two wives, if you please, sir. Gay: Two wives! Egad, Jack, you should write your adventures; they would be quite as entertaining as the histories of Lazarillo de Tormes, Meriton Latroon, or any of my favourite rogues, and far more instructive. Jack: You had better write ’em for me, Mr Gay. Hogarth: (to Gay) If you write them I’ll illustrate them. Gay: I will. An idea has just occurred to me – I’ll write an opera, the scene of which shall be laid altogether at Newgate, and the principal character a highwayman. I’ll not forget your two mistresses, Jack. Jack: Nor Jonathan Wild, I hope, sir. Gay: Certainly not. I’ll gibbet the rascal, a thief-taker! Eh? Ha!ha!ha!—I’ll call him Peach’em; and my opera shall have no music except the good old ballad tunes, and we’ll see whether it won’t put the Italian opera out of fashion . . . Hogarth: . . . Sheppard’s story has given me a hint – I’ll take two apprentices, and depict their career; one, by perseverance and industry, shall obtain fortune and honour, and the other, by an opposite course and dissolute habits, shall eventually arrive at Tyburn. Jack: (dejectedly) Yours will be nearer the truth, and have a deeper moral, Mr Hogarth.83
The illustration of the scene from Cruikshank’s hand is a study in layered representation. It depicts Jack in the center of the room flanked by Thornhill’s formal painting on his right and Hogarth’s sketch on his left – all in a scene that formed an essential part of the theatrical tableaux of each performance. But Reed stresses the important point that the representation does not end
128 there, noting, “Cruikshank’s drawing represents an already theatricalized scene. Jack performs for his audience, who process his performance into various other modes and media. Once again, blurring the boundaries between on- and offstage, Cruikshank’s actors and audience occupy the same space.”84 Indeed, the re-creation of Jack Sheppard was taking place all over Britain in its working class theatres and by working class people whistling his songs and chanting his lyrics. The traits and tricks, gestures and jokes of the real life Jack Sheppard and his various creative manifestations were continuing to live, grow, and spread throughout Britain, across the Atlantic, and eventually, over the Channel.
Black Jack In December of 1839, two months after the opening of Buckstone’s play in London’s Adelphi, Jack Sheppard, or the Life of a Robber! made its debut at the Bowery Theatre in New York. The play was the creation of Jonas B. Phillips, a nominally successful playwright in the melodrama genre and, as Reed writes, “The Bowery seems a particularly fitting place to stage the escapes and insouciances of the Atlantic lumpenproletariat . . . As one might expect from a theatrical venue in the middle of public negotiations over the relationships between class and culture, the Bowery was a tumultuous place.”85 The neighborhood was racially mingled and socially charged – recent years had been marked by violent demonstrations and riots that often involved the theatre itself. And it was among this demographic that T.D. Rice had been jumping Jim Crow to enthusiastic responses for the past few years. The traditional minstrel variety show was still developing in the late 1830s, but as the popularity of Rice’s blackface character had become a sensation, it opened doors for a new form of working class entertainment and its fame had earned it hegemonic status among the lower classes. The cultural consumption of the laborers was no longer dictated by the tastes and trends of the moneyed class but rather, by the songs, dances, and characters of their own creation. Such organic entertainment had obviously always existed but now it dominated the popular venues. The almost-simultaneous development of such vernacular forces as Jim Crow’s and Jack Sheppard’s stage personae was made even more remarkable by the shifts in Jack’s lore cycle than manifested themselves in several of Rice’s later shows. As noted above, Rice took his Jim Crow show to London in the summer of 1836, returning there regularly until 1844. Jack Sheppard mania (to employ Buckley’s term once
129 again) launched three years later, re-stoked by several manifestations of Jack’s story. (In fact, Ainsworth’s was not the only novelized version of Jack Sheppard’s life to be released in 1839; Lincoln Fortescue published The Life and Adventures of Jack Sheppard anonymously in London that same year, placing his name on the second printing in 1845, only after the popularity of his subject was certain.) As the Jack Sheppard plays leapt to prominence by winter of 1839 on both sides of the Atlantic, evidence suggests that Rice had already absorbed elements of Jack’s cycle into his own trans-Atlantic performances. In the autumn of 1835, an early version of Bone Squash Diavolo played around the northeast, first at the Bowery and then at the Walnut Theatre in Philadelphia. In 1839, truly a red-letter year for working class entertainment, a re-worked version Bone Squash86 opened in London in 1839. A self proclaimed “Burletta” (burlesque/operetta), it featured original composition as well as lyrical reworkings of popular tunes and like Gay’s work, featured a character who has several traits of Jack Sheppard. Bone Squash, a good-timing chimney sweep (played by a blacked-up Rice) sells his soul to the devil – “a real genuine Yankee devil, or a devil of a Yankee”87 – a figure with a real-life correlation to the so-called “Yankee devils” who were fat-cats of New York industry. After the transaction, Bone Squash wins the admiration of Pompey Duckellegs, a black man trying to live like a white man, who is impressed by Bone Squash’s expensive new clothes and apparent upswing in fortune. Duckellegs secures Bone Squash’s promise to marry Junietta – a young woman of similar class and race aspirations as her father. The plans for the wedding are interrupted, however, by the appearance of Janza who insists that her claim on Bone Squash is the rightful one, as well as by the repeated attempts of the Yankee Devil to entrap his quarry. The crafty Bone Squash eludes capture by means of an awaiting hot air balloon, pushing the Devil back into the pits of hell and leaving his friends and brides-to-be behind. Lhamon makes an important observation about this play, noting that the two wives at the close of the curtain: makes swift allusion to John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera (1728), which was still standard fare in the theatre when Rice was coming up. Macheath’s promises to Polly and Lucy a century earlier activate Bone’s vows to Junietta and Janza . . . Moreover, Rice solves the infamous problems of Macheath’s release at the end of The Beggar’s Opera, but without Gay’s contrivance. Gay sends in a reprieve. Rice sees to it that the play shakes Bone free, its very instability accessing the uncertainty of its characters’ lives.88
130 Even before Jack was reliving his adventures between the covers of Bentley’s Miscellany throughout 1839, it seems that he also found himself between the proscenium arches of Atlantic stages. Eighteen fifty-three saw the premier of another “burlesque opera” by Rice, this one a parody of Shakespeare’s Othello entitled Otello. The role of the Moorish hero is performed in blackface and incorporates only reworked folk melodies such as “Yankee Doodle” and “Dan Tucker” for its characters’ songs. Two songs are of special note, however. Lhamon suggests that Iago and Roderigo’s duet, “‘Polly Will You Now’ was perhaps derived from Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and its sequel, Polly.” Likewise, Otello has a ditty set to the tune of none other than “Nix My Dolly” of Jack Sheppard fame. Lhamon makes note of this, as well, pointing out that, “It may be that Rice has Otello sing his ‘notin’ to pay’ lyrics at this point to emphasize his likeness to Jack Sheppard’s Romany or ‘gypsy’ mood.”89 The inclusion of this song is not at all surprising, as Rice’s shows were often performed in the same playhouses that hosted Jack Sheppard productions and the primary audience of both shows was the same – working class youths with no other social or influential voice than the advancement of their own vernacular culture. And one of the most important elements of vernacular culture is its recognizability by a large group, as well as its flexibility to adapt to changing tastes, trends, and contexts. These minstrel shows, with their use of familiar elements, quickly grew to become arguably the most powerful source of popular culture in the mid-nineteenth century on both sides of the Atlantic. Much of their appeal lay with the tension between the familiar and the unfamiliar, the predictable and the unpredictable, the static and the ever-changing elements of each show. Lhamon opens his book Jump Jim Crow with the remark Shakespeare penned for Roderigo in Othello, in which the younger man warns Brabantio about the secret marriage between Desdemona and the Moorish soldier: Your daughter . . . hath made a gross revolt, Tying her duty, beauty, wit, and fortunes In an extravagant and wheeling stranger Of here and everywhere.90
It is on this description of Othello as an “extravagant and wheeling stranger” that Lhamon chooses to base his discussion of the blackface Jim Crow character, and it is an amazingly
131 accurate description of what the gestures of the minstrel shows would contain almost four hundred years later. The ubiquitous chorus of the character’s title song, “Jump Jim Crow,” repeats the following passage: “Weel about and turn about and do jis so,/Eb’ry time I weel about and jump Jim Crow.”91 These lyrics and their accompanying spinning, leaping dance, were the only stable part of an ever-changing series of verses that quickly became a staple part of blackface minstrel shows and comedy routines. The dances and acrobatics highlighted in blackface performance were some of the most distinguishing features of the shows. Constance Rourke describes the typical show in her seminal study American Humor: A Study of the National Character, first published in 1931. She stresses that: Primitive elements were roughly patterned in minstrelsy. Its songs, its dances, its patter, were soon set within a ritual which grew more and more fixed, like some rude ceremonial. Endmen and interlocutors spun out their talk with an air of improvisation . . . In the dancing a strong individualism appeared, and the single dancer might step out of the whole pattern; the jig dancer might perform his feats on a peck measure, and dancers might be matched against each other with high careerings which belonged to one alone: but these excursions were caught within the broad effect. Beneath them all ran the deep insurgence of Negro choruses that flowed into minstrelsy for many years, even after its ritual grew stereotyped and other elements were added.92
The formula of these gestures is especially evident in their treatment in Harriett Beecher Stowe’s groundbreaking 1852 novel Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Stowe, who insisted that she had never attended a minstrel show herself,93 exhibits signs of habitus in that she is nevertheless cognizant of the elements of this popular entertainment. This influence is evident in the manner in which St. Clare introduces Ophelia to the unforgettable Topsy: “I thought she was rather a funny specimen in the Jim Crow line. Here Topsy,” he added giving a whistle, as a man would to call the attention of a dog, “give us a song, now, and show us some of your dancing.” The black, glassy eyes glittered with a kind of wicked drollery, and the thing struck up, in a clear, shrill voice, an odd negro melody, to which she kept time with her hands and feet, spinning round, clapping her hands, knocking her knees together, in a wild, fantastic sort of time, and producing in her throat all those odd guttural sounds which distinguish the native music of her race; and finally, turning a summerset or two, and giving a prolonged closing note, as odd and unearthly as that of a steam-whistle, she came suddenly down on the carpet, and stood with her hands folded, and a most sanctimonious expression of meekness and solemnity over her face, only broken by the cunning glances which she shot askance from the corners of her eyes.94 (369)
132 A few pages later, we see Ophelia’s fruitless attempts to school Topsy in the ways of domestic chores: Topsy would hold a perfect carnival of confusion, for some one or two hours. Instead of making the bed, she would amuse herself with pulling off the pillowcases, butting her wooly head among the pillows, till it would sometimes be grotesquely ornamented with feathers sticking out in various directions; she would climb the posts, and hang head downward from the tops; flourish the sheets and spreads all over the apartment; dress the bolster up in Miss Ophelia’s night- clothes, and enact various performances with that, -- singing and whistling, and making grimaces are herself in the looking-glass; in short, as Miss Ophelia phrased it, “raising Cain” generally. On one occasion, Miss Ophelia found Topsy with her very best scarlet India Canton crape shawl wound round her head for a turban, going on with her rehearsals before the glass in great style . . . “Topsy!” she would say, when at the end of all patience, “what does make you act so?” . . . “I spects I ’s the wickedest critter in the world;” and Topsy would cut a summerset, and come up brisk and shining to a higher perch, and evidently plume herself on the distinction.95
As Topsy creates her own minstrel show hilarity, “in the Jim Crow line,” Jim Crow seems to have developed this “extravagant and wheeling” style of performance while he also absorbed the specific elements of the Jack Sheppard lore cycle discussed above. As Stowe’s novel was adapted for stage – both in the versions maintaining her abolitionist stance and those (usually in lower class playhouses) that reversed it – the character of Topsy became an indispensable comic-relief figure. Her subversive songs, coupled with wild dances and gymnastics were often a main attraction of the show. In light of this, one cannot help but be reminded of Jack’s defiant escape letter and spontaneous celebration as it was recorded in Defoe’s popular book: “having gone a little way, Hefford’s-Harp at the sign of the Irish-Harp, put me a Jumping and Dancing to that degree that I could not forbear making a Somerset or two before Northumberland House . . . [and] meeting by meer chance a Bakers Cart going to Turnham-Green, I being not Mealy Mouth’d, nor the Man being Crusty I wheel’d out of town.”96 As is evidenced by the inclusion of such social fixtures as the Yankee Devil in Bone Squash, the defiance of hegemonic concepts of decency in “Nix My Dolly,” and possibly even the jumping acrobatics of the general minstrel show tradition, it is apparent that the blackface inclusion of Jack Sheppard elements was more than convenient cross-pollination. Meer asserts,
133 “Minstrelsy could thus direct the class anxiety of white workers at potential black rivals and at the same time suggest the possibility of allegiance. Blackface’s inherent political ambiguity was enhanced by the fact that performances were topical, partly improvisatory, and acutely responsive to their audiences.”97 Lhamon makes a similar argument in Raising Cain, stating simply that “The blackface lore cycle is what held together in useful tension the conflicted voices of this class.”98 The same class-conscious fear that had erupted in England over the popularity of Jack Sheppard’s story among the working classes was applied on both sides of the Atlantic to minstrel shows, as well. Lhamon applies this argument to the Jim Crow figure, quoting the Devil in his own exasperated curse at Bone Squash: “You’re like a ‘lasses candy in a shop window. You run away on all sides” (Act II, scene 4). His melting instability is exactly what bosses held against Jim Crow’s public. And that’s why polite culture aimed its big guns of disrepute against Jim Crow. Elites could not entirely outlaw common people, but they could try to make taboo their cultural activities.99
As Jack’s lore cycle developed, it also diversified. Its nature dictated the working class realms in which it stayed – the politically and economically satisfied rarely have an interest in the emblems and images of those who are not, except when those images threaten the structure that keeps the status quo in place. Elements of Jack’s presence in burnt cork make-up on a proletariat stage could hardly have seemed threatening to the hegemonic powers; after all, a black laborer was the only person less socially empowered than a white one. And his persistence was at first only a cultural victory. But the political potency of the cycle would eventually become apparent.
Jack to the Future Bone Squash may have sailed away into the heavens in the Diavolo, but a century later Macheath resurfaced in the underworld again – and as himself this time – in Bertolt Brecht’s Dreigroschenoper (in English, The Threepenny Opera). Brecht’s creative retelling of Gay’s story also comes in the form of a parody, now of the German high art conventions that were being perpetuated by theatrical forms such as Wagnerian opera. As Lotte Lenya, one of the stars of the original production (and wife of composer Kurt Weill), recollected about the play in the 1940s, “Respected Berlin theatre oracles slipped out to spread the word that Brecht and Weill
134 proposed to insult the public with a ludicrous mishmash of opera, operetta, cabaret, straight theatre, outlandish American jazz, not one thing or the other.” 100 Such was Brecht’s style – he was eclectic and unabashed about borrowing from other cultural sources as part of his own creative genius. Lenya describes what was Brecht’s tendency, “As his admirers have it: to adapt, reinterpret, re-create, magnificently add modern significance; or in his detractors’ eye: to pirate, plagiarize, shamelessly appropriate – to borrow at will from the vanished greats like Marlowe and Shakespeare and Villon, and even from his actual or near contemporaries like Kipling and Gorky and Klabund.”101 As such, when the idea came to him to resurrect The Beggar’s Opera but in a satirical manner that would ultimately highlight Brecht’s socialist ideals, the borrowing of Gay’s story and characters was not only convenient, it was quite appropriate. After all, Gay’s original production had been laced with political satire itself. And similar to the theatrical revolution of which Gay’s ballad opera was a catalyst, so too did Brecht’s treatment of the story mark an important era of change in cultural production. In the visual arts, the painters dubbed “modern artists” were reclaiming the two-dimensional canvas from the photo-realists; meanwhile, a similar movement occurring with the stage. Playwrights like Brecht sought to recapture the stage from the realm of suspended disbelief and to tear down the so-called “fourth wall.” If one wanted to be lost in the melodic scores of classical composition (so the reasoning went), one should attend an orchestral performance; if one sought entertainment, one should seek out a cabaret or the moving picture shows; if one desired to see real life performed, one should simply stand on a city street corner, or in a drawing room or workhouse and see real life displayed before one’s very eyes. If one wanted live performance in a theatrical setting, the performance should be delivered in such a way that the immediacy and fabrication of the live theatre was never forgotten, suspended, or imagined away. The result of such a philosophy were performances punctuated by dropped signs announcing new scenes, costume changes on stage, and theatre-in-the-round in which the audience was always acutely and unavoidably self-aware due to the section of audience seated across the stage from themselves – in short, it was a reclaiming of the Greek “theatron” or “spectacle” of the theatre. Brecht described the process by which theatre ideally reclaims the written word for performance as such:
135 Today the theatre exerts an absolute primacy over dramatic writing. The primacy of the theatrical apparatus is a primacy of means of production. The theatre as a whole resists any attempt to change its function for other ends. The moment it gets hold of a play, the theatre immediately starts transforming it – except those passages which are not in direct contradiction to the theatre – so that it no longer in any way remains a foreign body in the theatre. The necessity for presenting the new drama adequately – more important for the theatre than for the drama – is weakened by the fact that the theatre can present anything and everything: it “theatricalizes” any play.102
It is in this atmosphere of cultural change and social activism that elements of Jack Sheppard emerges again – and again with Macheath, the dashing and slippery underworld rogue. It is important to note, however, that Brecht’s interests in the play had nothing to do with the actual figure of Sheppard. It is unlikely that Brecht was even aware of the historical inspiration for Gay’s Macheath. Instead, it is the gestures that Macheath brings that Brecht sought to perpetuate. The plethora of wives (Polly, Lucy, and Jenny are those explicitly named) are again in place, as is the dapper appearance (in Act one, Scene one, Polly breathlessly describes Macheath’s “White kid gloves and a stick with an ivory handle and spats over his patent leather shoes and a nice polite manner and a scar”), and the chronic escapes (from both the prison of his physical confinement and the prison of matrimonial responsibility via his eleventh-hour royal lordship). But the circumstances of the play are slightly altered. In Brecht’s version, Peachum is no longer just an underworld dealer of stolen goods. Now, he is a tight-fisted capitalist who has built an industry of begging and regulates his myriad panhandler and pickpocket employees in their various professional endeavors throughout the London streets. His business is based upon the principle that hypocrisy is a marketing technique: that the rich of the earth indeed create misery, but they cannot bear to see it. They are weaklings and fools just like you. As long as they have enough to eat and can grease their floors with butter so that even the crumbs that fall from their tables grow fat, they can’t look with indifference on a man collapsing from hunger – although, of course, it must be in front of their house that he collapses.103
Peachum thus reveals himself a player in the very system he seeks to exploit. Macheath makes a similar observation as to the hypocrisy of the commercially successful, but from the point of view of one outside of the capitalist establishment. In “Second Threepenny-Finale” he and Ginny Jenny share a duet commenting on the inherent problem with social moralizing separate from social equality. Macheath opens with the statement:
136 Now all you gentlemen who wish to lead us Who teach us to desist from mortal sin Your prior obligation is to feed us: When we’ve had our lunch, your preaching can begin. All you who love your paunch and our propriety Take note of this one thing (for it is late): You may proclaim, good sirs, your fine philosophy But till you feed us, right and wrong can wait! Or is it only those who have the money Can enter the land of milk and honey?104
Once again, Jack Sheppard emerges as the champion of the lumpenproletariat and the mouthpiece of their anger. And once again, his form ruled the dictates of popular culture. Lenya recalls, “From that day [of the play’s opening] Berlin was swept by a Dreigroschenoper fever. In the streets no other tunes were whistled. A Dreigroschen bar opened, where no other music was played. Immediately the ‘Brecht style’ and the ‘Weill style’ were slavishly imitated by other dramatists and composers.”105 Brecht’s version may have secured Macheath in a barony among the elite, but Jack Sheppard was never one to shun the common folks. As The Threepenny Opera opened and closed in Berlin, there was a song that lingered. Composed hastily to create a grander entrance for the egotistical actor originally cast as Macheath, the song was sung on-stage by an organ grinder, representing the downtrodden empire of which Macheath was the criminal hero. It was called “Die Moritat von Mackie Messer” in German, which translates to “The Deadly Deeds of Mr. Mackie.” And because Anglophone cultural ties with Germany from the First World War were not fully mended before the second broke out, the song remained on the continent until the 1950s. It was not until the rebuilding of Europe after World War Two that trans-Atlantic cultural exchange really began again, and it is at this point that Jack Sheppard once again crossed to America. In 1954, Marc Blitzstein translated the musical into English for its New York debut, and re-named the song “Mack the Knife.” The show was a hit off Broadway; the song was a phenomenon everywhere else. American jazz great Louis Armstrong recorded a version of it in 1956. Two years later, Bobby Darin did the same, and the cut rapidly rose to the top of the American charts. Its ubiquitous presence on the radio and on bandstands assured it a solid place in popular music history, as well as establishing it as a perennial remake favorite. Bill Haley and His Comets, The Doors, Frank Sinatra and Lyle Lovett have all offered up their own versions of
137 the song; in fact, between 1956 and 2006 there were at least fifteen renditions of the song recorded by mainstream popular musicians and it became common practice to tweak the lyrics according to each singer’s situation. Armstrong, for example, spontaneously added the name of “Miss Lotte Lenya” in his own adaptation as tribute to original Threepenny cast member, as she was present at Armstrong’s recording session. In a rather ironic application of this song from Brecht’s capitalist protest, it was even parodied in the late 1980s as “Big Mac Tonight” in an advertising campaign launched by McDonald’s, perhaps the most readily recognizable brand of western capitalist consumerism. True to the nature of lore cycles, the elements are unstable and malleable. They change and adapt to fluctuating circumstances and shifting contexts. Perhaps one of the most significant performances of “Mack the Knife” occurred in 1960. Ella Fitzgerald was in Germany, recording her album Ella in Berlin, when someone suggested that she perform the song live in the studio. She agreed, but with the caveat that she might not remember all of the words; and the band began. After crooning the first verse flawlessly, she started to stumble over the lyrics, then began to extemporize and the result was a high-spirited, hilarious tribute to Armstrong, Darin, and Mack himself. The mood was infectious and in 1961, Fitzgerald was awarded the Best Female Vocal Performance for the album as well as for the single. Jack Sheppard must surely have been laughing at how far a common housebreaker had come from his unceremonious hanging, and yet how little he had traveled from his common-man roots. The song is now one of the most widely recognizable tunes in modern music, but its beginnings in German socialist theatre have just as widely been forgotten. It is the song and not the story – the element and not the entire figure itself – that is disseminated in popular culture. As Fitzgerald improvises towards the end of her recording: “You won’t recognize it – It’s a surprise hit, This tune called ‘Mack the Knife.”106
Indeed, Jack is not always recognizable, whether he is in the figure of Macheath or Bone Squash, Morano or Mack the Knife, but thus is the nature of lore cycles: they are elements, not archetypes; they are memories, not originals.
138 Conclusion: “Launched into Eternity” Wordsworth famously commented that “poetry is the spontaneous overflow of emotion recollected in tranquility.” We might best define lore cycles as the spontaneous emergence of a remembered trait recollected in a moment of cultural transition. We see Jack as Macheath in the overhaul of British opera, as well as making political jabs; we see Jack in the industrialized urban centers as proletariat power is beginning to swell; we see Jack under the burnt cork mask of blackfaced minstrelsy; we see Jack in economic commentary of post-war political theatre; and we see Jack in the earliest stages of a widespread youth music culture. Yet it is not Jack who we see so much as it is his gestures. What persists are moments, gestures, and traits that surface in his finery and his wives and his African disguise and his subversion of authority. And every time he emerges as recognizable, he changes his form and slips away, only to resurface at another time or place or in a different guise. The lore cycle of Jack Sheppard, like its real life counterpart, is always able to break free and re-emerge again.
139 CHAPTER SIX Conclusion: Dawkins, Duchamp, and the Persistence of Memories
Clichéd phrases tell us that unrepeatable events now exist “only as memories” and that these memories are “mere echoes of the past.” While these statements intend us to understand that we cannot retrieve the past, semantically, they speak to just the opposite: A memory is a form of indefinite survival that preserves the image and reality of something far beyond its own tangible span or immediate life. Likewise, an echo is a repetition of sound that reflects back to the listener when certain conditions are right for preserving and retransmitting that sound. Despite their common semantic application, memories and echoes do not mark absence but, in fact, preserve and transmit proof of the existence and continued presence of something. In 1976, biologist Richard Dawkins released his groundbreaking and hotly debated study on evolutionary theory The Selfish Gene, in which he introduced a theory about the persistence of human memory via the passage of information from one carrier to successive generations. He deemed these units of knowledge “memes,” and considered their function in human culture to be similar to that of genetic survival. Dawkins writes: Examples of memes are tunes, catch-phrases, beliefs, clothes fashions, ways of making pots or of building arches. Just as genes propagate themselves in the gene pool by leaping from body to body via sperms and eggs, so memes propagate themselves in the meme pool by leaping from brain to brain via a process which, in the broad sense, can be called imitation. If a scientist hears, or reads about, a good idea, he passes it on to his colleagues and students. He mentions it in his articles and his lectures. If the idea catches on it can be said to propagate itself, spreading from brain to brain.1
The theory is certainly an intriguing one, but it does not account for purposeful changes or rhetorical applications of a cultural memory unit. Change is, after all, the antithesis of imitation. We can certainly credit consistency with preserving certain aspects of cultural thought, such as the stories discusses in “The Genesis Complex.” But as we saw in a microcosmic way with the concept of the American Eden, a foundational myth can lose its impact on the basis of its very prominence in a culture. It becomes a victim of image saturation – because it has so successfully propagated itself in the cultural memory, it is well-known, but no longer remarkable. The most memorable cultural products are often situated in a unique place within their social context; they are noteworthy because they are exceptional. It is for this reason
140 that Gary Taylor notes, “We are particularly prone to remember stimuli associated with changes in a niche.”2 A work that transforms the familiar becomes memorable for its novelty, distinctiveness, innovation, or defiance. The “ready-made” works of Marcel Duchamp illustrate this point perfectly.
In 1915, the experimental and early modern artist Marcel Duchamp introduced the first of his innovative sculptures based upon prefabricated objects. Dubbed “Ready-Mades,” these controversial works represented the inherent aesthetic pleasure present in ordinary items of everyday life. His first of such exhibits was a spinning bicycle wheel, soon followed by such pieces as a hanging snow shovel suspended from a piece of wire, a dog comb, and a typewriter cover. In 1917, he made an arrangement involving a porcelain urinal and entitled it The Fountain. For Duchamp, one critic observes, “a work of art was not meant to remain a mere object of sensual presence, but was intended, as directly as possible, to address our sympathetic awareness.”3 Another art scholar, Cliff G. McMahon, asserts, “To demonstrate the sovereignty of the theoretical intellect of a modern man of autonomous reason (and thus accept a concept of the rational self derived from the Greeks, Descartes, and Locke), Duchamp chooses Readymades, which are useless and un-beautiful . . . This choice constitutes a portentous and radical event in art history.” McMahon notes further that these works were “designed for a radical shift and a genuine shock.”4 Duchamp, in a self-critique of The Fountain (which was released under the pseudonym of R. Mutt), sheds some further light on this motivation for his works, writing “Whether Mr. Mutt with his own hands made the fountain or not has no importance. He chose it. He took an ordinary article of life, placed it so that its useful significance disappeared under the new title and point of view – created a new thought for that object.”5 These thoughts from Duchamp’s own pen are, perhaps, the most important for this particular study. The use of pre-existing elements in an alternately-meaningful whole is not so remarkable as is the creator’s conscious choice to use them. When a cultural producer recognizes a useful element and selects it for use within an original work, we witness a change to the original object as it takes on both its original significance, as well as its newly-assigned one.
141 Sarah Beckwith explores a similar concept in Signifying God, her study of the medieval York cycle plays. Though her discussion is related to the unique nature of theatrical performance, the sentiments are appropriate: When it enters illusory space and time, anything put onstage begins to signify, to point to, represent, become of or about something else. Consider, says [performance theoretician] Herbert Blau, an object in front of your eyes. ‘On stage it is no longer simple. A real chair used for a real chair in a ‘realistic setting’ remains, though a real chair, a sign for a chair. It is what it is not, though it appears to be what it is.’ And yet it is the especial, unique property of theatre that its signs are also in a very special way of the world . . . The materiality of the signifier plays a constitutive role in theatre for it relies very heavily on the iconic identity of its signs.6
Such a discussion inevitably raises the question of the performativity of every text, but for our purposes, the most pertinent application is the intentional multiplicity of symbolic elements in a work. Each layer of meaning designates a choice – conscious or not – of inclusion, reformation, and change. But there has to be a reason or a motivation for the change, and it is here that the choice becomes essential. As Newton’s first law of motion clearly states, if no external force acts on an object, then the object does not accelerate; the same is true of cultural change. There must be some catalyst that creates the desire to cause a kink or fork in the perpetuation, a twist in the otherwise stable and predictable forward movement of a myth’s continued existence in a culture. The use of ready-made stories surfaces in specific cultural contexts not as an impetus to some new cultural movement, but as a response to it. In Brontё’s case, it was the developing struggle for women’s suffrage. By undercutting the stance of the opposition via a negation of its basic rhetorical argument, Brontё subtly (but no less forcefully) asserted change upon both the story and her society in much the same way that the prominent modern feminist bumper sticker boldly and simply declares, “Eve was framed.”7 For Cather, the myth of the American Eden rapidly played itself out to a predictable ending. It was less a case of Frost’s famous pronouncement, “Nothing gold can stay,”8 than a reconciliation with the inevitable conclusion of the original story. A culture cannot selectively draw its identity from a myth, the novel argues; by embracing the story, the society necessarily admits responsibility for the entire narrative, including its liabilities. Both Steinbeck and Miller were keenly aware of the social issues their audiences faced and were each able to speak to the
142 anxieties and values of their own context by deliberately composing the modern story in the framework of an ancient myth. Because the myth had gradually expanded to take on broader dimensions, their interpretations were dramatic but not out of line with the story’s own, more organic development. Yet the changes that each author executes are not permanent, nor pervasive. They do not alter the narrative in the collective memory but rather, broaden the scope of each story’s implications and applications. Ultimately, each author offers changes not to the text, but to our understanding of it; to employ Duchamp’s language, each author “created a new thought” for the story. In lore cycles, however, the changes are pervasive – perhaps even invasive. We can still see the choices that each transmitting and receiving culture has made regarding preservation and re-presentation, but what becomes harder to detect are the sources of the ready-made elements. As is the essential truth of gradual change, we do not witness the process – only the results of it. The surviving notions, gestures, ideas, and images that emerge in later works and traditions are not the choices themselves but evidence that they have occurred. The texts in which we observe the various manifestations of Cain or Jack Sheppard are merely tangible forms of ideas that existed, developed, and gained their own significance in cultural awareness before they were fossilized in performed space or transcribed page. As Gary Taylor writes, regarding Ivor Stravinsky’s orchestral premier of The Rites of Spring, “For Stravinsky, sounds were the essence of the work; the score was a mere supplement, an afterbirth. For us, though, the score preserves the only representation of sounds that have vanished.”9 And like a fossil, the recorded text is only a brief, frozen moment in the life of a lore cycle. Their very nature requires them to reform, re-invent, resurface . . . and be rediscovered.
The question remains, however, as to why it is that certain cultures invoke specific myths as social commentary while leaving others alone, or why only a few gestures or traits from a work persist and transform. The easiest answer, perhaps, would be to point to the universal themes present in these myths and lore cycles – the inherent elements that appeal to our most basic humanity, regardless of social context. But this cannot be the entire answer because, as we have seen, there is a reclamation process, a re-forming of that which is pre-existing from its universally recognizable form into something “created in our own image” – and yet even this
143 image of creation is a pre-existing one, central to the western concept of existence and invention. Perhaps the discussion of authorial choice is not altogether essential to this discussion, after all. Maybe the choices are inevitable ones, dictated less by conscious, unique decisions and more by an intuitive understanding of the patterns of human behavior and trends of social thought. As certain images are handed down, they come to us with perceived value simply because they have been remembered. 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: We stand on the shoulders of giants, and yet there is nothing new under the sun.
144 ENDNOTES
Notes to Introduction 1 Aristotle. Poetics, Loeb Classical Edition. Stephen Halliwell, ed. and trans. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1995), 89. 2 Gary Taylor. Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of time – And Other Don’t. (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 142. 3 R.W.B. Lewis. The American Adam. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1959), 2-3. 4 Gary Taylor, 14. 5 Philip Fisher. “Introduction.” In: The New American Studies: Essays from Representations. (Berkley: University of California, 1991), vii. 6 Jean M. Higgins. “The Myth of Eve: The Temptress.” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 44 (4), December 1976), 639. 7 Lewis, 1 8 Michael Spindler. American Literature and Social Change: William Dean Howells to Arthur Miller. (Bloomington: Indiana, 1983), 3. 9 David Lowenthal. The Past is a Foreign Country. (New York: Cambridge, 1985), xx.
Notes to Chapter One 1 All biblical quotations in this text are from the New Revised Standard Version unless specified otherwise, such as when the King James Version would have been the most likely translation available to an author. 2 Genesis 2:11-14 3 Tertullian. “On Female Dress.” The Writings of Tertullian. Alexander Roberts, James Donaldson, eds. (Kila, MT: Kessinger, 2004), 304. 4 Ambrose of Milan. Hexameron. Saint Ambrose: Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel. John J. Savage, trans. (New York: Fathers of the Church Inc. , 1961) 173-174. 5 Kim Power. Veiled Desire: Augustine on Women. (New York: Continuum, 1995), 209, 229. 6 Elaine Pagels. Adam, Eve, and the Serpent. (New York: Random House, 1988), 114. 7 Jean M. Higgins. “The Myth of Eve: The Temptress.” (Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 44 (4), December 1976), 641. 8 Fall of Man (York). Medieval Drama. Ed. David Bevington. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), ll. 108-110, 118-119, 144-146. 9 Harrowing of Hell (Wakefield). Medieval Drama. Ed. David Bevington. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), ll. 33, 375. 10 John Knox. The First Blast of the Trumpet Against the Monstrous Regiment of Women. (Geneva. Short Title Catalogue: 253:09, 1558), 14-15. 11 Knox, 18. 12 John Milton. Paradise Lost. Roy Flannagan, ed. The Riverside Milton. (1674; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1998), IX.404. 13 Milton, IX.997-999. 14 Higgins, 643. 15 Christine Pizan. City of Ladies. Earl Jeffrey Richards, trans. (1405; New York: Persea, 1998), 24. 16 Lynn Stanley. The Book of Margery Kempe. (Kalamazoo: Western Michigan, 1996), 1. 17 Jane Anger. Her Protection for Women. (London. Short Title Catalogue: 644, 1589), C. 18 Rachel Speght. A Mouzell for Melastomus, The Cynicall Bayter of, and foule mouth Barker against Evahs Sex, or an Apologeticall Answere to that irreligious and Illiterate Pamphlet made by Io. Sw. and by him Intitled, The Arraignment of Women. (London. Short Title Catalogue: 23058, 1617), 4, 10. 19 Ester Sowernam. Esther hath hang’d Haman: or An Answere to a lwed Pamphlet, entitled, The Arraignment of Women. With the arraignment of lewd, Idle, forward, and unconstant men, and Husbands. (London. Short Title Catalogue: 22974, 1617), 3, 5, 7. 20 Mary Wollstonecraft. A Vindication on the Rights of Women. (1792; New York: Cambridge, 1995). 95 21 A Brief Review of the Women’s Suffrage Movement Since Its Beginning in 1832. (Westminster. Strozier Library microfilm 4068.954 (9496), April 1911), 4,1. 22 Charles Kingsley. Women and Politics. (London: Spottiswoode. Strozier Library microfilm 4068.953 (9390), 1869), 3-4. 23 Christine Peters. Patterns of Piety: Women, Gender and Religion in Late Medieval and Reformation England. (New York: Cambridge, 2003), 130.
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24 Barbara Taylor. Eve and the New Jerusalem: Socialism and Feminism in the Nineteenth Century. (New York: Pantheon, 1983), 22-24, 118. 25 Gregory I. Molivas. “Richard Price, the Debate on Free Will, and Natural Rights.” (Journal of the History of Ideas, 58 (1), January 1997), 109. 26 All of the Brontë passages are taken from: Charlotte Brontë. Jane Eyre. (1847; New York: Penguin, 1996.), 41. 27 Brontë, 42. 28 Brontë, 405, 394, 447-448. 29 Brontë 451. 30 Chris Vanden Bossche. “What Did Jane Eyre Do? Ideology, Agency, Class and the Novel.” (Narrative. 13(1), January 2005), 55. 31 Brontë, 31, 33. 32 Brontë, 284, 277, 278, 283, 352. 33 Brontë, 294, 355. 34 Genesis 3:17-18, KJV. 35 Brontë, 242, 478, 500. 36 Genesis 2:23, KJV. 37 Brontë, 502. 38 Genesis 3:22 39 Micæl M. Clarke. “Bronte's Jane Eyre and the Grimms' Cinderella.” (SEL: Studies in English Literature 1500- 1900) 40 (4), Autumn 2002), 696, 696. 40 Brontë, 284. 41 Howard Schwartz. Lilith’s Cave: Jewish Tale of the Supernatural. (New York: Oxford, 1988), 223. 42 Brontë, 15. 43 Brontë, 128. 44 Brontë, 22, 259. 45 Brontë, 225, 230, 266, 294, 317, 357, 487. 46 Brontë, 317, 487. 47 Brontë, 276, 290, 291, 300, 408, 485, 487. 48 Brontë, 153, 290, 293. 49 Brontë, 300. 50 Brontë, 486. 51 Brontë, 406. 52 Brontë, 316, 24. 53 Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar. Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Imagination. (New Haven: Yale, 1979), 341. 54 Schwartz, 15. 55 Brontë, 317, 239. 56 Lynn Grossman Bartholome. “Lilith the She-Demon.” (Master’s thesis, Florida State University, 1986), 59, 64.
Notes to Chapter Two 1 Eric T. Freyfogle. “Owning the Land: Four Contemporary Narratives.” (Florida State Land Use and Environmental Law Review, 13, 1998), 279. 2 Frederic I. Carpenter. “‘The American Myth’: Paradise (To Be) Regained.” (PMLA, 74(5), December 1959), 605-606. 3 John Locke. Two Treatises of Government. (London, 1690. Wing/L2766), 254, 268. 4 Crèvecoeur. Hector St. John. Letters from an American Farmer. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter 6th Ed. Nina Baym, ed. (1782; New York: Norton, 2003), 303. 5 Crèvecoeur, 301. 6 David W. Noble. The Eternal Adam and the New World Garden: The Central Myth in the American Novel Since 1830. (New York: George Braziller, 1968), 5. 7 Noble, 4. 8 F.O. Matthiessen. American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman. (New York: Oxford, 1941), 347. 9 R.W.B. Lewis. The American Adam. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1959), 114. 10 Nathaniel Hawthorne. The House of the Seven Gables. (1851; Mineola, NY: Dover, 1999), 195. 11 Lewis, 115.
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12 Hawthorne, ix. 13 William Cullen Bryant. “The Prairies.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter 6th Ed. Nina Baym, ed. New York: Norton, [1833] 2003.) ll. 1-3. As Norton notes, Bryant replaced “ere man had sinned—” in subsequent editions with “For which the speech of English has no name—.” (473) 14 Lewis, 91. 15 Ralph Waldo Emerson. Nature. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter 6th Ed. (1836; New York: Norton, 2003), 488. 16 All Whitman quotations are from the following edition: Walt Whitman. Leaves of Grass. Emory Holloway, ed. New York: Doubleday, Doan, and Co. [1891 ed.] 1943). “Ages and Ages Returning at Intervals,” [1860], 91. 17 Matthiessen, 517-518. 18 Whitman, “Song of Myself,” 75. 19 Henry David Thoreau. Walden. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter 6th Ed. Nina Baym, ed. (1854; New York: Norton, 2003), 857. 20 Thoreau, 901. 21 Noble, 56. 22 Mark Twain. The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. (1884; New York: Dover, 1994), 162. 23 Twain, 220. 24 Ernest Hemingway. The Sun Also Rises. (1926; New York: Scribner, 2003), 120. 25 Frederick Jackson Turner. “The Significance of the Frontier in American History.” Re-reading Frederick Jackson Turner: “The Significance of the Frontier in American History’ and Other Essays. John Mack Faragher, ed. (1893; New Haven: Yale, 1999), 60. 26 Lester R. Kurtz. “Freedom and Domination: The Garden of Eden and the Social Order.” (Social Forces, 58(2), December 1979), 453. 27 Emma Lazarus. “The New Colossus.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter 6th Ed. Nina Baym, ed. (1883; New York: Norton, 2003), ll.14. 28 U.S. Bureau of the Census: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1919. (Washington, D.C., Department of Commerce, 1919), 89. The total number of immigrants admitted between 1895-1904 is 5,250,210. 29 F. Scott Fitzgerald. The Great Gatsby: 75th Anniversary Edition. (1925; New York: Scribner, 2000.), 189. 30 Edward A. and Lillian D. Bloom. “Willa Cather’s Novels of the Frontier: A Study in Thematic Symbolism.” (American Literature, 21 (1), March 1949), 72, 74. 31 Genesis 2:15. 32 All quotations from O Pioneers! come from the following edition: Cather, Willa. O Pioneers! (New York: Vintage, [1913] 1992). 6, 1, 7, 6 (emphasis added) 33 Genesis 3:7. 34 Cather, 118. 35 Cather, 41. 36 Genesis 3:19. 37 Cather, 40, 41 (emphasis added). 38 Cather, 65. 39 Cather, 76, 65, 76-77. 40 Cather, 115. 41 Cather, 132, 132, 133, 133. 42 Cather, 136, 140, 61. 43 Bloom, 79. 44 Cather, 33. 45 Robert H. Footman. “The Genius of Willa Cather.” (American Literature, 10 (2), May 1938), 134. 46 Cather, 158. 47 Leo Marx. The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America. 35th ed. (1964; New York: Oxford, 2000), 364-365. 48 T.S. Eliot. “East Coker.” The Four Quartets. (1940; New York: Harvest, 1968) l. 1.
Notes to Chapter Three 1 Gary Taylor. Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of time – And Othesr Don’t. (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 87. 2 Oliver F. Emerson. “Legends of Cain, Especially in Old and Middle English.” (PMLA, 21 (4), 1906), 831.
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3 The quotations from Philo are all from the following source: Philo Judaeus. The Works of Philo Judaeus, A Contemporary of Jospehus. Charles Duke Yonge, trans. (London: H.G. Bohn. [1854-1890] 1993. EarlyChristianWritings.com.). On the Birth of Abel and the Sacrifices Offered by Him and His Brother Cain, XIII.52. 4 Philo, On Husbandry, V.21, XXIX.127. 5 Philo, On the Posterity of Cain and His Exile III.10-11, L.172. 6 Philo, Posterity, XI.35. 7 Philo, Posterity, XII.42. 8 Flavius Josephus. Jewish Antiquities: Books I-IV. H. St. J. Thackeray, trans. (London: William Heinemann, 1926), 25-27. 9 Ambrose of Milan. Cain and Abel. Saint Ambrose: Hexameron, Paradise, and Cain and Abel. John J. Savage, trans. (New York: Fathers of the Church, Inc., 1961), 360, 383-384. 10 Ambrose of Milan. On the Holy Spirit. Saint Ambrose: Theological and Dogmatic Works. Roy J. Deferrari, trans. Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America, 1963), 200. 11 The Banns (N-Town). Medieval Drama. David Bevington, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin., 1975), ll. 64-65. 12 John Gardner. “Theme and Irony in the Wakefield Mactacio Abel.” (PMLA, 80 (5), December 1965), 515. 13 The Killing of Abel (Wakefield). Medieval Drama. David Bevington, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), ll. 91-93, 140-143. 14 Gardner, 516. 15 Killing of Abel (Wakefield), ll. 99-100, 111. 16 Gardner, 516. 17 Thomas Paynell. A Frutefull Booke of the Common Places of All S. Pauls Epistles Right Necessarye for All Sorts of People, but Especially for those of the Ministerye Dyligentelye Sette foorthe by Thomas Paniell. (London. Sort Title Catalogue: 19492, 1562), 5. 18 Alleine, Joseph. An Alarm to Unconverted Sinners, In a Serious Treatise. (London. Wing/A961, 1672) 15-16. 19 Genesis 2:2. 20 Meyer Schapiro. Late Antique, Early Christian, and Medieval Art: Selected Papers. (New York: George Braziller, 1979), 249. 21 Schapiro, 256. 22 Donald Clark Hodges. “Fratricide and Fraternity.” The Journal of Religion, 38 (4), October 1958): 245. 23 Richard Rodgers and Oscar Hammerstein, II. Oklahoma! (Original 1943 Broadway Cast Recoding. Decca U.S. [1943] 2000). Audio CD. 24 Philo. That the Worse is Want to Attack the Better, I.1-2. 25 Augustine. The City of God. Marcus Dods, trans. (New York: Random House, 1994), 479, 487-488. 26 George M. Shulman. “The Myth of Cain: Fratricide, City Building, and Politics.” (Political Theory, 14 (2), May 1986) 227, 227-228. 27 Genesis 4:7. 28 Michael Spindler. American Literature and Social Change: William Dean Howells to Arthur Miller. (Bloomington: Indiana, 1983), 98. 29 Spindler, 98. 30 U.S. Bureau of the Census: Statistical Abstract of the United States, 1919. (Washington, D.C., Department of Commerce, 1919), 389. Between 1910 and 1914, the numbers fluctuated between approximately 34,000,000 and 37,500,000. Previous to that, between 1989-1909, the total amount ranged from approximately 22,000,000 and 28,000,000. 31 Harold Evans. The American Century. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998), 176. 32 John Steinbeck. East of Eden. (1952; New York: Viking, 1977), 305. 33 Steinbeck, 309. 34 Steinbeck, 310-311. 35 Steinbeck, 622, 647, 650. 36 Steinbeck, 647-650, Genesis 4:7. 37 Spindler, 202. 38 Evans, 435. 39 Evans, 435. 40 Spindler, 202. 41 Spindler, 202.
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42 Spindler, 203. 43 Matthew Roudane. Conversation with author. Editor, South Atlantic Review. Atlanta, 5 November 2005. 44 Arthur Miller. Death of a Salesman. Miriam Gilbert, Carl H. Klaus, Bradford S. Field, Jr., eds. Modern and Contemporary Drama. (1949; New York: St. Martin’s, 1994), 345. 45 Miller, 349. 46 Spindler, 203. 47 Miller, 358. 48 Miller, 349. 49 Spindler, 204. 50 Miller, 342. 51 Miller, 358. 52 Miller, Arthur. “The Salesman has a Birthday.” The Salesman has a Birthday: Essays celebrating the Fiftieth Anniversary of Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman. Stephen A. Marino, ed. (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1999) 14. 53 Miller, “The Salesman has a Birthday,” 14. 54 Steinbeck, 310.
Notes to Chapter Four 1 Gary Taylor. Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of time – And Other Don’t. (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 47. 2 Gary Taylor, 67. 3 William Shakespeare. The Tempest. G. Blakemore Evans, J.J. M. Tobin, eds. The Riverside Shakespeare, Second Edition. (1611; New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1997), I.ii.283-284, I.ii.263, I.ii.362-363 (1665, 1666). 4 Ricardo J. Quinones. The Changes of Cain. (Princeton: Princeton, 1991), 59. 5 Shakespeare, The Tempest, I.ii. 321-324, 331-332, 339-342 (1666). 6 We may even see Cain in his full form lurking in the background of the story – almost unrecognizable as himself, perhaps – but present and intrusive nonetheless. When courtiers Stephano and Trinculo encounter Caliban upon the island, the monster has the following exchange with the two chronic drunks: Caliban: Hast though not dropp’ed from heaven? Stephano: Out o’ th’ moon, I do assure thee; I was the Man in the Moon, when time was. Caliban: I have seen thee in her, and I do adore thee. My mistress show’d me thee, and they dog and bush. Stephano: Come, swear to that . . . Trinculo: By this good light, this is a very shallow monster! I afeared him! A very weak monster! The Man i’th’ Moon! A most poor credulous monster! Well drawn, monster, in good sooth! Caliban: I’ll show thee every fertile inch o’th’ island; and will kiss they foot. I prithee be my god. (II.ii.137-149) Though clearly intended to poke fun at the recent contemporary accounts of native peoples who believed that the arriving Europeans were heavenly beings descending to earth (one famous example being the Aztecs’ reception of Cortés as Quetzacoatl), it also seems to indicate something else. Oliver Emerson asserts that the medieval tradition that Cain burned thorns and thistles in defiance of God’s cursing of the ground through such vegetation (Genesis 3:18) led its perpetrator to be depicted throughout medieval Europe in a new form as the proverbial Man in the Moon figure, a character that reached its fullest development in Renaissance literature. Dante alludes to the connection between these figures twice in the Divine Comedy: first in the Inferno, where Virgil urges: “But onward now: / For now doth Cain with fork of thorns confine / On either hemisphere, touching the wave / Beneath the towers of Seville. Yesternight / The moon was round” (xx.124-127); and secondly, in Paradisio when the narrator asks Beatrice, “But tell, I pray thee, whence the gloomy spots / Upon this body, which below on earth / Give rise to talk of Cain in fabling quaint?” (ii.51-53). The connection is bolstered by the iconography of the Man in the Moon as a wanderer who carries a lantern and bundle of thorns with him as he traipses about the earth, ever shielded from the warming, benevolent light of the sun, and often accompanied by a loyal dog – a commonly-invoked figure in Shakespeare’s plays who appears in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, III.i. 59-61 (266), V.i.240-259 (278-279). (The canine element enters the story through rabbinic literature as, Emerson points out, according to some traditions, the mark that God places upon the banished Cain to ensure his protection is actually the faithful shepherding dog that had first belonged to Abel.)
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As evidence of Shakespeare’s own awareness of the connection between Cain and the Man in the Moon, Emerson cites the lines of Bolingbroke in Richard II V.vi.43, as he sentences Exton to exile for regicide: “With Cain go wander through shades of night,/And never show thy head by day nor light.” Emerson then asserts, “If now ‘wander through shades of night’ be assumed to apply to Cain in the moon, we may reasonably infer that the other references in Shakespeare to the moon and the thorns are also connected with the Cain legend” (844). Stephano refers to Caliban as “moon-calf” five times and Caliban accepts this term because, it is imperative to note, he views himself an eager disciple of the newly-arrived god, not a manifestation of it himself. He reveres his new god, even emulates his behavior at times, but Caliban is Cain no more than Cortés was the promised plumed white god from the west. 7 Shakespeare, I.ii.360-361. (1666). 8 Specifically, Oliver Emerson notes the writings of Pirke Rabbi Eliezar xxi.6 and the Bibliotheca Magna Rabbinica I, 291 by Batolocci, which quotes Ialkut Sect. Berescith as well as making its own elaborations on the ill-fated coupling. 9 Oliver F. Emerson. “Legends of Cain, Especially in Old and Middle English.” (PMLA, 21 (4), 1906), 835. 10 John Block Friedman. Monstrous Races. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1981), 95. 11 Emerson, 832 (citing I John 3:12). 12 Shakespeare, The Tempest, I.ii.321-322, IV.1.189. (1681). 13 Friedman, 95. 14 Seamus Heaney. Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. (New York: Norton, reprint 2001), ll. 99-113. 15 Heaney, 1258-1267. 16 Friedman, 95. 17 Timothy Husband. The Wild Man: Medieval Myth and Symbolism. (New York: Metropolitan Museum of Art, 1980), 2, 13. 18 Friedman, 96. 19 Husband, 34. 20 Shakespeare, III.ii.88-90. 21 Friedman, 29. 22 Genesis 4:9, 4:13-14. 23 Shakespeare, The Tempest, III.ii.135-143. (1676). 24 Shakespeare, The Tempest, II.i.124-126. (1669). 25 Genesis 9:25. 26 Genesis 10:6. 27 Friedman, 101. 28 Phillis Wheatley, “On Being Brought from Africa to America.” The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter 6th Ed. Nina Baym, ed. (1773; New York: Norton, 2003), ll. 1-3, 7-8. 29 Virginia Mason Vaughn. Performing Blackness on English Stages: 1500-1800. New York: Cambridge, 2005), 18, 31-32. 30 Paul H.D. Kaplan. The Rise of the Black Magus in Western Art. Ann Arbor: UMI, 1985), 36. 31 Kaplan, 32. 32 Gary Taylor, 46. 33 W.T. Lhamon. Raising Cain. Cambridge: Harvard, 1998), 31. 34 Lhamon, Cain, 58, 59. 35 Michael Pickering. “The Blackface Clown.” Gretchen Holbrook Gerzina, ed. Black Victorians, Black Victoriana. (Piscataway: Rutgers, 2003), 167. 36 Pickering, 169-170. 37 Lhamon, Cain, 124. 38 Genesis 4:9. 39 Lhamon, Cain, 124. 40 W.T. Lhamon. Jump Jim Crow. (Cambridge: Harvard, 2003), 3. 41 Michael R. Booth. Theatre in the Victorian Age. (New York: Cambridge, 1991.), 96. 42 I shall be using the Lhamon text as it appears in Jump Jim Crow: T.D. Rice. The Virginia Mummy: A Farce in One Act. W.T. Lhamon, ed. Jump Jim Crow. (1835; Cambridge: Harvard, 2003). 43 Rice, 164, 164, 165. 44 Lhamon, Crow, 427. 45 Rice, 171, 177, 177, 177.
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46 Genesis 4:14, 15. 47 Rice, 160, 163, 163. 48 Rice, 165. 49 Rice, 177. 50 Rice, 164. 51 Rice, 164. 52 Rice, 165, 177. 53 Langston Hughes. The Norton Anthology of American Literature, Shorter 6th Ed. Nina Baym, ed. (1949; New York: Norton, 2003), ll. 1-11, 12.
Notes to Chapter Five 1 Edgar V. Roberts. “Introduction.” In: The Beggar’s Opera. John Gay. Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1969), xvii-xviii. 2 James Greenwood. 11 November 2001. Seven Curses of London. Victorian London. Comp. Lee Jackson. Viewed: 3 Apr. 2005. 3 Dee Garrison. 1976. “Immoral Fiction in the Late Victorian Library.” ( American Quarterly, 28(1), 1976), 85. 4 Peter Linebaugh. The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. (New York: Cambridge, 1992), 27. 5 Christopher Hibbert. The Road to Tyburn: The Story of Jack Sheppard and the Eighteenth-Century London Underworld. (Cleveland: World, 1957), 212. 6 Lennard J. Davis. “Wicked Actions and Feigned Word: Criminals, Criminality, and the Early English Novel.” (Yale French Studies. (59), Winter, 1980), 108. 7 Maximillian Novak. “‘Appearances of Truth:’ The Literature of Crime as a Narrative System (1660-1841). (The Yearbook of English Studies. 11 (Special Number), 1981), 40-41. 8 Daniel Defoe. The History of the Remarkable Life of John Sheppard, Containing a Particular Account of His Many Robberies and Escapes. (1724; New York: Hard Press, 2006), 26. 9 Defoe, 28. 10 Defoe, 7. 11 Davis, 160. 12 Linebaugh, 39. 13 All quotations for The Beggar’s Opera will be taken from the following text: John Gay. The Beggar’s Opera. Edgar V. Roberts, ed. (1728; Lincoln: University of Nebraska, 1969), I.i., I.xiii. (28). 14 Roberts, xxiii. 15 Gay, Beggar’s Opera, I.vi, II.ix, III.xv. (15, 44-45, 81). 16 Gay, Beggar’s Opera, III.xvi. (82). 17 Rob Canfield. “Introduction to Polly: An Opera.” Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century Drama. J. Douglas Canfield, ed. (Orchard Park, NY: Broadview 2001), 1545. 18 Canfield, 1545. 19 All quotations from Polly will be taken from the following text: John Gay. Polly. Restoration and Early Eighteenth Century Drama. (1729; Orchard Park, NY: Broadview [1729] 2001), II.iii. (1567-1568). 20 Gay, Polly, I.xii. (1560). 21 Pat Rogers. “The Waltham Blacks and the Black Act.” (The Historical Journal. 17 (3) September 1974), 465, 466, 474. 22 This particular plate is particularly interesting, as Hogarth himself married the daughter of his artistic master, Thornhill. 23 Martin Meisel. Realizations: Narrative, Pictorial, and Theatrical Arts in Nineteenth-Century England. (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1983), 99-103. 24 George J. Worth. William Harrison Ainsworth. (New York: Twayne, 1972), 35. 25 Worth, 37, 39. 26 Worth, 16. 27 Charles A. Briggs. “The Christ of the Church.” (The American Journal of Theology, 16 (2), 1912), 196. 28 Oscar G. Brockett. History of the Theatre. (Boston: Allyn and Bacon, 1999), 117. 29 All Ainsworth quotations are from a 1908 printing of his original work: William Harrison Ainsworth. Jack Sheppard: A Romance. (1839; New York: Century, 1908), 456-457. 30 Ainsworth, 361.
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31 William Shakespeare. The Tempest. G. Blakemore Evans, J.J. M. Tobin, eds. The Riverside Shakespeare, 2nd Ed. (1611; New York: Houghton Mifflin. 1997), I.ii.285, II.ii.146-147, V.i.294-295. (1665, 1673, 1685). 32 Ainsworth, 512. 33 Richard B. Hauck. “The Comic Christ and the Modern Reader.” (College English, 31 (5), 1970), 502. 34 Hauck, 498, 502. 35 Hauck, 499, 501. 36 John 10:1-16, Hebrew 13:20. 37 Luke 15:3-6. 38 Luke 2:8. 39 Peter and Linda Murray. Oxford Dictionary of Christian Art. (Oxford: Oxford, 2001), 531. 40 Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Nice, trans. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977). 81-82. 41 Montague R. James and R.L. Hobson. “Rare Mediaeval Tiles and Their Story.” (The Burlington Magazine for Connoisseurs, 42 (238), 1923), 34. 42 The Birth of Jesus (York). Medieval Drama. David Bevington, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 373. It should be noted that the want of a better walls is appropriate and important, as the plays were often produced by trade guilds of related subject matter. This particular drama was sponsored by the tile thatchers. 43 Ainsworth 1, 3-4. 44 Ainsworth, 14. 45 The Pseudo-Gospel of Matthew of the late eighth or early ninth century is actually the first text to explicitly include the presence of animals (Murray 450), but Birgitta’s text is thought to be the one that truly popularized the notion. 46 Birgitta of Sweden. Birgitta of Sweden: Life and Selected Letters. Marguerite Tjader Harris, ed. (New York: Paulist, 1990) 203, 202. 47 Daniel 4:16-17, 23-25 KJV. 48 Birgitta, 203 49 Ainsworth, 2. 50 Birgitta, 203. 51 Ainsworth, 11. 52 Bevington, 53. 53 Hauck, 499. 54 Evidence of this verbal shortening is present in numerous medieval nativity plays, in which one character or another makes mention of going to worship the holy child in “Bedlam” or “Bedlem” as the case may be, such as in the Wakefield Cycle plays Herod the Great/Slaughter of the Innocents (l. 219)and Offering of the Magi (l. 487). 55 Ainsworth, 349, 343. 56 Heidi J. Hornik and Mikeal C. Parsons. Illuminating Luke: The Infancy Narrative in Italian Renaissance Painting. (New York: Trinity. 2003), 61. 57 Hornick and Parsons 47; Murray, 269; Bart D. Ehrman. Lost Scriptures: Books that did not make it into the New Testament. (New York: Oxford, 2003), 63. 58 Ainsworth, 232, 248. 59 Ainsworth, 264, 350, et al. 60 Ainsworth, 313. 61 Ainsworth, 399-401. 62 Bevington. 454. 63 The Shepherds (York). Medieval Drama. David Bevington, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 379. The Birth of Jesus (York), 375. 64 The Offering of the Magi. (Wakefield). Medieval Drama. David Bevington, ed. (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1975), 415-416. 65 Ainsworth, 233. 66 Ainsworth, 465, 465, 473, 474. 67 Cathy Oakes. Lecture. “Saints and Sacred Places: Romanesque Art and Architecture.” (University of Bristol. 6 March 2002). 68 Bevington, 594. 69 Ainsworth, 555, 551, 556, 556. 70 John 19:34, KJV.
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71 Pierre Bourdieu. Outline of a Theory of Practice. Richard Nice, trans. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 82. 72 Hauck, 500, 500. 73 Ainsworth, 555. 74 Meisel, 247. 75 Matthew Buckley. “Sensations of Celebrity: Jack Sheppard and the Mass Audience.” (Victorian Studies, 44 (3), 2002), 437. 76 Buckley, 458-459. 77 Buckley, 431. 78 George Taylor. “Introduction.” Trilby and Other Plays. (New York: Oxford, 1996), 277. 79 Busckstone, III.i.96, II.i.14-16, 23-24. (44, 21). 80 Peter Reed. Arrant Beggars: Staging the Atlantic Lumpenproletariat, 1777-1852. (Ph.D. diss., Florida State University, 2005.), 116. 81 Buckstone, III.1. (42). 82 Reed, 116. 83 Buckstone, IV.3. (70-71). 84 Reed, 113. 85 Reed, 121. 86 Again, I shall be using the Lhamon text as it appears in Jump Jim Crow: T.D. Rice. Bone Squash Diavolo: A Burletta. W.T. Lhamon, ed. Jump Jim Crow. (1839; Cambridge: Harvard, 2003). 87 Rice, 183-184 88 Lhamon, Crow, 57. 89 Lhamon, Crow, 445, 447. 90 Shakespeare, Othello. I.1.132-136. 91 Lhamon, Crow, 1, 96. 92 Constance Rourke. American Humor: A Study of the National Character. (New York: New York Review of Books, [1931] 2004), 83-84. 93 Sarah Meer. Uncle Tom Mania: Slavery, Minstrelsy, and Transatlantic Culture in the 1850s. (Athens: U of Georgia Press, 2005), 23; Lhamon, Crow, 91. 94 Harriet Beecher Stowe. Uncle Tom’s Cabin (Or, Life Among the Lowly). (1852; New York: Aladdin/Simon and Schuster, 2002), 369. 95 Stowe, 386-387. 96 Defoe, 28. 97 Meer, 11. 98 Lhamon, W.T. Raising Cain. (Cambridge: Harvard, 1998), 64. 99 Lhamon, Crow, 53. 100 Lotte Lenya. “August 28, 1928.” The Threepenny Opera. Desmond Vesey, Eric Bentley, trans. (1956; New York: Grove, 1960), xiii. 101 Lenya, v. 102 Bertold Brecht. “Notes to The Threepenny Opera.” The Threepenny Opera. Desmond Vesey, trans. (1929; New York: Grove, 1960), 98. 103 Bertold Brecht and Kurt Weiss. The Threepenny Opera. Desmond Vesey, Eric Bentley, trans. (1929; New York: Grove, 1960), III.1. (72). 104 Brecht and Weiss, II.iii. (66-67). 105 Lenya, xiv. 106 Ella Fitzgerald. “Mack the Knife.” Ella in Berlin. Norman Grantz, producer. (Verve Records, 1960).
Notes to Chapter Six 1 Richard Dawkins. The Selfish Gene: 30th Anniversary Edition. (New York: Oxford, 2006), 192. 2 Gary Taylor. Cultural Selection: Why Some Achievements Survive the Test of time – And Other Don’t. (New York: Harper Collins, 1996), 67. 3 Jindrich Chalupecký. “Marcel Duchamp: A Re-Evaluation.” Paul Wilson, trans. (Artibus et Historiae. 6(11), 1985), 131. 4 Cliff G. McMahon. “The Janus Aesthetic of Duchamp.” (Journal of Aesthetic Education. 26(2), Summer 1992), 44, 45.
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5 Quoted in Chalupecký, 131. 6 Sarah Beckwith. Signifying God: Social Relations and Symbolic Action in the York Corpus Christi Plays. (Chicago: University of Chicago, 2001), 62-63. 7 “Eve Was Framed” bumper sticker. Copyright, Northern Sun Co., 1998. 8 Robert Frost. “Nothing Gold Can Stay.” Norton Anthology of American Literature. Shorter 6th ed. Edited by Nina Baym. (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003), 1890. 9 Gary Taylor, 149.
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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH
Tiffany Yecke Brooks grew up in Virginia and attended Harding University in Searcy, Arkansas, where she completed her Bachelor of Arts in English and Theatre in 2001. That fall, she began work on her Master’s Degree in Classical Mythology at the University of Bristol in Bristol, England, and graduated in 2002. After completing her M.A., she taught writing and literature at Abilene Christian University and McMurry University (both in Abilene, Texas), and English and Drama at Pamlico County High School in Bayboro, North Carolina. In 2004, she enrolled in the doctoral program in literature at Florida State University. She currently teaches at the University of South Carolina, Beaufort.
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