Clotel 184) with the Speed of a Bird, Having Passed the Avenue, She Began to Gain, and Presently She Was Upon the Long Bridge
European journal of American studies
15-2 | 2020 Summer 2020
Édition électronique URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/15701 DOI : 10.4000/ejas.15701 ISSN : 1991-9336
Éditeur European Association for American Studies
Référence électronique European journal of American studies, 15-2 | 2020, « Summer 2020 » [En ligne], mis en ligne le 23 juin 2020, consulté le 08 juillet 2021. URL : https://journals.openedition.org/ejas/15701 ; DOI : https:// doi.org/10.4000/ejas.15701
Ce document a été généré automatiquement le 8 juillet 2021.
European Journal of American studies 1
SOMMAIRE
What on Earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy Mahshid Mayar
Homecomings: Black Women’s Mobility in Early African American Fiction Anna Pochmara
Hollywood’s Depiction of Italian American Servicemen During the Italian Campaign of World War II Matteo Pretelli
“Being an Instance of the Norm”: Women, Surveillance and Guilt in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road Vavotici Francesca
Complicating American Manhood: Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time and the Feminist Utopia as a Site for Transforming Masculinities Michael Pitts
Beyond Determinism: Geography of Jewishness in Nathan Englander’s “Sister Hills” and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union Filip Boratyn
Rummaging Through the Ashes: 9/11 American Poetry and the Transcultural Counterwitness Matthew Moran
“Challenging Borders: Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted as a Subversive Disability Memoir” Pascale Antolin
Un/Seeing Campus Carry: Experiencing Gun Culture in Texas Benita Heiskanen
A Rational Continuum: Legal and Cultural Abortion Narratives in Trump’s America Eir-Anne Edgar
Measuring the power of parties within US Government from 1993 to 2018: New key variables Matteo Laruffa
Empire? Wesley Renfro et Dominic Alessio
American Messiahs: The Narrative Strategies of FDR and Reagan, 1933 and 1981 Theo Zenou
Only Dead Metaphors Can Be Resurrected: A Review of Jill Lepore’s These Truths George Blaustein
European journal of American studies, 15-2 | 2020 2
What on Earth! Slated Globes, School Geography and Imperial Pedagogy1
Mahshid Mayar
1. Introduction
1 In 1576, the English explorer-turned-pirate Martin Frobisher (1535-1594) traveled to America (Chaves et al. xxiv). Among his belongings was a blank globe onto which he was going to carve cartographic findings as he explored the “New World.” Three centuries later, “slated globes”—blank, black table globes that could be written on by chalk or crayon—were advertised in the 1876 edition of The Cyclopædia of Education (372) as ideal tools to teach a wide range of neighboring subjects: “advanced geography, … spherical geometry, trigonometry, navigation, etc.” Right in the middle of the twentieth century, the Social Studies for Teachers and Administrators (328) commended slated globes as support material for teaching geography at all levels: “This simplified globe is excellent for elementary geography exercises, as well as being ideal for projects at intermediate and upper-grade levels.” By this time, and in the country’s competitive cartography market, American educators and globe-making companies such as Denoyer-Geppert and Co. and Rand McNally and Co. began to call them by a variety of names: “write-on-me,” “learn-by-doing,” “simplified,” or “project problem slated” globes.2
2 Outside the United States too, slated globes were known by many names, from “Induktion-“ or “Anleitungglobus” in Germany and Austria to chalkboard “slated globes” and “slated outline globes” in England. Records suggest that blank globes had been invented in Britain and Germany almost at the same time when Americans stumbled upon the idea. The so-called Induktionglobus (32.5 cm in diameter) invented by Joseph August Brandegger (1797-1890) in the second half of the nineteenth century is one example of European slated globes that, unlike their American counterparts, were used to teach both terrestrial and celestial geography to German and Austrian
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pupils (Mokre 78-9). In England, too, the 1846 edition of A Concise Introduction to the Knowledge of the Globes mentioned slated globes, examples of which were produced by Malby & Co. (Houghton Street, Newcastle Street, Strand, London), as useful tools in teaching “the young student… the position of the principal places on the surface of the Globe (Maynard 73).” A later example of British slated globes from 1906, manufactured by George Philip and Son, the London Geographical Institute, was listed in the institute’s own publication, Geographical Gleanings (Burrows 80). Like other British slated globes I have come across, this specimen too was manufactured with the outlines of the continents already printed on its surface. Similar examples of British slate surface globes were mentioned in the 1906 edition of the Journal of Education: A Monthly Record and Review, again all outlined (Rice 202).
3 Invested in the many intended and potential uses of the completely blank, US- manufactured slated globes as objects in the United States’ imperial archive, and at the risk of glossing their uses in European school- and war-rooms,3 I leave a more comprehensive examination of slated globes’ multiple origins and uses in other settings to historians of European geography. Furthermore, given the dearth of historical studies concerning the invention and uses of slated globes, I concede that to do the subject matter justice will take further archival studies by historians of geography as well as historians of education. Nonetheless, I take the occasion here to briefly investigate the American origins of slated globes, examining their growing popularity over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in teaching 4th, 6th, or 10th grade American pupils “certain fundamentals” of world geography (Geppert 8). Delving into the study of these historical artifacts, I focus the paper on the examination of slated globes as ideological tools of empire that taught American children not only how to draw maps but also, far more significantly, how to see the world. In this part, I identify slated globes’ potential capacity at the service of the geopolitical interests and spatial urgencies of the young US Empire and as spaces where American pupils of all grades, the future stewards of the rising US Empire, could re-imagine and re-order the world. The legitimacy of any such inquiry into geographical tools’ potential meta- geographical uses lies in the fact that, as map historian John Brian Harley argues in his discussion of the simultaneously practical and ideological nature of maps, “that which is absent from a map is as much a proper field for inquiry as that which is present” (86). Along this line, I then proceed to a theoretical discussion of cartographic blank as alluring, pliant, communicative, and performative of political meaning, reading slated globes as generative of an alternative type of terra incognita.
2. Slated Globes: An American Genealogy
4 The earliest US-made slated globes that I have found record of appear to have been manufactured by the Boston-based globe-maker Josiah Loring (ca. 1775-1840). Described as a sine qua non in American schoolrooms, Loring’s “blank globes” (either black or ivory in color) were advertised as pedagogical novelty in the December 1831 issue of the American Annals of Education and Instruction (174). Hazard's Register of Pennsylvania, Volume 12 (355) commended Loring’s blank globes as specially outstanding artifacts in his rather substantial globe inventory. Almost two decades forward, a different line traces back to a slated globe patented by Forrest Shepherd on December 22, 1857 (Figure 1). Shepherd’s slated globe (Patent No. 18,931) applied “elastic slate” to
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an orb, making a simple slated globe for classroom use.4 The 1859 volume of The Connecticut Common School Journal ( (Barnard 311) quoted Tutor Kelsey of Amher st College who praised Shepherd’s slated globes despite their high prices, stating that “[w]e should consider our recitation rooms poorly furnished without these Globes.” The 1876 edition of Knight's American Mechanical Dictionary, however, merely mentioned Shepherd’s or perhaps another slated globe of similar make as “[a] paper shell globe covered in powdered slate,” without providing any further details as to its origins, use, or popularity (Knight 987).
Figure 1. Slated Globes, manufactured and patented by Forrest Shepherd on December 22, 1857 – Patent No. 18,931. Source: United States Patent and Trademark Office, www.uspto.gov.
5 It was in fact only toward the end of the century that, with the invention of a more practical slated globe, these artifacts finally gained currency in American schools. On May 1, 1894, Isaac and Mary Ann Hodgson, of Chicago, Ill., obtained the patent (No. 519,061) for their “Geographical Globe” (Figure 2). The globe they had invented consisted of two layers, an inflatable core made of India-rubber and “an exterior globe or sphere made of cloth or suitable material to be used as a slated or black-board on which may be drawn a representation of the geography of the world and erased therefrom.”5 Right before the turn of the twentieth century, and as these artifacts proliferated and their use proved of immense benefit in teaching world geography, it was recommended to geography teachers to either use a slated globe or—in case of a tight budget, especially in schools in the countryside—to at least bring an orange or an apple to the class in order to teach primary-school geography lessons (King 397).
6 While in the 1850s a map-making company such as Moore and Nims, of Troy, NY, would simply advertise their slated globes in educational journals with their prices listed (30 and 16 inch for $40 and $12, respectively), to which it was plainly added that they “are intended for exercise in map drawing” (Davis 232), in the 1910s and 1920s Rand
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McNally and Co., for one, would advertise their “Slated Table Stand Globes” as indispensable classroom equipment (Rand McNally and Co. 15). Improved over time for use by generations of students and still popular in the mid-twentieth century, slated globes in different makes and sizes had become so popular and so affordable that even the Bureau of Indian Affairs, Department of the Interior, began in the 1950s to recommend two types of 16” Denoyer’s project-problem slated outline globes for use in the nation’s least-funded “Indian schools (United States Bureau of Indian Affairs 94).”
Figure 2. Slated globes, manufactured and patented by Isaac and Mary Ann Hodgson on May 1, 1894 – Patent No. 519,061. Source: United States Patent and Trademark Office, www.uspto.gov.
7 As noted before, slated globes seem to have had as many origin stories as names. And yet, early-twentieth century American journals of education advertised slated globes as novelties in American school geography either because they were unaware of the parallel inventions in Europe or—since they time and again referred to Shepherd as the original inventor—they had decided to avoid giving European globe-makers any credit.6 Remarkably, this attitude was contradicted by a story of an altogether different nature that was told of these globes’ origins in the middle of the twentieth century. In 1955, Otto E. Geppert, cofounder of the map-making company Denoyer-Geppert and Co., started the promotional essay the company had dedicated to slated globes with the following words: More than 15 years ago we were getting calls from a few progressive educational centers for a special type of globe. At that time it was not made in our country. It was made in England. Evidently some of our elementary school teachers and supervisors of elementary education had been visiting English schools and seeing how effective this type of globe was for teaching earth or world geography in the lower grade levels, they insisted on getting that type of globe and nothing else. The globe in question was only a little more than 12” in diameter. It was made of wood painted black, with the continents rather crudely outlined in a thin line of white
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ink or paint. Certainly nothing to get enthusiastic about—until one found out how it was used: For this small, rather crude globe without a meridian, just a plain axis mounting, schools willingly paid from $30.00 to $35.00. (8)
8 Regardless of the various, and at times contradictory, origin stories of slated globes that different sources tell and their itinerary before they ended up in schoolrooms across the United States, it is evident that these globes became truly popular with American geography teachers in the twentieth century, resulting in a competitive market in which companies such as Denoyer-Geppert tried to take credit for their introduction to the US market.
3. Slated Globes at the Dawn of the American, aka, the Geographic Century
9 In the spirit of what she calls “pedagogic modernity,” Sumathi Ramaswamy (29-30) makes the case for terrestrial globes as quintessentially imperial objects—objects that materialized “a planetary consciousness grounded in Earth’s sphericity.” Indeed, terrestrial globes have long been tools at the service of imperial geographical education. As I demonstrate here, as artifacts of great ideological import in the archives of the rising global empire, slated globes offered an even more enterprising possibility than did terrestrial globes as their predecessors, that is, to re-imagine the planetary consciousness that terrestrial globes helped teach, all over again.7 Produced by globe- making companies, such as A. J. Nystrom and Co. (1903-present), Rand McNally and Co. (1856-present), Denoyer-Geppert and Co. (1916-1980s), Weber Costello (1907-1960), and others in the United States, these artifacts were tools with which to imagine the world afresh as a homogeneous whole, albeit one which offered a colonially creative “spatial void” on which teachers and students of geography could draw borders and navigation routes with crayon or chalk without the fixity of an already illustrated and ornamented terrestrial globe (Rand McNally and Co. 15). More affordable than fully illustrated terrestrial globes (Figure 3),8 slated globes had come to offer “unlimited possibilities” in teaching world geography to American children (Rand McNally and Co. 15). In sum, put to use in teaching world geography to more advanced students, and responding to major changes in geography as both a school subject and an imperial project, slated globes espoused the cause of empire with that of public education. But what were these changes and in what ways did they affect the uses of slated globes in American classrooms?
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Figure 3. Slated Table Stand Globe, manufactured by Rand McNally and Co., ca. 1910s. Courtesy The Newberry Library, Chicago.
10 By the dawn of a century christened as both the American and the geographic century, and on the eastern side of the Atlantic, European maps and globes overflowed with cartographic data, various shades of imperial colors, and contested colonial place- names. By this time, European explorers and cartographers actively filled the last remaining terrae incognitae with ever more dots, lines, and words, so much so that maps and globes hardly showed any remarkably large bare surfaces. Apace with the newest discoveries and explorations, maps and globes had to be continuously updated to keep up with the latest changes European imperialism dictated upon the face of the earth. Moreover, the vanishing of the terra incognita, of the antipodes, Africa, and elsewhere, meant that—ever so anxious as cartographers now were about “mak[ing] sense of what the new replete mapping of the world means” (Smith 54)—new definitions of geography and cartographic practices were needed. Consequently, as geography “adopted a new and more intricate identity” (Smith 54), geographers in and out of schools took part in projects that collected, classified, and updated geographical data about the previously “unknown,” de-mystified the terra nondum cognita (territory not yet known), and excited economic and political interest in near and far parts of the world and their markets. As imagined by European colonizers and reflected in ambitious cartographic projects such as the “Millionth Map” proposed by Albrecht Penck (1858-1945) in 1891, this world was deemed a sufficiently homogeneous entity, to be neatly knit into a global network of inter-imperial exchanges.9
11 In other words, by the dawn of the twentieth century, European empires celebrated their centuries-long colonization projects that had resulted in a massive quilt of terrae cognitae that, with the exception of a few spots here and there, had turned the world into an illusively homogeneous totality. In other words, from a Western point of view and—at least among the white, free populations of various Western metropoles—as a
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result of centuries of colonial practices, the world was assumed ready to be imagined as a market of overlapping spaces where the colonizers could pursue an assortment of projects toward the colonized: to dominate and exploit or to educate and elevate. In light of such make-believe homogeneity, Europeans could make sense of their modern lives only through an awareness of their interdependence on a web of inter-imperial connections (Jameson 411). It was a life that, while unique to imperial subjects, was by no means isolated and abstracted from what resided beyond the borders of their immediate locality. Thus, early twentieth-century European cartography constituted of scientific and educational maps and globes that established one single imaginary of the world, a unitary planetary consciousness, which, from the perspective of the Western metropole, stood as a meticulously surveyed global environment.
12 On the Western side of the Atlantic, on the other hand, maps and globes heralded, braced, and promoted the expansionist projects of the final years of the century—a century of national coming of age for the United States, during which Americans had struggled to make sense of the nation’s history and their spatially unsettled, globalizing empire. Around the turn of the twentieth century, Americans viewed maps and globes, Susan Schulten reminds us, as “arbiters of power” (5). Slated or replete, they were viewed as artifacts whose malleability in the hands of the present and future agents of empire marked the hand-in-glove advancement of the cause of their modern empire and of governance-minded cartographic matter (Akerman). Drawing a direct line between geography and wars of empire, President McKinley, for instance, told an audience of missionaries from the Methodist Episcopal Church that, once his prayers to God about the “Filipino question” had been answered, his first presidential order was for “the chief engineer of the War Department (our map-maker) to put the Philippines on the map of the United States” (Rusling 17).
13 As this incident attests, the popularity of slated globes in American classrooms coincided with a phase during which the United States, hoping to materialize the “global Monroe Doctrine,” was actively redefining its standing as an imperial power beyond the Americas (Smith 5). The turn of the twentieth century was in fact the first of several “formative moments” that Smith has identified “in the US rise to globalism,” spanning the years between the “classically colonial wars of 1898” and the entry of the United States into World War I (Smith 5). Amid climactic changes in the modes and means of world cartography, Americans’ heightened interest in and engagement with the world at large coincided with a turn-of-the-century crisis of legitimacy among European empires,10 as a result of which the formerly isolationist Americans viewed the world more as a web of seamlessly interrelated spaces. This meant that American geographers, in and out of schoolrooms, needed to pay special attention both to the rapidly disappearing terra incognita and to those recently-made-cognita regions (such as the Philippines, Hawaii, Guam, and Puerto Rico) that now stood in a different relationship to the United States. Consequently, by the end of the century, even the most mundane aspects of Americans’ lives were mapped onto a cartographically known, commercially accessible, cognitively smaller world. As Du Bois maintained in his 1898 commencement address at Fisk University, On our breakfast table lies each morning the toil of Europe, Asia, and Africa, and the isles of the sea; we sow and spin for unseen millions, and countless myriads weave and plant for us; we have made the earth smaller and life broader by annihilating distance, magnifying the human voice and the stars, binding nation to nation, until today, for the first time in history, there is one standard of human culture as well in
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New York as in London, in Cape Town as in Paris, in Bombay as in Berlin. (Du Bois and Provenzo 205)
14 On the whole, by 1900, excessive data and visual elements covering the surface of world maps and terrestrial globes cast a near total eclipse over them, a cartographic masquerade resulting from spatial omniscience (or the delusion thereof). In response to this masquerade and along with the young empire’s geopolitical urgencies noted above, a rather curious turn occurred in the United States. It is true that, during the final decades of the nineteenth century, data from discoveries and explorations in Africa and elsewhere had resulted in such excess of toponyms, routes, and borderlines that American geographers joined Europeans in celebrating the fact that there was no more need to “place elephants for want of towns” to fill the terra incognita on maps and globes (Swinton iv). What is more, while European colonizers posed as authors and, later, as readers of a material, objectified, plastic world that they were actively giving shape to and “writing” on through ongoing colonization projects, American cartographers reacted to the impending total loss of terra incognita in a manner fitting their role as agents of a rising empire: longing to assert their own reading of the world at large, and in the face of the so-called closing of the western frontier, the new imperialists embraced the new, replete blank that had resulted in part from the cartographic masquerade of colonization, welcoming slated globes as spaces of pragmatic emptiness and as tools with which to tilt away from then common cartographic traditions.
15 Therefore, the appeal of slated globes lay, I argue, in the fact that they could allow American youth, the future agents of the US empire, to learn to embrace the world afresh as a blank sphere onto which unprecedented orders, color codes, and borders could be dictated. If by then the earth was about to suffocate underneath the weight of cartographic facts and geographic knowledge, slated globes could help strip terrestrial globes of their imposed content, recasting them as a new “blank” of a different quality, an unornamented, unslathered homogeneity of another kind—performing an omission by design.11 In other words, while the terrestrial globe—continually updated to keep up with the newest conquests over the terra incognita—paid homage to the colonial projects of expansion aggressively pursued by European empires and closely followed by the agents of the US empire, slated globes supported the young US empire’s need to dismiss and downplay European colonial competition by imagining the world as one homogeneously re-inscribable blank.
16 As Edney contends (cf. Brückner 13-14), modern empires are cartographically constructed, and thus, their movements within and in between the spaces they dominate, exploit, or covet necessitate repeated acts of mapping (45). In other words, empires conduct their own surveying and develop their own mapping discourses and cartographic apparatus, regardless of (though heavily informed by and carefully positioned against) the maps they inherit from a former or neighboring empire or they seize from the native populations whose territory they plan to colonize. As citizens of a late-coming empire, Americans too were eager to draw their own maps of the world, inscribing it in their own “imperial vernacular” (Edney 45). In light of this, we should read slated globes as the scaled-down materialization of Americans’ desire to imagine and map the world and develop their own cartographic narratives of the world while distancing themselves from European cartographic precedents.12 With slated globes— more widely in use in American schools during the first half of the twentieth century— American youth could re-draw and re-order the world in the US imperial vernacular.
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As such, slated globes should be viewed, if not as projections into a future that the comparatively young US empire envisioned for itself, then at least as modern, practice fields of world geography at the service of the urgent, shifting global interests of this outward-looking empire. After all, as Harley maintains, maps and globes have long been “appropriated as an intellectual weapon of state system” (88).
4. Terra Incognita Iterum, the New Cartographic Blank
17 Shifting focus from imperial geopolitics in the abstract back to the very surface of slated globes in American schoolrooms, it might seem at first sight as if slated globes were educational aid materials that served as practice fields to teach the basics of world geography to very young pupils in their first encounters with the subject: “Sometimes,” wrote Otto E. Geppert, “I refer to this globe as similar to a storage battery. Looking at a storage battery we do not see very much, but,” he continued, “it has a remarkable potential. It starts the car motor, it lights the lights, it plays the radio” (9). In line with Geppert’s observations here, my reading of the potential uses of slated globes at more advanced levels of school geography, captures the nature of their intellectual re- purposing and their ideological power to call back an intentional overall blankness imposed on the surface of the earth, enabling cartographic adventure and territorial domination. After all, as Geppert posits, once the slated globe is put to use, what geographical “things” happen and what they mean “is up to you” (9).
18 It is further evident that slated globes stand in a long line of objects that reflect a post- Enlightenment fixation on the idea of blank. In effect, the post-Enlightenment West has hardly ceased to be fascinated by blank as (a) an unusually powerful metaphor (the notion that the human brain is a blank slate onto which impressions can be made through parenting, education, and other forms of exposure is an infamous example already);13 (b) a precondition to gendered and romanticized relationships between individuals and entities (the marginalized and disempowered figure of the female as well as non-female, infantilized bodies of native populations who have time and again been depicted in literature and political discourses as blank);14 and, (c) a spatial imaginary that comes with corresponding ideas and artifacts (colonialism as active erasing, writing, and re-writing of spatial relations on the surface of the globe as if it were formerly entirely blank).15 In the case of the latter, the Age of Exploration saw the expansion of the colonial territory and the extension of the governing arm of European empires into other parts of the world as an act which, if understood cartographically, involved the attempt to chisel into that blank, piece by piece, to slowly but surely cover that terrestrial skin with colonial ink. The colonized space posed as a body whose exteriors were assumed to be a mappable terra incognita—erotic, alluring, and demanding attention—a space in need of colonial order, waiting to be surveyed and overwritten with a new set of toponyms, recognizable and pronounceable for modern Western subjects. To the same effect, promising permanence while eventually falling victim to fits of fragility like any other object, slated globes allowed future agents of the US Empire to experiment with the spatial representation of such a world as a geographical expanse that was both desired and imagined to be blank, mappable, erasable, and pliant.
19 And yet, there is a “but” to ponder here: According to Roland Barthes, it is not the blank itself but the difference that always remains between the already-written-on
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surface (the expanding grip of Western spatial dominance surveyed, mapped, and named, the terra cognita) and the yet-to-be-written-on surface (the terra nondum cognita) that leads to a somatic, Epicurean, sensual quality in any surface (10). Barthes likens this lag and its resultant lure to “the intermittence of skin flashing between two articles of clothing (trousers and sweater), between two edges (the open-necked shirt, the glove and the sleeve); it is this flash itself which seduces, or rather: the staging of an appearance-as-disappearance” (10). Without this contrast of the known and the unknown, the juxtaposition of the written and the to-be-written, the philistine posited against the civilized, the blank is deemed dull, banal, even nonexistent.
20 If blank charms and tempts only when placed in a nexus with what is already unmasked, if it triggers a youthful wish to grow older and discover what stands outside of the known and the civilized only when coupled with the mapped and named and occupied, then how did a complete blank in the form of black, tabletop, slated globes manage to capture the fascination of American geographers and pupils? If, as Harley contends, maps have historically been considered “privileged knowledge” (88), then what did the American youth of the early to mid-twentieth century see when faced with the total blankness of a slated globe that promised to quench their thirst for both knowledge and privilege?16 Where on the blank surface of a slated globe would a twentieth-century American pupil place her finger and quote Heart of Darkness’s Marlow?
21 My response to these questions is threefold: first of all, if we continue to take these blank globes as simple representations of the classic terra nondum cognita of the Age of Exploration, then the pedagogic use of slated globes would rather neatly correspond with the times’ understanding of the blank state of a child’s mind, at least when first learning about and encountering the world at large. This would in effect fit the primary educational purpose of slated globes (as set by cartography companies), resulting in their gradual popularity over time, because similar to the supposed tabula rasa state of the human brain upon birth, the terra incognita of the Age of Empire too was a temporal category that was expected to diminish over time, a “not-yet” of perspective—“a way of foretelling future knowledge, of submitting… to a particular temporality, that of the perfectibility of knowledge and the linear and continuous progress of discovery” (Jacob 264). During the Age of Empire, Africa, for instance, was a massive terra incognita only from the perspective of Europeans and only up until the moment when European cartographers decided that they were done mapping and partitioning it. In a similar manner, and at least at the beginners’ level, that is, 4th through 6th grades, slated globes were effective tools that could lessen young children’s confusion in encountering the fully cognita, terrestrial globe by parsing out the excess of data on its surface and de- hierarchizing the terra cognita and terra incognita at the service of geographical education.
22 Second, given that slated globes were recommended as tools to teach geography to American children at all levels, from beginner to advanced, these globes could be viewed at more advanced levels of geography teaching in terms of their capacity to counter the fascination of the times with the fully-mapped world of European empires. There is no doubt that blank does not necessarily signal an absence, but rather the illusion thereof. Similar to the external reality of Africa or the Americas, which were far from blank before Europeans began to survey and map their various parts, slated globes too were never fully free from the dictates of the very history that baptized them as tools of empire before they were put to use by school children. In effect, to
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better respond to the questions posed above, it is imperative that we remind ourselves that, when put to use as an educational artifact, the blank surface of slated globes was inevitably already haunted by the ghosts of previous acts of mapping as if it was the same terrestrial globe that had yielded to blankness due to the excess of visual matter violently covering its surface. In essence, then, the surface of slated globes was entirely cognita, neither un- nor de-colonized. In other words, slated globes’ blank surfaces, far from being vacant, were overflowing with cartobibliographic material (transportation routes, borderlines, colors, place-names, scalar miscalculations), and masked through multiple acts of cartographic (un)doing every time the outline of a continent was drawn and erased and every time a teacher put a student’s memory to test. And the gap between the repeatedly recorded known that was accessible through comparison to other maps and globes and the presumed unknown that was waiting to be drawn, named, and then erased on slated globes was filled with chalk dust, youthful trepidation, didactic frustration, occasional playful doodles, and stern imperial ideology.
23 Based on this, we could distinguish the blank offered by slated globes from the one entailed in terrestrial globes and world maps. Viewed from this angle, what can be discerned is that, determined to restore the power and allure of the blank as it was fast disappearing, American geographers took advantage of this moment in order to establish a different kind of blank: unblemished by the European touch, this was not the same old terra nondum cognita of the Age of Reconnaissance, but a seamless terra incognita iterum—the coming back of a blank of an unprecedented nature that was the product of a different historical moment. Not entirely antonymous to the traditional notion of terra incognita, the terra incognita iterum departed from the very existence and quality of the terra nondum cognita. This new terra incognita recorded pristine world orders. To be precise, the terra incognita iterum was a means of learning how to draw and control, one that translated erasure—of traditional Western scientia mundi—not into want of cartographic knowledge but rather into spatial re-investment, as it gave American youth the power to re-possess the world at the dawn of a century that was later styled both as the American and the geographic century (Smith 7).
24 In other words, in a colonial setting acutely fraught with anxieties about loss of domination over the colonized space and about putting their dominion on display through maps and globes, slated globes’ emptiness did more than inviting fantasy; rather, it provided the ground for absolute and boundless dominion, the ground for the rise of a global power. In this light, the terra incognita iterum is different from the original terra incognita in that it could be called upon as a modern spatial fix to the already overly and overtly known, the terra seemingly seamlessly rendered cognita, a colonially homogeneous space possessed by European imperial states. Terra incognita iterum entailed an as-if call to new imperialists to treat the world ambivalently as a globe and a blackboard and to renew colonial spatial efforts to navigate, know, name, and narrate.
25 Underlining the significance of tactile cartographic didactics for the mostly untraveled, young American students of world geography, and speculating on the range of possible effects emanating from the “physical relationship between the individual and the map” (Edney 24), what made these objects effective educational tools was that they enabled American youth, future stewards of the US Empire, to in fact learn how to (re-)colonize the terra that was already made cognita by Europeans without stepping away from their
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desks and to engrave the surface of the earth without having observed it firsthand. Provoking, in equal measure, playfulness and patriotism, slated globes were washed of imperial colors, and freed of the border lines imposed on them, drained of water and emptied of landmasses, only to be scathed, and tattooed with lines, colors, and names, watered and landed—in sum, to be “globed” in the hands of the young American learners of world geography.
26 Third and finally, to further respond to the doubt cast upon the allure of the blank surface of slated globes, I would like to turn to the insights offered by the president of the Association of American Geographers at the time when slated globes were at the peak of their popularity, that is, the middle of the twentieth century. As John K. Wright (3) argued in his now classic, 1947 presidential address, “Terrae Incognitae: The Place of the Imagination in Geography”: Indeed, if we look closely enough—if, in other words, the cartographical scale of our examination be sufficiently large—the entire earth appears as an immense patchwork of miniature terrae incognitae. Even if an area were to be minutely mapped and studied by an army of microgeographers, much about its geography would always remain unknown, and, hence, if there is no terra incognita today in an absolute sense, so also no terra is absolutely cognita.
27 In Wright’s observation, by the mid-twentieth century, absolute terra incognita was nowhere to be found, at the same time that the absolute terra cognita did not exist either. Considering the questions of distance and scale, we can conclude that, no matter where we direct our gaze, the closer we get to the terra cognita on the surface of the earth, the more visible and troubling (to the colonizer’s confidence) the incalculable number of personal, domestic, privatized, or imaginary terrae incognitae that we spot. As Wright further clarified: “Behind us has lain the valley out of which we have come, the farm or ranch where we have sojourned. Before us has spread, if not a land unknown to the United States Geological Survey, at least a personal terra incognita of our own” (Wright 1).
28 In this sense, it is important to note that, from the perspective of mid-twentieth century world geography, terra incognita and terra cognita have never been mutually exclusive, binary opposites. The known and the unknown, though hardly admitted by colonizers just a few decades before Wright made these observations, could not be separated, nor could their blanketing effect in shaping individuals’ geographical imaginaries be clearly marked. From this perspective, what is discernible is that terrestrial globes were not fully cognita, just as their slate siblings failed to offer a total blank. Instead, each functioned as a proxy for the other for American children to make sense of the world. In the case of common terrestrial globes, the explosion of place- names and borderlines created the illusion that no terra incognita was to be found anymore. In the case of slated globes, on the other hand, the total blank they offered would result in the illusive notion that students could essentially imagine the world anew, while a careful juxtaposition of the two globes together at the more advanced levels could cast serious doubts on these illusions altogether.
29 Thus, slated globes do not denigrate the known in favor of the unknown, nor do they simply conflate the known and the unknown. More complexly than that, these modern artifacts were charged with cartographic significance only once they entered a complementary matrix created around the previously existing cartographic knowledge of the world. The cartographer, the school teacher, and the pupil appropriated the terrestrial globe as a spatial palimpsest, invoking varying degrees of known and
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unknown as they erased, drew, and erased again: once put to proper use, the 1955 catalog of the Denoyer-Geppert Company insisted, “this globe becomes a living thing, made so by the interplay of minds, teachers’ and pupils’” (Geppert 8). In effect, if we agree with Wright that in late modernity we understand all terra to be an intermittent conglomeration of the cognita and the incognita, then the comparatively younger American colonizers could decide which terra to focus on in isolation, keeping the rest conveniently covered under the blanket of blankness. After all, allowing for uncertainty, inaccuracy, and partiality of perspective, despite the urge to know it all and own it all, is an essential feature of the modern global environment.
5. Conclusion
30 As I demonstrate here, slated globes were objects with both a past (their intended educational purposes that they shared with terrestrial globes, cradle globes, etc. once they appeared in classrooms) and a present (their potential, intended and unintended, repertoire of uses on the hands of individuals who came to work with them)—a life that was uniquely their own.17 Standing against the dominance of horror vacui over then conventional cartographic practices, they further opposed the fascination of the times with the homogenized, fully mapped global. Far from being a finished goods, slated globes were plastic, imperial “practice fields” of world geography—(re-)inscribable objects that were both intimate to children’s touch and pliant in the service of the shifting geopolitical interests of the outward-looking US Empire at the dawn of a new century.18
31 In hindsight, we can argue that slated globes stood for more than a mere protest against early twentieth-century pretensions to cartographic accuracy and scientific thoroughness. Indeed, at work at the nexus of the colonized and the colonizable spaces, calling into question the “apparent stability” and “aesthetic closure and finality” of world projection maps and terrestrial globes (Cosgrove 2), slated globes mediated between the distrusted but undoable cartographic knowledge that had resulted from previous acts of colonizing and mapping (the un-veiled known, the terra made cognita) and a recalled, as-if, evasive, re-colonizable unknown (the re-veiled known, the terra incognita iterum) that the US Empire desired upon its entry into the global market of colonization. Departing from existing cartographic modus operandi for the sake of establishing a new global imaginary—an imaginary that would best fit the imperatives of the US rise to global empire at the dawn of a new century—these artifacts allowed for a new mode of world cartography, a modern spatial fix that I refer to as “globing.”
32 Reading slated globes in their US context of use, these blank globes materialized Americans’ desire to imagine the world as terra incognita through and through, in the spirit of what Arjun Appadurai characterizes as a “plurality of imagined worlds” (5). While there is no guarantee that every American pupil growing up at the turn of the twentieth century learned geography with the use of a slated globe, and while British or German teachers and students might have used slated globes entirely differently, we can safely conclude that, in reference to individual or collective understandings of the “world”—beyond the version already endorsed by those in power as the one and only visual narrative of the world—slated globes offered a heuristic, a reminder that—once espoused with geopolitical imperatives of this or that empire—geographic knowledge is
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inevitably conditional, shifting, provisional, partially futuristic, and, most importantly, palimpsestically plural.
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Schumacher, Frank. “Embedded Empire: The United States and Colonialism.” Journal of Modern European History, vol. 142, 2016, pp. 202-224.
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NOTES
1. I am grateful to the staff of the International Coronelli Society for the Study of Globes for their assistance with accessing their collections online. I am further grateful to the staff of the Newberry Library and the Library of Congress who helped me with finding archival material at the time when—as a result of the 2016 travel ban (Executive Order 13769)—I could not travel to the United States to conduct further archival research myself. I also wish to thank Stephen Morgan, Niko Rohé, Rodrigo Marttie, and the anonymous EJAS reviewers for their insightful suggestions on earlier drafts of this essay. 2. At the start of the twenty-first century, slated globes are known merely as “chalkboard globes.” Either bought ready-made or slated by individuals who are interested in DIY, they no longer belong to schoolrooms but rather to the idle collection of objects that stand on a living room sideboard. They are mentioned in passing, if at all, in coffee-table books on the history of western cartography, or in encyclopedias and museum publications on their holdings. Whether used to teach geography in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries or adopted to do collage work or to playfully draw travel itineraries in the twenty-first century, however, these woefully understudied objects seem to have had great appeal both in Europe and the United States. No doubt, the didactic function of these artifacts has been superseded over time by their adaptation as items of decoration, and yet, looking back at the settings in which they were originally put to use reveals their political birthmark. This is what this article sets out to do.
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3. Like any other tool, slated globes too were used in a number of scripted and unscripted ways. After all, as Annabel Wharton (48) maintains, regardless of the original intentions envisioned by its producers and of the many intended and unintended uses that it is put to by its consumers, an object’s functions and uses are ultimately “conditioned by its context.” Here, it is the context of the US Empire that informs my reading of the US-made slated globes over the course of almost a century. 4. Having found its way to the other side of the Atlantic too, Shepherd’s invention was noted in England, for instance, in the 1867 Catalogue of the Educational Division of the South Kensington Museum (334). 5. Reflective of the differences between the ways the young US Empire and the long-lived British Empire approached and appropriated slated globes, one outstanding difference that sets US- made slated globes apart from their British counterparts is that—whether introduced in patent documents or endorsed in journals of geography—American slated globes were used to teach “a representation of the geography of the world” as a whole while their British siblings were recommended to be used in teaching “the position of the principal places on the surface of the Globe [emphasis added]” (Maynard 73). 6. See, for instance, “Inventions for Schools: Slated Globes,” in The New York Teacher and American Educational Monthly, vol. 5, June 1868, 204. 7. Another set of geographical globes that appeared both in American schoolrooms and war rooms are “cradle globes.” Originally invented by the Austrian globe-maker Richard Haardt in the mid-1930s, this axis-free globe appeared in the United States by the 1940s. As Carolyn Burrell (111-112) establishes, whether copied from Haardt’s globes or not (he had called his axis-free globes “roll globes”), in vogue well after the Cold War era, American cradle globes first gained popularity during the WWII and as the nation developed a keen interest in air travel especially to the poles. 8. According to Davis (236), while Moore and Nims sold their terrestrial and celestial globes for $75, their 16-inch and 30-inch slate globes cost respectively $12 and $40. 9. Also known as the “International Map of the World” or the IMW, Albrecht Penck’s Millionth Map (called so after its 1:1,000,000 scale) was first proposed by the German geomorphologist in 1891. Introduced to and rather immediately adopted by the international community early in the twentieth century, the project was planned to consist of 2,500 maps that were drawn individually (but using one standard cartobibliographic language) by various national cartography organizations across the globe, with the hope of reaching a viably consistent map of the world. For a thorough examination of this promising but ultimately aborted world cartography project, see Monmonier, Coast Lines, pp. 86-101, and Pearson and Heffernan, “Globalizing Cartography?,” pp. 58-80. 10. For an excellent work on the crisis of imperial legitimacy, see Barth and Cvetkovski, “Encounters of Empires,” pp. 7-14, and Schumacher, “Embedded Empire,” pp. 202-224. 11. Detailed records exist of countless occasions at which European and American statesmen, mapmakers, and educators speculated about the right amount of cartographic data and topographic information to be included in maps and globes. For an inventory of instances of such debates in Britain and France, see Sponberg Pedley, The Commerce of Cartography, pp. 159-197. 12. See Wilford, The Mapmakers, p. 253. 13. “Tabula rasa”—the belief that human brain is a blank slate unto which impressions can be made through parenting, education and other forms of exposure—is one of the most well-known examples of blank popularized in the wake of the European Enlightenment. Though never referred to by John Locke in these words, the idea of tabular rasa is generally traced back to his educational writings, including An Essay
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Concerning Humane Understanding and Some Thoughts Concerning Education. See Locke, An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding; and Locke, Some Thoughts Concerning Education. An outstanding twentieth-century example of the metaphoric use of blank in the West is found in the work of the Algerian-French artist/activist Fred Forest, such as his series of projects called Space Media that he created during the 1970s and his curated blank-signs demonstration against political oppression in Brazil during the twelfth São Paulo Biennial in 1972. For a detailed examination of Forest’s art/activism, see O’Rourke, Walking and Mapping, pp. 20-23. 14. The marginalized and disempowered figure of the female has time and again been rendered ‘blank’ in western literature. As Lloyd Davis points out, in a wide range of literary renderings, the female body “is figured as a blank page, as virginal space, to be inscribed by the pen of the authorial and authorizing male” (50). In a remarkably incisive examination of the literary female as cartographically disempowered, Maura Giles-Watson refers to the female body in classic British literature as “geosomatic.” Related to this is the image of other groups of individuals like governesses, maids, and servants, or non-female, infantilized African American slaves who have repeatedly fallen victim in literature and political discourses to the disempowering effects of being deemed blank. See, for instance, Hughes, “The Figure of the Governess.” 15. Examples abound of such a viewpoint in the discourses on colonial cartography during the Age of Empire. For illuminating discussions about cartographic blank, see, for instance, Harley’s discussion of the various meanings and uses of “silence” on cartographic maps in his work on history of cartography in the West. The discussion appears in Harley (86), where he emphasizes that he intentionally promotes “silence” as a preferable alternative to “blank” because of the human agency that the former implies. Further discussion on the politics behind cartographic blank is made by Sponberg Pedley. For a discussion of “silent” maps and their uses in teaching geography, see Jacob, The Sovereign Map, pp. 354-360. 16. If, as Claire Reddlean maintains, we in fact “see with maps” (1), then the question here turns out to be: what is there to see when the whole globe is blank? 17. A thorough account of cradle globes and their origins appears in Burrell, “Cradle Globes in the USA.” 18. This of course is not meant to write off the long imperial history of the United States before 1898 in its violent policies toward Native Americans or to treat the Spanish-American War as an aberration in US foreign policy. To the contrary, as Amy Kaplan (1) contends in her now-classic work The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of US Culture, I insist that twenty-first century scholarship on US Empire has to attend to the conflated proximity of the many imperial theaters the United States orchestrated throughout the nineteenth century in order to understand the ways “international struggles for domination abroad profoundly shape representations of American national identity at home, and how, in turn, cultural phenomena we think of as domestic or particularly national are forged in a crucible of foreign relations.” Further illuminating works such as Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt's Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization, Amy S. Greenberg, Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire, John Cullen Gruesser, The Empire Abroad and the Empire at Home: African American Literature and the Era of Overseas Expansion, Alyosha Goldstein, Formations of United States Colonialism, Ian Tyrrell and Jay Sexton, Empire's Twin: US Anti-imperialism from the Founding Era to the Age of Terrorism, and Carole McGranahan, John F. Collins, Ethnographies of US Empire, provide access to the many contours of US Empire at home and abroad.
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ABSTRACTS
Manufactured by leading American globe-making companies, slated globes were adopted in the second half of the nineteenth century as educational aid materials, recommended for teaching world geography from the 4th grade on. Focusing on their production and use in the US context at the turn of the twentieth century, and following an examination of their role in teaching American children the fundaments of terrestrial geography, I probe these now forgotten, blank, black, educational table globes’ capacity in offering a timely “spatial fix” to the prosaic finality of an already overly and overtly known world that the globally rising US Empire was grappling with. Provoking, in equal measure, playfulness and patriotism, I argue, slated globes were washed of imperial colors and freed of the border lines imposed on them, drained of water and emptied of landmasses, only to be once more scathed, and tattooed with lines, colors, and names, watered and landed—in sum, to be “globed” in the hands of the generations of American youth, future stewards of the US Empire who were learning how to (re-)imagine the terra that was already made cognita by earlier colonial powers. Furthermore, I read slated globes as generative of terra incognita iterum (territory made unknown again)—a terra incognita of a different kind and for different purposes than the terra nondum cognita (territory yet unknown) of the previous centuries: a blank fraught with colonial urges of a young empire and charged with imperial pedagogics.
INDEX
Keywords: slated globes, terrestrial globes, imperial pedagogy, US empire, cartographic blank, terra incognita, globing, terra incognita iterum, school geography
AUTHOR
MAHSHID MAYAR A literary critic and cultural historian, Mahshid Mayar is an assistant professor of American Studies at Bielefeld University, Germany. She is currently working on her second-book project where she studies “blank” and “erasure” in postmodern American literature, while she also conducts research on US empire, historical childhood studies, and critical game studies. Mahshid's first book, Citizens and Rulers of the World: American Children and World Geography at the Turn of the 20th Century, is under contract with the University of North Carolina Press.
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Homecomings: Black Women’s Mobility in Early African American Fiction
Anna Pochmara
And now with the speed of an arrow—having passed the avenue—with the distance between her and her pursuers constantly increasing, this poor hunted female gained the “Long Bridge,” as it is called, where interruption seemed improbable, and already did her heart begin to beat high with the hope of success. (Brown, Clotel 184) With the speed of a bird, having passed the avenue, she began to gain, and presently she was upon the Long Bridge. Panting, gasping, she hushed her babe, appealed to God in broken sentences, and gathered all her courage to dash across the bridge and lose herself in the friendly shelter of the woods. (Hopkins, Hagar’s Daughter 74) I do not think that that slave mother who took her four children, crossed the Ohio River on the ice, killed one of the children and attempted the lives of the other two, was a contented slave. And that other one, who, running away and finding herself pursued, threw herself over the Long Bridge into the Potomac, was evidently not satisfied. (Harper, Iola Leroy 98)
1 The epigraphs from three different mulatta novels1 all rewrite the same story of a slave mother jumping with a child into the Potomac. The jump scene, whose affective force was exploited both in abolitionist discourse and in postbellum literature, aptly introduces this article’s focal point and illustrates its significance. I will show how representations of black women’s bondage and mobility in early African American fiction complexly recast and problematize the hegemonic ideologies of domesticity and separate spheres as well as counter-hegemonic depictions of mobile and heroic black masculinity in slave narratives.2 The corpus will consist of three mulatta melodrama novels: William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy (1893), and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter (1901-1902). All three texts feature mulatta protagonists and tell strikingly parallel stories, engaging in interesting dialogical relations. They are driven by the melodramatic peripeteia that Brown summarizes in the title of one of Clotel’s chapters as “To-day a Mistress, Tomorrow a
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Slave.” After a sudden and unexpected withdrawal of white male protection, mulatta wives and daughters are remanded to chattel slavery, which produces a chiaroscuro effect in which the binaries such as freedom/slavery, humanity/commodity are both reversed and challenged.
Introduction: Sentimentality, Abolitionism, and the Woman Question
2 A focus on mobility will enable me to add to the growing body of scholarship that has reclaimed the critically long-shunned mulatta protagonist. In the selected novels, she is a strategic choice, which makes the extensive travel of the African American characters more plausible. My reading of the black women’s enslavement, forced movement, and self-determined mobility will be positioned in the context of two discursive and literary fields. First of all, the novels resonate with nineteenth-century hegemonic women’s culture, its diverse reform activism as well as the literary tradition conceptualized by Nina Baym as “woman’s fiction” and Jane Tompkins as the “sentimental novel.” Secondly, the theme of mobility as represented in the texts—especially their recasting of bondage and escape—echoes abolitionist rhetoric and the genre of the slave narrative. Those two discursive fields are related in many ways; however, from the perspective of this article, the most relevant of these overlapping spaces is their concern with captivity and confinement.
3 In the intersections of abolitionism and nineteenth-century women’s movements, the figures of the woman and the slave have been both historically and rhetorically related. Until the end of the Civil War, abolitionists and suffragists closely cooperated (Davis 30–45),3 and the rhetorics of the two causes compared the woman’s condition to slavery and posited African Americans as the feminine race (Sánchez-Eppler, “Bodily Bonds” 33; Dorsey 186–194). As far as the theme of mobility is concerned, its limitations were a means of subordination of African Americans as well as women, and hence both reform movements addressed this issue. As the narrator in Iola Leroy states, “the slaves were denied unrestricted travel” (4), and analogously the nineteenth-century “social structures [were] designed to keep women in their place” in both metaphorical and literal way (Steadman 4). Antislavery reform institutions, such as the Underground Railroad, helped slaves escape to the North or to Canada, and women’s reform movements also contested, though in more subtle ways, middle-class women’s sense of confinement and isolation in the private sphere. One of such challenges to the separate spheres ideology was the very act of activism, which aimed to extend the woman’s influence into the public space (Epstein 132–137). Accordingly, in literary tradition, canonical slave narratives were driven by the desire to escape from slavery, and in a similar way, woman’s fiction, as Baym claims, also challenged the separate spheres ideology, extending the realm of the private sphere “so that home values dominated the world” (48). Hence, despite the dramatic difference between the literal bondage of slaves and largely symbolic confinement of women4 in American cultural imagination, the two groups were associated with immobility, which was challenged in abolitionist discourse as well as in woman’s fiction and reform rhetoric.
4 The intersection of travel restrictions for African Americans and women is vividly showcased in the renowned Crafts escape. In 1848, Ellen Craft cross-dressed as a man and passed as white to make the couple’s travel more plausible, which powerfully
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highlights the privileged position of white male mobility in nineteenth-century cultural codes, ideologies, and practices. The Crafts’ escape thrilled the audiences of abolitionist lectures (Zackodnik 49) and was fictionalized by Brown in Clotel and Hopkins in Hagar’s Daughter. Due to their simultaneous focus on black emancipation and women’s concerns, the mulatta novels I discuss in this article highlight and simultaneously complicate the overlapping spaces of abolitionist discourse and contemporary hegemonic women’s culture analogously to the Crafts’ story.
5 Despite their excessive melodramatic aesthetics, explicitly or implicitly, all three novels are related to the slave narrative tradition and its discourse of authenticity. It is most conspicuous in the case of Clotel, which was authenticated by Brown’s slave narrative published in the same volume. At the end of the text, he also lists many sources that the novel draws on, including “narratives . . . from the lips of those who, like [himself], have run away from the land of bondage” and “American Abolitionist journals” (208). His declaration has been confirmed by literary historians. For example, the central episode of the novel, cited in the epigraph—Clotel’s jump into the Potomac —is based on Congressman Seth M. Gates’s account “Slavery in the District: The Escape” published in the New-York Evangelist in 1842 (Johnson 14). Writing in the postbellum era, Harper recasts Brown’s authenticating gesture and ends with a note stating that Iola Leroy is a story woven “from threads of fact and fiction” (282) and, as critics have pointed out, it heavily references the historiography of black emancipation (Foreman 90–102). Moreover, as the third epigraph illustrates, the text also contains references to historical events popularized by the abolitionist movement, including the death in the Potomac recorded by Gates. Hagar’s Daughter, in turn, quotes a number of passages from Clotel, almost word for word, including the Gates/Brown Potomac jump story and thus— using the strategy that Augusta Rohrbach calls “literary ‘sampling’” (484)—it also participates in the process of historical legitimization. Additionally, as I will argue, Hagar’s Daughter draws on a postbellum discourse that appropriated the conventions of the antebellum slave narrative: the novel echoes the Progressive Era white slavery hysteria and “white slave narrative literature”: memoirs of prostitutes published by the social purity reformers, which drew on conventions of the black slave narrative.
6 The tradition of the canonical slave narrative, dominated by male voices, is rooted in the philosophy of individualism and autonomy and is based on the paradigm that begins with the state of bondage in the South and ends with unrestrained freedom in the North. As Valerie Smith points out, masculinity was central for the genre, as the narrative traditionally represented “a journey from slavery to freedom but also a journey from slavery to manhood” (34). Brown’s, Harper’s, and Hopkins’s narratives discussed here transcend this binary paradigm, which primarily stems from their focus on families rather than individuals and on women rather than men. This breach between the tradition of the male slave narrative and the mulatta novel is bridged by the canonical narrative written by Harriet Jacobs. Incident’s in the Life of a Slave Girl in many ways undercuts its own authenticity and incorporates the sentimental tradition (Patton 54), and in contrast to the male individualist narratives, it dramatizes the relatedness of family members under slavery. Yet, despite its similarities to the novels I analyze, it principally follows the linear South-North itinerary, and as Jacobs alias Linda Brent famously states, her story “ends with freedom, not with marriage” (224).
7 The relevance of hegemonic woman’s fiction for the African American mulatta tradition has been acknowledged by a number of critics (Tate 65–66; McDowell 29;
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duCille 4, 17; Raimon 8). There are so many different intersections between the two bodies of writing, however, that the potential of intertextual readings of white women’s novelistic tradition and mulatta novels has not been exhausted. One of the yet unexamined parallels is the melodramatic reversal that opens the narratives of both traditions. In her classic study of nineteenth-century novels authored by women, Baym claims that the deep structure of woman’s fiction is the story of an allegedly orphaned girl, frequently a pauperized heiress, who is exploited by her guardians and bravely stands the trials of poverty and homelessness, gains independence, and triumphs (35– 39).5 The story of a young girl in financial trouble resulting from her father’s failure to protect the family neatly parallels the narrative reversal of “to-day a mistress, to- morrow a slave” characteristic for mulatta melodrama (Brown 120). Additionally, all three mulatta narratives feature young women separated from their families and mistreated by their protectors, which echoes the paradigm of “neglected and overworked orphans” and guardians who abuse their authority, two central archetypes of woman’s fiction (Baym 37). By depicting and celebrating female independence and agency, the novels discussed in Baym’s Woman’s Fiction challenged the subordination and women’s confinement to their homes. More specifically, they did not perceive the home and the world “as separate spheres” but voiced a message that “woman’s sphere is to reform the world” (Baym 48–49). The mulatta novel depicts female mobility and emphasizes women’s agency in an even more extensive way. Since they incorporate the escape plot from the slave narrative, the texts repeatedly depict protagonists traveling in public spaces and cannot be characterized as “largely descriptive of events taking place in a home setting” (Baym 26). Even more significantly, the novels represent enslavement, bondage, and forced travel, which highlights the dramatic difference between white women’s relegation to the private sphere and status of black female slaves as private property.
8 All three mulatta novels begin with a depiction of idyllic domestic scenery, yet analogously to woman’s fiction, they principally challenge the separation of home and world. Their openings are positioned in a setting whose privacy and seclusion are emphasized, and thus they express the sense of isolation, which is parallel to the experience of white middle-class women’s confinement in the domestic sphere as analyzed by Barbara Epstein and Nancy Cott (77–84; 63–100). The black authors represent life in a home completely divided from the world as a brief, dangerous, and tragic fantasy. In the novels, in the antebellum context, the women’s initial isolation in and confinement to the private sphere soon change into literal bondage, and their shelters are exposed as prisons. Clotel and her daughter Mary, Hagar and her daughter Jewel, Marie and her daughter Iola, all begin as mistresses of their respective cottages, mansions, and plantations, and are soon enslaved or re-enslaved as a result of the white father’s/slave owner’s irresponsibility, ambitions, or death. As far as the narrative structure is concerned, the idyllic openings are characterized by slow-paced, extensive passages of description, which are contrasted with a rapid diegetic tempo, which is classified as a summary in Gérard Genette’s typology of narrative movements (94–106).
9 The women’s bondage is represented not only as confinement and immobility but primarily as an enforced movement. It exemplifies what Susan Roberson discusses as forced travel, which paradoxically indicates powerlessness rather than autonomy typically associated with mobility and is closely related to loss rather than quest (98). 6 The forced movement into slavery is in most cases resisted by the protagonists’ attempts at escape. Yet in contrast to the dominant slave narrative paradigm, the
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movements of female characters in fiction are complex and circular, and thus they depart from the traditional linear movement of the fugitive slave from the South to the North, from slavery to freedom. Beginning with a family disintegration and striving towards a family reunion, the novels simultaneously follow two or three generations of family members. Such a construction of the narrative frequently results in chaos and fragmentation, thus depicting the unpredictability and instability of the fate of black families under slavery. Yet in these complex narratives, almost all female characters make a circular trajectory that takes them back closely or exactly to the point of their departure rather than to the North as in the case of the tradition of the male slave narrative. Apart from the geographically circular character of their journeys, these are also symbolic homecomings; the mulattas return to their birthplaces, to their hometowns, or even, as one critic claims, to their African origins (Johnson 11–26).
10 In order to rigorously examine the circular movements of characters and visualize their homecomings, I will use maps that depict the separation of the mixed-race families and the female protagonists’ movements. I will juxtapose these figures with a reading of the narrative means that are employed to represent the characters’ travels. In order to produce precise graphic visualizations of mobility, I will chronologically analyze the texts, and each section will be devoted to a separate novel, beginning with Brown’s Clotel and ending with Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter.
Clotel: “Death is Freedom” or “Vessels bound for Europe”
11 Jewel—in contrast to Brown’s and Harper’s younger generation protagonists—is quite unexpectedly denied a happy ending after her mixed-race identity is discovered because she has been engaged to Cuthbert Sumner, a white Northerner who does not approve of interracial marriages. As she admits in a letter to her fiancé, “Like Miriam of old, I have scorned the Ethiopian and the curse has fallen upon me” (282). Hopkins refers here to the sister of Moses, who—in one of the dominant interpretations of this bible passage—criticizes Moses’s “Cushite” wife. Used synonymously with Ethiopian, the adjective was widely regarded as a reference to the wife’s racial origin as “Cushite,” which derives from “Kush,” a kingdom in ancient Nubia, today’s Sudan (“Kush”). In the biblical story, God curses Miriam with leprosy. Hopkins’s use of the biblical passage foreshadows the very ending, narrated from Cuthbert’s perspective, which states that “a righteous God” and his “wrath” will punish the “nation’s [sin]—the “idolatry of the Moloch of Slavery” (283–284). Cuthbert, having found out that Jewel has a drop of black blood, hesitates about his further actions. In the meantime, she leaves with her parents for Europe, dies of Roman fever, and is buried at Enson Hall in a conspicuously pastoral setting. The cause of death and daisies near her grave clearly allude to James’s famous 1878 novella. Yet, in contrast to James’s Daisy, whose grave is a “raw protuberance among the April daisies” “in the little Protestant cemetery, by an angle of the wall of imperial Rome” (82), Jewel is brought back to the US and buried in a “little graveyard nestled close beside the road, . . . [the] enclosure [where] dead and gone Ensons slumbered for centuries” (283). Hence ultimately both Hagar and Jewel return to their point of departure, one to live happily with her original husband in an interracial union, the other to be buried among her predominantly white ancestors (fig. 7). This unexpected ending—especially when juxtaposed with the numerous implausible events
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of the novel’s melodramatic plot—highlights the unlikelihood of willful interracial marriages at the turn of the twentieth century. Also—in contrast to Brown’s and Harper’s texts, where the daughter’s story is more hopeful than the mother’s— Hopkins’s vision of American history—typically for the melodramatic mode, represented as a history of families and generations—is not that of progress but of, at least temporary, decline.
Figure 1. Family separation in Clotel and Clotelle
Figure 2. Clotel’s journey in Clotel.
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12 Brown, following the popular rhetoric of the slave narrative and directly echoing the newspaper account of Gates, exploits the democratic irony of the setting (Heermance 85). Clotel dies “within plain sight of the President’s house and the capitol of the Union” (Brown 184). He also makes sure that the reader remembers the particular significance of Washington, DC, for Clotel, reminding that she was the “daughter of Thomas Jefferson, a president of the United States; the author of the Declaration of American Independence” (184). The clearly political meaning of Clotel’s death in the public sphere forms a dramatic contrast with “long-drawn-out death scenes, in which a saintly woman dies a natural death at home” that, according to Tompkins, characterize the sentimental novel (38). Not only does the scene turn a woman’s death into a political action, but—as Brown mentions the home of the President and Jefferson’s fatherhood—it also melodramatically highlights the private elements of the public and exposes what Karen Sánchez-Eppler refers to as “a crack in the hegemonic rhetoric of political disembodiment” (Touching 1). Jefferson—president and author—perfectly symbolizes nineteenth-century national body that grants citizenship only to “incorporeal” white men (Touching 3), yet this official position as a founding father is undercut here with his function as a biological father, whose necessarily bodily character is additionally dramatized by the reader’s knowledge of the illicit character of his extra-marital thus intensely sexualized relationship with Currer. There is also another possibility to read the jump scene, which focuses on the direction of the Potomac rather than on the white house. From this perspective, Clotel turns to her matrilineal roots. As Lynn R. Johnson argues, her jump can serve as a connection to “her African forebears in the Black Atlantic world,” who jumped into the ocean during the Middle Passage (13). Psychoanalytically, death in water can also be seen as a regressive return to the womb. In such a reading, the Potomac becomes a way back to the maternal arche of Africa, which even further underlines the circular trajectory of Clotel. Thus, Brown’s protagonist’s itinerary can be read as a return along both patrilineal and matrilineal lines.
13 Clotel’s daughter Mary, equally resistant to her condition of bondage, signifies on her mother’s flight and thus indirectly also on Ellen Craft’s successful escape. As Teresa Zackodnik puts it, “in a clever parody of the child following the condition of the mother, Brown has Mary pose as the rebel slave George so that he can escape prison. Like her mother before her, Mary conceives of a plan to enable the freedom of a male slave by dressing as a man” (57). Her scheme helps her beloved George to escape, yet it leads her to an auction block. Saved from slavery in a dramatic narrative twist by Mr. Devenant, an unexpectedly introduced Frenchman, she moves to France. As a result, in the first, 1853 version of the novel, constructed by Brown for the British audience, Mary is the only character discussed here whose journey does not form a circular trajectory. As Fabi argues, “[c]ompounding a brilliant stoke of abolitionist propaganda with a critique of American democratic ideals that flattered British liberals, Brown presents exile as Mary’s only option to secure freedom and safeguard her chastity” (14). Her fate is thus is at least partially determined by the antebellum context. Furthermore, in contrast to Clotel, Mary replicates male slave trajectories. Neither a wife nor a mother when she leaves the US, she is free to follow a more individualist, linear route.
14 However, in the postbellum, 1867 version of the novel, retitled Clotelle; or, The Colored Heroine: A Tale Of The Southern States, although Brown dramatically tempers his critical
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edge (Fabi 23–28), he also adjusts the ending to the post-Emancipation context. This revision enables the homecoming of Mary’s character, now renamed Clotelle, from France.7 Before that happens, however, Mary/Clotelle makes a more complex journey than the 1853 Mary, whose travels were depicted very briefly. Clotelle travels to France from New Orleans via Natchez, where she is enslaved at Poplar farm, the very place where her grandmother Currer was enslaved. Later, in France, she is miraculously reunited with her first lover (called Jerome in the 1867 version) in Dunkirk just like her 1853 equivalent, yet—rather than settle them down and provide the novel with the closure of marriage—the text depicts their travels in an extensive way: Everything being arranged for a wedding tour extending up the Rhine, the party set out the same day for Antwerp. There are many rivers of greater length and width than the Rhine. Our Mississippi would swallow up half a dozen Rhines. The Hudson is grander, the Tiber, the Po, and the Mincio more classic; the Thames and Seine bear upon their waters greater amounts of wealth and commerce; the Nile and the Euphrates have a greater antiquity; but for a combination of interesting historical incidents and natural scenery, the Rhine surpasses them all. (98)
15 In the span of this short passage, Brown lists and compares as many as ten rivers from Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and the United States, thus signaling his own and by extension his community’s wide knowledge and experience of the world. Significantly, he names the Nile and the Euphrates as the most ancient, thus pointing to the African and Middle-Eastern origins of Western culture.8 Brown makes the couple travel along the Rhine through Coblenz, Brussels, and Cologne, and stop for a sojourn in Geneva: After strolling over miles and miles of classic ground, and visiting castles, whose legends and traditions have given them an enduring fame, our delighted travellers started for Geneva, bidding the picturesque banks of the Rhine a regretful farewell. Being much interested in literature, and aware that Geneva was noted for having been the city of refuge to the victims of religious and political persecution, Jerome arranged to stay here for some days. (99; emphasis added)
16 Here Brown again exploits the political associations of geographical names and forms an analogy between persecuted Reformation advocates and fugitive slaves.
17 The reunited couple then goes to “the little town of Ferney, on the borders of Lake Leman” (99), which becomes the setting of another coincidental meeting: Mary/Clotelle encounters her white father, who in the version released for the American audience is not President of the United States but an ordinary white plantation owner. After the family reunion, however, they neither return to Richmond nor settle down. Instead, the reader is informed that “[m]any were the excursions [Mary/Clotelle] made under the shadows of Mont Blanc, and with her husband and father for companions; she was now in the enjoyment of pleasures hitherto unknown” (103). Subsequently, Brown takes the reunited family back to Geneva and yet again highlights the emancipatory symbolism of the city: For more than three weeks, this little party spent their time in visiting the birth- place of Rousseau, and the former abodes of Byron, Gibbon, Voltaire, De Stael, Shelley, and other literary characters. . . . We can scarcely contemplate a visit to a more historic and interesting place than Geneva and its vicinity. Here, Calvin, that great luminary in the Church, lived and ruled for years; here, Voltaire, the mighty genius, who laid the foundation of the French Revolution, and who boasted, “When I shake my wig, I powder the whole republic,” governed in the higher walks of life. (103–104)
18 Like in his earlier reference to the history of Geneva, here by echoing the rebellious romantic poets as well as figures representing the Reformation movement, the
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Enlightenment, and the French Revolution, Brown legitimizes the resistance of his black slave characters and writes it into the mainstream of modern Western history. Hence, the extensive space devoted to the travels of freed American slaves do not serve any clear narrative function, they do not move the action forward, but predominantly function as signifiers of freedom and unrestrained mobility, further underlined by the connotative significance of the above-mentioned places, that is the ideals of modernity such as revolution, reformation, and progress.
19 In the 1867 version of his novel, Brown adds four chapters on the Civil War to make it relevant in the contemporary political situation. Mary/Clotelle and George/Jerome return to New Orleans so as to join the union ranks (105). George/Jerome enlists into the army and is fatally wounded, whereas Mary/Clotelle travels from Louisiana to Andersonville, GA, where she helps black prisoners escape (107). Ultimately, she succeeds, and “[l]ong suspected of too freely aiding Union prisoners,” Mary/Clotelle is “charged with a knowledge of the escape of these men, and…compelled to leave Andersonville” (111). After being finally imprisoned for her Union sympathies in New Orleans, and in turn, aided in her escape by a black woman, in the novel’s closure, she returns to Natchez, where she and her grandmother were separately enslaved: In the summer of 1866, the Poplar Farm, on which she had once lived as a slave, was confiscated and sold by Government authority, and was purchased by [Mary/ Clotelle], upon which she established a Freedmen’s School, and where at this writing,—now June, 1867,—resides the “Angel of Mercy.” (114)
20 Foreshadowing Iola Leroy’s trajectory, the 1867 Mary/Clotelle uses her white father’s money to buy the very plantation where she was kept as a slave, thus completing her complexly circular trajectory (fig. 3), which was available neither to her mother nor to the 1853 version of her character. In contrast to the following mulatta melodramas, Brown’s last version of the novel still retains the pre-Emancipation rhetoric, and it cannot imagine a full black family reunion that constitutes the climactic moment of Harper’s and Hopkins’s novels. Paradoxically, it also makes Mary/Clotelle the most unlimited and individualist of mulatta melodrama protagonists, foreshadowing the Harlem Renaissance novels of Nella Larsen or Zora Neale Hurston.
Iola Leroy: “Delightful Reunions”
21 In Iola Leroy, just as in Clotel, the termination of male authority resulting from the death of the white father leads to a disintegration of the interracial family and prompts Iola’s forced mobility. The reader is introduced to the eponymous heroine only in the fifth chapter of the novel, when having been “sold from State to State,” “seben times in six weeks” (42; original spelling), she is enslaved and incarcerated in the city of C--- (most likely Charlotte), North Carolina. Simultaneously, as the reader learns later, her mother Marie is in Vicksburg and her brother Harry in Maine (fig. 4). Unlike Clotel and Mary, Iola does not resort to cross-dressing and is not the one to initiate escape. Harper decides on a more plausible solution, and Iola is rescued by black fugitives on their way to join the Union army, who—much less plausibly—include her uncle Robert, a close family member she has never met. Like “a trembling dove,” she is taken from “the gory vulture’s nest and given a place of security” (39). Yet, despite these initial images of vulnerable submission, Harper’s Iola does not perpetuate the stereotype of the tragic and passive mulatta. After she is saved by the Northern army, she joins “a new army
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that had come with an invasion of ideas” (146; emphasis added). Iola becomes a teacher, and tutoring is metaphorically represented as a political action. Apart from the military tropes, teaching is positioned as resistance since “one of the powers of knowledge is the power of the strong to oppress the weak” (147).
Figure 3. Clotelle’s journey in Clotelle
Figure 4. Family separation in Iola Leroy
22 Iola, just like Clotel, tries to find her family members. She declares that she will “search for [her] mother until [she] find[s] her” (142), and, again mimicking Clotel, after her liberation, she goes down South to Georgia instead of going North. During her extended search for family, Iola’s forced travels as a bondwoman are counterbalanced with self- determined traveling, which includes a trip by train on her own as well as carriage rides. When depicting an excursion into the countryside, Harper highlights Iola’s
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enjoyment of such idyllic “delightful” experiences (175). As a result of her travels, she soon reunites with her grandmother (chapter XX, “A Revelation”), as well as her mother Marie and brother Harry (chapter XXII, “A Further Lifting of the Veil”). Harper resorts to a number of coincidences and excessive evidence that includes lockets, beauty spots, moles, and children’s songs to make those family reunions possible. The fact that such narrative excess is necessary for the happy ending highlights the unlikelihood of family reunions.
23 Even though the search for her mother is Iola’s repeatedly declared mission, and the desire to reintegrate the black family drives the narrative of the novel, the text does not end with the series of chapters titled “A Revelation,” “A Home For Mother,” “Further Lifting Of The Veil,” and “Delightful Reunions,” which in detail depict the recognitions and reconnections of Marie’s mother Harriet and her brother Robert; Marie, Harry, and Iola; as well as Marie, Robert, and Harriet. After all these reunions, instead of the expected ending, the reader follows the protagonist for another nine chapters set in the North until the final chapter takes Iola back to the South. Her extended travels, which do not move the plot forward, echo Mary/Clotelle’s excursions to European landmarks, yet their symbolic significance is quite different. Before the ultimate reunion and marriage take place, Iola first moves to the city of P--- (probably Philadelphia) and later to H--- (probably Hartford) in New England, where she is refused a place in a boarding house on account of her race. She comes back to P---, where after much difficulty, she finds different jobs and takes part in the intellectual life of the African American community. With these seemingly redundant chapters that do not contribute to any conflict resolution, the text represents the economic displacement of black people after Emancipation and highlights their determined search for employment with the endless migrancy it entails.
24 In the final chapter, having gotten engaged to a black doctor, Iola comes back down South to become the mistress of her own house and a Sunday school teacher in the very town where she was imprisoned at the beginning of the novel. Thus Harper signifies on the 1867 plotline of Mary/Clotelle, who opens a school for freedmen on the very plantation where she was a slave. The city of C--- in North Carolina frames the novel, and the narrative comes full circle (fig. 5). In the twisted plots of the text, the city turns out to be the hometown of Iola’s grandmother Harriet and the birthplace of her mother Marie, which further emphasizes the centrality of homecoming and circularity for the narrative. Once the complex family reunion is complete, three generations of women live in the same city in North Carolina. Harper’s Iola Leroy, written at an optimistic historical moment, “upon the threshold of a new era” (282), differs from Brown’s novel rooted in the antebellum times as well as from Hopkins’s text, published after the Plessy v. Ferguson decision legitimized Jim Crow segregation nationwide, lynching violence deeply marred interracial relations and the failure of Reconstruction was generally acknowledged. Thus, Iola Leroy is the only of the melodramas I analyze here to close with a univocal happy ending for all mulatta characters.
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Figure 5. Iola’s journey in Iola Leroy
Figure 6. Hagar’s journey in Hagar’s Daughter
Hagar’s Daughter: Slavery and Traffic in Women
25 As I have mentioned, Hagar’s Daughter even more directly than Iola Leroy signifies on Clotel’s narrative. The mulatta plot begins and ends in a similar region—suburban Baltimore—and in an analogously idyllic setting. Hagar, the only daughter of the elite Sargeant family, gets married to her neighbor Ellis Enson from a family of equal social standing. Characteristically, the courtship and marriage of the mixed-race woman are narrated in a single chapter, and in the next episode, published in the same
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installment, due to a plot devised by the evil brother of her husband St. Clair Enson— she finds out that she is, in fact, a black slave, adopted by the Sargeant family. In the next installment—after her husband’s protection is terminated by his alleged suicide— she is transferred to a slave trader. The pace closely resembles the action-packed sequences from the beginning of Brown’s novel and also can be classified as Genette’s notion of summary. As the epigraph illustrates, Hagar, just like Clotel, flees from the slave pen in Washington to the woods of Arlington. Hopkins literarily quotes from Brown’s narrative, retaining many of his original sentences and phrases in her description, and exchanging a number of minor lexical items for their synonyms: “woodlands” for “forest,” “mass” for “throng,” “side” for “shore,” “cross” for “pass” (73–74). Perhaps the most telling of these substitutions is that of “a flying arrow” for “a bird,” since it foreshadows the resurrection the narrative has in store for Hagar (74). Apart from constructing this intratextual rebirth, Hopkins, by rewriting Brown (and indirectly also Gates), intertextually resurrects the character of Clotel and reunites her with her daughter. In contrast to Clotel—whose body is “picked up from the bank of the river, where it had been washed by the strong current” and “deposited, without either inquest being held over it, or religious service being performed” in “a hole dug in the sand” (186)—Hagar is miraculously saved by an oyster digger, and “drift[s] to California” (266), where she gets married and comes back to Washington, DC, a wife of a Senator Bowen (fig. 6), thus again signifying on the relations between mulattas and white politicians, which were central for Clotel. Hagar’s choice of the Western route interestingly resonates with the classical Western’s protagonist’s frequent Southern background. Just as defeated Confederate soldiers a decade later, she looks at the frontier for the freedom that the South could not offer at the time. Additionally, California and the West, even though only briefly mentioned, are significant for the novel’s logic in general. The region serves to explain Bowen’s honest, rough, self-made manhood as well as Hagar’s daughter’s courage and independence. Jewel—introduced as a “Western girl”—always carries a gun with her just like the mythical cowboy (211).
26 Hagar’s Daughter’s second part narrates a story that signifies both on the novel’s first part and indirectly, on Brown’s Clotel. First of all, Jewel coincidentally follows the route of her mother: she is rescued and then adopted by Zenas Bowen, who takes her to the West. Jewel returns to Washington, DC, via Canada, where she gets an education in a convent. In the context of African American travel writing, the Canadian episode can be read as echoing the Underground Railroad and the final destination of many slave narratives. In the second part of the novel, a slightly changed family—the mother and the daughter are the same as in the antebellum section, the father is a different elite white man—is yet again disintegrated by the plotting of the same evil Enson brother. Since it is set in the 1880s, the characters are not sent back to slavery. Instead, Hagar’s daughter is kidnapped by St. Clair and imprisoned in the now ruined family mansion.
27 Such a juxtaposition of slavery and kidnapping may be read as an allusion to the contemporary discourse of white slavery and traffic in women. At least since 1885, when British reformer William Stead exposed the traffic in young girls in his “The Maiden Tribute to Babylon,” the metaphor of white slavery captivated the public, and its influence continued through the entire Progressive Era (Hobson 142). As Ruth Rosen argues, at the dawn of the twentieth century, “American reformers soon took up the banner of both the ‘new abolitionism’ and the fight against the white slavery” from their British counterparts, and many “former abolitionists . . . now joined forces with
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‘social purity’ reformers to battle the new slavery” (117). Thus in many ways, the turn- of-the-twentieth-century social purity movement drew on abolitionist discourse and slave narratives. The story of Jewel in Hagar’s Daughter closely parallels typical contemporary white slave narratives—“tales of the conspiratorial abduction of pure womanhood into the grips of the prostitution establishment” (Bristow 100). Hopkins thus recasts the white slave narrative paradigm that necessarily echoes the black slave narrative, creating a complex palimpsest of a text. She uses the contemporary dominant anxieties about white women to reinforce her readers’ affect for her mulatta protagonists and thus to mobilize their wider response to the nation’s greatest sin, that is, the “idolatry of the Moloch of Slavery” (Hopkins 283).9
28 Just as it is in the case of Clotel, Mary, Iola, and Hagar, Jewel’s initial forced movement is followed by resistance, an attempt at escape, and self-determined mobility. Also, just as the previous novels, also Hagar’s Daughter devotes much more space to her escape than to her seizure. Hagar’s daughter, “a Western girl,” bravely resists her kidnappers (211). After some time in confinement, she manages to find a secret passage from the summer house where she is imprisoned to the slave quarters. Thus she retraces the probable route of white male inhabitants to black bondwomen: it “had evidently led to the servants’ quarters at the back of the house when mirth and gaiety held high revel in the glorious old mansion” (215; emphasis added). The proximity of the words “house” and “mirth” might be seen as the novel’s subtle critique of the “good old” glorious days, when read as a reference to the biblical verse that locates “fools” in “the house of mirth” (Ecclesiastes 7.4). Depicting Jewel’s discovery of the passage, Hopkins highlights her skills in observation and logical deduction: “a small strip of canvas swung to and fro as if from a draught of air. . . She trembled with sudden hope. . . There was a narrow recess behind it. . . . Oh! Joy! It revealed a passage. . . Escape seemed very near” (215). Jewel provides a model for the female mystery book protagonist almost 30 years before the release of the Nancy Drew series. However, the melodramatic narrative toys with the reader’s expectations, and the discovery of the secret tunnel does not directly liberate Jewel. At the end of the way, instead of liberty, the heroine finds another prisoner, her and her mother’s black mammy, Aunt Henny Sargeant, also kidnapped by the same band of villains. The twist foregrounds relationality among the novel’s characters and downplays individualism, autonomy, and linear movement from bondage to freedom.
29 Ultimately, Jewel is saved by another protoplast of the Nancy Drew figure—her own cross-dressed female servant Venus, who “evolves from being a black maid to becoming the heroine of the story” (Carby, Introduction xxxix). Hopkins puts her at the center of the novel’s action: after Jewel’s abduction, “the brain of the little brown maid was busy. She had her own ideas about certain things, and was planning for the deliverance of her loved young mistress” (218). Venus uses cross-dressing in the rescue plan, which is yet another way in which Hopkins signifies on the Crafts’ story and Brown’s rewriting of it with her poetics of “literary ‘sampling’” (Rohrbach 484). Additionally, as Venus replays Clotel’s escape in male attire and Hagar replays Clotel’s jump into the Potomac, the two characters—the black lower-class girl and her mulatta employer—are intertextually united. Moreover, Venus saves not only Jewel but also her own grandmother, Aunt Henny, imprisoned in the same place. This reinforces the interrelatedness of Venus’s and Hagar’s families, the family of visibly black servants and the interracial family of almost white mulattas, and as a result, it highlights the significance of the former. In the scene that is the novel’s equivalent of Iola Leroy’s
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chapter “Delightful Reunions,” Hagar alias Mrs. Bowen serves festive supper to celebrate the family reunion after Jewel’s deliverance. The two mulatta characters— Jewel and Hagar—are reunited with their black “mammy” Aunt Henny (Jewel unknowingly at this stage), which is analogous to Iola Leroy’s reunions of the three generations of mulattas. In contrast to the traditional use of visibly black and lower- class characters as comic relief even by African American authors, the novel critically investigates intraracial, interracial, and class divisions. In Mrs. Bowen’s parlor, Hopkins invites the class of black servants and masters to dine together at one table, and Hagar’s attention is evenly divided “between her step-daughter and the old Negress [Aunt Henny]” (240). In this fragment, the narrative is yet unaware that all characters are African American, the scene thus presents a common celebratory supper of a white and a black family, during which Aunt Henny is “an honored guest,” “all thoughts of caste” are forgotten, and “the representatives of two races [meet] on the ground of mutual interest and regard” (240; emphasis added). In the light of the revelations in the novel’s finale, Hopkins’s use of “race” is wrought with irony. Hagar’s Daughter challenges interracial divisions by pointing out that class divisions are by far more dramatic than those between races, yet simultaneously, she elevates her lower-class female characters to the status of heroines, thus at least partially bridging also the socioeconomic gap.
30 Jewel—in contrast to Brown’s and Harper’s younger generation protagonists—is quite unexpectedly denied a happy ending after her mixed-race identity is discovered because she has been engaged to Cuthbert Sumner, a white Northerner who does not approve of interracial marriages. As she admits in a letter to her fiancé, “Like Miriam of old, I have scorned the Ethiopian and the curse has fallen upon me” (282). Hopkins refers here to the sister of Moses, who—in one of the dominant interpretations of this bible passage—criticizes Moses’s “Cushite” wife. Used synonymously with Ethiopian, the adjective was widely regarded as a reference to the wife’s racial origin as “Cushite,” which derives from “Kush,” a kingdom in ancient Nubia, today’s Sudan (“Kush”). In the biblical story, God curses Miriam with leprosy. Hopkins’s use of the biblical passage foreshadows the very ending, narrated from Cuthbert’s perspective, which states that “a righteous God” and his “wrath” will punish the “nation’s [sin]—the “idolatry of the Moloch of Slavery” (283–284). Cuthbert, having found out that Jewel has a drop of black blood, hesitates about his further actions. In the meantime, she leaves with her parents for Europe, dies of Roman fever, and is buried at Enson Hall in a conspicuously pastoral setting. The cause of death and daisies near her grave clearly allude to James’s famous 1878 novella. Yet, in contrast to James’s Daisy, whose grave is a “raw protuberance among the April daisies” “in the little Protestant cemetery, by an angle of the wall of imperial Rome” (82), Jewel is brought back to the US and buried in a “little graveyard nestled close beside the road, . . . [the] enclosure [where] dead and gone Ensons slumbered for centuries” (283). Hence ultimately both Hagar and Jewel return to their point of departure, one to live happily with her original husband in an interracial union, the other to be buried among her predominantly white ancestors (fig. 7). This unexpected ending—especially when juxtaposed with the numerous implausible events of the novel’s melodramatic plot—highlights the unlikelihood of willful interracial marriages at the turn of the twentieth century. Also—in contrast to Brown’s and Harper’s texts, where the daughter’s story is more hopeful than the mother’s— Hopkins’s vision of American history—typically for the melodramatic mode,
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represented as a history of families and generations—is not that of progress but of, at least temporary, decline.
Figure 7. Jewel’s journey in Hagar’s Daughter
31 On the other hand, if the reader focuses on the lower-class black heroines rather than on the mulattas, Hopkins’s narrative is as almost optimistic as Harper’s. Not only are the three generations of black servants—Aunt Henny, Marthy, and Venus—reunited after the grandmother’s rescue, but Venus gets engaged to John, Cuthbert’s black servant: “Venus was to go to Massachusetts with her young mistress, and the plan was that she and John Williams should be married about Christmas” (274). As Jewel dies, the wedding is postponed, but Cuthbert’s support for the union is mentioned as the first reason for his return to the Bowen mansion in the novel’s closure (282). Thus, even though it is not explicitly depicted, the novel is optimistically closed with the marriage of Venus and John. Although it does not cross either class or race barriers, their union symbolically reunites the North and the South in the novel. Overall, although as far as mobility is concerned none of the black servants travel as widely as the mulatta characters in all three novels, Hagar’s Daughter’s subplot centered on the black lower- class characters is a reversal of the text’s main upper-class romantic plot, and it expresses hope and belief in upward progress of the black lower strata.
Conclusion
32 Whether hopeful or more pessimistic, all mulatta melodramas I have examined challenge the individualistic, linear narratives of male slaves by foregrounding the relatedness and familial, especially matrilineal, connections. Unlike in the mythical
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heroic quest, where the hero returns home having found the searched object (Campbell 193), in the two post-Emancipation novels—Iola Leroy and Hagar’s Daughter—home has to be reconstructed and itself becomes the object of the quest. When compared to the maps visualizing the characters’ movements, the novels devote much more space to the protagonists’ self-determined mobility than to their initial forced travels, which are narrated in a rapid pace that characterizes Genette’s notion of summary in his analysis of narrative discourse. In this way, the separations, bondage, and being taken “down the river” are represented as sudden, unpredictable, and thus even more traumatic, whereas the character’s resistance is given more space and their cunning as well as bravery are highlighted. Extensive passages that depict the mobility of the female characters underline their newly regained freedom and challenge not only the limitations on travel imposed by slavery but also women’s confinement in the public sphere.
33 The mulattas’ returns to the South are opposed to Du Bois’s representation of “homecoming as a regrettable instance of downward mobility” (Williams 179), but they are also different from Booker T. Washington’s contemporary call to “cast your buckets where you are,” commonly interpreted as an appeal to remain in the South and accept social segregation (106–108). The mulatta novels, in contrast, repeatedly expose the interracial unions in American history, and hence present social segregation as an impossible fantasy. The protagonists’ return to the very plantations and mansions they come from can be read as a reclamation of their white owners and/or husband’s, father’s, or grandfather’s property, yet the novels simultaneously privilege the black matrilineal line. The female family members reunite and build their homes on the previously white male property. Intertextually, the two later novels return to their narrative point of origin: they rewrite Brown’s Clotel, the founding text of African American mulatta novel.
34 The circular itineraries of the novels are conspicuously at odds with the linear, before- after paradigm of slave narratives, but they also dramatically contrast with the domestic and stationary character of woman’s fiction. Even though, as I have argued, the forced travel in the novels showcases the powerlessness of slaves rather than the agency traditionally associated with mobility, none of the discussed characters remains a passive victim, and all repeatedly resist their oppressors and escape from their prisons. Their daring flights and self-determined mobility are much more extensive than those typically found in, largely domestically-centered, Victorian hegemonic woman’s fiction. As the figures in this chapter illustrate, the numerous destinations of the protagonists’ itineraries range from the West Coast and California, through the entire South and Northeast of the US, across the border to Canada, all the way to and Europe. Significantly, such wide-ranging mobility is possible due to the ability of most characters to pass for white, which makes the choice of the white-looking mulatta a strategic vehicle of autonomy. It is especially visible when the phenotypically white heroines are contrasted with the visibly black and lower-class female characters in Hagar’s Daughter, who travel much less widely, despite their “becoming the heroine[s] of the story” (Carby xxxix). When read in the context of hegemonic woman’s culture, the novels cast shadow over domesticity by highlighting the condition of confinement related to it, yet they also powerfully demonstrate the specific condition of black chattel slavery and its difference from white domestic confinement.
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35 In the novels, the mulattas’ initial solitary domesticity is contrasted with the endings. In Clotel, the desire for a complete family reunion remains on the level of counterfactuality (Dannenberg 1–17). Iola Leroy’s closure—written at the dawn of the Nadir—optimistically depicts a home that reunites three generations of a mixed-race family and a happily married protagonist. Published 10 years later, Hagar’s Daughter reunites the two generations of mulattas, yet denies a happy ending to its younger protagonist. Despite such a wide spectrum of closures, all the narratives are driven towards a family reunion and extended black and interracial family. In order to express such desire, they mobilize the affective force of melodramatic conventions and sentimental sympathy, whose continuing power is visible also in today’s US.
36 Bearing in mind the risky character of historical analogies and the specific conditions of US chattel slavery, I nevertheless end this article and with a contemporary reference. Such a bridge can be further supported with Yogita Goyal’s claim regarding “the ongoing appeal of sentimentalism to narrate trauma,” which, she argues, is especially clearly visible in the recastings of the slave narrative in contemporary literature to “narrate[s] stories of oppression from the Global South” (3). Working on this paper in June 2018, I could not help but notice a parallel between mother-child separations and the Potomac jump scenes in the mulatta melodrama and the 2018 controversy regarding the immigrant families, representative of the Global South, separated by the US border. Both trigger identification with the familial bonds to evoke an affective response and suggest the historical, national, and public dimensions of intimate relations. Even more significantly from the perspective of this article, they both mobilize the dialectically related notions of forced and self-determined mobility (slavery/detention v. escape/migrancy), and their most powerful affective force is located in the family separations related to these complex patterns of movement. Just as the readers of Hagar’s Daughter necessarily imagine the cries of the baby Hagar needs to “hush” moments before her jump into the Potomac, on June 19, 2018 guests at President Donald Trump’s fundraising event listened to recordings of immigrant children crying from speakers installed by protesting activists in front of the venue (“Protesters Blast”).10 The affective force of the scene lies in what Donald Winnicott calls “a song of sadness”—the child’s cry stemming from the grief that is unimaginable for adults (63).11 That musical metaphor, which he extends later in the text, representing crying as a melody that both expresses sadness and soothes its painfulness (64), echoes the poetics of melodrama, in which the Greek term melos (music) is the necessary element that intensifies the affective force of theater and literature. As Peter Brooks argues, “[t]he emotional drama needs the desemanticized language of music” and “its evocation of the ‘ineffable’” (14) or, as Winnicott puts it, the verbally unrepresentable, “almost unbearable feelings, such as we were liable to as babies” can only be expressed in the child’s “song of sadness” (63). Thus, the redemptive melodies of separation and reunion, exile and homecoming, detention and mobility continue to move and soothe the audiences, who vicariously grieve the losses of the subaltern. Although Lauren Berlant correctly points out that such mode “has been deployed mainly by the culturally privileged to humanize those very subjects who are also, and at the same time, reduced to cliché within the reigning regimes of entitlement or value” (636), she—also rightly—admits that “[t]he possibility that through the identification with alterity you will never be the same” not only constitutes a threat but also remains “the great promise of this affective aesthetic” (648). From a pragmatic standpoint, the effectiveness of melodramatic scenes and their
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“contradictory bargains with pain, domination, terror, and exile” (Berlant 663) can be tangibly observed. The day after the fundraiser accompanied by recordings of children’s cries and other forms of protest against the family separation policy, Trump “bowed to public pressure and signed an executive order promising to ‘keep families together’ in migrant detentions” (“Trump Reverses”).12 Despite the continuing racial oppression in US society, there is a difference between what Ian Haney López discusses as the present postracial racism and the past regimes of slavery or segregation challenged by the mobilities in mulatta melodrama.
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NOTES
1. For a detailed examination of mulatta melodrama as a genre, see Anna Pochmara, “Like Mother, Like Daughter?: The Matrilineal Opposition in African American Mulatta Melodrama” (2017) and my forthcoming book The Nadir and the Zenith: Temperance and Excess in the Early African American Novel (2021). Although the term mulatta might seem outdated and not consistent with the jargon of today’s mixed race studies, scholars writing about early African American fiction and US nineteenth-century culture continue to use it, as today’s terms, such as biracial, do not fit precisely the sentimental mixed-race characters. Moreover, most of black nineteenth-century writers engaged in a dialogue with the cliché image of the passive tragic mulatta, which further explains the use of the term in critical analysis of the period. See, for example, Susan Bost’s
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Mulattas and Mestizas (2005) and Teresa C. Zackodnik’s The Mulatta and the Politics of Race (2010). 2. I will focus on physical mobility of characters, which is represented in the maps. Although a discussion of social mobility in the novels could be interesting and productive, it is beyond this already extensive article. For an interesting reading of distance and intimacy in sentimental literature that includes texts by black authors, see Naomi Greyser’s On Sympathetic Grounds: Race, Gender, and Affective Geographies in Nineteenth-Century North America (2017). 3. For an account of the conflicting interests of suffragists and African Americans and racism within the women’s movement in the postbellum era, see Davis 70–86. 4. As many critics recently have argued, the rigid paradigm of separate spheres, according to which women were “relegated exclusively to domestic rather than public life,” does not accurately account for the complex ways “women participated in public life” (Steadman 9). 5. For other accounts of nineteenth-century women’s popular fiction, see Cathy N. Davidson, Revolution and the Word: The Rise of the Novel in America (1986), Joanne Dobson, “The Hidden Hand: Subversion of Cultural Ideology in Three Mid-Nineteenth-Century American Women’s Novels,” (1986), Susan K. Harris, 19th-century American Women’s Novels Interpretive Strategies (1990), ), Lora Romero, Home Fronts: Domesticity and Its Critics in the Antebellum United States (1997), and Cathy N. Davidson, editor, No More Separate Spheres!, a special issue of American Literature (1998). Among the most significant twenty-first-century studies devoted to this body of literature, there are Marianne Noble’s The Masochistic Pleasures of Sentimental Literature (2000), Gillian Silverman’s Bodies and Books: Reading and the Fantasy of Communion in Nineteenth-Century America (2012), Claudia Stokes’s The Altar at Home: Sentimental Literature and Nineteenth- Century American Religion (2014), and G. M. Goshgarian’s To Kiss the Chastening Rod: Domestic Fiction and Sexual Ideology in the American Renaissance (2019). 6. In September 2017, I attended a conference on women and travel organized by the University of Silesia, called “A Suitcase of Her Own.” The great majority of speakers emphasized the emancipatory character of travel for women in the nineteenth century, playing with the playful name of the conference. In my paper, I referred to this assumption, making a claim that the case of mulatta melodrama characters is more complex, as at first – in their forced travels – they are turned into chattel – they are the “suitcase.” 7. In the 1864 and 1867 versions of the melodrama, Clotel is renamed as Isabella, and Mary as Clotelle, which makes her the single main character. The change in names conforms to the reader’s expectations and narrative rules, according to which the novel should follow main character’s actions until the end rather than kill her off in the middle, but it also takes away the cognitive shock derived from the unruliness of the 1853 narrative. When referring to the later versions, I will use both names for the sake of clarity. 8. For a discussion of Afrocentrism and cosmopolitanism in mulatta melodrama, see Pochmara, “In a Lily-tangled Bed” (2018). 9. For a discussion of white slavery and Iola Leroy, in turn, see Foreman (82–86). The metaphor of white slavery as well as the narrative of abduction seems more relevant for Hopkins’s novel, published at the beginning of the twentieth century when the white slave narratives were more popular. 10. The Times’s July 2018 cover, which juxtaposes Trump—a white privileged man—with a non- white crying child, which his policies have separated from her parents can be another relevant intertext. 11. Winnicott identifies four reasons behind children’s cries: Satisfaction, Pain (including hunger), Rage, and Grief. As children have not yet learnt to defend
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themselves against painful like adults, it is difficult for us to “believe in your own infant's grief” with “direct sympathy” (63). And by sad crying an infant to some extent entertains himself. He may easily develop and experiment with the various tones of his crying while he is waiting for sleep to come to drown his sorrows. A little older, and he will be actually heard sadly singing himself to sleep” (64). 12. The family separation crisis has not been successfully resolved. Although “the President ended zero tolerance at the border,” “the family separations at the border continue, albeit in different forms, and with different rationales” (Blitzer).
ABSTRACTS
In this article, I examine the patterns of black female mobility as represented in three African American mulatta novels: William Wells Brown’s Clotel (1853), Frances Ellen Watkins Harper’s Iola Leroy (1893), and Pauline Elizabeth Hopkins’s Hagar’s Daughter (1901-1902). First of all, I discuss their protagonists’ movement into bondage and forced travel resulting from the withdrawal of their father’s protection. Such imposed mobility is countered by the self-determined action undertaken by the black heroines not only to free themselves but also to reunite their families. As a result, their itineraries are circular rather than linear and frequently take the form of a homecoming. In contrast to the paradigm of the traditional slave narrative, which focuses on a single individual, the novels I analyze simultaneously follow two or three generations of family members. Such representations result in a chaotic aesthetics that successfully depicts the unpredictability of the fate of black families under slavery, and it foregrounds the relationality of the novels’ characters.
INDEX
Keywords: melodrama, mulatta, travel writing, African American novel
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Hollywood’s Depiction of Italian American Servicemen During the Italian Campaign of World War II
Matteo Pretelli
1. Introduction
1 In a scene from Steven Spielberg’s Hollywood blockbuster war movie, Saving Private Ryan (1998), a few soldiers in the platoon led by John Miller (played by Oscar winner Tom Hanks) search through a bag containing dozens of dog tags for the name James Francis Ryan, a G.I. missing in action in Normandy, France. While pronouncing the Italian surnames of many soldiers killed in action, one of Miller’s servicemen calls them “guineas,” a derogatory term traditionally applied to Italian Americans. This cynical and inopportune expression indirectly refers to Hollywood’s long tradition of negatively depicting Italian immigrants living in the United States, going all the way back to the beginning of silent cinema in the 1910s. Indeed, early American movies showed Italians as tending towards violence, being highly impulsive and emotional, gesticulating excessively, and wearing traditional folk costumes. All of these onscreen features were further reminders of the supposed “inferiority” of the Italians relative to Anglo-Saxon values and standards.1
2 In Spielberg’s movie, the sizeable number of dog tags with Italian surnames suggests just how many young Italian Americans served in the American forces during World War II.2 Americans with Italian backgrounds were drafted and deployed to battlefields across the world. Some of them fought to fully liberate their ancestral homeland from Nazi and Fascist control during the Allied Italian Campaign of 1943 to 1945; many Italian surnames appear among the graves of the American cemeteries in Florence and Nettuno, the final resting places in Italy for those US service members whose remains were not repatriated.
3 The goal of this essay is to investigate the presence and the function of Italian American servicemen in Hollywood’s World War II movies set in Italy, to understand
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the value ethnicity had in films depicting American soldiers of Italian descent against the backdrop of their ancestral country. The first section will look at the Italian battlefield as a cross-cultural site, given the composite character of the US forces, which included African American and Japanese American soldiers. Italian Americans played a major role as culture brokers in establishing contact and developing rapport with the Italian population. This role was widely depicted in war films set in Italy, with American servicemen of Italian descent facilitating reconciliation between the Allied occupiers and the Italian population. The second part of the article will investigate the way Hollywood promoted the value of patriotism, and how this was done through on- screen representations of Italian American servicemen.
4 The focus is specifically on six motion pictures set in North Africa and Italy, based on either novels, memoirs, or journalism, and produced from 1945 to 1980: The Story of G.I. Joe (William A. Wellman 1945), A Bell for Adano (Henry King 1945), A Walk in the Sun (Lewis Milestone 1945), To Hell and Back (Jesse Hibbs 1955), The Pigeon Who Took Rome (Melville Shavelson 1962), and The Big Red One (Samuel Fuller 1980).3 The four combat- themed movies (The Story of G.I. Joe, A Walk in the Sun, To Hell and Back, and The Big Red One) feature non-protagonist Italian American ordinary G.I.s, and are played by Italian American actors. These include Osvaldo Castellano (Wally Cassell) as Private Dondaro in The Story of G.I. Joe;4 Joseph Sciurba (Richard Benedict) as Private Tranella,5 and Richard Conte as Private Rivera in A Walk in the Sun;6 Paul Picerni as Private Valentino in To Hell and Back;7 and Robert (“Bobby”) Leonard Di Cicco as Private Vinci in The Big Red One.8 In contrast, the non-combat film A Bell for Adano recounts the efforts of Italian American Major Victor Joppolo (the movie protagonist) to administrate the fictional Sicilian town of Adano (in reality the town of Licata) after the invasion of the island.9 Exceptionally, the character is played by John Hodiak, an actor without an Italian background, but whose physical features, including a mustache, resemble the typical Hollywood Italian10. In addition, The Pigeon That Took Rome tells the story of two American secret agents in occupied Rome, one of which is the Italian American Sergeant Angelico (performed by the Italian American actor Harry Guardino), who appears subordinate to his Anglo-Saxon comrade, Captain Paul MacDougall.11 His experience in the film recalls that of the many Americans whose Italian backgrounds led them to be recruited into the Office of Strategic Services, the special corps for espionage and sabotage missions behind enemy lines that operated in Italy (Corvo; Squatrito; LaGumina, The Office).
2. Hollywood and Wartime Italy as a Site of Cross- Cultural Encounter
5 On 9 July 1943, Operation “Husky” launched an invasion of Sicily by hundreds of thousands of Allied soldiers, who had departed from the Tunisian coast.12 It was the largest World War II military operation before the Normandy landing nearly one year later, on 6 June 1944. Soldiers of several nationalities contributed to the liberation of the island before moving north to free the rest of the peninsula from Nazi and Fascist control, a mission effectively completed on 25 April 1945 (Williams). Thus, the Italian population encountered mixed Allied forces, because these included troops drawn from across the British Commonwealth, North African soldiers serving with French liberation forces, and Filipino. Overall, minorities were well-represented in the US military (Takaki). For instance, African American soldiers were employed in Italy in the
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92nd Infantry Division, the so-called “Buffalo Soldiers,” an experience recounted by Carolyn Ross Johnston, through visiting the places in Italy where her father had fought (Gibran; Hargrove; Wynn; Ross Johnston). In World War II, African Americans fought in segregated units and in Italy their relationship to the local population was multifaceted. According to Maria Porzio (65-68), many Italians saw them as “evil” because of their skin color and treated them with fear and suspicion. Alternatively, Andrew Buchanan argued that contact with Italians “offered a welcome break from vicious racism prevalent in the army, and black GIs found themselves welcomed for their apparent exoticism as well as for the fact that their military assignments often gave them access to cigarettes and food” (Buchanan 598). Because of widespread prejudice, African American servicemen hardly appeared in Hollywood’s war movies, until African American director Spike Lee depicted a segregated US battalion fighting in Tuscany in his 2008 Miracle at St. Anna.13 Paradoxically enough, it was Italian neorealist cinema—such as the internationally acclaimed Paisan (Rossellini 1946)—that, to a greater extent, took into account the African Americans who served in Italy, albeit sometimes by reproducing images of blackness tied to violence and savagery. According to Shelleen Greene, these portraits would contribute to reiterating the Italian claim to “whiteness,” and the disappearance of the recent colonial past in Africa from the Italian collective memory (Greene 93-107).14
6 Prejudice also played a role for Japanese Americans during wartime. After the Japanese aerial attack against the American fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor in the Hawaiian Islands, on 7 December 1941, suspicion of treason and allegations of collaboration with Tokyo’s government, which were mostly unfounded, led to the mass incarceration of Japanese Americans in US detention centers. Widespread anti-Asian racial bias was behind these measures, as Caucasian Americans with German and Italian backgrounds were subjected to less restrictive limitations, despite the fact their ancestral homelands were also at war with the United States. In order to demonstrate their patriotism, a certain number of second generation Japanese Americans agreed to serve in the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, which was employed in Europe (Mccaffrey). After the invasion of Sicily, they fought across the Italian peninsula, and their story was positively depicted in Robert Pirosh’s 1951 movie Go for Broke, released, coincidentally enough, the year that the Allies and Japan signed their Treaty of Peace. The movie shows these “unusual” American soldiers fraternizing with Neapolitan citizens, who offer them wine on their way to Rome. The astonishment of many Italians upon meeting American uniformed men with Asian traits marks this out as a distinctive form of intercultural encounter. While Black Americans recalled the colonial subjects of the Italian territories in East Africa, who were constant subjects of the Mussolini regime's racist propaganda, Japanese American servicemen gave rise to a novel curiosity, given the theretofore unlikelihood of most Italians having encountered Asian people.15
7 For African Americans and Japanese Americans, joining the US military forces in World War II was an opportunity to attempt to counteract discrimination, demonstrate full- fledged patriotism, and seek acceptance by US society. Given these particular aims, and their lack of local connection, these minorities were likely to see Italy as no more relevant a place to serve as any other. For Italian Americans, however, fighting in the ancestral homeland was personal, since there was a risk of facing friends or relatives on the battlefield. Within this context, some preferred to voluntarily enlist in the Marines to fight the Japanese in the Pacific, and thus avoid any confrontation with Italians
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(Pretelli and Fusi 304). Nevertheless, the US authorities considered American servicemen with Italian backgrounds as key to the occupation of Italy. While on the domestic front Italian Americans supported the US war effort through the widespread purchase of war bonds (Luconi, “Bonds”), in Italy, ethnic servicemen were commonly utilized as cultural brokers. Their knowledge of the Italian language, local dialects, and cultural customs, even if only partial, genuinely helped to facilitate the military administration of the liberated territories, as in the cases of Italian American officers such as Charles Poletti and Michael Musmanno, U.S. Army Civil Affairs Officer in Italy, and Allied Military Governor of the Sorrentine Peninsula, respectively. Overall, ordinary soldiers’ command of Italian served as a medium to aid reconciliation between the local population and US uniformed soldiers who entered Italian towns and were acclaimed as liberators. In their memoirs, Italian Americans fighting in Italy recounted mixed feelings towards Italy and Italians.16 Many felt love and compassion for the harsh conditions caused by war privations endured by the Italians, and wished to contribute to their rapid economic and social recovery. While some might have been embarrassed by the local population’s attempts to endear themselves to the ethnic Italian soldiers, the majority of Italian American servicemen responded positively to the Italians’ warmth (LaGumina, The Humble 204-264; Luconi, “Italian Americans”; Patti 19-61; Rioss 165-194; Baris 62-65; Rossi; Pretelli and Fusi 299-324; Belmonte, Italian Americans 100-102).
8 In regard to the Italian Campaign, Hollywood’s films from the selected sample are geographically set in Southern Italian locations, in places such as Sicily, Naples, and Salerno, that were heavily affected by war operations and in which memories of conflict are still very vivid today (Gribaudi). Additionally, these regions saw massive emigration to the United States in the early 20th century. In Central Italy, the city of Rome enjoys special attention, along with the famous Benedictine Abbey of Montecassino, located south of the capital. The Abbey has been an object of intense debate since it was almost completely destroyed on 18 February 1944 by American bombers, based on the erroneous belief that the Catholic site had been occupied by Germans for its strategic position and ample view over the surrounding valley (Caddick-Adams).
9 In Hollywood war movies, Americans are usually portrayed as liberating Italy from the oppression of fascism, both in older and more recent reels. In The Story of G.I. Joe (1945) local Italians come out of their homes after the Americans defeat the Germans in battle, and receive food from them. More recently, in The Big Red One (1980), Italian American Private Vinci’s platoon celebrates a dinner together with a group of old Italian women, after the former had killed a group of German artillerymen who were forcing the ladies to work the land. Emblematically, the women use their spades on the dead bodies of the German soldiers as a form of revenge. Food, flowers, and the display of American and Italian flags together proclaim the reborn friendship, to the point that during the festivities the narrating voice states “it is the first time in ages we all felt very good.” In the American platoon Vinci acts as a “cultural bridge” to facilitate contact between Italians and Americans, as Italian American servicemen usually do in war movies set in Italy. In the cases of Private Dondaro (in The Story of G.I. Joe) and Vinci, Italian American G.I.s’ ability to speak Italian, or dialects, allows them to familiarize themselves with the local population. In movies such as A Bell for Adano and The Pigeon that Took Rome, dialogues are all played in English, but Italian American characters are identifiable by their capacity to speak the local idiom. Language is a medium particularly emotional
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for Private Tranella who, in A Walk in the Sun, is called to translate the interrogation of two suspicious Italian defectors. Shifting from a rigid American-style military discipline, Tranella transforms himself to employ the typical Italian gestures and body movements in his dialogue with the Italians. He also experiences excitement and empathy upon learning that the soldiers come from his own father’s hometown. Tranella even becomes upset with his American ranking officer, when the latter seems dubious of the Italian soldiers’ honesty.
10 Cinematic fiction mirrored the military practice of relying on ethnic soldiers, including Italian Americans, to make and maintain contact with local populations in the countries where American troops were operating. However, in the movies, servicemen's use of the native language is always accompanied by a full command of English, devoid of any accent whatsoever.17 This capacity reveals that these people were usually born and raised in the United States, where their experience attending American schools accelerated their acquisition of local values and behaviors as children. Those who volunteered or were drafted into the US armed forces during the war were in fact members of the generation born in America to Italian parents. According to the 1920 US census, these American-born children had by then already outnumbered those who, like their parents, had been born in Italy and later emigrated to the United States. American born ethnic Italians were exposed to mostly their parents’ native culture and language at home, but outside they made the American lifestyle their own and used English with non-Italian peers. Thus, while the first Italian generation to arrive idealized the country from which they had departed, their children mainly perceived themselves as American. Given the fact the majority of them had never visited, Italy was felt to be very far away (Orsi 133-147; Carnevale; Vecoli 75-78).18
11 Italian Americans also function to bridge Italians and the American troops, as they comprehend local culture. Major Joppolo “conquers” Adano’s population by taking part in the Sunday mass, thus showing everybody his Catholic faith. Afterwards, he also undertakes very popular initiatives to improve the local economy and the average living conditions of the population (such as establishing fishing rights and free passage for mule carts), as well as fulfilling his promise to bring a historic bell back to the town that had been stolen by the fascists. Set in Rome, The Pigeon that Took Rome is another case, in which Italian American Sergeant Joseph Angelico plays a significant role as a bridge between Italians and Americans. Angelico and MacDougall find a “natural” liaison with partisan Ciccio Massimo, a member of the Roman Resistance, and his family, who end up definitively facilitating their mission.
12 In terms of reconnecting with the land of their ancestry, encountering Italian women was of major relevance to Italian American G.I.s. Around one third of the American soldiers who married Italian women during wartime were of Italian descent (Varricchio 146; Cassamagnaghi). In light of this, these relationships as depicted in war movies may be seen as functioning to fill a sense of emptiness caused by the tragedies of conflict. Thus, the encounter between Italian American servicemen and Italian women becomes a way to escape loneliness, fear, and alienation. In The Story of G.I. Joe, Private Dondaro is the traditional Italian Latin-lover who, in the course of a battle against the Axis forces, finds an Italian lady stuck at home. Despite the inappropriate situation, he oddly seduces the woman in a mix of English and Sicilian dialect. When she asks that he stay because she feels lonely, he responds that he has to leave to keep fighting, but he
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promises to return. In A Bell for Adano, Major Joppolo—a married man in the United States—has a quasi-affair with a local Sicilian lady whose Italian fiancé is detained somewhere as a prisoner of war. Their being together is for each of them a way to temporarily escape loneliness and the tragedies of war, in view of a future return to ordinary life. Love is also a core theme in The Pigeon that Took Rome: Sergeant Angelico falls in love with Rosalba, Ciccio’s daughter, and asks her to marry him, despite learning that she is pregnant by another American G.I. He is ready to accept her anyway because, he says, these things “happen” during warfare. Eventually they get married after the liberation of Rome. Sergeant Angelico shows his Italian character by being particularly appreciative of the Italian ladies’ charm; conversely, MacDougall persists in his contained, “Anglo” attitude towards women, but inevitably falls in love anyway, with Rosalba’s sister Antonella.
13 The above-mentioned examples reiterate the traditional stereotypes of Italians as passionate, driven by emotion, and, in the case of Dondaro, who searched for love in the midst of a battle, an irrationality alien to mainstream Anglo-Saxon Americans. At the same time, the importance Italian Americans attribute culturally to the value of family becomes, in war movies, a plea for the return to ordinary civil life. In Hollywood productions, family gatherings associated with big lunches and dinners are among the most common tropes regarding Italian Americans, to the point that the household becomes a “primary cultural value” for them (Bondanella 89). According to Ilaria Serra, the “predominance of the family as a narrative unit is part of a larger tendency in American cinema. In the majority of Italian American films, however, the family is not only a cue for comedy or simple wallpaper, it is indeed a constitutive part of the narration” (Serra 197).
14 In The Pigeon that Took Rome, Ciccio’s household becomes a sort of substitute family for Sergeant Angelico, who left his own behind in America. In The Big Red One, when Vinci finds a bag full of Italian liras in a destroyed Sicilian house, he thinks immediately of helping his father. In the film A Walk in the Sun, Private Rivera is a sociable Italian American G.I. who seems detached from his Italian ethnicity, but at the beginning of the movie he is introduced as an Opera-lover willing to find a wife and have a lot of children. Family is also a pivotal component of identity for Private Valentino in To Hell and Back. During the transit from North Africa to Sicily, Valentino talks about Italy as his “ancestral land”. As soon as he arrives in Naples, he leaves his comrades hanging out in the city streets so that he can pay a visit to his relatives and bring them gifts, in order to fulfill the promise he made to his mother to take care of the family. Valentino reproduces on screen the widespread practice of many Italian American servicemen to visit the ancestral villages and towns from where their parents and grandparents had departed. This popular activity was encouraged by the American authorities, which believed that it was a way to facilitate reconciliation between uniformed American soldiers and locals (Fusi 1-23).
3. Hollywood and Italian American Patriotism
15 One of the main wartime goals of the US government on the home front was to cultivate a positive view of the American military effort overseas, in order to foster patriotism. In particular, the movie industry was a vehicle to heroically describe the Allied “good war,” namely a conflict worth fighting in order to defeat the evil of
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totalitarianism, whether in Europe or in Asia.19 Debra Ramsay points out how every week during the war, over ninety million Americans went to the movie theatres, an activity that became a communal viewing experience (Ramsay 38-39). The American authorities sought collaboration with Hollywood to spread propaganda and accelerate their final victory. As part of a deal, the federal government softened its anti-trust attitude towards cinema moguls and worked to reduce import tariffs on American films in foreign countries, especially in Europe. In return, Hollywood fully embraced patriotism and displayed, through its reels, a willingness to depict American society positively; consequently, it received abundant war materials from the US armed forces for filmmaking purposes (Bennett 18-19). The US government agency charged with managing information and dealing with propaganda both at home and abroad, the Office of War Information printed a handbook intended to be a guide to movie production during wartime for Hollywood, the Government Information Manual for the Motion Picture Industry (Winkler). Hence, Hollywood and the U.S. government aimed jointly to shape national unity and mobilize citizens against Axis enemies, especially the Japanese, often portrayed on screen as an indistinct, dehumanized, and threatening mass. According to Todd Bennett, “Widely associated today with the United States, Hollywood became fully American by virtue of its extensive patriotic service during World War II, when the industry’s commercial objectives complemented Washington’s geopolitical agenda and established the foundation of a cozy corporatist partnership” (16).
16 Generally, movies set during World War II highlight a natural “harmony” in the U.S. combat unit, typically depicted as a platoon able to accomplish the final mission, under the guidance of a leader who was typically a white officer surrounded by servicemen who were usually identifiable by ethnicity or geographical provenance (Muscio 1051, 1059; May 142; Basinger 259; Bennett 107). Overall, in war movies, American soldiers with Italian heritage are often marked by Italian-sounding surnames and Mediterranean physical traits, such as dark skin, and appearances, like greased hair. Ethnicity is a relevant factor for indicating servicemen, especially in movies produced during and immediately following the war. These films often perpetuates some of the most typical stereotypes associated with Italians in early cinema, as Italian American servicemen are sometimes portrayed as getting drunk, fighting, dancing, and strongly sexualizing women. Perhaps the most remarkable case in point is Sands of Iwo Jima, a 1950 movie recounting the American invasion of the eponymous Japanese island, in which the Italian American Private Regazzi (another role played by the Italian American actor Osvaldo Castellano as “Wally Cassell”) is a US platoon member renowned for his clownish behavior and sociability. In war movies set in Italy, highly marked ethnicity appears in the combat themed films The Story of G.I. Joe and A Walk in the Sun, both produced in 1945. In the former, Private Dondaro from Brooklyn constantly sexualizes women and displays extravagant, caricatured behavior; in the latter, during his interrogation of the two Italian defectors, Private Tranella displays the tendency to gesticulate in an animated fashion that accords with the traditional American view of Italian people’s behavior.20
17 In war movies set outside of Italy, but that included Italian American servicemen, spoken Italian lacks a cinematic function narratively; yet, this pattern of cultural hybridity is mirrored in the capacity of Italian American servicemen to speak perfect English while simultaneously utilizing words extracted from Italian and its dialects,
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typically capisce? (understand?), or idiomatic expressions such as Mamma mia! (Oh my God!).21 In films produced since the 1960s, remarked “Italian” ethnic traits become much less pronounced and Italian American servicemen become quite undistinguishable from their peers. Indeed, against the backdrop of the formerly straight-forward process of assimilating minorities, the post-1960s’ “ethnic revival” gave an entirely new value to the distinctiveness of ethnicity in the United States. This may have actually pushed Hollywood to progressively treat excessive accentuation of ethnicity, including those of servicemen in World War II movies, with more nuance.22 In this phase, necklaces carrying Catholic crucifixes, or direct declaration of their Italian background by protagonists, rather serve to indicate their ethnicity. Nevertheless, in these decades Italian characters can still be distinguished from others by virtue of their being very talkative, particularly braggadocious, and by their obsession with women.
18 Yet, despite “typical” Italian ethnic traits, the Italian American servicemen in war movies (including those set in Italy) are always virtuous, patriotic American citizens, who fight hard and sacrifice themselves for the country and for their comrades. In this way, the Italians contribute to the trend described by scholar Richard Slotkin (480-481, 486): the soldiers of a platoon metaphorically depict a “microcosm” of the American liberal, multiethnic society committed collectively to the ultimate goal of winning the war. Consequently, harmonious relations among all of the different ethnic servicemen mirror the American democracy's supposed capacity to resolve differences and create shared objectives.23 This attitude is functional to the spread of patriotism, but it is also part of the legacy from the New Deal years, a time when Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration worked intensively towards making the American mainstream more inclusive of ethnic and racial minorities. While trade unionism close to the Democratic Party played a pivotal role in this practice, even the army facilitated this mediation by fostering patriotic feelings in the 1930s among people of foreign background.24 In addition, World War II became a peak period of naturalization in American history, with over 1.5 million civilians becoming citizens, and more than 112,000 naturalizations based on wartime service in the armed forces. Italians were among the largest numbers of naturalized newcomers (Gerstle 187-237; Bruscino 56-58; Ueda 168). Despite this context, however, the World War II filmic platoon recurrently still perpetuated Hollywood’s old stereotypes attached to ethnic groups, such as the drunk Irish, the Latin-lover Italian, and the complaining Jew (Muscio 1061).
19 With respect to patriotism, Italian Americans had to work hard to have their loyalty to the United States fully acknowledged. Before the outbreak of World War II, Americans of Italian descent still had strong transnational ties with their native country. During the years of Mussolini’s dictatorial regime (1922-1943), they expressed feelings of appreciation towards Il Duce, as they perceived him as a great statesman who had placed Italy among the most respected countries in the world.25 In the second half of the 1930s, international tensions escalated, to the point that Italian Americans felt the suspicions of being seen as potential overseas agents of Mussolini. After Pearl Habour, together with Japanese Americans and German Americans, many ethnic Italians saw their private liberties restrained, while those few that were considered national security threats were interned for the duration of the war (Fox; DiStasi; Basile Chopas).
20 Serving en masse in the military was a way for Italian Americans to demonstrate full loyalty to the United States and the American democracy, a patriotic feeling easily recognizable in their war memoirs.26 According to the Italian American literary
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professor Fred Gardaphe, who grew up in postwar America with the myth of war veterans, in the “Little Italies” “one way of providing unquestionable masculinity, as well as loyalty to the new country, would be performing service during World War II” (Gardaphe 18). Even servicemen in Italy always valued their American identities first, so much so that for the majority of them fighting in Italy was mainly matter of patriotism, with their priority being the final victory against the Axis forces. A case in point is Italian American aviator Edward J. Denari, who was stationed in Italy and wrote in his memoir: I was filled with the consuming idea that my crew mates and I were on a grand mission that personified the core values of our beautiful country and that coming thousands of miles to this foreign land to bring an end to enormous forces of evil was in the mind of this twenty-two-year-old just regular American, simply an act of patriotism. (128)
21 The content of the New York printed Il Progresso Italo-Americano—the most widely circulated Italian ethnic newspaper in the United States—fully shows how popular the war effort was in the “Little Italies” in American cities. In his war memoir, the historian Salvatore LaGumina talked about those who came from the Italian American neighborhoods to fight in the war: If not the greatest of the Italian American generation, they were a major element in the ranks of unsung heroes of the war. This was the mindset of Italian Americans on the home front as we lived, worked and sacrificed during the war years. For me and many others of my background, it was critically important that we were doing our share. For my fellow ethnics in Brooklyn, it meant a great deal to see those of our nationality performing the essential services that earned the respect of the nation. (The Humble 266-267)
22 As already mentioned, despite all of the stereotypes and caricatured depictions in war movies, Italian American servicemen, including those in Italy, are constantly shown as patriotic. This image probably mirrors the public perception of an ethnic minority that had demonstrated loyalty over time, initially through the massive purchase of war bonds and subsequently through their sacrifice on the battlefield. In the movie A Bell for Adano, Major Joppolo was the epitome of this ethnic patriotic Americanism: “More than simply a ‘good man’… he was a quintessential American hero, thoroughly assimilated and aspiring to a better life, and better world, than the one inhabited by his Italian- born parents” (Carruthers 1090).
23 A fluent speaker of accent free English, he is the obligatory embodiment of American values, made up of discipline and composure. Without any of the caricatured Italian- style features, Joppolo is called to administrate the Sicilian town of Adano. He works to “export” the values of American democracy through the promotion of equity and justice to the local population, who was unfamiliar with those principles after twenty years of dictatorship. Hence, Joppolo is the “good” and “benevolent” American administrator who works hard to help the Sicilians survive by fulfilling their daily economic needs. In this regards, Joppolo fully embodies the role of patronizing, Americanized, ethnic officer, called to “liberate” Italy from the relics of fascism. An Italian American from the Bronx, his parents had arrived from the surroundings of Florence, a detail that perhaps functions to explain his calm and efficient behavior. From the end of the 19th century, Americans tended to perceive people from Northern Italy as more acceptable and easy to integrate than Southerners, so much so that, from 1899 onward, Italians arriving in Ellis Island were registered as either Northern or Southern (cf. D’Agostino 330). A long term persistent prejudice, during the occupation
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Allied military authorities in Italy reported that the local population in Tuscany had already begun reconstruction, while the Southerners were waiting to receive Allied assistance.27
24 American patriotism, however, might encounter some military hurdles. A case in point is the aforementioned bombing of the Montecassino Abbey, an architectural masterpiece of primary importance not only for its role in the history of Christianity in Italy, but also for its overall cultural heritage value. Despite the importance of the site, in the movie The Story of G.I Joe, its destruction provokes no crisis of identity in the Italian American Private Dondaro. A member of an American platoon fighting on the Italian front, Dondaro cheers the bombing of the Abbey together with this fellow soldiers, after what is presented in the film as a very difficult decision made by the American high command, and only after long reflection on the matter. In this sense, Dondaro seems to renounce his Italian roots and utterly devote himself to the final victory against the Axis powers. Dondaro’s behavior mirrors Italian American war memoirs, in which one hardly ever finds any criticism of the US government or military authorities. This was one of the ways in which Italian American soldiers demonstrated the extent of their own patriotism (Pretelli and Fusi 308-312).
25 Consequently, the full-fledged Americanism and patriotism of Italian Americans is never challenged in Hollywood motion pictures. A marked case in point is the 1980 film The Big Red One, set in Sicily and Tunisia. In the movie, Private Vinci is clearly identifiable as Italian American by his physical appearance, his capacity to speak the Sicilian dialect, and reference to his father’s birth on the island. During the transit from Tunisia to Sicily, a red-haired soldier taunts Vinci for his ethnicity, belittles his masculinity, and insultingly suggests that he drink his “dago red” (red wine usually drunk by Italian immigrants in the US), and sing the famous Neapolitan song O sole mio. Aided by a companion moving in his defense, Vinci reacts by placing his rifle in the taunting soldier’s mouth, while the entire group flanks him and joins the Italian American G.I. in singing the Neapolitan song. While Vinci’s reaction might recall stereotypes of Italian hot-blooded temperament and tendencies to violence, the group’s behavior clearly stands against the attempt to undermine Vinci’s patriotism, loyalty, and even masculinity, because of his Italian roots.
4. Conclusion
26 The historian Thomas Guglielmo points out how American World War II motion pictures and popular literature never depicted Italians as enemies, but rather as pitiful and craven soldiers, as in the case of the two defectors from A Walk in the Sun. At the same time, Italians are usually seen as jovial and good people, as well as full supporters of the United States. This image is very far from that of the “inhumane” German and Japanese fighters. Guglielmo labels Italians the “forgotten enemy,” an image based on the brief, two year period of hostilities between the two countries and on the disastrous Italian outcomes on the battlefield (5-22).
27 A positive perception of Italy might also have been presented on screen for political purposes, given that Italians in the United States were a key electoral bloc of Roosevelt’s constituency. Additionally, because of their sizeable number and excellent service record, Italian Americans experienced appreciation and respect for their military contributions back in the United States, which may be part of why so few war
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memoirs recount ethnic discrimination in the military. Therefore, they eventually achieved a positive—even though sometimes caricatured—depiction in the American war film. In the broader context of the Soviet challenge, American policymakers worked to quickly integrate Italy into the pro-American, democratic bloc. During this process of rapprochement, Hollywood’s Italian American servicemen in Italy appearing onscreen helped to offer a better image of the Italian population, and to establish a new phase of friendship and reciprocity.
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NOTES
1. As early as 1906, Wallace McCutcheon’s silent movie The Black Hand embraced these ethnic representations and had begun to popularize the myth of the Italian migrant as being culturally alien, associated with criminal organizations, and impervious to assimilation into American society. Subsequently, the gangster genre would reiterate the trope of Italian violence, and continues to do so currently. On anti-Italian sentiment in the United States, see LaGumina, Wop!; Connell and Gardaphé. For Hollywood’s perspective on Italians, cf. Bondanella; Bertellini. 2. According to the military historian Thomas Bruscino, Italian Americans were the largest ethnic group in the US armed forces. A teenager during the war, the historian Salvatore LaGumina counts roughly 750,000 servicemen of Italian descent. Other sources indicate around 850,000 servicemen, a number close to LaGumina’s figures. However, these data can be considered merely speculative, because the US military authorities did not register ethnicity for drafted men during World War II (LaGumina, The Humble 152; Bruscino 58; Pretelli and Fusi 302-303). 3. Jeanine Basinger’s close examination of nearly 600 war movies set in World War II and produced from wartime to the present, clearly shows the importance of ethnicity in cinematic narrative through the notable presence of Caucasian non-Anglo-Saxon servicemen of European background. Of these, twenty-nine movies depict Italian American servicemen (including some presenting Italian American World War II veterans' experiences in a postwar setting), suggesting that the fictional presentation of these ethnic soldiers was important to the American public’s perception of World War II veterans (Basinger; Eberwein; Ramsay). In the television miniseries The Pacific (Steven Spielberg, Tom Hanks, Gary Goetzman 2010), the actual war hero John Basilone, who had an Italian background, was one of the main characters. A marine from Raritan, New Jersey, born to Italian parents, Basilone was repeatedly decorated for his wartime accomplishments, becoming so well-known that he was featured in a nationwide campaign encouraging Americans to purchase war bonds. He eventually was killed in action in Asia, fighting the Japanese (Frontani 21-52). 4. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0144082/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm. Accessed 18 December 2019. 5. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0070807/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm. Accessed 10 December 2019. 6. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0002017/. Accessed 12 December 2019. Conte is also the Italian American Lieutent Angelo Canelli, member of group of aviators taken as prisoners of war by the Japanese in The Purple Heart (Lewis Milestone, 1944). 7. http://www.nndb.com/people/750/000279910/. Accessed 13 December 2019. 8. Di Cicco’s Italian ancestry is not proven by sources, but his Italian-sounding surname surely indicates an Italian background. 9. The film was adapted from the Pulitzer Prize winning novel of the same name, published in 1944 by journalist and writer John Hersey, which was later made into a Broadway hit as well. 10. http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0388303/bio?ref_=nm_ov_bio_sm. Accessed 14 December 2019. For a literary analysis of the novel see Mariani 2013. Actors of Eastern European descent played Italian American criminals in the gangster movies Little Caesar (Mervyn LeRoy, 1931) and Scarface (Howard Hawks and Richard Rosson, 1932).
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11. On Guardino see Aste 390. 12. The Allied troop landing in Sicily was a pivotal moment in Italian history that quickly led to the collapse of Benito Mussolini’s Fascist regime. The Italian King Victor Emanuel III had him arrested and removed from his position as the head of state, before signing an armistice with the Allies on 8 September 1943. The new premier Pietro Badoglio’s flight from Rome to find shelter in Allied occupied Brindisi marked the beginning of a civil war between the Nazi and Fascist controlled northern part of the country and the southern part, in the hands of the Allies. 13. The film was highly controversial in Italy for its depiction of traitorous Italian partisans who delivered their compatriots to the Nazis (McDonald Carolan 103). During World War II, US military authorities produced The Negro Soldier (1944)—followed by The Negro Sailor (1945) and Teamwork (1946)—to show the African American contribution to the American wars, in an attempt to mitigate the widespread racism within the US forces (Wynn 50). 14. On Italian neorealism see Ruberto and Wilson. 15. In the memoir of one of these servicemen, we can read the following account: “At any rate, I can say that the participants get a kick out of it… Pompeii, that’s where we were headed for—that famous town buried in 600 bc by the ashes and dust from the volcanic antics of Mt. Vesuvius. I’d looked forward to the trip and here we were on our merry way with a mess of Italians in a crowded tiny train with a responsible guide. Naturally the passengers were quite curious about us wondering as to our race and we told them in our beautiful Italian (don’t forget the hand movements). They couldn’t quite figure out how come we were speaking English, when we were Japanese. We had some good conversation all the way (or should I spell that confusion)… the tour was excellent and very worthwhile and we were in the ruins for three hours. After the hot walk, naturally, we had to go to an arbor where wine was sold and a bottle of the sparkling stuff was in order” (Masuda 35). 16. For an overview of Italian American servicemen’s memoirs see Belmonte, “The Sword”. On US World War II soldier writings see Bodnar 34-59. 17. Command of the German language is an important factor for American servicemen fighting the Nazis in the movies U-571 (Jonathan Mostow 2000) and Inglorious Basterds (Quentin Tarantino 2009). 18. This lack of knowledge regarding the ancestral country, combined with some command of the Italian language or its dialects, is traceable in the memoirs of Italian American soldiers who took part in the Italian Campaign (Petruzzi; Lovoi; Caponi; Denari; Feuer). 19. For the American view of totalitarianism see Gleason; Alpers. 20. In Hollywood motion pictures, excessive gesticulation has long been a marker of Italian ethnicity, recurring still in current films, like Eat, Pray, Love (Ryan Murphy 2010), a romantic drama in which Julia Roberts plays a divorced American woman searching for a new life in Italy. 21. Such is the case of Private Adrian Caparzo in the aforementioned Saving Private Ryan, or Private Joe Collucci in Eight Iron Men (Edward Dmytryk 1952). 22. On the “ethnic revival” see Jacobson.
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23. For a critical perspective on the myth of American patriotism in World War II, see Rose. 24. Unlike during World War I, in this decade the armed forces had only a limited number of drafted aliens to integrate through the teaching of English and American civics. US anti-immigration laws passed in the 1920s had in fact drastically curbed the arrival of newcomers from Eastern and Southern Europe, which in turn restricted and restrained transatlantic mobilities, and pushed ethnic settlements in the United States to become more stable. Hence, by the early 1940s, the US military relied on Americanized draftees whose pro-American ideology had also been shaped by their widespread participation in Civilian Conservation Corps programs designed to have young Americans doing public works such as clearing forest lands or building roads. Over 2.5 million were recruited between 1933 and 1942, during which time the US Army managed the agency camps, as well as some of the educational programs. 25. Scholars define it as a “nostalgic nationalism,” given the fact many ethnic Italians matched their positive view of Mussolini with their ancestral memories of the homeland. Additionally, the admiration expressed by many American politicians and stakeholders for Mussolini’s anti-Communist attitude and emphasis on social order was appreciated in the “Little Italies,” insofar as it was a psychological reaction against the derogatory stereotypes to which Italian Americans had been traditionally subjected (Cannistraro; Diggins). 26. For instance, an Italian American G.I. from San Francisco named Ben Savelli wrote: “Our family was as patriotic as patriotism could be... my sister Roberta was selling war bonds; my mother and father were working hard in the store, keeping track of all the food rationing problems; my brother Richie was in the Service; and I was already notified, upon my graduation, that I was to be drafted. Now, how patriotic can we get? (Savelli 131).” 27. On the encounter between the Allies and Italians see Ellwood; Miller.
ABSTRACTS
This article analyzes the portrayal of Italian American servicemen in Hollywood films set in Italy during the Italian Campaign of World War II (1943-1945) and produced from the time of the war to the present. Addressing this widely overlooked theme, the study shows how the American film industry perceived and represented one of the largest ethnic groups in the US forces, who were deployed to liberate their ancestral country from Axis control. Special attention is paid to representations of the servicemen's relationship with the Italian population and to their expressions of American patriotism.
INDEX
Keywords: Italian Americans; Servicemen; Hollywood; War movies; Italy
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AUTHOR
MATTEO PRETELLI Matteo Pretelli teaches history of North America at the University of Naples “L’Orientale,” Italy. Prior to joining “L’Orientale,” he was a Fulbright research scholar at the University of Minnesota and a visiting assistant professor at New York University. He has published extensively on the history of Italian American communities and the relations between Italy and the United States.
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“Being an Instance of the Norm”: Women, Surveillance and Guilt in Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road
Vavotici Francesca
1 In the early 1960s, as Betty Friedan was conducting her preliminary interviews for The Feminine Mystique (1963), she encountered the testimony of “a twenty-three-year-old mother in blue jeans” (11) who explained: I often ask myself why I’m so dissatisfied. I’ve got my health, fine children, a lovely new home, enough money. My husband has a real future as an electronics engineer.... It’s as if since you were a little girl, there’s always been somebody or something that will take care of you life.... Then you wake up one morning and there’s nothing to look forward to. (Friedan 11)
2 As a young mother, the woman seems to possess everything that she is supposed to desire. She is privileged with the comforts of a stable and decorous income, and she is secure in her position as the member of a respectable family unit. She is the prototype of the successful white middle-class American, and, yet, she is “so dissatisfied.” She has “nothing to look forward to,” no stimulus that will propel her toward further personal development and growth. She has no desires outside the ones she has been conditioned to accept as her own, and she is not alone in this. On the contrary, as The Feminine Mystique demonstrates, she is a representative of a specific cross-section of America in response to which she seems to voice a series of concerns—concerns with regards to social status, consumerist instincts, and self-actualization—that permeated the social structures and shaped the cultural landscape of the time. The mother of Friedan’s recollection is, essentially, a spokesperson for a generalized feeling of social paralysis and anxiety that seems to characterize early-1960s’ middle-class America as a social milieu occupying a liminal space between utopia and dystopia.
3 Exploring the contradictions, limitations and struggles of this particular social milieu has been a primary aim for the fiction of Richard Yates. As Jennifer Daly argues, “as a writer, Yates was primarily concerned with what he saw as the flawed American Dream” (1). Burdened by the “stifling conformity and artificiality” (1) that the dream
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engenders, Daly continues, American “citizens” become in Yates’s fictions centres of tension where the dream is both “atrophied” and, simultaneously, “still holds power over almost every aspect of life” (1). That the “flawed” dream—which Daly identifies as the “struggle to... be content to conform to the social and cultural mores of the time... without compromising” a certain “sense of individuality” (1)—is inextricably linked to environmental circumstances is evidenced by the attention placed by most scholarly readings of the novel on the idea of the suburb as the setting that “deftly reveals the mechanisms of social control that drive these conformist environments, and thereby exposes the illusory nature of freedom and autonomy existing therein” (Wilson 14). Indeed, the vast majority of criticism concerned with Yates’s Revolutionary Road (1961) places the novel steadily within the sub-genre of suburban fiction, and addresses, to varying degrees, the effects of suburban development on its characters and storylines. Jessica Mayhew speaks of “the frightening aspect of this environment” as one that “is difficult to articulate because it is concealed in blandness” (618), while Andrew Slade suggests that “April and Frank live in a constricted space where the possibilities for action appear progressively limited” (671). Wilson, Mayhew and Slade all point at the physical design of suburban developments as directly impacting the psychological and social development of Yates’s characters, rendering the Revolutionary Hill Estates an active agent in the process of identity formation. In this context, then, suburbia is seen as functioning as a locus that both offers a physical representation of the “stifling conformity” imposed on the characters, and, at the same time, engenders a reinforcement of the social structures from which such concept of social conformity stems. Indeed, if, as Beuka suggests, “the development and subsequent expansion of suburbia entailed the construction of... new psychic and emotional landscapes” (4), these seem to work in Yates’s fiction in a symbiotic relationship with the strategic planning of the suburban town and its houses, so as to establish suburbia “as a place that reflects both an idealized image of middle-class life and specific cultural anxieties about the very elements of society that threaten this image” (7).
4 Yet, if the impact and symbolic value of suburbia in Revolutionary Road has been widely analyzed and debated, there still appears to remain a certain degree of ambiguity over the highly gendered connotations that the suburban town and house bear for the characters in the novel, and for the wider social landscape. On the one hand, there is no doubt about the structural normalization of gendered roles that is embedded within the suburban landscape. As Kim England underlines, Post-war residential suburbanization was hinged on the notion of dichotomous spheres. The ‘private’ sphere of consumption/reproduction, home, family, and domesticity being the domain of women, and the ‘public’ sphere of production, waged work and political activity being associated with men. (25)
5 In this light, female characters in the novel are regularly depicted in critical assessments as representations of “the myriad unfulfilled housewives of the post-war years, confined to their homes and gendered roles” (Wilson 20), or “the suburban housewives and mothers” that were “of central importance as the symbol[s] of the new domesticity even as [they] found [themselves] increasingly estranged from society at large” (Beuka 152). On the other hand, however, this reading of the gendered prescriptions embodied by suburban developments is employed to portray an uncomplicated image of womanhood in the novel by essentially generating an ulterior gendered code wherein all suburban housewives are encompassed by one archetypal character-type subjected to limiting standards of gender identity, and, as such, devoid
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of personality and individuality as an emblem alternatively of female repression or masculine dissatisfaction. As Wilson suggests, Frank Wheeler is “Yates’s protagonist in Revolutionary Road” (15), while “the Wheelers exemplify falsehood, duplicity and inauthenticity” (19). There is either no distinction between April and her husband, or, if a distinction is identified, it is only so that April might serve as a counterpart to Frank’s “protagonist” struggles. Moreover, in the same article, John Givings as the madman of Foucauldian heritage is described as “forc[ing] his family and neighbors to confront the ruptures in the dominant ideology of the time” (Wilson 28), while April Wheeler is portrayed as a mere victim of social circumstances beyond her control, a slave to the “traditional gendered behaviors demanded of her by the postwar context” (Wilson 27). Similarly, McGinley argues that, within the realm of the suburban home, only Frank is able to realize “that he is playing the role of the prototypical suburban husband,” becoming thus compelled “to shatter the image by breaking the picture window” (36) while April remains unaware of her condition, a meek player in a suburban social performance solely orchestrated by patriarchal authority.
6 Where many have recognized the gendered nature of suburban structures and social mores, the significance of singularly female struggles and expressions within Revolutionary Road has often been either overlooked or wildly misread as a the exclusive result of patriarchal operations of power. What this paper proposes to address in the first instance, then, is an analysis of the ways in which the pre-existing gendered codes embedded within the structural design of suburban towns and houses serve to enforce a mechanism of social control exercised by women over women. This mechanism, it will be argued, leads to a seemingly unbreakable cycle of surveillance and guilt over the performance of certain prescribed gender roles aimed at the preservation of the social status quo. The question of whether and how the novel seems to present avenues for the examination, manipulation and subversion of such roles will then be raised in an attempt to demonstrate what agency remains available to the female characters offered by the narrative. The first section of the paper will focus primarily on the language employed in Yates’s description of the suburban landscape so as to highlight the gendered dynamics at work in the connection between the physical structure of the suburban town and its social hierarchies. The following section will highlight the impact of said characteristics onto the suburban community by examining the ways in which the instances of social performance encouraged by the suburban design deprive female characters of a viable audience for the expression of personal desire. The paper will conclude with a suggestion that an alternative form of extra-linguistic semiotics may be available to the female characters in Revolutionary Road as exemplified by April’s death at the conclusion of the novel.
1. Dream Houses and Suburban Consumerism
7 As the main site of narrative action, the Revolutionary Hill Estates are first presented in the novel in a carefully planned introduction orchestrated by the town’s estate agent, Mrs.. Givings. In describing Frank’s and April’s soon-to-be family home, the woman praises its neat and tidy appearance, placing emphasis on its rigorously structured spaces with the “prim suburban look” of a “symmetrical living room” (Yates 30) “corners” that “made right angles,” and “floorboards” that “lay straight and true” (Yates 30). The language employed to describe the house gradually shifts in
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conversation with the Wheelers from a strictly architectural register to one concerned with rather more moral and symbolic issues, prompting the idea of the suburban home as the focal centre of social status and emblem of honesty and respectability. What Mrs. Givings implies in her presentation is the idea that the choice of dwelling for the Wheeler bears far wider ramifications than the practical aspects of family living. The scriptural language employed to describe the physical space denotes an almost religious belief that the regulated and hierarchical order of the suburban landscape can give meaning to an otherwise confused and hazy concept of personal and social identity, a characteristic that even the Wheelers cannot help but find “undeniably appealing” (Yates 30). The choice of a proper and “prim” suburban home grants a feeling of social affiliation that signifies the willing adoption the suburban social code, thus rendering the values associated with the social norm a commodity that can be acquired for the improvement of one’s personal circumstances. Mrs. Givings as an estate agent in this context, then, is significant beyond the contents of her discourse for it is representative of the notion that suburban ideals possess a certain consumeristic quality, and idea that is reinforced by Frank Wheeler’s own latent attitudes toward suburban living. Indeed, in his attempt to align himself with a social structure that sees him as the intellectual guide of his familial life, Frank goes so far as to rewrite entire conversations and scenes of his life to create, in his mind, a TV spot of what his future is supposed to look like: All afternoon in the city, stultified at what he liked to call ‘the dullest job you can possibly imagine,’ he had drawn strength from a mental projection of scenes to unfold tonight. Himself rushing home to swing his children laughing in the air, to gulp a cocktail and chatter through an early dinner with his wife; himself driving her to the high school, with her thigh tense and warm under his reassuring hand...; himself glowing and disheveled, pushing his way through jubilant backstage crowds to claim her first tearful kiss...; and then the two of them stopping for a drink in the admiring company of Step and Milly Campbell. (Yates 13)
8 Frank’s constructed image of the idyllic family life—the “children laughing,” the “cocktail and chatter,” April’s “tearful kiss,” and “the admiring company of Shep and Milly Campbell”—speaks of an individual whose sense of personal achievement is deeply connected to his compliance with normalized standards of suburban “happiness:” the “mental projection” that gets Frank through his day is a pre-packaged dream, a spectacularly presented interlude that he actively pursues in an attempt to “sell” the utopic suburban vision to both himself and his wife, and whose crystallized existence, however, is at odds with the complexities of a reality that is far from the imagined.
9 In a social environment which equates housing circumstances to happiness and morality, being able to provide a suburban house for his family becomes for the male characters a rite of passage, a way of showing he belongs to the status of manhood. As John Cheever suggests in his novel Bullet Park (1969): “The stranger has left his wife in the Hotel Plaza, watching television. The search for shelter seems to him to go on at a nearly primordial level. Prices are high this days and nothing is exactly what one wants” (4). The satisfaction of a primary need such as the “search for shelter” is equated in the suburban context to the acquisition of commodities that bear little connection to survival and are, instead, to be considered as emotional tokens of personal success. As Berger explains, “the suburbs were rich with ready made visible symbols: patios and barbecues, lawnmowers and tricycles, shopping centers, station
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wagons, and so on” (82) and “such symbols were readily organizable into an image of a way of life that could be marketed” (82) not only by businesses seeking financial gain, but also by single individuals in promotion of their supposed self-actualization. The reference to the hunter-gatherer spirit that is embedded in Hammer’s “search for shelter” demonstrates how identity has become a transaction closely linked to consumeristic drives, in which the prosperity of the family unit is granted by the fulfillment of prescribed roles: a husband who is willing to embrace the “primordial” struggle to provide for his family, and a wife who “gathers”—by “watching television”— the social codes and is capable of enacting them. This “commercial quality” (Cheever 100) is exactly what distinguishes the suburban effort: the symbolic possession of commodities for the man is not constrained to objects of everyday use, nor to his dwelling and his wealth. Rather, it extends to encompass, as the ultimate signpost of his achievements, his family, for it is the family that becomes representative of the values to which the suburban community attributes importance. Ownership of the physical landmarks of respectability—the “patios and barbecues, lawnmowers and tricycles”—in itself is not enough to grant male satisfaction, for the symbolic power of said articles needs to be reflected in the behavioral patterns of those who wield the objects. In this light, the acquisition of the familial home becomes more than a commercial investment, and is charged with allegorical meaning: “The house or the flat that he looks for, he knows, will have to have appeared at least twice in his dreams” (Cheever 4). There is a spiritual quality to the “search for shelter” insofar as its completion seems to mark, for the man, a development from boyhood into manhood.
10 The issue is, of course, markedly different for female characters, for whom two contrasting forces are seen at play in the geographical plan of Revolutionary Road. On the one hand, the design of the home as the normative female space seems to reflect a need for the projection of an outward appearance whose accomplishment defines the woman’s—and, as a reflection, the family’s—success within the suburban community. On the other hand, the physical isolation of the Revolutionary Road houses from the wider landscape of productive activity—agricultural, industrial, or tertiary—also imparts limitations on ideas of femininity by precluding female characters from partaking in occupations of financial and political interest. It is, thus, no surprise that the objection that April Wheeler finds to the property presented by Mrs. Givings is that, “Of course it does have the picture window” (Yates 29). With its similarity to a permanently open stage curtain or an always-on TV screen, the picture window represents the social scrutiny to which the woman as the centre of the house is subject, and emphasizes the need for a sort of theatrical “(re)production” of motions and tasks as a way of expressing allegiance to the predetermined role and satisfying the prying viewers. April’s understanding that “I guess there’s no escaping that” (Yates 29), and Frank’s assured response that “I don’t suppose one picture window is necessarily going to destroy our personalities” (Yates 29) foreshadow an essential thematic concern for the entire novel: the fact that the notion of female “entrapment” is mystified by its being embedded in a project of architectural reconstruction that symbolizes a social discourse whose primary manufacturer is patriarchal authority. Frank’s dismissal of April’s objection to the “picture window” that characterizes suburban life is symptomatic of a wider attitude that seeks to establish female desires and anxieties as secondary, irrational, and unimportant in the broad scheme of things. Particularly if examined in contrast to a female-authored novel such as Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar (1963), Revolutionary Road is shown to make a conscious effort to depict the totalitarian
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nature of the male discourse within the suburban community. Indeed, Plath’s heroine’s response to the intrusiveness that windows represent demonstrates a sharp contrast in perspective: Ours was a small, white clapboard house set in the middle of a small green lawn on the corner of two peaceful suburban streets, but in spite of the little maple trees planted at regular intervals around our property, anybody passing along the sidewalk could glance up at the second storey windows and see just what was going on. (Plath 111)
11 Where April Wheeler’s complaint with regards to the picture window is presented as being only a minor glitch that can easily be conquered by Frank’s self-assured stance, Esther Greenwood’s insistence on the contrast between the “two peaceful suburban streets” and the “glance” that, at any moment, can “see just what was going on” underlines the constant violation of female personhood that the suburban standard of living imposes upon women. [Mrs. Ockenden] had called my mother up twice about me—once to report that I had been sitting in front of the house for an hour under the streetlight and kissing somebody in a blue Plymouth, and once to say that I had better pull the blinds down in my room, because she had seen me half naked getting ready for bed one night when she happened to be out walking her Scotch terrier. (Plath 111)
12 The two instances of intrusion that Esther Greenwood chooses to recall describe the lack of privacy that the suburbs offer to women, and are thus significant insofar as they speak of an entrapment that is not merely psychological, but bodily. The acts of kissing and undressing are denounced by the community as unbecoming for they do not conform to the wholesome ideals of femininity as pure—before marriage—and motherly—after marriage. The female body is controlled by the community insofar as its uses are prescribed by the same social codes that affirm men as providers and women as carers, and the only role open to the female character as a participant in the suburban social performance becomes that of the “suburban housewife.”
13 It can be argued, then, that the male patriarchal authority is able to find its own self- actualization through the provision of a satisfactorily “suburban” familial home. His female counterpart, however, is either infantilized or subdued by the physical space she is forced to occupy. This is particularly evident in Yates’s treatment of Milly Campbell and Mrs. Givings, where both characters seem to live in an almost symbiotic relationship with their home, so much so that their identities become fused with the social significance of the buildings the inhabit. Milly Campbell’s bedroom, for example, Was a room that might have been dreamed by a little girl alone with her dolls and obsessed with the notion of making things nice for them… and whose quick, frightened eyes, as she worked, would look very much like the eyes that now searched this mirror for signs of encroaching middle age. (Yates 143)
14 The aspirations of “little girl” Milly are reflected in the design of the bedroom, whose mirror, in turn, reflects an image of adult Milly, fighting “encroaching middle age” and yet somehow still stuck in an immature fantasy of what her life should be. The house is an extension of Milly’s desires—or lack thereof. The childlike obsession with “making things nice” for her “dolls” develops in the adult representation of a woman that “could live in an ugly, efficient suburban house like this and know why and how it had to be apologized for in terms of the job and the kids” (Yates 142), and all through this, nothing of Milly is ever explored outside her relation to the house and the family that inhabits it. The home becomes the place where female identity is realized not as a personal choice, but, rather, as a conventional association. The segregate nature of
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suburban life grants no space for female expression outside the home, and yet, the “regulations” that familial life abides to limit the scope of independent agency for women even within the narrow confines of their assigned habitat. The desires of the female caretaker are equated to those of the community insofar as they seek to uphold externally dictated standards of respectability.
15 If Mrs. Givings, the real estate agent, could be read as a character in defiance of this oppressive strategies—she is the only married female character in the novel who occupies a productive role as a member of the suburban workforce—yet it has to be noted that her efforts are limited by the fact that her pattern of financial production demonstrates a repetitiveness that seems to point at the futility and vanity of her project as devoid of all economic and political significance. “Helen had a way with houses,” Yates writes, “She could buy one in a rundown condition, move in, vigorously improve its value and sell it at a profit, to be invested in the next house” (152). Rather than utilizing her profits—and her business acumen—to accomplish professional goals and establish her independence from male-dominated work environments, Mrs. Givings’s talent seems to be reduced to a recreational interest in manual labor that provides a superficial satisfaction “against the pressures of marriage and parenthood” (Yates 155). Moreover, even Mrs. Givings’s feeling of self-actualization outside the prescribed roles of mother and wife is eventually understood as delusional, for the only looming prospect that the working woman can aspire to is that of eventually settling into her family life. This is what her latest house represents for Mrs. Giving, and “her ability to love this house, she truly believed, was only one of many changes in her nature these past few years —deep, positive changes that had brought her to a new perspective on the past” (Yates 154). As with Milly, the house gradually becomes a reflection of Mrs. Givings’s state of mind, and the woman’s deep bond with her physical surroundings talks of a “change” that encourages a “dwindling of her fixation on work” (Yates 156) and a “long-delayed emergence into womanliness” (Yates 156), where “womanliness” is equated to domestic contentment and maternal care. In both Milly Campbell’s and Mrs. Givings’s narratives, the female character whose actions are dictated by the suburban milieu almost assumes the shape of her environment, generating the cult of womanhood as domesticity, nurture and maternal instinct; or, as Friedan would later call it, the cult of a “feminine mystique.”
2. Gender Performance, Motherhood and Surveillance
16 With its detailed and insightful depiction of the physical space of suburbia, therefore, Revolutionary Road offers a glimpse into the private and public workings of the “regulations” to which gender identity is “subjected” (Butler 41): as Judith Butler asks her readers, “Is there a gender that pre-exists its regulation or is it the case that, in being subject to regulation, the gendered subject emerges, produced in and through that particular form of subjection?” (41). In the context of Yates’s novel personal identity is indissolubly tied to social norms of decorum and decency that dictate highly gendered behavioral patterns and whose existence is validated by the subject’s willing adherence. The desire to participate in and be accepted by the suburban community leads to the birth of a gendered “norm” that “has no independent ontological status” and “is itself (re)produced through its embodiment, through the acts that strive to approximate it, through the idealizations reproduced in and by those acts” (Butler 48).
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As Richard Ford notes in his introduction to Revolutionary Road, “None of the characters glimpsed in Revolutionary Road has much of a clue about who it is they are. … All are walking paths laid out by forces and authorities other than their own personal sense of right and wrong: Convention. Habit. Disengagement” (xviii). Ford’s emphasis on the idea of “being” is interesting, for it delineates a distinction between the characters’ existence and their actions, where the former becomes undefinable because its only means of expression—action—is determined “by forces and authorities” that are “other” and, therefore, unrecognizable. “It’s as if,” Frank himself admits, “everybody’d made a tacit agreement to live in a state of total self-deception. The hell with reality!” (Yates 65): the suburban existence is not “real” insofar as its dynamics are shaped by “convention” and “disengagement,” and bear no relation to the “beings” that inhabit them.
17 Thus, when April asks Frank to be let out of a commitment with the Campbells, Frank is forced to lie to the couple: “It was the first lie of its kind in the two years of their friendship, and it caused them all three to look at the floor as they labored through a halting ritual of smiles and goodnights; but it couldn’t be helped” (Yates 17). Both the Campbells and the Wheelers realize what the lie is hiding, and yet, the lie “couldn’t be helped” for with its delivery the “ritual of smiles and goodnights” that accompanies the traditional ending to an evening can be taken to its rightful completion. The integrity of the suburban interaction is restored beyond April’s distress for her acting failures, and the momentary awkwardness of the lie is a small price to pay for the fulfillment of the social norm. Yet, as Butler suggests, “The norm is a measurement and a means of producing a common standard. To become an instance of the norm is not fully to exhaust the norm, but, rather, to become subjected to an abstraction of commonality” (50). If adherence to the social “ritual” allows the characters to perform in compliance with suburban standards of decorum, the reproduction of the ritual is what generates and reinforces the norm itself. Moreover, the superficial satisfaction of the “common standard” reduces and impedes personhood in favor of “an abstraction of commonality.” Despite their loud complaints against the constraints of suburban life, the Wheelers’s actions denote an ever-fading sense of selfhood and a voluntary subscription to suburban regulations. By senselessly abiding to the social code that requires him to lie to the Campbells, Frank annihilates all instincts of personal expression in favor of an obedient replication of conventional gestures, thus adopting upon himself a pre-made model of personhood that comes to absorb his entire existence.
18 Throughout his novel, Yates demonstrates over and over how, circumscribed within the confines of their suburban interactions, his characters willingly renounce the idea of an autonomous and individual identity. Even as protagonists, they become satirical stock figures in a scripted sequence of appropriate behaviors—“Mrs. Givings, the ungiving real estate agent; Shep, the bird-dogging neighbor; … the implicitly grubby Ms Grube; even the reeling Wheelers themselves, spinning out of kilter and down the road to disaster” (Ford xix). The use of evocative names that express ethical judgments recalls Medieval morality plays and thus generates a claim to suburbanity as a faith whose dogmas establish personal identity as a form of controlled agency that denies free will. There is a sense of pre-destination that pervades the community of characters populating Revolutionary Road, as if, from the very beginning, their paths to success or failure have been established in their relation not to the idea of selfhood, but to that of
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the authoritarian “norm” of suburbia. April Wheeler with her “patrician kind of beauty,” her perpetual claim to “the shyly sensual grace of maidenhood” (Yates 7), and a name that recalls ideas of Spring and rebirth, is bound to become pregnant and thus repeat the “natural” cycle of social entrapment. The paradoxical nature of the suburban existence is thus brought to light in satirical tones as an appraisal of the fact that a recognition of forms of subjection to social norms does not lead to a break with conventional standards, but, rather, to a reaffirmation of the same social patterns that the characters claim to be struggling against. There is no personal identity that precedes the social codes of suburban interplay, for the characters’ very existence depends upon their interaction with the norm: as Yates suggests, “[Frank] couldn’t even tell whether he was angry or contrite, whether it was forgiveness he wanted or the power to forgive” (Yates 31). Deviation from the norm—as in the case of a husband and wife falling into a violent fight—cannot lead to liberation, for it leaves characters in a state of numb confusion in which, unable to fulfill the role they have been assigned by suburban regulations, they cannot achieve a state of resolution. Frank’s line of thought constantly leads him back to what is expected of him, and no interiority or personal drive is found in his efforts to deal with his circumstances. In Cheever’s Bullet Park, the character of Nellie clearly and consciously delineates the way this mechanism works in terms of gendered understandings of personal identity: “[Nellie] was going home and she would, in the space of an hour, be able to close the door on that disconcerting and rainy afternoon. She would be herself again, Nellie Nailles, Mrs.. Eliot Nailles, honest, conscientious, intelligent, chaste, etc.” (Cheever 32). The act of “closing the door” represents the symbolic separation between independent will and traditional gender performance, with the former pertaining to an outside world that is afforded no place in the home and in the female construction of selfhood. The woman, whose name dangerously reads like an abbreviation of her husband’s name, sees the familial residence as a refuge from forces that would lead her to stray from the established role that she performs within her household and her community. Cheever’s ironic use of “etc.” underlines both the impersonality and the omnipresence of the qualities that Nellie lists as her own. There is nothing in this depiction of womanhood that can be attributed to an autonomous “essence” the way Ford describes it, because any instance of female selfhood can only recur within the boundaries set by the suburban code of conduct.
19 Moreover, it has to be noted that the architectural structure of the familial residence regulates gender dynamics not only by demanding that women occupy certain prescribed spaces but also that specific tasks are associated with such spatial constraints, and that the degree of proficiency with which said tasks are completed will be carefully judged by an audience of peers: Large windows, open-plan settings, fireplaces, and gallery kitchens added to the visibility of housework, enforcing high standards of cleanliness and neatness. Essentially the design of suburban communities and houses reinforced the notion that women’s place was in the home doing ‘housework’ and raising children. (England 26)
20 If the home is private in the sense that it is excluded from the political and social discourse, its privacy is threatened by the endlessly scrutinizing eye of the community, and the woman is therefore never able to shed the role of perfect “housewife” without permanently compromising her social status and that of her family. The voluntary performance of gender-appropriate roles for the benefit of an outside audience creates
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a type for womanhood that is so well cemented in its own environment—the home—as to become a model for the continuous replication of the norm. As the character of Mrs. Givings demonstrates, the gendered code becomes in Revolutionary Road a consciously female concern to be passed on from woman to woman. Indeed, not only is Mrs. Givings, in her own private understanding of self, giving in to the pressures of suburban gender regulations, but, through her work, she is able to implicitly encourage other women to follow in her footsteps by replicating the “change” that she herself has experienced, and thus becoming a vehicle for the “(re)production” of established gendered norms. Because Mrs. Givings’s role as a respectable suburban woman is juxtaposed with her role as an estate agent, she becomes a spokesperson for the gendered suburban ideal she in programmed to “sell.” Mrs. Givings is aware of the “charm” (Yates 28) that the suburban house, built “right after the war” by “little local builders” (Yates 29) exercises over “so many city people” (Yates 28), and she is willing to overemphasize this charm to reach her aim. Mrs. Givings’s description of the Wheelers’ property is telling in this regard: “It’s really rather a sweet little house and a sweet little setting,” she states, “Simple, clean lines, good lawns, marvelous for children” (Yates 29). The assumption is that a married couple of Frank and April’s age and social status would want to have children, and that the house—the neat, “clean,” dignified house—would serve the purpose of shielding the mother as the head of familial care-taking from the “cinder-blocky, pickup-trucky places” of “plumbers” and “carpenters” (Yates 29). The overly-emphatic, repetitive, child-like language employed by the real estate broker—“a sweet little house and a sweet little setting”—recalls the rhythmic cadence and alliterations typical of nursery rhymes, and points to a certain conventionally “motherly” behavior on the part of Mrs. Givings. The Wheelers are, at this point, extraneous to the suburban community and landscape, social “newborns” that Mrs. Givings seeks to educate by employing certain speech-patterns that project a biased image of suburban life, simultaneously establishing the implicit “regulations” governing it and normalizing the notion of “dichotomous spheres” expressed by England.
21 The presentation of the Revolutionary Hill Estates through the eyes of a woman who not only willingly adheres to, but also actively seeks to impart the gender hierarchy that the design of the suburb recommends is a crucial mark of how ingrained within personal identity the notion of a gendered separation of roles might be, and negates the existence of a personal identity that is distinguished from the social performance that the suburban community collectively agrees to fulfill. Mrs. Givings’s discourse, influenced by suburban ideas of happiness and self-satisfaction, is persuasive insofar as it is capable of exploiting the romantic notion of suburbia to affect her clients’ decisions. She is, at heart, a business woman, and, as such, her efforts are focused on some form of personal gain. As she herself complains, she cannot “waste” (Yates 28) her time, for she has a goal to achieve. However, where the aim of Cheever’s male real estate agent, Hazzard, is that of pursuing financial profits, Mrs. Givings’s efforts seem to be driven by different motives. In describing the “great hulking split levels, all in the most nauseous pastel” (Yates 29), her only mention of commercial value—“and dreadfully expensive too” (Yates 29)—comes as an afterthought, an appendix to the real, moral issue that is at stake in her personal line of business. With her donations of sedum (Yates 40), her insistence that the Wheelers “call her Helen” (Yates, 41), her taking “a little trouble, even in the low price bracket” (Yates 28), Mrs. Givings seems to assume upon herself the part of maternal caretaker of the suburban social order, in
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which all houses present beautifully arranged flower beds, and neighbors share in each other’s lives both through affected courtesy and unreserved judgment. “For Mrs. Givings the time after April’s death followed a pattern of shock, pain, and slow recovery” (Yates 333): like the community she inhabits and represents, Mrs. Givings cannot come to terms with the disruption to social structures that April’s decision has brought upon her suburban reality. “At first, she could think of it only in terms of overwhelming personal guilt, and so was unable to discuss it at all.… This, then, was what came of good intentions” (Yates 333): not only does Mrs. Givings fear the subversion of the stereotypical roles that she has willingly chosen to adopt and endorse; she also feels guilty at not having been able to pass down to April as a daughter-figure the idea of “change” as a settlement into pre-disposed duties.
22 The only way that the shock and pain caused by April’s death can be overcome is by restoring the theatrically idyllic and static nature of the suburban community. “I simply cannot tell you how pleased I am about the little Revolutionary Road place” (Yates 335), Mrs. Givings tells her husband once a new couple of her selection has taken possession of the property. The restoration of the house—“I drive past it and it gives me such a lift to see it all perked up and spanking clean again” (Yates 336)—represents the symbolic recreation of the family unit as the basis of suburban society, and of feminine care-taking as the core of familial survival. Mrs. Givings’s ultimate aim is that of “improving” her little suburban community by keeping it clear of the “impossibly rude people whose children ran tricycles against her shins” (Yates 153), a sort of social crusade that Yates veils with ironic hyperbole. “The demands of the working day might take her deep into the ever-encroaching swarm of the enemy swamp” (Yates 152), the narrator explains, drawing a satirical comparison with the heroic endeavors of some ancient Greek demi-god descending into hell. The alliterations, the assonances, the rhythmic cadence of the sentence, all point to some sort of epic narrative and add to the humor of Yates’s portrayal: Mrs. Givings’s fight for “the clean scent of cedar and floorwax” (Yates 153) is what drives her business efforts, but the contrast between the woman’s first impression of the Wheelers—“it is so refreshing to deal with people of that sort” (Yates 28)—and the denouement of the Wheelers’ storyline points at the futility of the woman’s strive for social decorum. As depositaries of “the home,” suburban women are ironically depicted by Yates as the “moral” centers of social interaction, and yet their efforts to diverge from the norm are always shown as destined to fail. Encapsulated in Mrs. Givings and April Wheeler is, essentially, the idea that adherence or deviation from the standardized roles of loving mothers and wives both loosen the fabric of the community, the former by vesting it in ridiculous effacements, and the latter by leading it to tragedy.
3. Guilt, Confession and the Potential for Female Self- Determination
23 Where Yates takes a satirical approach toward the performative demands placed upon his female characters, however, there still seems to remain throughout the novel a conception of femininity as embedded within archetypal images of womanhood. As Charlton-Jones argues, Yates’s fictional representations of females appear to fall into two categories: young women struggling to communicate with the men in their lives, with whom we
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generally sympathize, and older women, mothers, who restrict their sons and daughters, unequivocally damaging them in the process. (Charlton-Jones 501)
24 This separation between “younger” and “older” women—the latter, by necessity, “mothers”— bears some critical insight insofar as it addresses the archetypal ideals of motherhood and wifehood not as mere private practices, but as social acts with ramifications for the entire community. Yet, at the same time, Charton Jones’s analysis fails to address the possibility of alternative readings of Yates’s femininity, where the responsibility of failed “communication” and enforced “restrictions” lies beyond female culpability for it depends on the systemic misinterpretation and misrepresentation of female-dominated discourses. Indeed, it could be argued that Revolutionary Road presents, through the character of Maureen Grube, quite a clear depiction of how an alternative reading of urban femininity can shed light on the pitfalls associated with conventional understandings of female suburbanity. As an unmarried, satisfactorily employed, young woman who shares a city flat not with a family of her own, but with a peer and a “mentor” (Yates 95), Maureen could not be further removed from the suburban life in which April feels trapped. In fact, with her administrative job, her freedom of movement, and, even, her not-so-secret affairs, Maureen quite plainly represents the life that April imagines for herself in Europe. Maureen Grube’s “all girl orthodoxy of fun” (Yates 95) allows the female character to shed the suburban roles of wife and mother and explore a more varied and liberal narrative. If April’s life is characterized by its resemblance to the constraints of a stage play, Maureen’s set recalls a “confectionery Hollywood romance of bachelor-girls in Manhattan” (Yates 96): despite the still recognizable signs of action as performance —“her overuse of ‘fabulous’ and ‘appalling,’ her wide-eyed recitals of facts concerning apartment maintenance, and her endless supply of anecdotes” (Yates 95)—Maureen’s life is afforded the freedom of expression and extension that April’s lacks. Nowhere in her suburban setting is April able to encounter the “sweet little Italian grocers and sweet little Chinese laundrymen and gruff but lovable cops on the beat” (Yates 95-6) that enrich Maureen’s stories and give depth and variety to her background. The “stock of supporting actors” (Yates 96) that populates Maureen’s tales may account for nothing more than romanticized fantasies and exaggerated caricatures of real people, and yet it serves to put the woman at the centre of her own story, making her a protagonist in a self-produced narrative that defies external definition.
25 Of course, the problem remains that, just like April with her European dream, Maureen is only partially able to accomplish her imagined narrative. In fact, as Frank notes, “much of [Maureen’s] talk rang false” and “so many of its possibilities for charm were blocked and buried under the stylized ceremony of its cuteness” (Yates 95). The focus on the woman’s “stylized” discourse and the “quality of play-acting” (Yates 103) carried by her voice points to a re-writing of personal history that is purely fictionalized, and cannot concretely come to fruition within the social realities in which these women find themselves. If Manhattan, with its endless potential for discovery and development, offers a more imaginative and freeing environment for a re-writing of personal history, this rewriting “seems to speak… to some romantic abstraction” (Yates 103). The fault in Maureen’s fictionalization of her character is not in the narrative itself, but in the impossibility of matching her ideal audience with her current interlocutor, and the “stylized ceremony” of “cuteness” that Frank despises masks a clumsy attempt to adapt the female performance of independent personhood to what is, essentially, a hostile system of—male—listeners. As Butler proposes,
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deviance from normalization results in a form of social guilt that manifests itself through confession (162-3), a confession that in the case of both April and Maureen is not based on a past deed, but, rather on an intended form of agency with no potential for actual realization. If the confession as a performative act is employed by women in an attempt to overcome the structural impasse in the process of female identity- making, yet its existence within an ideology reliant on imbalanced gender regulations signifies its impending failure. In fact, the unwillingness on Frank’s part to meaningfully hear both April’s and Maureen’s confessions attests to the existence of a semiotic system whose process of assigning meaning lies beyond the female field of agency and whose effect is that of nullifying the female communicative effort.
26 The forms of oral storytelling that both April and Maureen adopt as avenues of self- expression are thwarted by the patriarchal lens through which these performative acts are read and analyzed, and speech and audience become fundamental in the representation and actualization of gender stereotypes both within a suburban and an urban environment. Quite significantly, where male speech is characterized by a structure closely resembling free indirect discourse—“[Frank] went that far without any idea how the matter was going to be taken in hand, if at all; but… soon he was intoning one smooth sentence after another” (Yates 122)—women are often pictured “stalking” the scene, and speaking “in an odd, stifled voice,” as if they have “rehearsed [their] speech several times without allowing for the fact that [they]’d have to breathe while delivering it” (Yates 49). Even within their own project of storytelling, women are limited in their freedoms and conditioned by the “regulations” that apply to all gender dynamics. In the realm of performance, male characters can draw on experience to successfully deliver improvised monologues, while female characters, whose only source material is imagination, are limited to rehearsed conversations whose effectiveness is undermined by their own nature as fiction. The semiotic patterns underscoring male and female discourses speak of a highly gendered hierarchy that sees performative and narrative acts as successfully persuasive only where they demonstrate to be embedded within the current cultural rhetoric, and thus favour the patriarchal authority as the social entity that is charged with dictating the rules of said rhetoric. The expression of a female desire that exceeds the boundaries of domestic contentment cannot be contemplated as a “logical” and “sensible” (Yates 226) form of agency, for its realization would contradict the very speech norms that allow for its existence.
27 The idea of female self-actualization is undermined by semiotic regulations that mirror the gendered codes of social interaction and preclude hypothetical statements of alternative agency from being realized. Where “her speech is supposed to underscore her own sovereignty,” Butler states, “something else is revealed. Although she uses language to claim her deed, to assert a ‘manly’ and defiant autonomy, she can perform the act only through embodying the norms of the power she opposes” (167): because the language sign-system is the domain of patriarchal signification, the female confessor is by default precluded from finding liberation in her speech. Rather, following her confession April Wheeler is presented as “damaged” insofar as her behavior deviates from the standards of what “intelligent” and “thinking” (Yates 20) people would assume as normal. “Wasn’t it likely, after all, that a girl who’d known nothing but parental rejection from the time of her birth might develop an abiding reluctance to bear children?” (Yates 225) Frank asks rhetorically. Against her will, April becomes the subject of a personality study that seeks to disengage her from her
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personal desire for freedom and self-actualization by attributing its roots to some traumatic experience that disconnected the woman from her own “femininity.” “I guess your aunt always really seemed like your mother, though, didn’t she?…. She must have given you a certain feeling of—you know, love, and security and everything” (Yates 38-9), Frank tries to suggest. His interest in the “motherly” as the source of “love” and “security” is crucial in this context, for it shifts responsibility of parenting from a shared duty to a form of deranged motherhood, and makes April’s “problems” a result of an exclusively female lineage of “emotional difficulty” (Yates 226). The pseudo-psychiatric jargon employed by Frank in this context seems to resemble more closely that of a court of justice than that of a helpful, open, and constructive, session of dialogue and interaction, and the woman finds herself in need of creating a line of defense—“But I’ve had two children.… Doesn’t that count in my defense?” (Yates 225)— not to assert her will—for no space is left for that—but to ensure her social survival.
28 In addition, in April’s discourse the feeling of ostracization that is elicited by the fracture between the woman’s expected behavior and her personal desires becomes an internalized state that creates a fragmentation of the female consciousness. “Don’t ‘moral’ and ‘conventional’ mean the same thing?” (Yates 222), April asks Frank: subjected to the pressure of sacrificing her own aspirations in order to achieve the image of “happiness” that her husband and children have grown accustomed to, April becomes incapable of distinguishing between what society requires of her and what is right for her personal development. The “regulations” to which April must obey are seen as the realization of a social hierarchy that is the epitome of “morality,” and by failing to accept the normative behaviors codified by the suburban landscape, April automatically poses herself as an exception, an error that needs to be rectified. “Maybe it means there’s something awful the matter with me” (Yates 223), she says. The incapability on April’s part of denying “what I feel” and “what I’ve got to do” (Yates 224) is coupled with a sense of guilt at the understanding that this marks her, not only to her audience of judgmental peers and to her husband, but also to herself, as an anomaly. Frank doesn’t need to voice his anger at April’s “way of denigrating” what he considers “every half decent human value with some cute, brittle snobbish little thing to say” (Yates 222), because it is exactly in the inconsistency of April’s expression of discontent and her intense conviction that “how am I supposed to get over it?” (Yates 225-6) that her interior struggle lies.
29 April is thus subjected to an encroaching feeling of abstraction and guilt that determines her existence as woman, in a process that is clearly exemplified in the novel by the only chapter narrated from April’s perspective. The chapter opens with a vision of familial life as observed from a distant and objective position. April is depicted from the outside as the perfect housewife, watching “her husband’s face withdraw,” “hugging her arms against the morning chill, while he started up the station car and brought it rumbling out into the sunshine” (Yates 300). This short portrait of idyllic domesticity is described with clinical impartiality, and yet its presence at the beginning of the section point to a displacement of the woman’s sense of identity in which April cannot reconcile her notion of self with the scene that occurs before her eyes. Although she casually participates in the scene, then, April is also left to watch its unfolding as if she were extraneous to the role that her body plays. Even in her most intimate manifestations of emotion—“her gums were sore from too many cigarettes, her hands were inclined to shake and she was more aware of her heartbeat than usual; otherwise she felt fine” (Yates 301)—April finds herself incapable of untangling her physical
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symptoms from a social psychology that seeks to impinge on her personal perceptions, and she is therefore left to enact a process of analytical rejection of the self that leads her to a detachment from independent personhood. The female consciousness cannot exist for itself within the context of this social background, and, yet, all attempts at diverting from the background are thwarted by the mechanical reproduction of gender “regulations” that are ingrained within the female mind. As Esther Greenwood tries to externalize, “if Mrs. Guinea had given me a ticket to Europe, or a round-the-world cruise, it wouldn’t have made one scrap of difference to me, because wherever I sat… I would be sitting under the same glass bell jar, stewing in my own sour air” (Plath 178). The suburbs are not just a physical environment, nor a social group that shapes the norms of that environment. Instead, they symbolize within the woman a state of mind hinged on a series of limitations that pervade all avenues for self-expression and shape the female characters’ personal identities.
30 Yet, on closer analysis, certain details of April’s life and, even more importantly, her death, seem to suggest that reducing the female character to the role of the victim might overlook the narrative signs that help portray a more nuanced picture of femininity. It does not appear correct to simply state, as Butler does, that “although [the confession] reads as an act of defiance, it seems in fact to be a suicidal act propelled by an obscure sense of guilt,” nor does it automatically follow that “the confession produces a set of consequences that in retrospect illuminate a desire for punishment” (Butler 170). As an unsuccessful “act of defiance” the confession certainly comes to shape April’s ultimate decision to abort her unborn child, but the claim that this abortion might be fuelled by “a desire for punishment” much like the claim that April’s death might merely be read as the tragically unfortunate result of “a late-term home abortion attempt” (Wilson 27) subtract intentionality from April’s act and fail to appreciate her understanding of and rebellion against the social persona she is forced to impersonate. Indeed, in the context of her strictly controlled suburban environment, April Wheeler demonstrates insight and clarity beyond all other characters in Revolutionary Road. April is painfully awake to the fact that her attempted abortion is likely to result in her early demise, so much so that her preparations involve devising what can be essentially read as a suicide note, and it is with this awareness that April transforms her death from the tragic denouement of an anti-heroic epic to an act of defiance in the face of constriction and ostracization. As a suicidal act, April’s abortion bears invaluable political ramifications: by choosing to die, essentially, of motherhood, April commits an act that is fundamentally representative of a reluctance to relinquish a sense of independent selfhood and succumb to gender regulations. The impossibility of achieving a successful confession, thus, does not result in a defeatist abandonment to the gendered discourse laid out before the character, but, rather, it propels April towards the search for an alternative semiotic system outside the control of patriarchal authoritative codes. Thus, the “suicidal act” can be read not as an attempt to assuage a form of social guilt derived from deviance, but, rather, as an expression of self- determining personhood in the fact of male-centered processes of signification. The intentional nature of April’s gesture is denoted by her final message to Frank: Dear Frank, Whatever happens please don’t blame yourself.
From old, insidious habit, she almost added the words I love you, but she caught herself in time and made the signature plain: April. (Yates 310)
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31 April’s insistence that Frank should not “blame” himself is not an act of kindness and wifely affection toward her husband, but a reclaiming of personal agency. April’s note is a declaration of intent whose function is primarily that of asserting responsibility and control over the rhetoric surrounding her decision to end her pregnancy and her life. The fact that April is consciously “catching” herself before adding “the words I love you,” and thus before falling into the codified behaviors conventionally associated with the roles of wife and mother, is indicative of a desire to break with normalized ideas of femininity and disrupt the semiotics that characterize these. By ending the note on her “plain” signature, April is erasing the social pressures that would see her perform a role she perceives as foreign and alienating, effectively fabricating a liberating language void—represented on the page by Yates’s use of punctuation— around her presence and existence. If April’s speech acts throughout the novel designate her as a woman trying to unsuccessfully negotiate a semiotics that is too entrenched into traditional discourses of gender dynamics and, therefore, both restrictive and inaccessible, her final, free choice seem to suggest the possibility, however minimal, of a new kind of semiotics beyond language.
32 Indeed, in what could be read as a further attempt at distancing herself from stereotyped suburban codes, April also actively involves herself in an intentional break from the singularly female line of inherited limitations that distinguishes the suburban rhetoric of Revolutionary Road. “‘Have you thought it through, April?’ Aunt Claire used to say, holding up one stout, arthritic forefinger. ‘Never undertake to do a thing until you’ve thought it through; then do the best you can’” (Yates 302). April’s recollection of her aunt’s words at the beginning of the chapter mimics the conventional pattern of female interaction that the suburban communities represented by Yates adhere to: the older, wiser motherly figure imparts advice upon the younger, less experienced woman, drawing from a catalogue of preconceived ideas whose purpose is that of maintaining the status quo. Through this pattern, the concept of female identity is codified within the social fabric as a form of care-taking that simultaneously reinforces the gendered standards and suggests its benignity. Yet, rather than unquestioningly identifying with Aunt Claire’s words, April seems to challenge their validity. In reporting her aunt’s advice in the form of direct speech, April creates a distance between her self and the behavioral patterns that she is socially required to follow, and her subsequent return to the idea of advice as an impulse that shapes the cultural landscape of the community is telling of a new maturity of judgment: But she needed no more advice and no more instruction. She was calm and quiet now with knowing what she had always known, what neither her parents nor Aunt Claire nor Frank nor anyone else had ever had to teach her: that if you wanted to do something absolutely honest, something true, it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone. (Yates 311)
33 The equivalence that April draws between “advice” and “instruction” marks a system that April recognizes as constricting and in which the notions of functional personhood encouraged by the community have been transformed into social obligations beyond which no space is left for individual thought. April’s rejection of her pregnancy within this framework is not merely a rejection of the ways in which giving birth might change her life and personal identity, but, rather more significantly, it becomes a rejection of motherhood as a social institution whose reach extends far beyond the familial nucleus and whose existence serves as the basis for the suburban social aggregation. The idea that “if you wanted to do something absolutely honest,
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something true,” as April tells at the end of her chapter—and her life—“it always turned out to be a thing that had to be done alone” (Yates 311) points to a form of self- actualization in which the only way personal desire can be accomplished is through the realization of a cultural and social vacuum that excludes external intervention.
34 Because the scrutinizing action of the suburban community, facilitated by the structural design of the home and fervently endorsed by the social group, serves as a regulating body that both promotes adherence to the norm and continuously reaffirms its legitimacy, the suburban realities explored by Yates delineate a social and political background to 1960s American life that is based upon mutual surveillance. The environmental circumstances of the suburban landscape, with its focus on the home as the centre of superimposed moral codes and behaviors, creates a fertile soil over which the gendered code that sees men as providers and women as carers can flourish, and each and every character in this setting acts both as a player in the contractual obligations dictated by social convention and as an enforcer of said obligations, thus generating a chain of behavioral patterns that becomes impossible to break without risking social and personal alienation. This imposes vast limitations and unbearable pressures upon female characters, whose only options in this landscape are either compliance with the rule or expulsion from the social group. However, an a-critical depiction of female characters as victims only serves to reinforce certain cultural stereotypes that limit female agency to functional viability. If it is indeed true that social pressures result in a fracture that sees women both as alienated from the social discourse—for they do not possess the language to influence it positively to their own advantage—and from their own ideas of selfhood—for they cannot imagine themselves as anything other that their functional roles without experiencing feelings of guilt and estrangement, it is also important to notice how forms of awareness and attempts to reclaim autonomous selfhood beyond the superimposed social codes are still present in Yates’s narrative—primarily in the form of April Wheeler—and serve to complicate the notion of an archetypal understanding of womanhood.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Berger, Bennet. “Suburbia and the American Dream,” The Public Interest, vol. 2, 1966, pp. 80-91.
Beuka, Robert. SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth Century American Fiction and Film. Palgrave Macmillan, 2004.
Butler, Judith. Undoing Gender. Routledge, 2015.
Charlton-Jones, Kate. “Richard Yates’s Fictional Treatment of Women.” Literature Compass, vol. 7, no. 7, 2010, pp. 496-507.
Cheever, John. Bullet Park. Vintage, 2010.
Daly, Jennifer. “Introduction.” Richard Yates and the Flawed American Dream: Critical Essays, edited by J. Daly, McFarland, 2017, pp. 1-10.
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England, Kim. “Changing Suburbs, Changing Women: Geographic Perspectives on Suburban Women and Suburbanization.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies, vol. 14, no. 1, 1993, pp. 24-43.
Ford, Richard. “Introduction.” Revolutionary Road by Richard Yates, Methuen, 2001.
Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. Penguin Classics, 2010.
Mayhew, Jessica. “Pantomimes of Death within Suburbia: Abject Boredom in Yates’s Revolutionary Road, Lynch’s Blue Velvet, and Bowen’s ‘Attractive Modern Homes.’” Interdisciplinary Literary Studies, vol. 17, no. 4, 2015, pp. 617-34.
McGinley, Rory. “Playing Suburbia in Revolutionary Road.” Richard Yates and the Flawed American Dream: Critical Essays, edited by J. Daly, McFarland, 2017, pp. 30-49.
Plath, Sylvia. The Bell Jar. Faber and Faber, 2013.
Slade, Andrew. “‘You Are the Most Beautiful Creature’: The Ethics of Masculinity in Revolutionary Road.” Quarterly Review of Film and Video, vol. 34, no. 7, 2017, pp. 664-677.
Wilson, Joanna. “Revolutionary Road: Mental Illness and Socio-Political Control.” Richard Yates and the Flawed American Dream: Critical Essays, edited by J. Daly, McFarland, 2017, pp. 11-29.
Yates, Richard. Revolutionary Road. Methuen, 2001.
ABSTRACTS
This paper will analyze how space as both a physical environment and a social construct affects what Judith Butler calls ‘gender regulations’: how does the intersection of the private and the public influence the development of personal identity? How can these stereotypes be challenged within the confines of structured social and gendered hierarchies? The notion of suburbia as a physical representation of social anxieties and codified behaviours will firstly be introduced. In particular, the paper will look at how a male authoritarian rhetoric that sees happiness as a commodity rejects the idea of individual identity and serves to generate the conventional role of the all-American housewife as the only aspiration for female characters. Through an investigation into the development of different female characters, the paper will then highlight the ways in which adherence to the suburban social norm that regulates gender relationships leads to a renunciation of personhood in favour of conformity and designates the ostracisation of April Wheeler as an outcast. The semiotics of female identity that surrounds the character of April will be examined to show how this ostracisation is not only an external process of separation form society, but becomes an internalised action that leads to a fracture in the female consciousness that can only be overcome through the adoption of an alternative, extra-linguistic semiotics.
INDEX
Keywords: 1960s, American novel, Judith Butler, feminine mystique, femininity, feminist theory, gender studies, second-wave feminism, suburban life, Betty Friedan, Sylvia Plath, John Cheever, Richard Yates, Revolutionary Road
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AUTHOR
VAVOTICI FRANCESCA Francesca Vavotici is a teaching assistant and final-year doctoral candidate in English Literature at the University of Edinburgh. She is involved in gender and equality projects within the Centre for Research Collections at the University of Edinburgh and has served on the reading panel for the James Tait Black Memorial Prize. Her scholarly interests lie in twentieth- and twenty-first- century American literature, with a particular focus on gender studies and feminist theory. She is currently working on a project examining the relationship between space, language and female identity in the American novel of the 1960s.
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Complicating American Manhood: Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time and the Feminist Utopia as a Site for Transforming Masculinities
Michael Pitts
1 The cultural climate of the 21st century United States is characterized by, among other ideological battles, conflicts between traditional conceptions of manhood and alternative masculinities posited to replace these patriarchal scripts. This conflict has escalated with the recent resurgence of patriarchal ideals of manliness.1 There is a resulting effort among masculinity scholars to develop feminist-oriented conceptions of manhood that may challenge and replace these patriarchal gender roles. These efforts frequently intersect with literary scholarship since they entail analyses of “representation and its connection with wider questions of change and continuity in contemporary, and in some more historical, masculinities and identities” (Edwards 3). Applying a similar approach at the intersection of masculinity studies and speculative fiction, this analysis utilizes contemporary American feminist utopias as a site for mining new masculinities. This project continues the work of scholars mining “theatre, film (narrative and documentary), literature, music, advertising, internet content, television, photography, politics, and current events-to posit questions about the processes of gender creation,” but applies such an approach specifically to American science fiction (Shaw and Watson 1). In examining the fictional presentation of traditional and alternative masculinities in an influential feminist utopian novel, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), this research locates new insights into the possibility of critiquing and transforming manhood. In her landmark text, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity (1990), Judith Butler sets out “to trace the way in which gender fables establish and circulate the misnomer of natural facts” (xxxiv). This analysis examines the ways feminist speculative authors such as Piercy, reversing the process Butler highlights, utilize their fiction to challenge naturalized, patriarchal conceptions of gender.
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2 Often cited alongside Joanna Russ, Ursula K. Le Guin, James Tiptree, Jr., and others as a central voice in 1970s feminist science fiction, Marge Piercy is a feminist poet, novelist, and recipient of the Arthur C. Clarke Award for science fiction. Her critiques of traditional masculinities and femininities exemplify Brian Attebery’s description of a radical change in science fiction, making it “virtually impossible for an SF writer to take gender for granted any more” (Attebery 6). Piercy’s novels such as Woman on the Edge of Time (1976) and He, She and It (1991) highlight the socially constructed and subjugating natures of gender roles, making them essential works at the intersection of masculinity studies and contemporary American science fiction. Her characters rebel against intersecting systems of oppression and, as a result, disrupt normative ideologies, especially those concerning gender. Woman on the Edge of Time, therefore, literally embodies “every ideal of the counterculture/Movement: ecological wisdom, community, androgyny, ritual, respect for madness, propertylessness, etc.” (“Woman on the Edge of Time”). Among these revolutionary ideals is Piercy’s presentation of new, egalitarian conceptions of masculinity. What she contributes to conversations at the intersection of gender and society, therefore, is a new conception of American manhood based upon connection, vulnerability, and equality that, as she illustrates, is germane to the utopian project and the betterment of contemporary American society.
3 Unlike their traditionally masculine counterparts, the new men populating Piercy’s utopia value their feminine qualities and seek to eliminate the patriarchal order. Woman on the Edge of Time presents male and female characters who are characterized by and perform social functions traditionally deemed both masculine and feminine and are, therefore, androgynous. This aspect of the novel places it in contrast with Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Left Hand of Darkness (1969), which is criticized for its presentation of biologically androgynous characters marked as men linguistically through the use of masculine pronouns and socially via their “roles which we are culturally conditioned to perceive as ‘male’” (Anna 151). Piercy’s male characters break from traditional gender scripts, offering alternative performances of manhood. In place of traditionally masculine desires for power and control, Piercy presents male characters focused on community, healing, connection, and fraternity.
4 Such new conceptions of manhood are positioned against the traditional masculinities of genre fiction: the so-called supermen. Ubiquitous in midcentury American speculative fiction, this character type, exemplified by characters such as Jommy Cross in A.E. van Vogt’s Slan (1946) and John Pollard in Edward Hamilton’s “The Man Who Evolved” (1931), is detached from societal concerns and, instead, focuses upon his own evolution and the possibility of consolidating power. Opposing the utopian project, he sees no value in “schools, governments, families, political groups, media,” and other such communal organizations (Attebery 67). In contrast to the superman who “evolves apart from, or even in opposition to, his society,” the men populating 1970s feminist utopias seek to nurture strong communal bonds and reject all hierarchical systems of power including racism, homophobia, and capitalistic patriarchy (Attebery 67). Catharine Stimpson implies as central to the novel these new male characters replacing the supermen of earlier speculative fiction when she states that the feminist utopia “has implored women and men alike, of all classes and races, to envision a social order” that takes as its ethical foundation “the profound liberty and freedom of each individual; the equality of individuals and groups; and the necessity of a balance between freedom and responsibilities, the autonomous self and the communal citizen, declarations of
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independence and interdependence” (3). Similarly, Donna Fancourt’s identification of a “movement away from an emphasis on sexual difference, and towards a society that promotes connection with others” as central to feminist utopias hints at the necessity for men to undergo a paradigm shift in consciousness—a new masculinity—for society to be improved (109). Such a change in consciousness rejects the values of the traditional supermen of science fiction. Piercy, like Dorothy Bryant and Ursula K. Le Guin, rejects the traditional masculinities of earlier speculative fiction and replaces them with male characters performing new, utopian interpretations of manhood.2
5 Crucial to Piercy’s depiction of these alternative masculinities and non-normative gender scripts more broadly is the way she imagines in each of her characters—both male and female—a combination of traits traditionally identified as feminine and masculine. In this way, she breaks from the trend among male writers to present visions of the androgyne in which a “masculine personality” is “fulfilled and completed by the feminine” (Annas 147). Pamela Annas groups “together loosely under the concept of androgyny” a range of examples “from visions of worlds which have entirely eliminated men and therefore sexual polarization, through visions of worlds which are biologically androgynous, to visions of worlds in which male and female functions and roles simply are not sharply differentiated” (146). Central to Woman on the Edge of Time is a vision of androgyny encapsulating these last two examples; in Piercy’s novel, social and biological roles do not belong strictly to the categories of traditional masculinity or femininity. Instead, male characters balance traditionally masculine goals such as military service with their desires to raise and nurture a child. Female characters meanwhile occupy positions of social power and these roles showcase personality qualities traditionally labeled as masculine. Critics of androgyny as a tool in speculative fiction such as Jean Elshtain posit that “the full achievement of an androgynous world is possible only with the total elimination of sex roles” and the elimination of connections between biological sex and procreation (7). Piercy’s presentation of androgyny and its attending genderqueer, alternative ideals of manhood is made possible through the utilization of technologies, such as the brooder, which allows reproduction without the need of a female host, and those developments allowing men to breastfeed, to differentiate reproductive roles. Piercy’s vision of alternative masculinities, with its emphasis on technology and a more complex gender dynamic, illustrates, therefore, the radical nature of feminist utopias.
6 The structure of Piercy’s novel adds considerable strength to its utopian message. Like Dorothy Bryant’s The Kin of Ata Are Waiting for You and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, Woman on the Edge of Time follows a protagonist who travels between utopian and dystopian societies. Unlike these texts, which follow male citizens of dystopia and utopia, respectively, Piercy’s novel centers the experiences of a disempowered female citizen of dystopia—the contemporary United States—as she experiences life within a drastically improved, feminist polity. Confined to a mental institution early in the narrative, Consuelo Ramos discovers she can communicate with people of the future and even travel mentally across space and time to explore their utopian community. The novel, like the novels of Bryant and Le Guin, interweaves utopian and dystopian passages in order to dramatically demarcate the differences separating patriarchal and feminist societies and the masculinities each nation normalizes. Central to this functioning of the novel and its presentation of contrasting utopian and dystopian performances of manhood is Piercy’s use of time travel as a powerful literary device. Able to travel across time and therefore visit a future feminist
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utopia and patriarchal dystopia, the novel’s protagonist, Connie, and the reader through her are prompted to compare three possible societies. The connections Piercy draws between the contemporary American dystopia and these two possible futures, a feminist utopia and a nightmarish patriarchal alternative, illustrate the binary struggle between two societies with antithetical feminine and masculine gender scripts.
7 The dystopian societies of the text, the United States in the present and a future version of the society in which the ideals of capitalistic patriarchy are taken to their extreme, are presented in tandem with those passages located in the future utopia. Piercy compels her reader to note the differences separating these polities by alternating, through the protagonist’s ability to time travel, the setting of her novel from the dystopian to the utopian nation and vice versa. The qualities of this utopia, a future, collectivist anarchical community located in present-day Mattapoisett, Massachusetts, are, therefore, contrasted strikingly with those of these patriarchal alternatives. In this way, the structure of the novel and its intermingling of utopian and dystopian passages add considerable power to Piercy’s gender analysis. This juxtaposition of nations parallels a contrast in traditional and new conceptions of manhood that produces the dialectic of masculinities central to Piercy’s novel. Building upon “Mikhail Bakhtin’s emphasis on the importance of generic heterogeneity as a source of dialogic” power, Keith Booker identifies as “an important source of energy for” Woman on the Edge of Time “the resultant dialogue between” these imagined utopian and dystopian nations visited by Connie (340). Just as the novel’s contrast between these dystopian and utopian visions increases its power, its inclusion of traditional and alternative masculinities in opposition to one another intensifies the dialectic of the utopian text concerning gender.
8 The feminist qualities of this utopia reveal the significance of masculinities to Mattapoisett. Requiring of its citizens a balanced focus on community, interdependence, responsibilities, and an interest in equality, this idealized society compels attitudes absent from traditional masculinities and implies, therefore, a need for alternative conceptions of manhood. Karen Stein’s claim that in the novel “it is necessary ‘to make men over’ as more sensitive and nurturing people so that they fit into the communal society” reiterates this common understanding of the way the text connects to issues of masculinity (129).3 As Stein outlines, “the people of this future have worked to create such consciousness” through, among other methods, education (130). In this polity, “young people are trained in meditation, and forms of mind control” and “their educational system strives to imbue all community members with values of caring and nurturance” (Stein 129). As Stein’s analysis reveals, it is through these methods that masculinities are re-made.
9 Piercy’s presentation of disruptive, future masculinities is unique in its “emphasis upon purposeful human action in bringing about utopia” (Somay 30). In the text, the direct tracing of the impact of present actions upon the future is made possible by Connie’s time-traveling abilities. When the future is altered and Connie arrives not in Mattapoisett but instead in a patriarchal, dystopian New York, she and her utopian allies recognize a causative event in her own time: the development of a cognitive biotechnology enabling control of the mind and emotions. A wrongfully confined patient of the mental institution at which this tool is developed, Connie resolves to halt the research project. Concluding with Connie fatally poisoning the doctors spearheading this work, the novel offers to the reader as apparent the assurance that
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the utopian future is at least temporarily protected and that actions today will lead either to alternative masculinities and utopia or dystopia. Piercy presents her utopia as vulnerable to present actions and the influence of capitalism and the patriarchy.
10 This depiction of both future utopian and dystopian polities and their dependence upon events and characters in the present enables the novel to escape what is often considered a fatal flaw of utopian writing, its tendency toward the ahistorical and static.4 In the novel, Connie must choose between two possible futures, a feminist utopia and patriarchal dystopia. Prodding the reader to consider possible configurations of gendered societies and the possibility of influencing the development of such a future society in the present, Piercy radically re-envisions the utopian genre. Avoiding the tendency among traditional utopian writers to favor “over-arching theories of utopia as a distant or perfect world” and to thus fail to present “historically specific and situated alternatives” to socioeconomic ideologies, she presents a dynamic utopia connected to the historical setting of its audience (McBean 42). The power of the text is derived significantly from its inclusion of time travel as a means of critiquing masculinities and considering future dystopian and utopian societies alongside the society in which Connie resides, the contemporary United States.
11 Central to this presentation of the 20th century United States is its tracing of the impact of intersectionality upon marginalized subjects such as Connie. In this way, the novel outlines those gendered networks of power that must be disrupted for new masculinities to be normalized. Through Connie’s experiences, we see how interconnecting systems of sexism and racism work to marginalize and disempower the protagonist and others. The men with whom Connie comes into contact are either medical professionals or part of her social network. The men are positioned at varying distances from power and their contrasts reveal connections existing between intersectionality and masculinities. The doctors populating the novel in the 20th century time frame, Redding, Morgan, and Acker, maintain powerful social and economic positions as educated, white, heterosexual performers of traditional masculinity. The men with whom Connie comes in contact outside the medical institution, mostly working-class men of color, on the other hand, wield less masculine authority due to their race and class positions.
12 The traditional masculinities of these men marginalized by class and race are informed by the concept of machismo. As demonstrated by Alfredo Mirande in Hombres y Machos: Masculinity and Latino Culture (1997), the understanding of this term and its performance is heavily influenced not “by region but by socioeconomic status” and therefore varies according to the social and economic positioning of its subscriber (77). As Piercy illustrates in the novel, a man such as Geraldo, the pimp of Connie’s niece, Dolly, possesses little socioeconomic power and conceives of machismo “as exaggerated masculinity predicated on male dominance and authoritarianism, violence, aggressiveness, drunkenness, dumb, irresponsibleness, selfishness, stubbornness, and the unwillingness to back down for even the most trivial matter” (Mirande 77). In contrast, other men of color, such as Connie’s brother Luis, who possess socioeconomic power and seek to pass as white in order to increase this amount of control, limit their public demonstrations of machismo since the application of this term “to Mexicans or Latino” by white men is “imbued with such negative attributes as male dominance, patriarchy, authoritarianism, and spousal abuse” (66). Machismo, therefore, is a type of hypermasculinity demonstrated by those men of color with whom Connie comes into
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contact in her personal life that, like its white masculine counterpart, exploits those marginalized further from power according to the logic of sexism, racism, and homophobia.
13 While prevented from fully accessing the power granted his white counterparts due to his ethnicity, Luis, for example, exercises complete control over those women in his life such as Connie. He experiences intersectionality as a financially successful, heterosexual man hindered by discrimination according to his race. He wields the power he has by subjugating those situated further from power. While “his anger and unruly pride” are “channeled into a desire to get ahead, to grab money, to succeed like an Anglo,” he also directs this resentment toward those few people whom he is able to control, his family (397). Preoccupied, for example, with the appearances of his children and wife, Luis orders his son, Mark, to eat more in order to develop a masculine physique and baselessly accuses the women of the family, his daughter, Dolly, and wife, Adele, of being overweight. Besides these harsh, demeaning criticisms, the interactions between Luis and his family are controlled by him as a means of exercising that power denied him in contemporary American society: “He spoke quickly and he talked a lot and he didn’t like interruptions” (383). Luis dominates his family, releasing upon them the anger he accumulates from his experiences in a systemically racist society.
14 This brutality is utilized by Piercy to reveal connections between traditional gender roles and intersectionality. Able to have his sister freed or confined indefinitely, Luis leverages this power, demanding that Connie perform traditionally feminine roles during a visit home he authorizes. Specifically, he demands that she perform domestic duties and refrain from offering her own opinion on matters during her stay. In this way, Luis takes advantage of a system that disenfranchises women and provides men power over them. Within patriarchy, male subjects who are not able to maintain the privileged hegemonic position are compelled to remain complicit to patriarchy, thereby benefiting “from the patriarchal dividend, the advantage men in general gain from the overall subordination of women” (Connell 79). Interlocking systems of oppression such as racism, sexism, and homophobia, therefore, affect both Connie and those men such as Luis whose identity markers distance them from hegemony but grant them power for their complicity to patriarchy.
15 The traditional masculinities of these marginalized men are characterized by desires to consolidate power and control over others and are informed by capitalistic, patriarchal socioeconomic systems and a sexist paradigm of consciousness. Shulamith Firestone’s materialist critique of inequality among the sexes further illuminates the ways Piercy presents class, race, and gender as connected systems of oppression. Writing during the height of second wave feminism, Firestone provided in The Dialectic of Sex: The Case for Feminist Revolution (1970) an influential map for bridging Marxist and Psychoanalytic theories of inequality. The importance of this theory of sex and class in developing the utopian society is outlined in the novel by Bolivar, a male inhabitant of Mattapoisett: “‘I guess I see the original division of labor, that first dichotomy, as enabling later divvies into haves and have-nots, powerful and powerless, enjoyers and workers, rapists and victims. The patriarchal mind/body split turned the body to machine and the rest of the universe into booty on which the will could run rampant, using, discarding, destroying’” (229).
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16 The male characters populating the contemporary United States of the text illustrate these connections and act as representatives of traditional masculinity, focused upon exercising power over others and attaining higher positions within socioeconomic hierarchies. The patriarchal, capitalistic men with whom Connie comes into contact throughout her personal life desire to have power and control over her, telling her “that what she” feels is “unreal and” doesn’t “matter” (308). These traditionally masculine men meet the criteria for what Connie describes to the citizens of Mattapoisett as a real man: He “is supposed to be… strong, hold his liquor, attractive to women, able to beat out other men, lucky, hard, tough, macho we call it, muy hombre… not to be a fool… not to get too involved… to look out for number one… to make good money… You knuckle under to the big guys and you walk over the people underneath …’” (127). As Piercy notes in this passage, a man is identified by his ability to dominate and subjugate others according to the logic of capitalism, sexism, racism, and homophobia.
17 These dystopian patriarchal qualities permeate the institutions of the gendered nation and, more specifically, the medical establishment. In the novel, the nature of diagnosis and “how mental illness gets constructed—frequently based on stereotypical readings of surface characteristics such as behavior, age, poverty, body odors, or ethnicity—and is used as a form of social control” are implicated as forces of intersectionality (Martinson 53). The text illustrates, therefore, how traditional masculinities possess a mutually constitutive relationship not only with the nation but those institutions contained within its networks of power. As a result of prior experiences with hospitals, including the hysterectomy to which she was subjected, Connie recognizes this relationship between patriarchy and healthcare. She now “is much clearer about the connections between race, class, gender and the ease with which she is hospitalized as well as the justifications for the degree of control manifested in her treatment plan” (Martinson 62). The presence of intersectionality within contemporary American healthcare is most clearly illuminated by Piercy in her depiction of the rules governing the behavior of Connie and her fellow patients in these institutions and the treatments to which she is subjected.
18 Through the guidelines and treatments to which Connie is compelled to submit within these hospitals, Piercy outlines the toxic influence of traditional masculinities in health care. Female patients, for example, are expected to perform traditional femininities and are “punished for unladylike behavior” (156). While the use of explicit language is a punishable offence, “volunteering for every task defined as women’s work, cleaning, sweeping, helping with the other patients, picking up clothes, fetching and carrying for the nurses” is rewarded with the allowance of greater personal liberties (369). Central to the treatment plans developed by these male doctors is the adoption by female patients of traditional gender roles and those unwilling to adopt these feminine roles are subjected to further domination and control. The increased severity of these treatments and their relationship to patriarchy are exemplified by the use of shock therapy: “A little brain damage to jolt you into behaving right. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes a woman forgot what had scared her, what she had been worrying about. Sometimes a woman was finally more scared of being burned in the head again, and she went home to her family and did the dishes and cleaned the house” (83). As Connie states, these shock treatments are repeated each time a female patient departs from the gender role assigned to her by the ideologies of traditional masculinity. Repeat
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offenders, or “shock zombies” as Connie calls them, are relocated to the back wards where they “lay, their brains so scarred they remembered nothing, giggling like the old lobotomized patients” (83). In this way, medicine as a traditionally male-dominated arena acts as a form of gender control and subjugation reinforcing patriarchy and centralizing control among traditionally masculine males.
19 Traditional masculinities seek to reinforce heteronormativity, exemplified in the hospitals’ homophobic policies that harm queer patients. Connie’s fellow patient and friend, Skip, for example, is identified as pathological due to his identification as a gay man. As Skip outlines, the harmful treatments imposed on these patients are the products of patriarchal desires to enforce heteronormativity: “‘They don’t like us, you know. We’re lepers… You know what the last experiment was they pulled on me? They stuck electrodes on my prick and showed me dirty pictures, and when I got a hard-on about men, they shocked me’” (177). Subjected to a newly developed brain implant through which his desires and actions are manipulated, Skip eventually commits suicide in order to escape the control of this dystopian mental health institution. The patients Piercy presents are, therefore, imprisoned and subjugated in order to force upon them the logic of patriarchy and traditional conceptions of manhood.
20 A new neuroscientific and cognitive treatment plan makes possible the complete consolidation of power and control by these physicians over the minds and bodies of their patients. By implanting a new technological device in the brains of patients, these doctors are able to control their actions and emotional states, thereby imposing upon the minds and bodies of patients their own wills. These men seek to control and subjugate marginalized subjects such as Connie, desiring ultimately “to place in her something that would rule her feelings like a thermostat” via which they may dominate her will (310). In contrast to the technologies of Mattapoisett in which “mental resources incorporate a revalorization of embodiment, emotions and other subjugated knowledges-including dreams and even madness,” this device empowers traditionally masculine men in places of power to control female bodies, restrict emotional experiences, and enforce the sanitized rationality they sanction as superior to the knowledges derived from embodied experience (Martinson 52). As outlined by Connie, they “believed feeling itself a disease, something to be cut out like a rotten appendix. Cold, calculating, ambitious, believing themselves rational and superior, they chased the crouching female animal through the brain with a scalpel” (308). As Connie recognizes, these men develop a tool enabling them to have complete control over the minds of women and to, therefore, enforce patriarchal values such as the distrust of disembodied knowledge upon them.
21 When she is eventually subjected to this treatment, Connie transforms into an image of traditional, hyperfeminine qualities, “an object. She went where placed and stayed there” (329). Piercy reveals in such a treatment plan how the interests of patriarchal masculinities are served by major institutions within the gendered nation, the contemporary United States. Pushed to the margins of power due to her sex, race, and class position, Connie faces the prospect of losing her very mind and body to those subscribing to traditional masculinities. Piercy, therefore, highlights in the novel those toxic elements of patriarchal visions of manhood that must be confronted for a new, egalitarian future to be possible. As she demonstrates, such a possibility is predicated upon the present. Failure to realize this ideal polity through activism in the present
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increases the likelihood of another, dystopian future characterized by traditional masculinities.
22 As Piercy reveals through Connie’s visit to a hypermasculine, dystopian New York of a possible future, the toxic elements of the contemporary American capitalistic patriarchy lead to greater inequalities along the lines of class and sex among other identity elements. The hypermasculine nation Connie visits represents a possible future for societies increasingly predicated upon the domination and control of women. An unbridled patriarchy, the nation is a hyper-capitalistic society stratified according to race, class, and biological sex and controlled by an upper class living in isolation from the devastated and polluted ecologies of the Earth. As a dystopian possibility, it refracts those aspects Peter Fitting identifies as central to the utopian society of Mattapoisett: “(1) the basic living units developed as alternatives to the nuclear family; (2) the question of gender and the division of labor; (3) sexuality itself, both as an index to human fulfillment and in opposition to heterosexism and/or attempts to limit it to procreation” (165). In presenting a dystopian future that, in contrast, allows for familial and communal bonding only for the elite class, divides labor according to strict gender and class lines, and exploits working class women for their sexualities and reproductive functions within a heterosexist paradigm, Piercy intensifies the dialectic of masculinities central to this feminist utopia. The performances of manhood presented in this dystopian setting, therefore, are positioned in direct opposition to those alternative masculinities of Mattapoisett and this contrast induces in the reader a reconsideration of traditional gender ideologies.
23 These dystopian masculinities reject embodied knowledge and seek to consolidate power and control over the other. The two male characters described during Connie’s visit, Cash and an unnamed guard, demonstrate such desires informed by patriarchal and capitalistic ideologies. Cash is the boyfriend and client of Gildina, a “contract girl” paid on retainer for sex. A type of substitute for the nuclear family, their relationship involves the contractual exploitation of Gildina. The dystopian performance of masculinity to which Cash subscribes is predicated upon the treatment of Gildina as a product to be purchased typically for the length of a month, consumed at his leisure, and discarded when these sexual experiences grow stale, at which point, she must locate a new partner at the risk of being identified as no longer desirable and, as a result, harvested for organs. While Gildina may sue if he breaks his contract, Cash and other men of his class position exercise almost complete control over such contracted women, placing them in isolation and under constant monitoring. Perhaps most conspicuously, this level of patriarchal control is reflected in the bodily alterations and appearances of these women. As Connie reflects, Gildina has “a tiny waist, enormous sharp breasts that stuck out like brassieres Connie herself had worn in the fifties--but the woman was not wearing a brassiere. Her stomach was flat but her hips and buttocks were oversized and audaciously curved. She looked as if she could hardly walk for the extravagance of her breasts and buttocks, her thighs that collided as she shuffled a few steps” (313). This role as a disempowered and enslaved sex worker and the other position available to women of Gildina’s socioeconomic position, that of a mother who, as she explains, are designed or “cored to make babies all the time,” reflect the centrality of traditional masculinities in feminist dystopias (316). Besides this focus on controlling and subjugating women, such conceptions of manhood are predicated upon the elimination of emotions and the rejection of embodied knowledge.
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24 The performative nature of masculinities results in the necessity for these men to silence emotional responses that could prevent them from fully adopting their hypermasculine social role. Gildina explains how Cash, whose name hints at the connection binding capitalism and patriarchy, underwent surgical alterations for this purpose: “‘He’s had SC, did you suppose on that?’ ‘What’s escee?’ ‘Sharpened control, reallike. He’s been through mind control. He turns off fear and pain and fatigue and sleep, like he’s got a switch. He’s like a Cybo, almost! He can control the fibers in his spinal cord, control his body temperature. He’s a fighting machine, like they say’” (324). As Vara Neverow outlines, embodiment “honors the unique subjectivity, physicality and agency of the individual in community” and is “linked to personal identity, to responsibility, to emotional health, to sensuality, to choice,” (22). Incorporation, on the other hand, “is linked to the annihilation of the individual, to the hierarchical subordination of the subject to a conglomerate, to the obliteration of uniqueness, to the tyranny of uniformity” (Neverow 22). In this dystopian future, the traditionally masculine project of incorporation results in the annihilation of individuals complicit to it such as Cash. Able to submit the body to the control of the mind and eliminate embodied experience, Cash signifies toxic masculinity and is therefore positioned by Piercy against the utopian performances of manhood found in Mattapoisett. While the new masculinities of the utopian polity value communal self- reflection or “worming” as a method for analyzing subconscious biases, these dystopian conceptions of manhood value the cutting off of such reflections as the irrational, emotive products of the body over which the mind must triumph.
25 Through her sympathetic portrayal of a protagonist who seeks to disrupt the progress of mind-control experiments in the present to protect a future utopian society, Piercy emphasizes the importance of current actions to insure an ideal, feminist future. In highlighting the significance of traditional masculinities in both the dystopian future and present, she more specifically identifies the necessity of embracing alternative conceptions of manhood to impact the future. Foundational to Piercy’s novel is the assumption “that the imagining of alternatives has a part to play in” the “profound social transformation” required to liberate humankind from “sexual oppression in our society” (Fitting 162). The outlining of these new ideals of manliness is central, therefore, to the project of imagining a new, egalitarian nation.
26 A central message of Piercy’s novel is that such improved polities are characterized by alternative performances of manhood that reject ideologies of power and control. In the preface to the 2016 edition of the novel, Piercy identifies utopia as “born of the hunger for something better” and relying “on hope as the engine for imagining such a future” (xi). The utopian image of manhood she provides offers hope that such transformations of society and gender are possible. This new image of masculinity is inseparable from the utopian nation in which it is situated and, therefore, bears qualities that parallel this society, “an ideal 22nd-century utopia based on tolerance, nurturing, communality, ecological responsibility, and the complete effacement of conventional gender differences” (Booker 339).
27 Piercy presents in her male utopian characters new masculinities that, like the feminist utopia, value community and embodied knowledge. Bolivar, a utopian male, departs from traditional masculinities by seeking connection in order to heal emotionally. When his close friend, Jackrabbit, dies in battle, he initially suppresses his emotions in
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a typically traditional masculine style. Yet, during the funeral, he participates in a ritualistic dance with the healer, Erzulia, that releases his grief: Erzulia possessed willfully by the memory of Jackrabbit led Bolivar round and round. He danced more feverishly, responding, his body became fluid and elegant as he had danced that night of the feast with Jackrabbit…The music ended and Bolivar embraced Erzulia. They stood a moment clasped and then Erzulia’s body relaxed. Bolivar jumped back. ‘But I felt per!’ he cried out. ‘You remembering,’ Erzulia lilted gently, wiping her forehead. Bolivar crumpled to the ground in a spasm of weeping so sudden that for a moment no one moved to support him. Then Bee and Crazy Horse gently held him, murmuring. ‘Good. At last your grief come down.’ (345)
28 This scene presents aspects of new masculinities, specifically their interest in community and rituals of grieving and their acceptance of embodied knowledge, that contrast dramatically with the traditional ideals of manhood possessed by the male characters of the present and future dystopias. Cash, for example, represents later stages of patriarchal masculinities that seek increasingly more extreme methods, enabled by technology, for divorcing the mind from the body and the male from community. Similarly, men in the 20th century United States such as Luis separate themselves from others and neglect social connections in order to avoid vulnerability and increase feelings of control and power. In contrast to these negative, traditionally masculine perceptions of embodied knowledge and community, the new men Piercy presents recognize the importance of such experiences and seek to cultivate meaningful connections with others.
29 These new gender conceptions replace isolation and the suppression of emotions with social connection and the expression of feelings. Central to this disruption of normative masculinities is community and vulnerability as tools for mourning and healing from a loss. Unlike the traditionally masculine desire to seek out isolation during times of grief, Bolivar and other utopian male subjects connect with others and strengthen community. Their openness to embodied knowledge and a new, community-oriented consciousness enables them to properly face their grief and express deeply felt emotions rejected by traditional masculinities. In this way, they contrast strikingly with the masculinities of the 20th United States, which are characterized by a need among men to suppress emotion and seek separation from others during traumatic experiences. The new masculinities Piercy presents in Mattapoisett are marked by such interests in embodied knowledge and communal connection as well as the rejection of traditional desires to consolidate power and control.
30 A society seeking to eliminate hierarchical networks of power, Mattapoisett develops alternative masculinities. Contradicting the sociopolitical logic of the dystopian capitalistic patriarchies presented in the novel, the United States in both the present and possible future, it rejects capitalism and other interconnected rationales of subjugation such as sexism, homophobia, and racism. The new masculinities Piercy presents in Mattapoisett are posited as ideal yet imperfect performances of manhood that embrace a new paradigm of consciousness in which embodied knowledge and communal connection are valued while traditional desires to consolidate power and control are rejected.
31 The new masculinities of Mattapoisett are presented via those male characters with whom Connie comes into contact—Bee, Jackrabbit, Barbarossa, and Bolivar. Each of these characters demonstrates an openness to gender roles and sexualities absent from
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traditional masculinities. Barbarossa and Bee, for example, illustrate the influence of such new conceptions of manhood upon parenting. Bee is a “com” or co-mother to Innocente and shares these responsibilities with two partners, Otter and Luxembourg. A caring and involved parent, Bee shocks Connie with his open expression of emotions, crying during the “naming” ritual in which children are recognized as adults and choose new names for themselves after proving their ability to survive in the wild. The very name he chooses, “Innocente,” illustrates his hope that in the future power structures valuing control and domination will be completely removed: “I’d been traveling for a year in Latin America. It made me brood about those centuries of the rape of the earth, the riches stolen, the brutalizing and starving of generations… toward that day when all trace of that pillaging will be healed… That’s how you got named” (121). By allowing alternatively masculine interests in the elimination of power and control to influence the name he initially chose for the child and later recognizing that same child as an adult free to adopt a new name, Bee is disinterested in familial control and is representative of the new masculinities Piercy presents as central to the feminist utopia.
32 Barbarossa, who attends the “brooder” via which babies are born without the need for biological parents, is similarly positioned as an alternative to traditional masculinities. During their first encounter, Connie is disturbed by the technological advancements that have enabled men such as Barbarossa to take on one of the most significant roles of motherhood, nursing: “He had breasts. Not large ones. Small breasts, like a flat- chested woman temporarily swollen with milk. Then with his red beard, his face of a sunburnt forty-five-year-old man, stern-visaged, long-nosed, thin-lipped, he began to nurse” (142). Focused upon the sustenance of these children and the “serene enjoyment” of such an intimate form of nurturing, Barbarossa, like Bee, illustrates the enriching capabilities of new masculinities (142).
33 An openness to diverse sexualities is another core principle of these alternative performances of manhood. Jackrabbit, a nineteen-year-old artist, illustrates this acceptance of and interest in alternative sexualities. Described by Luciente as one who “‘wants to couple with everybody,’” he is a queer character who performs a new masculinity in which other sexualities are accepted and respected (134). Involved with Luciente and Bolivar, he enjoys multiple relationships simultaneously and a range of sexual experiences. While Skip, a fellow patient of Connie’s committed by his family because he is homosexual, is hospitalized, experimented upon, and eventually driven to suicide by his marginalization within a heteronormative patriarchy, Jackrabbit stands as an example of how such queer men may flourish within a new society in which alternative masculinities are valued.
34 As an anarchist society, Mattapoisett’s aim is of “integrating people back into the natural world and eliminating power relationships” (Piercy ix). Such feminist interests are evidenced by its approach to medicine, education, agriculture, and government. In place of a medical establishment that exploits patients according to the logic of capitalism, patriarchy, and attending ideologies of subjugation, Mattapoisett possesses healers who practice naturalistic treatment approaches. Such healers do not resort to the removing of bodily organs but, instead, utilize their knowledge of the natural as well as technologies to treat the patient: “‘We don’t do much taking out. When we do, we regrow. We program the local cells. Slow healing but better after’” (170). In addition, they do not seek above all to extend life but teach instead to be accepting of
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death. As Susan Matarese points out, “Piercy seems to be suggesting…that a greater willingness to face up to our mortality and to recognize our shared vulnerability may be the basis for a dramatic transformation of human values and outlook” (107). Informed by the beliefs of “‘societies that people used to call primitive” but were “socially sophisticated,’” they reject traditionally patriarchal and coldly rational ideals in which life is prolonged and, instead, seek to comfort and enrich the experiences of each patient (132). This alteration is another product of the feminist paradigm shift in consciousness Piercy imagines. In presenting a “glimpse of the possibilities for social consciousness and community life” as the product of “a willingness to look at death more openly,” Piercy includes as central to this social progress the advent of new, heathier masculinities opposed to patriarchal networks of power (Matarese 109).
35 The mental health institutions of Mattapoisett, in contrast to their dystopian counterparts of the present and future United States, value the autonomy and individuality of the patient and this also signals a departure from patriarchal societies marked by traditional masculinities. These institutions are described by Luciente as “‘open to the air and pleasant’” (65). They “‘are places where people retreat when they want to go down into themselves—to collapse, carry on, see visions, hear voices of prophecy, bang on the walls, relive infancy—getting in touch with the buried self and the inner mind’” (67). In the utopia, subjects such as Jackrabbit, who seeks such mental healing and sanctuary often, are not stigmatized for their needs and do so according to their own free will. In this way, the mental health institutions Piercy imagines in this utopia lack those interconnecting forces of subjugation typical of such organizations in the contemporary United States.
36 The absence of hierarchical perspectives in these alternative masculinities results in significant departures from the educational and governmental practices of the contemporary United States. Specifically, these institutions do not reinforce networks of power through the awarding of degrees or the granting of significant governing powers. Influenced significantly by a paradigm of masculinities not predicated upon domination and control, these institutions imprint upon the student and civil servant the meaningfulness of learning and community. Students, for example, are educated in their village prior to their naming ceremony. After this point, as Luciente explains, “we go wherever we must to learn, although only up to the number a teacher can handle. I waited two years for Rose to take me. Where you go depends on what you want to study. For instance, if I were drawn to ocean farming I’d have gone to Gardiners Island or Woods Hole. Although I live near the sea, I’m a land-plant person’” (53). Informed significantly by new, egalitarian masculinities, this utopian educational system replaces patriarchal approaches to learning—focused upon profit, social mobility, and competition—with one focused exclusively upon community, education, and the natural world.
37 Such alternative masculinities influence the governmental practices of Mattapoisett, which lack those capitalistic, patriarchal aspects of civil service common to the United States. The planning council for this township is made up of citizens chosen not by election but by lot, thereby preventing the development of a political class. In addition, the temporary nature of these positions, typically one year in length, and the absence of any social or economic promotion as a product of this role eliminate the possibility of hierarchical systems of power developing. In the next level of government, regional planning, “reps chosen by lot from township level go to the regional to discuss gross
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decisions. The needs go up and the possibilities come down. If people are chilled by a decision, they go and argue. Or they barter directly with places needing the same resources, and compromise’” (162-163). Central to the governing practices of Mattapoisett is the voice of each citizen. The manner in which this polity removes socioeconomic influences protects it from the corrupting elements of capitalistic patriarchies. In place of such ideologies foundational to systems of power and control, Piercy imagines a utopian anarchy whose egalitarian system of government, predicated upon the elimination of power consolidation and subjugation, reflects those alternative masculinities central to this society.
38 Such new male gender scripts are reflected in the utopian community’s nonexploitative approach to the environment. Demonstrating a non-patriarchal, dominating relationship to nature, Mattapoisett possesses several key qualities of an ecofeminist society: “nonhierarchical forms of organization, recycling of wastes, simpler living styles involving less-polluting ‘soft’ technologies, and labor-intensive rather than capital-intensive economic methods” (Merchant 295). In contrast to this feminist utopia are both the capitalistic patriarchy of Connie’s present, the contemporary United States, and the dystopian vision of a future New York in which “multis” or multinational corporations have consolidated such power that the Earth has been stripped of its resources and is no longer inhabitable for life. By limiting the use of technologies to those dangerous or mundane tasks requiring completion, centering as the primary purpose of labor the enrichment of human lives in relationship both to each other and nature, and removing from agricultural industries the possibility to accumulate capital and market power, the citizens of Mattapoisett work to maintain a nation whose treatment of nature reflects its nonhierarchical conceptions of masculinity.
39 The key social organizations of Mattapoisett including its medical, educational, agricultural, and governmental institutions highlight the influence of masculinities upon national identity and the mutually constitutive relationship existing between gender and nation. The connections Piercy locates “among issues of racism, classism, sexism, and environmental abuse” strengthen both her critiques of contemporary American culture and the possibility she posits of moving toward a better society through the elimination of hierarchical perspectives central to traditional masculinities (Stratton 306). Presenting to her reader individual characters performing new, egalitarian masculinities, Piercy illustrates the methods by which men may work toward a better future through the introduction of new forms of manhood in the present.
40 The dialectic of masculinities Piercy provides and the manner in which the text prompts readers to consider the benefit of alternative ideals of manliness demonstrate Piercy’s concern “with the liberatory dimension of the choices which people make in the present” (King 77). Explaining the necessity for contacting Connie, Luciente states, “‘We must fight to come to exist, to remain in existence, to be the future that happens. That’s why we reached you’” (213). In this feminist utopian novel, Piercy similarly outlines for her audience the necessity to adopt new masculinities qualified by a feminist paradigm of consciousness and a rejection of traditional desires to dominate and control. By presenting the possibility of such utopian masculinities as predicated upon the outcome of present discussions concerning gender and manhood, she calls for
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her male readers to recognize the urgent need to depart from traditional, patriarchal ideologies of masculinity.
41 Woman on the Edge of Time and its embedded commentary on gender are crucial to masculinity studies since the novel, as a female utopian narrative, enables audiences to imagine new, feminist-informed masculinities and recognize current societal mechanisms by which the patriarchal order functions. Defining narrative as “not restricted to literary and cultural artifacts but” extending “from the construction of individual gender identity by way of biographical, material and embodied social processes to collective national identities and images,” Stefan Horlacher describes this communicative mode as crucial to conceptions of masculinity and the future of masculinity studies (5n14). Utilizing their own biographical, material, and embodied knowledge produced within the social processes of the patriarchal United States, Piercy and other feminist utopian authors construct invaluable, new gender identities for their male and female characters alike. The new conceptions of manhood they posit significantly enrich current masculinity studies scholarship and contribute to conversations surrounding the so-called crisis of masculinity in the 21st century United States.
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Somay, Bülent and R.M.P. “Towards an Open-Ended Utopia.” Science Fiction Studies, vol. 11, no. 1, 1984, pp. 25-38.
Stein, Karen F. “Inclusion and Exclusion in Some Feminist Utopian Fictions.” Women’s Utopian and Dystopian Fiction, edited by Sharon R. Wilson, Cambridge Scholars Press, 2013, pp. 112-132.
Stimpson, Catharine R. “Feminisms and Utopia.” Utopian Studies, vol. 2, no. 3, 1991, pp. 1-6.
Stratton, Susan. “The Messiah and the Greens: The Shape of Environmental Action in Dune and Pacific Edge.” Extrapolation, vol. 42, no. 4, 2001, pp. 303-316.
Waters, Alice E. “Hoping for the Best, Imagining the Worst: Dystopian Anxieties in Women’s SF Pulp Stories of the 1930s.” Extrapolation, vol. 50, no. 1, 2009, pp. 61-79.
“Woman on the Edge of Time.” Kirkus Review, 7 May 2019, https://www.kirkusreviews.com/book- reviews/marge-piercy-7/woman-on-the-edge-of-time/.
NOTES
1. Two events are considered central in this recent reemergence of traditional masculinities and their attending crisis: the attacks on and events surrounding September 11, 2001 and, more recently, the 2016 U.S. election of Donald Trump. Victor J. Seidler in Transforming Masculinities:
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Men, Cultures, Bodies, Power, Sex and Love (2005) identifies events following September 11, 2001— specifically the war in Iraq and the resulting protests across Europe—as exemplifying “a struggle that involved diverse global masculinities being locked into terrifying relationships with each other” (1). In an updated preface to Angry White Men: American Masculinity at the End of an Era (2017), Michael Kimmel highlights the importance of the Trump presidency to hegemonic masculinities: “Trump’s election underscores” how “white men’s anger comes from the potent fusion of two sentiments—entitlement and a sense of victimization” (x). 2. Though Le Guin’s presentation of the androgyne in The Left Hand of Darkness is problematic, as previously outlined, her later work The Dispossessed (1974) successfully imagines new masculinities possessing qualities traditionally labeled both feminine and masculine. It is this later novel, the focus of my analysis in chapter 2, that serves as an example of Le Guin’s depiction of new, transformed masculinities. 3. Erin McKenna locates a similar message in the novel, positing that “Woman on the Edge of Time not only presents a vision of an anarchistic society of the future, but… also focuses on the dangers of and need to get beyond violence, especially male violence” (69). 4. Alice Waters locates this dynamic aspect in both Woman on the Edge of Time and Moore’s “Greater Than Gods” (1939). Woman on the Edge of Time, therefore, is situated within a tradition of feminist speculative writing in which utopian and dystopian narrative elements are utilized to express anxieties surrounding current, traditionally masculine, patriarchal networks of power and the possibility in the present of developing egalitarian gender ideologies and socioeconomic systems.
ABSTRACTS
Contemporary feminist utopias make up an overlooked site for mining new masculinities amidst the current so-called crisis of masculinity in American culture. What is often overlooked in analyses of feminist texts and more specifically feminist utopian fiction is how the alteration of femininity necessitates the transformation of masculine ideals. Such novels, while varying in their focus, are united by an interest in transforming patriarchal masculinities and replacing them with an alternative informed by second wave and intersectional feminism. Through an analysis of masculinities in one such utopia, Marge Piercy’s Woman on the Edge of Time (1976), this essay traces how contemporary female speculative writers envision and propose new masculinities that, in opposition to their patriarchal counterparts, reject hierarchical perspectives and instead value equality, fraternity, and freedom.
INDEX
Keywords: science fiction, gender, utopia, dystopia, masculinities, Marge Piercy, feminism, genre fiction.
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AUTHOR
MICHAEL PITTS Michael Pitts, a recent Ph.D. graduate of the University of Arkansas, has accepted a position as assistant professor at the University of South Bohemia in the Czech Republic. His research interests are positioned at the intersection of gender theory, speculative fiction, and utopia studies.
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Beyond Determinism: Geography of Jewishness in Nathan Englander’s “Sister Hills” and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
Filip Boratyn
1. Introduction
1 In October 2017, The New York Times asked three major Jewish American literary figures of the early 21st century about their thoughts on the relationship between Jewish identity, the United States, and the State of Israel. Nathan Englander emphasized the need to enclose what he saw as “shifting” identity within borders, and said: “That’s what I latch onto when thinking about contemporary American Jewish novels engaging with Israel, the ideas revolving around fluidity, of borders drawn and redrawn, of changing landscapes and altered realities” (“On Being Jewish, American, and a Writer”). This sentence contains an interesting contradiction. On the one hand, Englander highlights the “fluidity,” the contingency of the constructs he mentions; on the other, he clings to the concept of borders that by definition has a policing nature. The act of enclosure performed by any border cannot be erased even if the border’s instability is agreed on. If Englander’s remarks were to be juxtaposed with his writing, fluidity would hardly present itself as an apt descriptor of stories full of characters who are quite comfortable with essentialist approach to ideological constructs. Stories such as “Sister Hills,” published in his 2012 collection What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, present characters devoted to safeguarding the established borders and unwilling to allow for fluidity in how they approach their national identity, territory, or religion. Much of this connection between the national identity and the delineated territory is achieved by the story’s use of the discourse of religious determinism.1
2 As much as “Sister Hills” can be read as an examination of how essentialist concepts of borders dominate the discourse about Israel, Michael Chabon’s 2007 novel called The
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Yiddish Policemen’s Union presents a much more fluid, postmodern take on the question of Jewish statehood. Chabon’s novel functions within the generic framework of a hard- boiled story and thus contextualizes all its depictions of the borders’ demarcation within the general skepticism about the stability of essentialist concepts characteristic of the genre. Interestingly enough, none of this play with the contingency of border- related issues is set in Palestine, as the action of the novel takes place in an Alaskan town of Sitka, the settlement of which by Jews was considered by the Americans during World War II. It appears that while Englander’s story depicts and problematizes a compatibilist2 interpretation of the controversy of Jewish settlement and shows that the understanding of borders as clearly demarcated—contrary to the idea of postmodernism—is still common, Chabon’s homage to hard-boiled fiction rejects the idea of divine predestination as fanatical and embraces the narrative of border-free universalism. The overlaying of the generic and tonal difference between the two texts, with their starkly different approach to the geography of Jewish settlement, begs the question: is it possible for contemporary Jewish American writing, as Englander would have it, to highlight the fluidity of borders in direct relation to the State of Israel? “Sister Hills” and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union suggest that while the Israeli setting carries with it a burden of essentialism connected to the Biblical discourse surrounding “the Holy Land,” only a more speculative approach, avoiding both the Palestinian setting and the history of the Palestinian conflict, opens up the discourse about Jewish statehood to more postmodern contexts and introduces free will into the geography of Jewishness.
3 The focus on the notion of borders is particularly justified in the case of these two texts as they engage with the theme of borders in general, while also connecting to the much broader cultural context of the disputes and controversies surrounding the borders of the State of Israel. The long-documented academic focus on sociopolitical and cultural aspects of geographical boundaries (cf. Minghi; Prescott; Van Houtum; Brunet-Jailly) has recently taken into account the apparent contradictory split between the seeming disappearance of boundaries in the spirit of “postmodern territoriality” and, on the other hand, the persistence of nationalism, for which the notion of borders understood in many different ways is one of the essential foundational concepts (Newman and Paasi 186; Newman; Paasi). The drive towards border-free world is in direct relation to postmodern notions of selfhood and a critical approach to national identities. It found its way into praxis, for instance, in the project of the European Schengen Zone; however, the pressure to reassert the significance of borders is still relevant in the case of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict or the fight against illegal Mexican immigrants in the United States. Even a closer look at the Schengen Zone reveals that it actually does not constitute a utopian realization of the border-free project. The Schengen Zone’s internal functioning always relied on particularly diligent policing of the border of the European Union as a whole. The borders might have shifted, but the concept remains in power as strongly as ever, making a case for the extension of the border studies theoretical framework from the fields of human and political geography to those of cultural and literary studies.
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2. The Compatibilist Geography of “Sister Hills”
4 A particular emphasis on safeguarding the stability of borders can be observed in Nathan Englander’s “Sister Hills,” a story that introduces an element of fate, divine or otherwise, into its consideration of the way human actions shape territoriality and, more generally, nationhood. The story focuses on a number of dualities, the central of which are its main characters: Rena and Yehudit, two Israeli women settlers. The story takes place in four specific moments in Israeli history, tying the fate of its characters to the fate of Israel as a whole. The first of these moments is in 1973, shortly after the settlement, when the male settlers have gone to war and Yehudit, who fears that her daughter is on the brink of death, decides to symbolically sell her to Rena, thus conforming with an ancient Jewish ritual, in order to save the daughter’s life. The plot resumes then in the time of the intifadas in 1987, when a rapid civilizational progress of the settlement has occurred, and 2000, when Rena, after suffering from a string of personal losses, decides to claim her right to be the mother to Yehudit’s daughter. The narrative finally shifts to 2011, when two stereotypically Millennial Russian settlers, unappreciative of the sacrifices made by their predecessors, come to live in the neighborhood.
5 Englander’s story aims to illustrate how time changes the women’s approach to the contract they have made early in their lives. It also stresses the importance of this seemingly futile gesture by suggesting the validity of its magical function in a number of ways tying to the story’s compatibilist view of fate. Most importantly though, the dualism of the relationship between the two women has to be read as an analogy for the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, which frames the whole text and relates it directly to the consideration of borders and territoriality. The conflict enters the text explicitly as the plot is linked with the intifadas; it is also present in the story as the factor responsible for the absence of male characters in the foreground. Perhaps its most literal incorporation into the thematic level of the piece arrives at its beginning when Rena is discussing the question of legitimacy of Jewish settlements with a Palestinian boy, who mocks the fact that Israelis refer to an ancient contract with God as their main claim to the land inhabited by Palestinians for centuries. He emphasizes the lack of practical grounding of symbolic and performative Jewish claims: “If it was your tree, I’d have seen you at my side last year during harvest. I’d have seen you the year before that, and ten years before that, and a hundred” (Englander 38), he says in response to Rena’s attempt to cut the tree down. The boy then puts a curse on her “head” and on her “home” (Englander 38), unless she leaves the tree be, which she eventually does, even as she continues to chop at it for some time. The thought of the curse does not leave her mind that day, but she imagines the boy might have meant a literal, physical revenge. Instead, Rena is faced with a string of personal tragedies. The rest of the story illustrates an attempt on the part of the Israelis to reclaim the seriousness of the idea of an ancient legal agreement with a higher power, as well as an attempt on Rena’s part to reclaim agency in her own personal life. Within the story world, recognizing the agreement’s validity is a necessary step conditioned by the tradition of rabbinical law. The agreement is then affirmed when the characters accept the conflict between Rena and Yehudit even if they feel uneasy or even outright antagonistic about it.
6 The essential point of view concerning the Israeli and Palestinian territoriality showcased by the story is that religious legitimacy and historical precedence might
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have more nation-building value than mere custom and respect for continuity. The argument between Rena and the Palestinian boy clearly sets the conflict between religious claims to the land and the historical continuity as central to the story’s plot, with the boy still expressing hope that “the Jewish court will return the hill to [the Palestinians]” (Englander 38). The rest of the story proceeds to highlight the way the tradition of religious principalism overtakes pragmatic sensitivity to reality in the Jewish state’s approach to justice. As Englander has been critical towards religion in the past, for instance recognizing ways in which it uses exclusion as means of safeguarding what is perceived as purity of the community (Propst 37), in “Sister Hills” he ambivalently identifies religious tradition as one of the main forces in the construction of the nation. The story world embraces change when it is motivated by transcendentally sanctioned law. Brian Willems has read the debate between Rena and Yehudit, that is, also the debate between the Israelis and the Palestinians, as one concerning “the ‘as if’” of Jewish law “being taken seriously” (10). The story, which includes a long scene of a rabbinical trial that convenes to decide the fate of Yehudit’s/ Rena’s daughter, provides several examples of such “as if” cases, enumerated also in Willems’s essay (10). They refer to cases customarily agreed upon not to be followed through, that is, for example, when a boy jokingly marries a girl at a bar mitzvah, the couple is not expected to continue living as a husband and a wife. According to Willems, in the story the controversy stems from the fact that Rena does follow through on the agreement in which she “as if” became a mother to Yehudit’s daughter (10). Transferring this analogically to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, the Jews for centuries did not take the “as if” of their ownership of the Palestinian territory seriously, yet when they did, controversy and shock arose.
7 This, however, can be put into yet clearer concepts by reading the controversy as one concerned with recognition of performative acts. After all, in order to resolve the national and the personal conflicts, both sides need to accept the performativity of the legal agreements to which Rena or Israel refer. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has argued for a spatial rather than temporal view of performativity, which would allow for the existence of acts which she called “periperformative.” These acts are characterized by varying levels of performativity; the performative power has been denied to them, yet they nevertheless make a claim to it (67-68). A slave who manumits himself by writing a letter to his master in spite of not having such legal power is one of the examples of such an act provided by Sedgwick (89). The question posed by “Sister Hills” seems to be: was the act based on which Rena makes her claim performative or periperformative? On the one hand, Yehudit says that “[i]t was a joke,” “a silly superstition,” and “old- country mumbo jumbo,” “a game.” On the other hand, Rena responds to this by saying: “A deal is a deal” (Englander 54). Rena’s actions are tied to Zionism through the analogy highlighted in her interaction with the Palestinian boy, but they also intersperse the personal with the political, since they represent an attempt to regain personal agency in a life beset with personal tragedies. The view that prevails in the end is that the performativity of a contract invoking God’s authority has to be recognized since, as the story suggests, the whole success of the community has depended on it. The Russian Millennial couple seen in the end of the story is an example of how, even though the importance of these contracts could be easily overlooked and dismissed as local, colorful superstition, the development of the settlement depended on the agreement between the two matriarchs. If the women had not performed the magical ritual at the beginning, the settlement might not have survived the 1973 conflict, therefore in the
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end everyone, including the conspicuously silent and humble daughter, accepts the performative character of the act. The same logic is extended to the question of the legitimacy of the Israeli claim to the territory in question: the success and the progress of the State of Israel relies on universal acceptance of their ancient claim to the Palestinian land, one which is best justified by reading the ancient contract with God as performative and thus legally binding. In 2011 the Palestinians are reduced to an abstract, abject, repressed entity, walled off from the relatively safe space to which the Russian couple is moving. Lisa, who is actually Russian American, expresses concern that underlies a worry that the awareness of the Palestinians’ fate may present an inconvenience for her and her partner. “Do they treat the Palestinians all right on the other side of the wall?,” she says, adding that “[w]e are kind of left-wing, you know. I mean, for the extra space, we’ll live here, for the extra bedrooms, but, you know, we feel bad for the Arabs, with all the roadblocks and things like that” (Englander 71).
8 The story adds a degree of irony to Rena’s and Israel’s fate in its description of what happens after the verdict. Two days later, after the Rosh Hashanah dinner, another intifada begins and Rena decides that it is time for the tree to finally fall down, perhaps encouraged by her victory in court. Aheret declines to help her because of the religious prohibition against work during a holy day, so Rena chops the tree down by herself and tremendously exerts herself in the process. After finding her lying down next to the tree, Aheret decides that her second mother’s life is not in danger, therefore she is not allowed to use a phone to call an ambulance. According to Aheret’s judgment, Rena’s quality of life will deteriorate if she does not receive immediate help, but she will not die. Aheret even mentions the possibility of having this matter settled by the rabbinical court. Still, she makes Rena an offer that she will break the prohibition if Rena gives her freedom. Rena declines, saying: “don’t need to walk.… Because I have you to take care” (Englander 70). This scene aptly encapsulates the story’s ambivalent attitude towards Rena’s and Israel’s reliance on the religiously sanctioned law by showing the cost of deciding to treat it as seriously as they do. She reclaims some of her personal agency, but the law is now yet another factor limiting her freedom.
9 The validity of the contract with God is further reinforced by God’s apparent presence in Englander’s narrative, at least in the form of fate, which is one of the factors shown to shape the characters’ existence. On the one hand, the argument that “Sister Hills” presents a fatalistic view of reality would be hard to defend, as characters are free to make their choices, at least to some extent. Yehudit does decide to sell her daughter because she believes that this action will save her life. Rena does decide to pursue her right to de facto motherhood after a series of personal losses leaves her lonely and without help. On the other hand, reading the story’s reality as wholly shaped by free will would be an equal fallacy since a clear, divinely inspired determinism is present in the story world. Rena’s personal tragedies happen within the context of the Palestinian boy’s curse, representing an intervention of a magical force into her life, if not the will of God or a higher power. Still, she bears partial responsibility for what happens to her: before his death, Rena’s son Tzuki leaves her because she rejects him due to his sexual orientation. In the spirit of compatibilism, people are free to choose the paths they will follow, yet only some of these paths align with God’s design by being good, just, and compliant with what the human and the divine sides agreed to in the covenant, even if Rena’s difficulties in the wake of the Palestinian’s curse complicate the question of what God’s design for her fate and the fate of Israel is. Jonathan Klawans points out a
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famous quote from Mishnah Avot 3.16 which is often used to illustrate the essence of compatibilism: “All is foreseen, but freedom of choice is given” (49).
10 Moreover, “Sister Hills” suggest that freedom does not mean that each choice is equally viable. The choices that violate the proper course of history on both personal and national scale are doomed, or at least this is what the characters think. This belief is enough for them to be reluctant to pursue such questionable paths. Therefore Rena, when standing in front of the Rabbinical court, has only one thing to prove—that letting her assume the role of the mother to Yehudit’s daughter is a choice that complies with God’s design for Israel’s fate. At first, the rabbis cannot imagine deciding in favor of Rena, dismissing her request as “the madness of grief” and calling the agreement between the two women “a trivial pledge” (Englander 55). Rena very quickly retorts by suggesting an analogy between the tradition of Divine contracts and her conflict with Yehudit. She talks about “a covenant with God, which gives [the Israelis] the right to [their] land as a whole” and asks whether “the contracts, with God and man, written down nowhere, only remembered, do they still hold?” (Englander 61). This obviously harkens back to the question of the degrees of the contracts’ performativity but it also illustrates how Rena convinces the rabbis by suggesting that the fate of the whole project of Israeli settlement is dependent on the execution of the women’s agreement. Allowing Yehudit to break the contract would be equivalent to sabotaging God’s design for Israel’s success as the contract was made in God’s name, in order to save the daughter Aheret and therefore save the whole project of the settlement in Sister Hills. Rena reminds the court that on the following day of Rosh Hashanah “God decides who will live and who will die,” (Englander 63) making them aware of the limits of their freedom to decide. It was enough for the rabbis to believe even to a slightest degree that the women’s contract was of foundational importance in the development of the settlement in order for them to decide to uphold and execute it.
11 Alongside the characters, Rena in particular, emphasizing God’s role in the course of history, the narration itself, by adopting a heavily stylized tone, reminiscent of a legend, a myth, or the Bible, becomes reflective of the state of mind of its characters and their belief in the importance of their participation in the nation-building process. The language of “Sister Hills” does not betray doubt if the construct of Jewish identity should be upheld or rather exchanged for a more universalistic ideal of a proper heterosexual life avoiding the issues put forward by consideration of ethnicity, as is the case in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. If anything, the constructedness of identity is obscured by heavy biblical language and symbolism serving to reaffirm the essentialist notions of Jewishness. The third-person narration is full of pathos, devoid of any traces of postmodern distance or self-awareness and eager to replicate the syntax of the Scripture without a parodic agenda. Some sentences, characteristically for the Biblical style, start with conjunctions: “And her ax needed sharpening. And as strong as she was, her arms would need strengthening” (Englander 39). Additionally, various repetitions occur either on the level of syntax, as when certain specifically constructed clauses reappear in the same sentence, or on the level of vocabulary: “But that tree was a dense tree.” (Englander 39). Certain archaisms also occur as when the word “for” is used as a conjunction: “For the tree… was much shorter than you’d imagine for something so tough.” (Englander 37). This biblical gravitas presented without irony attests to the story’s portrayal of the essentialist conception of Jewishness but it also allows for an interpretative supposition that the level of narration is aligned with
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Rena’s view of reality as at least partially determined by God, therefore justifying treating it as the story’s main point.
3. Postmodern Borders and Free Will in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union
12 Quite a contrary vision of a world full of borders but also full of people whose universalistic sensibility highlights the borders’ constructed, artificial character is created by Michael Chabon in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. By adopting the generic frameworks of a hard-boiled detective story and alternate history, Chabon breaks away from compatibilism and an essentialist approach to Jewish identity and geography, proposing a complex approach to history as shaped by the intricate web of human actions. The novel takes place in an alternate historical reality, both in temporal and spatial terms. In the story world, the project of creating the State of Israel has failed after World War II, but another undertaking concerning the fate of the global Jewish community has succeeded. Harold Ickes, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s secretary of the interior, proposed in 1939 that the state of Alaska could become a site of settlement for European Jews, who were at the time increasingly endangered by hostile policies of the Nazi Germany. Chabon’s novel presents a scenario in which this project prevailed and Jews from all over the world fled to Alaska rather than to Palestine. Most of the story takes place in the town of Sitka, which as some critics have remarked, seems remarkably appropriate given its already Yiddish-sounding name (Kravitz 95).
13 The precarious status of the Jewish community in the novel seems to be directly linked to lack of clarity concerning the status of their borders: they occupy the territory of the specific part of the United States, from where, throughout the course of the plot, they are to be deported. Since the federal government never agreed to recognize what was derogatorily called “Jewlaska” (Chabon 29) as a separate state, for years it was existing as an interim federal district. Just as in “Sister Hills,” the characters are not in complete control of their fate but in the case of Chabon’s novel this is wholly dependent on human decisions, though not made by Jews themselves. They cannot claim the Alaskan land as their own, since they struggle with the indigenous Native American population dominating the non-urban regions of the state in a way which is clearly parallel to both the conflict with the Palestinians and the treatment of Native Americans by the settlers from Europe. As the narration states, “Sitka Jews rarely see or speak to Indians, except in federal court or in the small Jewish towns along the Line” (Chabon 103), elsewhere emphasizing the Jewish fear of indigenous population: “Fifty years of movie scalpings and whistling arrows and burning Conestogas have their effect on people’s minds” (Chabon 104). Some of the characters clearly wish that their reality was much more reliant on boundaries, perhaps out of the desire to escape the precarity of the situation in which their settlement in Sitka is contingent on a whim of the American government. One of the more significant plotlines revolves around an Orthodox community that delineates its borders with the help of an eruv, symbolically reasserting the stability of the boundaries in a world where all borders seem arbitrary. At the same time, the point of view of the main character, who focalizes the narration, shares the universalistic distance from the nationalist or particularist discourses, which are presented as fanatical.
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14 The plot of the novel revolves around the investigation led by Detective Meyer Landsman, who alongside uncovering the generic murder plot, charts the complex web of human actions that shaped the fate of the Sitka community. Landsman’s name, as Daniel Anderson noticed, might refer to “landsmanshaft,” “one of the group of organizations that grouped Jewish immigrants together by associating them with other immigrants that came from the same places in Europe” (90). The name may also be read as having much less culturally specific significance, that of “Man of the Land,” pointing out in yet another way the novel’s preoccupation with geography. Landsman investigates the murder of someone who is initially known as Emmanuel Lasker and later revealed to be Mendel Shpilman, the son of an Orthodox rabbi and a man considered by many Alaskan Jews to be the Messiah. Ladsman’s investigation eventually requires him to visit Rabbi Shpilman, one of the religious leaders of the Orthodox Jewish community on Verbov Island and the father of the deceased. The Verbover Jews have established an eruv, a form of enclosing the space for themselves in order to circumvent the Sabbath laws by extending the private space of their homes into the territory of the whole neighbourhood, which becomes a private sphere of the whole Orthodox community and allows the observant Jews, for instance, to carry objects from one house to another without fear of breaking the Sabbath. One of the men introduced in the novel, Zimbalist, is tasked with safeguarding the integrity of the delineated boundary, policing its unspoiled wholeness as the religious validity of the eruv relies on strict physical enclosure from the outside, public world.
15 There are many ways in which the narrative frames the eruvim as fanatically scrupulous about ostentatiously guarding the enclosure of their neighborhood and presents their endeavor as ridiculous. It is achieved for instance through filtering the community’s representation through the consciousness of the novel’s protagonist. Landsman, who is the focalizer of the narration, is described throughout the novel as someone who sees the actions based on religious or nationalistic ideology as absurd, pointless, and detrimental to the overall quality of life. Before he is forced to visit Verbov Island, he states that “he’d much rather go to Madagascar” (Chabon 99), recalling the island’s status as one the possible places of Jewish resettlement before World War II. The narration later specifies that the Verbovers’ tribal appropriation of Jewishness makes him feel “less Jewish”: “He goes clean-shaven and does not tremble before God. He is not a Verbover Jew and therefore is not really a Jew at all. And if he is not a Jew, then he is nothing” (Chabon 102).
16 Landsman is presented as a broken alcoholic whose heterosexual relationship with ex- wife Bina has failed, leading him to depression and destructive behavior. A longing for a life compliant with the dominant American model of a well-structured heterosexual family fuels his frustration and informs the ending that asserts his eventual commitment to try to reestablish the relationship with his ex-wife. This view of a happy, undisturbed, long-term heterosexual relationship and the establishment of nuclear family as the ultimate goal of life has its ultimate expression in the American culture of post-World War II liberal consensus, coinciding with the peak popularity of the hardboiled genre and film noir. Even though the hardboiled tradition, with its predilection towards bleak endings, could superficially be considered skeptical about the possibility of realizing this dream, the conservative longing for an orderly life in an exemplary nuclear family is the basis of the genre’s ethos. In the spirit of postmodern self-awareness, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union seems to accept this longing and is more
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hopeful about turning it into reality as the answer about whether or not it will succeed remains open at the end of the novel. The fact that the narrative veers away from the hardboiled tropes, as it does not suggest the relationship’s eventual failure, serves as an act of affirming the heterosexual relationship as a goal. This ideological goal presents a clear alternative to religiously or nationalistically driven characters. The novel’s logic contrasts committing oneself to ideology as it is conventionally understood—a set of strict political or social beliefs—with devoting one’s life to building a normative family, therefore, committing oneself to ideology as it is understood in the Marxist tradition (cf. Althusser) and sees the two alternatives as mutually exclusive. In this context, then, the eruvim come out as suspicious from the beginning since Landsman sees their commitment to the intricacies of Jewish law as over-the-top and, as Daniel Anderson notices, cartoonish (91). As the narration attests, “[t]he truth is, black-hat Jews make Landsman angry, and they always have. He finds that it is a pleasurable anger, rich with layers of envy, condescension, resentment, and pity” (Chabon 102). The envy might relate to the well-structured and seemingly purposeful character of their existence, the longing for which is echoed in Landsman’s attempts to make his relationship work. The rest of the protagonist’s sentiments find their reflection in the place that the Orthodox Jews occupy in the story.
17 Landsman’s visit to Verbov Island conforms with a specific generic trope of a Chandleresque story, in which the investigation leads the protagonist to a place that is exotic and even grotesque in spite of its geographical proximity to the character’s everyday environs.3 In this context, the Verbover community with all its peculiarities and unusual customs, as well as the Verbov Island territory, become framed as grotesque right from their appearance: “The street grid here on the island is still Sitka’s, ruled and numbered, but apart from that, you are gone, sweetness: starshot, teleported, spun clear through the wormhole to the planet of the Jews” (Chabon 101). In the context of this trope, the mere distinctiveness of a place from its surroundings makes it weird. The community eventually has to leave the Island alongside all the other Jews because of the Reversion of the settlement in Alaska. The project of sustaining a separate, bordered out space within Alaskan territory fails, being replaced by what Landsman settles for in the end: a heterosexual relationship which keeps the private sphere where it belongs according to the dominant post-Enlightenment culture. “[T]here is no Messiah of Sitka. Landsman has no home, no future, no fate but Bina,” (Chabon 411) say some of the last words of the novel, asserting the rejection of stable notions of territory in which the Verbovers would believe and of nationalistic ideology espoused by the Jewish terrorist group that is eventually revealed to have been responsible for Mendel Shpilman’s death.
18 In eruv’s case, the approach to geography and borders is of crucial importance for understanding the ideological differences between the groups concerned. Davina Cooper analyzed a controversy concerning the establishment of an eruv in north-west London and has argued that the critics of the eruv’s establishment adopted what she called a “liberal modernist perspective,” emphasizing the notions of “universalism, evolutionism, the public-private divide, secularism, and Enlightenment rationality” (Cooper 530). In The Yiddish Policemen’s Union the Verbovers are depicted as a fanatical group challenging not only the modernist nationalist universalism, but also the postmodernist border-free perspective that might be ascribed to Landsman. The novel’s protagonist does not betray commitment to any stable national identity, unless
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his devotion to the ideal of a heterosexual couple is seen as aligned with the American ideology to a sufficient extent to read him as assimilated enough.
19 The way the characters in the novel approach the questions of territoriality and national identity is largely echoed in their approach to free will. This, in turn, informs what the text has to say about the historical conditions of Jewish settlement. The central consciousness of the novel, Meyer Landsman, espouses a view that is partially conditioned by the generic conventions of the hardboiled detective story. The typical noir scenario would fit either into the logic of predestination to failure or support the view of the world as governed by chance; in this case, the failure would be the result of the characters’ misjudged actions.4 The latter option is more supportive of the thesis that the noir genre was a backlash against the postwar empowered femininity (cf. Farrimond), as it still held up the restoration of the strong patriarchy as a possibility. Nevertheless, the importance of free will recurred in hardboiled stories, as is the case also in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. The responsibility for Landsman’s miserable life situation is put on his shoulders from the very beginning and his conscious decision in the end to reattempt to have a successful relationship with Bina is part of this logic.
20 This fusion between seeing one’s actions as the result of one’s free will and the constraints imposed on one’s free will by the others’ exercising of the same privilege, is prevalent in case of all the characters in the novel. It also further extends into the novel’s approach to the fate of the Jews as a people. What is certainly rejected, is the notion that a nation or a person may be predestined by God to succeed. Mendel Shpilman seems to be chosen by God to be the Messiah, yet the burden of being treated like one eventually leads him to self-loathing. Shpilman attempts to escape it by using drugs and withdrawing himself from society; the change of his name is one of the steps in that direction. The Verbovers choose to establish a closed community for themselves, yet the American decision to proceed with the Reversion becomes an obstacle to that project. The terrorist plot to blow up the Mosque in Jerusalem is a free- will attempt to influence the course of history even if the plans do not go as they were intended to because of individual mistakes. Landsman’s attempts to maintain a relationship with Bina are juxtaposed with these larger social and political issues, highlighting the tension between hope derived from Jewish utopianism and the hopelessness of the hard-boiled genre as central in the novel’s worldview. Toward the end of the novel, the narration illustrates the way Landsman’s hope is often undermined with doubt and fear that it is all too good to be true: Any kind of wonder seems likely. That the Jews will pick up and set sail for the promised land to feast on giant grapes and toss their beards in the desert wind. That the Temple will be rebuilt, speedily and in our day. War will cease, ease and plenty and righteousness will be universal, and humankind will be treated to the regular spectacle of lions and lambs cohabiting. Every man will be a rabbi, every woman a holy book, and every suit will come with two pairs of pants. (Chabon 406-407)
21 All of these plot points suggest that the geography of Jewishness is presented in the novel as a result of the complex web of human decisions and their unpredictable consequences. The project of establishing the State of Israel fails because of the Palestinians’ decision to oppose it militarily. The Jews settle in the Sitka District because of the American policy and later leave because of the federal government’s decision to discontinue support for this project. Any sort of emphasis on the identification of Jews as a Chosen People, being on “a mission from God,” is dismissed
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in the spirit of Meyer Landsman’s skepticism. In line with the generic tropes of the detective story, in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union the events are always a result of someone’s action and any sort of external conditioning stems only from the complexity of the actions’ consequences. Thus, an idea of divine fate is excluded from the novel’s philosophical framework.
4. Conclusion
22 The juxtaposition of “Sister Hills” and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union leads to a conclusion that it would be much harder to present such a postmodern narrative rooted in the contingency of human actions if it were to be set in Israel. This seems particularly true in the case of Jewish American writers, whose outsider position regarding the State of Israel makes it particularly difficult to pierce through the traditional discourses of Israeli statehood. As Englander put forward in “Sister Hills,” the Israeli national identity is built on the essentialist discourses of God-sanctioned territoriality, whose hegemony precludes their representation as optional. Narratives set in Israel have to face the fact that postmodern takes on geography of Jewishness are not the norm. The fictional speculative setting of an alternate history novel gives it freedom to let go of the essentialism, while setting it in the United States opens up narrative possibilities available because of the author’s position as an American Jew.
23 Another major difference between the two texts, besides the difference in genres, concerns the gender of the protagonists and the main focalizers of the narratives. In fact, most of the characters in “Sister Hills” are women, while almost all of the cast of The Yiddish Policemen’s Union is comprised of men. Their respective entanglement in certain discourses of femininity and masculinity partially informs the responses of both casts to the Other represented by the Palestinians and the Alaskan Native Americans. The characters of “Sister Hills” are put in a typical wartime scenario, in which women are deserted by men who go to war, while women have to take on responsibilities that were traditionally denied to them, such as that of defending the household. Instead of highlighting the reading of the project of Israeli settlement as invasion of lands occupied by the Palestinians, the emphasis on women’s experience pulls the focus of the narrative towards the basic need to defend the settlers’ own lives and, similarly, the need to avoid the nation’s annihilation as one of the essential reasons for the existence of the State of Israel. Rena’s attempts to reclaim agency through asserting her right to be Aheret’s mother can thus be read as a response to an unfair sacrifice she was forced to make because of her gender. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union, in turn, fully echoes the masculinist discourses of territorial conquest and, at the same time, critiques them through highlighting their inadequacy. The Sitka Jews are put in a position that resembles the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, but also the subjugation of Native Americans as a result of the westward expansion of the United States. As the decision to settle in Alaska was not entirely made by Jews, they are forced to replicate certain rituals of imperialist politics, without any apparent willingness to commit to them. The postmodern character of Landsman’s narration and his status as a generic hardboiled protagonist make him by default a representative of masculinity in crisis and therefore the crisis of the masculine discourse of territorial conquest.
24 Both “Sister Hills” and The Yiddish Policemen’s Union thematize Jewish identity as formed in and shaped by a specific geographic context, at the same time linking it to the
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problem of the extent of free will in human actions, which, after all, create the borders. As such, neither of them presents a deterministic view of reality. While “Sister Hills” introduces a compatibilist view of the controversy surrounding Jewish settlements, allowing for some degree of divine intervention into the course of action, The Yiddish Policemen’s Union rejects any notions of predestined fate. The ideological difference between the two texts is in strong correlation with their generic difference, one being a biblically-stylized parable problematizing the role of traditionalism in the development of national communities, second a postmodern riff on the hard-boiled detective story, a genre famous for highlighting the cracks in stability of essentialist concepts. Both texts were written by American authors in the early 21st century, it is hard not to read them then as statements on Jewish American support or rejection of Zionism in the face of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Chabon’s novel is very skeptical about the notion of using one’s national, ethnic, or religious identity as motivation for violence or destruction, therefore questioning the justifiability of Israeli offensive actions. Englander’s story examines how the sacrifices that the Israeli settlers made, as well as their ancient, God-given claim to the Palestinian land are taken advantage of in the shaping of the Israeli identity, which renders the story a portrait of the more conservative side of the divide. Both texts seem to come to one common conclusion: it is of the greatest importance to decide what stories Jews choose to tell about themselves, ones in which ancient contracts with God hold true, or ones in which the affirmation of the individual overcomes ethnic identity and history. Yehudit builds Aheret’s identity on stories—this identity will make her accept Rena’s decision to execute her rights to be her mother: “The [story] which Yehudit always told with great pride was that once upon a time, there were in this place two empty mountains that God has long ago given Israel but that Israel had long forgotten” (Englander 53). Chabon’s novel’s last words are simply: “I have a story for you” (411).
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses (Notes towards an Investigation).” Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Translated by Ben Brewster, Monthly Review Press, 1971, pp. 127-86.
Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities. Verso, 2006.
Anderson, Daniel. “Planet of the Jews: Eruvim, Geography, and Jewish Identity in Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” Shofar: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Jewish Studies, vol. 33, no. 3, 2015, pp. 86-109.
Avineri, Shlomo. The Making of Modern Zionism: The Intellectual Origins of the Jewish State. Basic Books, 2017.
Bigelow, Gordon. “Michael Chabon’s Unhomely Pulp.” LIT: Literature Interpretation Theory, vol. 19, no. 4, 2008, pp. 305-20.
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Brunet-Jailly, Emmanuel. “Theorizing Borders: An Interdisciplinary Perspective.” Geopolitics, vol. 10, no. 4, 2005, pp. 633-49.
Chabon, Michael. The Yiddish Policemen’s Union. Harper Perennial, 2008.
Cooper, Davina. “Talmudic Territory? Space, Law, and Modernist Discourse.” Journal of Law and Society, vol. 23, no. 4, 1996, pp. 529-48.
Elden, Stuart. Terror and Territory: The Spatial Extent of Sovereignty. U of Minnesota P, 2009.
Englander, Nathan. “Sister Hills.” What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank, Alfred A. Knopf, 2012, pp. 33-74.
Farrimond, Katherine. The Contemporary Femme Fatale: Gender, Genre, and American Cinema. Routledge, 2018.
Herzl, Theodor. A Jewish State: An Attempt at a Modern Solution of the Jewish Question. Translated by Sylvia d’Avigdor and Jacob De Haas, Federation of American Zionists, 1917.
Irwin, John T.. Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir. The Johns Hopkins UP, 2006.
Klawans, Jonathan. “Josephus on Fate, Free Will, and Ancient Jewish Types of Compatibilism.” Numen, vol. 56, 2009, pp. 44-90.
Kravitz, Bennett. “The ‘Aquatic Zionist’ in The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” Studies in Popular Culture, vol. 33, no. 1, 2010, pp. 95-112.
Minghi, Julian V.. “Boundary Studies in Political Geography.” Annals of the Association of American Geographers, vol. 53, no. 3, 1963, pp. 407-28.
Newman, David. “The Lines That Continue to Separate Us: Borders in Our ‘Borderless’ World.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 30, no. 2, 2006, pp. 143-61.
Newman, David, and Anssi Paasi. “Fences and Neighbors in the Postmodern World: Boundary Narratives in Political Geography.” Progress in Human Geography, vol. 22, no. 2, 1998, pp. 186-207.
“On Being Jewish, American and a Writer.” The New York Times, 2 Oct 2017, accessed 13 Oct 2019. www.nytimes.com/2017/10/02/t-magazine/jewish-american-novelists.html.
Paasi, Anssi. “Bounded Spaces in a ‘Borderless World’: Border Studies, Power, and the Anatomy of Territory.” Journal of Power, vol. 2, no. 2, 2009, pp. 213-34.
Prescott, J. R. V.. Political Frontiers and Boundaries. Unwin Hyman, 1987.
Propst, Lisa. “‘Making One Story’? Forms of Reconciliation in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Everything Is Illuminated and Nathan Englander’s The Ministry of Special Cases.” MELUS, vol. 36, no. 1, 2011, pp. 37-60.
Rovner, Adam. “Alternate History: The Case of Nava Semel’s IsraIsland and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas, vol. 9, no. 1, 2011, pp. 131-52.
Schwartz, Dov. Faith at the Crosswords: A Theological Profile of Religious Zionism. Translated by Batya Stein, Brill, 2002.
Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Touching Feeling: Affect, Pedagogy, Performativity. Duke UP, 2003.
Van Houtum, Henk. “The Geopolitics of Borders and Boundaries.” Geopolitics, vol. 10, no. 4, 2005, pp. 672-79.
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Willems, Brian. “Scale and Change: Assaf Gavron’s CrocAttack!, Nathan Englander’s ‘Sister Hills,’ and Elia Suleiman’s Divine Intervention.” Textual Practice, 2016, pp. 1-22.
NOTES
1. The example of Zionism illustrates that there was always a strong presence of religiously motivated determinism in social and political initiatives developed at the intersection of identity and geography. According to some of the religious Zionists, even the secular initiatives advocating the return to “Eretz Yisrael” were unconsciously following God’s design for the fate of his Chosen People (cf. Schwartz 179). Still, secular Zionists, Theodor Herzl among them, predominantly avoided overtly religious rhetoric, as their Zionism was a child of the post- Enlightenment, turn-of-the-century progressivism and was characterized by a pragmatic approach to resolving social problems. In Herzl’s writing Zionism was a necessity because Jewish existence in diaspora was a source of social tension, caused by the Jewish nation not having had its own state. The creation of Israel was to be a conscious human decision, with religion given a secondary position, respected but not overemphasized. Within the framework of his post- Enlightenment progressivism, the separation of church and state was an essential value to uphold, therefore the only section of Herzl’s A Jewish State devoted to religion serves to assure the reader that there will be no theocracy in the newly formed state (38). Secular Zionism was then not deterministic per se. The success or the failure of the project was primarily dependent on human action, which could be entirely shaped by human free will (cf. Avineri). The tension between reading Zionism as determined by God or by man was bound, then, to shape the policies adopted by the State of Israel after the settlement in Palestine that was locked in a state of perpetual ideological conflict. 2. Jonathan Klawans recounted an ancient text of Josephus that divided Jewish positions on free will into three groups. The Essenes were supposed to be practicing a wholly deterministic view of God’s intervention into human existence, the Sadducees were to espouse a position giving men an almost unlimited ability to choose between good and evil, pushing God aside into a role of a mere spectator of human drama. The Pharisees were to adopt a compatibilist position that would be situated somewhat in between, where determinism and free will coexisted (46-47). 3. Classic examples include Marlowe’s visit to a makeshift detox clinic in The Long Goodbye, replicated later by the defamiliarization of the Chinese American neighbourhood of San Francisco in Chinatown, or the sense of absurdity and weirdness surrounding almost every location in Thomas Pynchon’s Inherent Vice. 4. An illuminating discussion of fate and free will in various texts of hard-boiled fiction and film noir can be found in John T. Irwin’s Unless the Threat of Death Is Behind Them: Hard-Boiled Fiction and Film Noir.
ABSTRACTS
The discourses of modern Jewish statehood have always been entangled with the notion of borders and with the tradition of religiously inspired historical determinism. The Zionist project negotiated between the God-given, predetermined character of the Jewish return to “the Holy
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Land” and more secular justifications for settlement in the Palestine. Nevertheless, the establishment of the State of Israel relied on a strong assertion of redrawn geographical boundaries, which were symbolically strengthened by the authority of the Biblical geography of Jewishness. This article aims to investigate how two contemporary Jewish American literary texts, Natahan Englander’s “Sister Hills” (2012) and Michael Chabon’s The Yiddish Policemen’s Union (2008), address the stability of Jewish borders in relation to their reliance on the discourses of religious determinism. I argue that while the generic framework of a realist short story and the Israeli setting of “Sister Hills” lead it to examine the essentialism of the Biblical discourse surrounding “the Holy Land,” Chabon’s novel, through its adoption of a more speculative approach, which involves moving the center of Jewish statehood to Alaska, is able to open up the discourse about Jewish territoriality to more postmodern contexts and introduce free will into the geography of Jewishness.
INDEX
Keywords: Jewish American literature, Nathan Englander, Michael Chabon, geography of Jewishness
AUTHOR
FILIP BORATYN Filip Boratyn is a Ph.D. student at the University of Warsaw and a graduate of UW’s American Studies Center. His dissertation project focuses on the cultural work of enchantment in the contemporary American ecological imagination. He recently received the 2020 David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award from the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts for his paper “Magic(s) of the Anthropocene: Enchantment vs. Terroir in Jeff VanderMeer’s Southern Reach.”
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Rummaging Through the Ashes: 9/11 American Poetry and the Transcultural Counterwitness
Matthew Moran
1. Introduction
1 In the wake of 9/11, poetry proved an important medium for national expression. A year after the attacks, over 25,000 poems had been published on poems.com alone (Metres), and a year later, in The Best American Poetry 2003, edited by Yusef Komunyakaa, almost a fifth of the poems addressed the terrorist attacks or New York City (Keniston 659). In addition to print and virtual sites, poems were produced on nonconventional sites, such as the walls of Union Square and the sides of buildings (Gray 265). Poetry was such an important outlet of expression that one New York Fire Department chief pleaded with New Yorkers to give food, flowers and blankets, but refrain from publishing poems (Johnson & Merians ix).
2 Although studies of 9/11 poetry have been extensive, this essay returns to the attacks of September 11th to explore how two 9/11 poems, “First Writing Since (Poem on Crisis of Terror)” by Suheir Hammad and “Alabanza: In Praise of the Local 100” by Martin Espada, challenge the pervasive patriotism presented in mainstream journalism through acts of transcultural counterwitnessing. By drawing on current definitions of testimonial witnessing and public circulation, this study acknowledges the value of transcultural voices in America’s ongoing battle with identity politics, post-9/11. Through its investigation of Hammad and Espada’s writings, I address the following questions: How do Suheir Hammad and Martin Espada’s 9/11 poems oppose, and engage with, the pervasive patriotism presented in mainstream journalism? What is the value of transcultural poetry when confronting the factors that contribute to extreme violence? This study begins by briefly defining the key term “transcultural counterwitness” before turning to its analysis of Suheir Hammad and Martin Espada’s poems.
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2. Defining Transcultural Counterwitnessing
3 To explore the notion of “transcultural counterwitnessing,” it is important to first define the term and its role in my analysis. The modifier “transcultural” assumes two distinct purposes: first, it illuminates how remembrance is understood beyond national or local frameworks; and second, it reconsiders who has the right to bear national and cultural memory (Rothberg, “A Dialogue on the Ethics and Politics” 31). The transcultural figure occupies an important dialogical space and serves to draw attention to complex interactions between peoples, cultures, and patterns of belonging in a globalized world. It has been argued that the 9/11 attacks encouraged a conservative shift in American definitions of national identity and communal belonging (Zamorano Leena 4). Transcultural figures challenge such traditional understandings of national culture by providing access to diverse perspectives, and the various cultural and social backgrounds which contribute to broader understandings of national identity (Zomorano Llena, Hansen, and Gilsenan Nordin ix-xi).
4 The notion of “counterwitness” draws on research from the fields of witness testimony and the public sphere. In The Moral Witness, Carolyn Dean defines the “counterwitness” as a “marginal cultural figure [who] emerges as a symbol of frustration with uneven global justice and the strain injustice places on the governance systems it has created and sustained” (138). For Dean, this includes third parties, such as humanitarian workers, journalists, and onlookers, who were not present during the violence but “supplement the testimonial roles of witnesses” (Dean 137).
5 Another contribution to the notion of the counterwitness comes from Michael Rothberg, who bases his thinking on Jürgen Habermas’ and Michael Warner’s concepts of the public and counterpublic spheres. According to Habermas, publics are spaces of interaction and circulation, which are distinct from the state and can be critical of it and are necessary for a functional democracy (Fraser 57). Publics are formed and accessed by language and forged between strangers (Warner 85). Counterwitnessing depends on creating alternative spaces within the public sphere where dominant discourses can be challenged. These counterpublics emerge from “a conflictual relation to the dominant public” (Warner 85). Counterpublics allow citizens to participate in the transformation of culture by pursuing new modes of expression and challenging public testimony (Warner 88; Gustafson 466). Poetry is one of the counterdiscourses that goes into the creation of counterpublics, and it poses a challenge to mainstream journalism and conservative political rhetoric.1
6 In the case of 9/11, mainstream news coverage served as the primary means of witnessing the attacks for most Americans (Anker 23; Zelizer and Allan 7), with television being most prominent medium (Anker 23). In years following the attacks, the American public witnessed a surge of patriotic expression in mainstream journalism (Li and Brewer 728). For example, television coverage from providers such as Fox News and CNN, participated in countless reminders of nationalism.2 Reporters wore red, white, and blue ribbons, and segments were often adorned with logos of the American flag or had stars-and-stripes backgrounds (Wasibord 206). Broadcasters, such CBS anchorperson Dan Rather, publicly vowed to “line up” for the president and the country (Zelizer and Allan 5). This concept of “patriotic journalism” was most directly addressed by Fox Senior Vice President John Moody when he asserted that his news
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company’s mantra “be accurate, be fair, be American” was important post-9/11 because it showed that journalism was not “uncomfortable embracing a good-versus-evil canvas” (Rutenberg).
7 This is not to suggest that mainstream journalism failed to engage in discussions of American pluralism. For example, The New York Times’ moving tribute “Portraits of Grief”3 elegized the lives of Americans of various ethnic and national backgrounds, while networks like PBS ran specials such as “American Muslim Community Since September 11,”4 acknowledging the difficulties for Arab-American and communities of color, following the attacks. However, many studies have observed how mainstream journalism reinforced us-vs.-them political rhetoric and drew on Arab stereotypes to stoke public fear (Powell 92; Waisbord 205; Gershkoff and Kushner 526). For example, a study conducted by Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Paul Waldman describes how the mainstream coverage of 9/11 favored compelling narratives at the expense of accuracy which, in turn, greatly influenced how the general public viewed the attacks and Arabs (xii).
8 But Arab Americans were not the only targets of mainstream coverage. In her study The Criminalization of Immigration: The Post 9/11 Moral Panic, critic Samantha Hauptman describes how after 9/11 mainstream journalism increased its coverage of news which linked migrant groups to criminality (Hauptman 126-127). In doing so, mainstream journalism establishes a climate of fear that associates immigrants and non-citizens with recurring social issues such as crime, national security, and terrorism (Hauptman 141).5 The overwhelming pro-government bias and anti-outsider sentiment in media narratives played a critical role in stoking public support for the US government’s War on Terror (Bird 148; Gershkoff and Kushner 528). By framing the attacks through “the nation at risk” narrative, mainstream media “offered an opportunity to position patriotic identity by articulating the Other” (Waisbord 205). I call this us-vs.-them political frame “pervasive patriotism.”
9 Because pervasive patriotism had such a significant impact on public opinion, poetry offered important possibilities for articulating counter-discourses. Suheir Hammad and Martin Espada counterwitness pervasive patriotism through their representations of the “intersections, overlaps, and tensions between disparate histories” (Rothberg, “Writing Ruins” 102). Multidirectional remembrances allow writers “to think of the public sphere as a malleable discursive space in which groups do not simply articulate established positions but actually come into being through their dialogical interactions with others” (Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory 13). There were many interesting poetic responses to 9/11 such as Lucille Clifton’s “Tuesday 9/11/01” and Galway Kinnell’s “When the Tower Fell.” But such accounts address the trauma from nativist viewpoints. Transcultural poetics are more elastic in their ability to showcase the collision of intercultural relationships through their blurring of national labels and resistance to nativist views (Ramazani 14, 24).
10 Born in Lebanon, Suheir Hammad is the daughter of Palestinian refugees who migrated to Brooklyn when Hammad was five. Much of her writing invests in migrant perspectives to counter nativist American ones (Knopf-Newman 74). Hammad found that poetry provided an outlet to fight against anti-Arab sentiment in the United States, rebuking what Edward Said labelled the “essential terrorist” stereotype (Harb 92). But Hammad does not write on behalf of Arabs alone: “First Writing Since” and her subsequent poetry confirm her agenda to provide a voice to her “Puerto Rican and
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Haitian and Italian and Jewish neighbors” (Knopf-Newman 79). While Suheir Hammad’s poem focuses on effects of pervasive narratives on Arab-Americans, Martin Espada’s broadens the conversations to demonstrates how such narratives impact migrants of color.
11 Martin Espada is a Brooklyn-based poet, born in 1957 and raised in the southwest borough of New York City in a Jewish-Puerto Rican household. Son of photojournalist/ activist Frank Espada, Martin Espada entered the world of activism from youth and found poetry a useful form to champion the struggles of American migrants. With “Alabanza,” Espada saw an opportunity to counter rituals of patriotism and confront the dehumanization of immigrants (O’Conner). Hammad and Espada’s emphases on global injustice draw attention to how an understanding of our world “is organized by political choices, rather than it being the result of a convenient Darwinist fatalism over which we have no control” (Roberts 11).6 Their attention to factors, such as mass migration, that contribute to violence underscores the value of transcultural counterwitnessing in multicultural societies like the United States. Both poets are deeply affected by the attacks and invest in communicating their confusion, despair, and loss. Their ethnicity and outsider status afford them a vantage point to counter patriotic rhetoric and enable dialogues on global injustice and violence often neglected in pervasive patriotism.
3. Abstract Realities in Suhier Hammad’s “First Writing Since”
12 Suheir Hammad’s “First Writing Since (Poem on Crisis of Terror)” was written just weeks after the attacks. Hammad emailed her poem to around 50 of her closest friends who then circulated it via the Internet (Hopkinson). Within months, the poem was available on more than 150 websites and received widespread attention following her performance on HBO’s Def Comedy Jam (Rothberg, “Seeing Terror, Feeling Art” 135). The poem is prose-like in form, consisting of seven sections of various lengths and perspectives, and it reads like a diary. The poem’s impact has been attributed to its performative elements, specifically its use of multiple voices and identities.7 These voices provide a multiplicity of perspectives, which are essential for the poem’s thematic and formal purposes. Michael Rothberg, whose work has inspired this essay, has praised Hammad’s poem for its treatment of private and public trauma.8 My analysis will shift the focus to how the poem counterwitnesses the source and location of global violence.
13 The poem dramatizes a vast array of voices, ranging from the elegiac, humorous and hostile, to illustrate the fractured collective of the American people. For example, the “thank yous” of the second section draw attention to everyday stories of survival. The poem’s subtle, anecdotal humor sheds light on the unexpected reasons for survival: some people survive through luck, procrastination, and even food poisoning. The third section, meanwhile, stages the more disturbing realties of 9/11. Here, the poem’s narration fluctuates between the singular and collective “i” through its dramatization of families searching for loved ones. The poem’s use of the inclusive “we,” and the linguistic echoes of the infamous “Amber Alerts” of the late 1990’s,9 emphasize the sense of despair and ill-founded hope invested in rescue and search missions at Ground Zero. As the section closes, its perspectival shift from the “we” to “i” reimagines the
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relationship between collective and individual mourning through its intense emotional buildup. The repetitive “i am looking for” (Hammad) intensifies the drama and connects the human and moral collateral damage. But perhaps the most imperative performance within the poem is that of an Arab, female other. For the remainder of this discussion, I will turn my attention to this performance and its role in counterwitnessing the attacks.
14 Hammad situates her Arab, female, other “i” between two cultures, the American and the Palestinian. The intentional omission of capitalization raises suspicion about claims of cultural identification and recognition. Although her use of “i” demonstrates the heightened self-referentiality and self-reflexivity common to the first-person speaker of traditional lyrical poetry, the lack of capitalization evokes a sense of psychological displacement from her surroundings. 10The opening section of the poem, for example, illustrates the sense of fear and disassociation experienced by her Arab-American speaker through a series of random, interweaving meditations. Here, the performing “i” unites with, and breaks apart from, her audience through her confrontation with trauma: “there have been no words. / i have not written one word/ no poetry in the ashes south of canal street” (Hammad). From its outset, the speaker ensures the reader that she belongs to the greater American collective: she is a grieving citizen and a worried sibling. These feelings are short lived, however, as the speaker is forced to abandon her collective role to confront the immediate, inherited consequences of racialization: fire in the city air and i feared for my sister’s life in a way never before, and then, and now, i fear for the rest of us.
first, please god, let it be a mistake, the pilot's heart failed, the plane's engine died. then please god, let it be a nightmare, wake me now. please god, after the second plane, please, don't let it be anyone who looks like my brothers. (Hammad)
15 As the series of anaphoric “please gods” intensifies, the poem replaces the desolate mood of the opening with one of complete dread, as fears of citizen retaliation overtake the urge to participate in the larger experience of collective mourning. The fear felt for her sister results not from the death and debris at Ground Zero, but from more “abstract” uncertainties beyond the attack zone. Although the speaker is a victim of terror, like all other Americans, the speaker has difficulty articulating her Americanness, and instead refers to herself “as a woman, as a palestinian, as a broken human being” (Hammad). Her response echoes the Du Boisian notion of double consciousness,11 as she experiences herself as separated entities, rather than an autonomous whole, forcing the speaker into an either/or imperative of siding with her American or Palestinian identity.
16 But perhaps the most powerful performance of the citizen/other binary comes in section four. Here, the poem illustrates antithetical responses within the US political and cultural terrain and further complicates the inclusive/exclusive dynamics of citizenship through a series of direct and indirect encounters with other Americans. The first incident happens while overhearing the public outcry for military response over the radio. “ricardo,” presumably a radio personality or interviewee in a news program, declares: "i will / feel so much better when the first bombs drop over there. and my / friends feel the same way” (Hammad). A second incident soon follows when a
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woman in a parked car fumes “‘we’re gonna burn them so bad, i swear, so bad’” (Hammad). Both characters voice a version of patriotism that demonizes Arab- Americans and insists on the necessity of US military retaliation. These encounters have profound impacts on the Palestinian-American identity of the speaker. Taken aback, she feels a surge of conflicting emotions, such as her connection to the global struggle of her Palestinian brethren and a loyalty to her “friends and fam” at home (Hammad). This dynamism between the two cultural realties of the “i” portrays how reducing patriotism to a zero-sum game, in which the only possibilities are Palestinian or American, neglects the complexities of multicultural societies. It also bears light on the psycho-emotional repercussions of the rhetoric of patriotic expression.
17 One of the poem’s greatest merits rests in its resistance to oversimplification. For example, at the end of section four, the poem demonstrates the complexities of national identity and love of country through the speaker’s admission to having a brother in the Navy and being Arab. What follows is a touching, almost maternal moment, when a “big white woman” embraces the speaker to comfort her (Hammad). The reality that Arab-Americans protect America’s boarders, citizens and political interests through their service in US military contrasts the stereotypes prevalent in journalism at the time. Such moments within the poetry affirm Rothberg’s belief of the capacity for counterpublics to “challenge the supposed neutrality and transparency of the general public” (Rothberg, “Between Auschwitz and Algeria” 179). The speaker’s reply “word” functions affirmatively, as in word up!, and perhaps interrogatively, as in what’s the word for me? As Steven Salaita explains: “after 9/11 [Arab Americans] were faced with a demand to transmit or translate their culture to mainstream Americans” (149). Here, Hammad’s poem resists pervasive patriotism by testifying to the multifaceted nature of American citizen responses. The scene is also unique in its ability to reexamine the stereotypes the “i” herself entertains. The speaker’s shock from the embrace forces her to rethink the preconceptions of community, since any comfort is good comfort.
18 Hammad’s poem exposes the capacity of transcultural counterwitnessing to challenge pervasive patriotism through its recognition of multidirectional remembrances. By establishing points of contact between other events, people, histories, and narratives of suffering, “First Writing Since” acknowledges how nations and their citizens make sense of historical events. For example, in section four, just following the speaker’s encounter with the woman in a parked car who threatens military retaliation, the speaker conjoins 9/11 with other historical spaces of violence: […] my hand went to my head and my head went to the numbers within it of the dead Iraqi children, the dead in nicaragua. the dead in rwanda who had to vie with fake sport wrestling for america's attention. (Hammad)
19 Here, the poem overlaps with other sites of violence, such as America’s involvement in the Gulf War and its freshly started War on Terror, with its support for the Nicaraguan contras in the 1980s, and its disinterest in the Rwandan genocide in the 1990s, to introduce the historico-political spaces of 9/11. To reduce 9/11 to a Muslim/Christian clash of civilizations is to turn a blind eye to its more complicated historical origins, such as in colonial and Cold War politics, and the dangers of militarized nationalism. The US government funded extremist groups throughout the 20th century to challenge Communism, fight enemies of the state, and strengthen its global reach, with many of
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these conflicts leading to regional instability and the rise of authoritarian regimes (McSherry 35-37, 208).
20 In some of the most telling moments of the poem, transcultural counterwitnessing helps stage the emotional struggle of the Arab female “i” in the face of public stigma. For example, section five presents one of the more explicit performances of the Arab, female “i” with its sharp criticism of anti-Arab, pro-American, propaganda that views religion and ethnicity as key factors for determining citizenship (Fadda-Conrey 535).12 The speaker’s retort urges readers to witness larger issues of unilateral suffering: and when we talk about holy books and hooded men and death, why do we never mention the kkk?
if there are any people on earth who understand how new york is feeling right now, they are in the west bank and the gaza strip. (Hammad)
21 By positioning New York City in relation to the West Bank, Hammad’s “i” challenges nationwide feelings of exclusive victimization. The contemporary reader might be reminded of photographs from the Second Intifada, while similarly thinking of the tragic images captured by Peter Morgan at Ground Zero, through Hammad’s unlikely pairing of two devasted landscapes. Remembrance in the poetry functions multidirectionally, reminding readers that our relationship to the past is not straightforward, but full of unexpected connections that bind us to each other (Rothberg, Multidirectional Memory 12-13). It is no wonder that the speaker feels “less american and more new yorker” (Hammad). Consequently, readers are forced to confront their own agency in historical suffering. As the speaker reminds us, “[shit] is complicated” (Hammad), and even though it may be easier to reduce terror to victims and perpetrators, in real life, such reduction cannot hold.
22 The final section of “First Writing Since” returns the reader to the visual destruction at Ground Zero to reimagine the theme of global citizenship. The section opens with its most graphic description of the attack zone: all day, across the river, the smell of burning rubber and limbs floats through. the sirens have stopped now. the advertisers are back on the air. the rescue workers are traumatized. the skyline is brought back to human size. no longer taunting the gods with its height. (Hammad)
23 On a primary level, the images provide poetic closure: the return “to human size” refocuses the poetry on the present realities. The aural and olfactory images reawaken the speaker from the abstract nightmare she has been caught in and bring her back to the immediacy of the moment. On a secondary level, the allusion to Babel draws attention to the dangers of Western hubris by visualizing the crumbling hope of globalization and multiculturalism. Babel metaphors have found new meanings in Western promises of borderless worlds and global citizenship (Green and Ruhleder 56). The Babel echo challenges the mistaken ethos of Western globalization, a civilization committed to global trade and limitless technological advances. The fall of the World Trade Center suggests the break-up of civilization, a civilization built on the unproven promises of cross-ethnic cooperation and economic prosperity.
24 Moreover, the Babel allusion addresses the imperial factors behind terror, as the falling towers reinforce how ambition is paid for in human collateral. Here, the speaker plays the role of transcultural counterwitness, a witness to extreme violence at and beyond national borders. I am not suggesting that Hammad wishes to denigrate
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internationalism or justify acts of terror; however, it can be claimed that Hammad aims to remind readers that the 9/11 attacks were not only acts of madness, but calculated responses to larger issues of global inequality and injustice. The poem’s complicated perspective, linking 9/11to violence around the globe, counters extremism by illuminating the complicated truths of terror while offering an alternative to overly simplistic forms of patriotism.
25 The primary message of “First Writing Since” is not about division. The final lines of the poem reaffirm Hammad’s commitment to fight for justice and unity. By evoking the image of the phoenix, the speaker implies that just as the mythical bird takes new form from the ashes of its previous body, so must Americans find new meaning from the wasted landscape before them. In the poem’s closing words, the speaker redefines the parameters of post 9/11 citizenship by delivering one of the poem’s most important themes: terrorism teaches us that life is more important than death. The repeated call to “affirm life” (Hammad) echoes like a battle call and urges all Americans to join in solidarity. The return to the performative “we” makes the transition from the individual to collective once again and reunites the othered “i” to the greater, mourning public. This study will now turn its attention to Martin Espada’s “Alabanza” and his efforts to elegize those victims who were denied voices outright.
4. Praising the Shadows in Martin Espada’s “Alabanza”
26 Martin Espada was “haunted” by an investigative report from the BBC about the undocumented workers who died while working at the Windows of the World restaurant at the World Trade Center (O’Conner). During a reading at the College of Southern Maryland, Espada reflected on how “Alabanza” was a tribute to the “shadow army making those buildings run” who were “invisible in life and even more invisible in death” (“Martin Espada-Alabanza”). Published approximately a year after the attacks in The Nation, and then in his 2003 collection New and Selected Poems, the poem is a lyrical elegy, consisting of five stanzas, rich in image and varied in tempo. Espada’s title (the Spanish word for “praise”) takes the closing the lines of Juan Antonio Corretjer’s “Oubao-Moin” [“Island of Blood”], from his collection Alabanza en la Torre de Ciales [Song of Praise from the Tower of Ciales].13 For Espada, Corretjer’s poem “envisioned a movement for a ‘liberated homeland’ that was not only working class, but multiracial, based on a shared history of labor and exploitation” (“The Lover of a Subversive Is Also a Subversive” 520). His use of allusion places the migrant workers at the center of a decisive moment in modern history to present the realities of American economic and political practices. This section progresses by first acknowledging the specific role of elegy for Espada’s political messages before exploring the use of multidirectional remembrance to counterwitness the attacks.
27 Espada’s commitment to elegize migrant workers should not be underestimated. Elegy, as a genre, serves specific literary and cultural purposes in collective mourning and celebrating of the dead. In the modern era, television and social media have transformed death and grieving into large public spectacles, encouraging viewers to participate in public loss (Kennedy 7). Narratives of victimization often serve as representations of national identity to characterize desired stories of statehood. Elegy, like other forms of memorialization, assumes a collective role in the formation of
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national identity, as recursive language and images foster a nationwide sense of community (Ramazani 76).
28 As noted, following the attacks some mainstream journalism emphasized narratives linking heroism and innocence to whiteness (Toh 2). Thus pervasive patriotism puts forth its own, nationalistic form of the elegy, which seeks to strengthen national identity through its connection of mourning and nationalism. Espada counters this through an elegiac transnationalism. Jahan Ramazani defines elegiac transnationalism as poetic elegy that “redirects poetic mourning across national borders, building affective microcommunities that instance the possibilities of a public sphere not contained and subsumed by the nation-state” (Ramazani 82). Espada’s conscious choice to elegize the migrant workers in the World Trade Center highlights how poetry can challenge pervasive representations of the public sphere and draw attention to the difficulties of the global poor. His recital of “Alabanza” in spaces of national protest, for example at Amhurst College on May 1, 2006 during the National Boycott for Immigrant Rights14, and its successful broadcast on channels like YouTube, offers a moving testimony of how elegy operates as witnessing for those who remain on the margins.
29 Espada wanted his use of Spanish to sound “deliberately irregular” so that it would break with rhythmic expectations and draw recognition to the dead workers (O’Conner). Throughout the poem “Alabanza” is a declarative, given a full stop after each utterance, all but once. The polysyllabic, Spanish “Alabanza” is verbally dramatic, forcing emphasis on its multiple stresses and tonal variances: its affect is exaggerated further when juxtaposed against its monosyllabic, English counterpart “Praise.”15 The aural qualities of the Spanish cast an ethereal musicality over the stanzas, while the frank English directs the reader to the subjects and actions performed. The bilingual variations dislocate the reader, delocalizing the dominant, English-speaking experience, to relocate the attacks cross-culturally and redirect mourning across national borders to recognize wider intercultural dynamics such as the role of geo- politics and global capitalism.
30 The poem also amasses a series of images to individualize the undocumented workers: it affords the workers unique personal pasts; this transforms dead objects into living subjects, making the invisible, visible. For example, the subtle detail of the Spanish “Oye,” tattooed on the arm of the Puerto Rican cook, characterizes the subject, perhaps suggesting something about his brazenness, but also asks the reader to “listen” to his fate as well. Such details are important for the poem’s counterwitness agenda because they challenge the damaging representations of pervasive patriotism which view migrants as physical, cultural and economic threats (Cisneros 572; Esses, Medianu and Lawson 522). By affording dignity to the migrant workers, the poem celebrates the numerous immigrant communities who contribute to American society and rebukes the political characterizations and scapegoating of immigrants, offering instead moments of human compassion and recognition for the dead workers.16
31 By bringing the migrant workers to the forefront of the attacks, Espada links American capitalists’ exploitation of the global poor with the events of 9/11. The speaker presents his criticism of global capitalism through the experience of the New York skyscape and the cultural imageries associated with its presence:17 Praise Manhattan from a hundred and seven flights up, like Atlantis glimpsed through the windows of an ancient aquarium. Praise the great windows where immigrants from the kitchen could squint and almost see their world, hear the chant of nations:
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Ecuador, México, Republica Dominicana, Haiti, Yemen, Ghana, Bangladesh. (Espada, “Alabanza” 231)
32 Here, the Atlantis allusion positions New York City closer to myth than reality and captures the emotional claustrophobia of being stuck between worlds. To be trapped in an “aquarium” is to be trapped from the inside looking out. The visual distance of the squinting worker holds profound symbolism: from the migrant worker’s perspective, the poem testifies to the effects of diaspora on displaced peoples who are trapped in a world far from their own; for the reader, the poem testifies to a more troubling reality, as the workers normally hidden are brought to light and given voices. Moreover, the countries listed by the speaker have documented histories of human rights abuses, mass exoduses, and troubling, political-economic relationships with The United States of America. The interchangeableness between countries bears light on America’s responsibility in the production of global migrations. In this context, “Alabanza,” like other works of politically motivated literature, asks its audience to consider how the relationship between people and the material world moves beyond passive consumption by recognizing how industrialized countries profit from unprocessed traumas of the economic and political pasts (Mengal and Borzaga, ix-xi).
33 Espada also conjoins the trauma of 9/11 with other distant histories, further demonstrating transcultural poetry’s capacity to bring forth unexpected encounters through multidirectional remembrances. For example, when referencing “the cook’s yellow Pirates cap / worn in the name of Roberto Clemente” (231), the poem entangles the tragic fate of cook with the tragic fate of the baseball icon. Clemente’s death is well documented. On December 31, 1972, Clemente chartered a plane to bring relief supplies to survivors of an earthquake in Nicaragua. The plane crashed off the coast of Puerto Rico due to a faulty engine and overstocked cargo. While the crash has become something of a sports legend, most Americans fail to acknowledge that Clemente was on the flight due to the mass corruption of the Somoza regime, as his previous relief efforts, which included medical aid and an x-ray machine, never reached the people he intended to help (Fisher; Davidson Sorkin). The links between the United States and Anastasio “Tachito” Somoza are extensive. Not only was he educated in the United States and graduated from the esteemed West Point Academy, but even more troubling is that the United States supported Somoza’s National Guard and assisted his rise to power (Katovich 23-27). Following his coup in 1937, Anastasio Somazo installed a government ripe with corruption and amassed one of the largest fortunes in the region (“The Somazo Era”). Read in this historico-political context, the poem opens up for a transcultural reading and can be seen to grieve for the undocumented workers in a way that situates 9/11 in relation to a variety of international conflicts, including those abetted by US involvement in Central America. The allusion illustrates how transcultural counterwitnessing uses multidirectional remembrance to bring traumatic pasts into contact and thus remind readers of the “unexpected or even unwanted consequences that bind us to those whom we consider other” (Multidirectional Memory 13). Among these are the geopolitical factors contributing to migration. Consequently, the poem forces its reader to ponder unexpected ethical questions such as How do the political actions of America’s past affect the traumatic realities of others? and Do these traumas deserve recognition?
34 These questions are potentially addressed through the final stanzas. Like Hammad, Espada draws on babelesque images to visualize the collapse of the towers and comment on perils of the global poor. Violent images of wild thunder and blinding
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light, and unsettling seconds of silence, evoke a “Wrath of God” moment where “the smoke-beings flung in constellations / across the night sky” warn the readers of “this city and cities to come” (“Alabanza” 232). The image of smoke drifting from Manhattan towards Kabul conjoins two attack zones, making the migrant-workers and Afghan victims’ experiences interchangeable. Here, readers are also reminded of other countries affected by US and NATO military responses to 9/11, for example Iraq, Libya, and Syria. Such moments in the poetry confirm Espada’s ability to “realize the multidirectional interconnectedness of all human experience in space and time” (Salgado 208). The poem’s final dialogue raises numerous potential associations as well. The “song and dance” metaphor could allude to the banning of music in Afghanistan under the Taliban regime. Music had long been associated with celebration and freedom in Afghanistan but became symbolic for a functional society after Taliban rule, as it signaled a return to normal life (Bailey 24; Wroe). But the poetry refuses celebration. Although the Spanish and Afghan exchange is a moment of transcultural dialogue between East and West, the tone is not uplifting but something more defeatist, perhaps questioning the larger geo-political and economic structures in place. In the end, life does not change, and “the same old song and dance” continues for the global poor.
5. Conclusion
35 The poems by Suheir Hammad and Martin Espada demonstrate how transcultural counterwitnessing activates alternate perspectives to challenge the pervasive patriotism of mainstream media. Through their use of multiple perspectives, voices, and memories, transcultural counterwitnesses demonstrate how pervasive patriotism often confers ethical and moral privilege to dominant, cultural groups. Such performances also reveal the complex realities of marginal groups in diverse societies, such as the United States. The readers of the poems are invited to reconsider how pervasive patriotism limits broader discussions of national and global identity. By encouraging readers to witness the attacks from other perspectives, transcultural counterwitnessing acknowledges the multifaceted realties of terror for multicultural societies and draws attention to how a multidirectional consciousness promotes diversity in public discourses.
36 Secondly, transcultural counterwitnessing reminds readers how sites of violence, like 9/11, become entangled in larger networks of cultural, political, and social realities. Transcultural counterwitnessing compels readers to acknowledge how national foreign policies, economic practices, and military actions, collide into, and ricochet off, other events.
37 Lastly, if poetry should ask questions, as Hammad insisted in her interview with Mary Knopf-Newman (91), then the two poems under investigation provide numerous questions about the significance of 9/11, both past and present. Historical trauma has lasting effects on how one imagines claims of national and global identity. Transcultural accounts, such as those addressed in the study, illustrate how 9/11 established a foundation for reassessing what it means to witness historical events, with art and literature providing spaces that go beyond the boundaries of patriotism. As Michael Rothberg notes in his 2009 article “A Failure of Imagination,” literature about 9/11 helps readers “imagine how US citizenship looks and feels beyond the
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boundaries of the nation-state, both for Americans and for others” (158). In times of polarized politics, 9/11 must remain a site of empathetic imagination, as testified in the poetry analyzed in this essay.
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—. “Between Auschwitz and Algeria: Multidirectional Memory and the Counterpublic Witness.” Critical Inquiry 33.1 (2006): 158–184. Print. DOI: 10.1086/509750.
—. Multidirectional Memory: Remembering the Holocaust in the Age of Decolonization. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 13 Jan 2018.
—. “Seeing Terror, Feeling Art: Public and Private Post 9/11 Literature.” Literature After 9/11. Eds. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. New York: Routledge, 2008. 123-142. Print.
—. “Writing Ruins: The Anachronistic Aesthetics of André Schwarz-Bart.” After Representation?: The Holocaust, Literature, and Culture. Eds. Robert Ehrenreich and R. Clifton Spargo. New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press and US Holocaust Memorial Museum, 2009. 99-118. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 2 July 2019.
Rutenberg, Jim. “Fox Portrays a War of Good and Evil, and Many Applaud.” The New York Times, 3 Dec 2001. Web. 14 Aug 2019.
Salgado, César A. “About Martin Espada.” Ploughshares 31:1 (Spring 2005): 203–208. Web. 12 Dec 2019.
Salaita, Steven. “Ethnic Identity and Imperative Patriotism: Arab Americans Before and After 9/11.” College Literature 32:2 (Spring 2005): 146–168. Print. DOI: 10.1353/lit.2005.0033
"The Somoza Era, 1936-74.” Nicaragua: A Country Study. Ed. Tim Merrill. countrystudies.us. Library of Congress (1994). Web. 23 Aug 2018.
Toh, Justine. “The White Fireman and the American Heartland in the Memory of 9/11.” Australian Critical Race and Whiteness Studies Association ejournal 6.1 (2010): 1-17. Web. 27 Mar 2019.
Waisbord, Silvio. “Journalism, Risk, and Patriotism.” Journalism After September 11. Eds. Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan. New York: Routledge, 2004. 201-219. Print.
Warner, Michael. “Publics and Counterpublics.” Public Culture 14.1 (Winter 2002): 49-90. Print.
Wolf, Werner. “The Lyric: Problems of Definition and a Proposal for Reconceptualisation.” Theory Into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric. Eds. Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik. Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers, 2005. 21-56. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 17 Apr 2019.
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Zelizer, Barbie and Stuart Allan. “Introduction: When Trauma Shapes the News.” Journalism After September 11. Eds. Barbie Zelizer and Stuart Allan. New York, Routledge, 2004. 1-24. Print.
Zamorano Llena, Carmen. “Transnational Movements and the Limits of Citizenship Redefinitions of National Belonging in Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland.” Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Literature. Eds. Zarmorano Llena, Hansen, and Nordin. Amsterdam: Brill | Rodopi, 2013. 3-24. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 25 November 2019.
Zamorano Llena, Carmen, Julie Hansen, and Irene Gilsenan Nordin. “Introduction: Conceptualizing Transculturality in Literature.” Transcultural Identities in Contemporary Literature. Eds. Zarmorano Llena, Hansen, and Nordin. Amsterdam: Brill | Rodopi, 2013. ix-xxvii. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 25 November 2019.
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NOTES
1. This was best exemplified when Copper Canyon Press editor and poet Sam Hamill invited amateur and professional poets to protest Laura Bush’s planned Poetry and the American Voice seminar in opposition of the Bush administration’s War in Iraq. By February 2003, Hamill received over 13,000 poems on his website Poets Against War. The poems were compiled in print and presented to Congress on 5 March 2003. Martin Espada’s “Alabanza” was part of this collection. For a very comprehensive summary of the movement see Clark, J. Elizabeth. "Versus Verse: Poets Against War." The Radical Teacher 74 (2005): 6-11. Print. 2. For this context, “nationalism” refers to the everyday representations of nation that contribute to one’s sense of belonging. See Billig, Michael. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage, 1995. Print. 3. “Portraits of Grief” was a series of elegies for the victims of 9/11. It began around three days after the attacks when a group of reporters at The New York Times started to interview friends and relatives of the missing and dead. 4. “American Muslim Community Since September 11” was a PBS special which aired in October 2001. In the documentary, journalist Ray Suarez examines how life changed for Muslim Americans after the 9/11 attacks. 5. Hauptman identifies this media phenomenon as a form of “informal social control” (127) where media identifies foreign born people as “folk devils.” In her book she details how media uses scapegoating to target immigrants and non-citizens as “the other” who pose immediate threats to American society. See Hauptman, Samantha. The Criminalization of Immigration: The Post 9/11 Moral Panic. El Paso: LFB Scholarly Publishing LLC, 2013. Web. 22 Nov 2019. 6. This quote is taken from David Roberts’ work Global Governance and Biopolitics: Regulating Human Security. Although Roberts is not concerned with poetry, his idea resonates with the poets’ themes and this paper’s interest. See Roberts, David. Global Governance and Biopolitics: Regulating Human Security. London: Zed Books, 2010. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 28 June 2019. 7. See Bauridl, Birgit M. "“Rowing for Palestine,” Performing the Other: Suheir Hammad, Mark Gerban and Multiple Consciousness." Journal of Transnational American Studies, 5.1 (2013): 221-242. Web. 2 Dec 2018; and Jegić, Denijal. “Breaking Dichotomies: Counter-Narratives in the Spoken Word Poetry of Suheir Hammad.” Current Objectives of Postgraduate American Studies, 15.1 (2015): 1-23. Web. 12 Dec 2018. DOI: 10.5283/copas.227. 8. See Rothberg, Michael. “Seeing Terror, Feeling Art: Public and Private Post 9/11 Literature.” Literature After 9/11. Eds. Ann Keniston and Jeanne Follansbee Quinn. New York: Routledge, 2008. 123-142. Print. 9. The Amber Alert is a child abduction messaging system used in all 50 states. It was designed to be an early warning system to inform communities of missing children. Once law officials determine that a child is missing, the system interrupts TV and radio programming to broadcast that an abduction has occurred. The alert can also be transmitted via digital billboards, wireless devices, and Internet Service Providers. 10. This study uses Werner Wolf’s definitions of self-referentiality and self-reflexivity in this context. See Wolf, Werner. “The Lyric: Problems of Definition and a Proposal for Reconceptualisation.” Theory Into Poetry: New Approaches to the Lyric. Eds. Eva Müller-Zettelmann and Margarete Rubik. Amsterdam: Brill Academic Publishers (2005): 21-56. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 17 Apr 2019. 11. This conflict describes the process where people of color see themselves through the white racialized gaze. See Du Bois, W. E. B., and Brent Hayes Edwards. The Souls of Black Folk. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 17 Sept 2019. 12. Fadda-Conrey’s essay focuses on the depiction of Arab-Americans in post-9/11 fiction. She argues that literature forges spaces to redefine exclusionary concepts of citizenship by
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responding to “simplistic types” of post-911 patriotism, a concept closely related to “pervasive patriotism.” See Fadda-Conrey, Carol. “Arab American Citizenship in Crisis: Destabilizing Representations of Arabs and Muslims in the US after 9/11.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 57.3 (2011): 532-555. Print. DOI: 10.1353/mfs.2011.0068 13. Literary critic Camilo Pérez-Bustillo provides valuable insight to the social and cultural significance of Corretjer’s poem. In his essay, Perez-Bustillo details how Corretjer’s poem has been recited as song and reworked into theater and dance performances by Puerto Rican communities on the island. See Perez-Bustillo, Camilo. “Heart of Hunger: Martin Espada and the Poetry of Liberation.” Acknowledged Legislator: Critical Essays on the Poetry of Martín Espada. Ed. Edward J. Carvalho. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014. 159-217. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 5 Dec 2019. 14. “A Day Without Immigrants” was a one-day boycott of United States schools and businesses by immigrants in the United States on May 1, 2006. To view Espada’s recital see Jenks, Charles. “Martin Espada Recites Alabanza: In Praise of Local 100.” Youtube, 23 Nov 2006. Web. 28 Mar 2019. 15. In a reading at College of Southern Maryland, Martin Espada demonstrates its rhythmic effects through his dramatic reading of the poem. See “Martin Espada-Alabanza.” Connections Literary Series College of Southern Maryland. YouTube, 2 Nov 2007. Web. 15 Mar 2019. 16. Other critics have written about such motifs in Espada’s poetry. Two excellent works to reference are Azank, Natasha. “A Poetry Like Ammunition: Martin Espada’s Poetics of Resistance and Subversion.” Acknowledged Legislator: Critical Essays on the Poetry of Martín Espada. Ed. Edward J. Carvalho. Madison: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2014. 133-155. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 5 Dec 2019; and Carvalho, Edward J. “Taking Back the Street Corner: Interview with Martin Espada.” Works and Days 51/52, 53/54. 26 &27 (2008-09): 539- 550. Web. 5 Dec 2019. 17. Historically, New York City built its place in the global imagination by defining the modern skyscape through its relationship with economic prosperity, free market capitalism, and global modernization. From its early stages, the New York skyline hyperbolized the potentialities of the modern world. Important sites, such the Empire State Building, the Brooklyn Bridge, and the Statue of Liberty, “have vicariously connoted modernity, novelty, commercial power, technical knowhow, and political freedom” (Blake 11). By the mid-1920s, for example, New York City’s cultural, economic and political dominance made it the “de facto capital of the United States” (Blake 5) and transformed the city into an important place of urban and national identification (Brooker 30). The World Trade Center provides an important space to further such cultural imaginaries. From its beginnings, the World Trade Center represented globalization in the modern age as well as the cultural and ethnic heterogeneity which accompanies it (Lindner 306). Through its network of global banking, stock exchanges, and trading firms, the World Trade Center solidified New York City’s evolution as a global city (Boyer 53). Cultural theorist Jean Baudrillard describes how the violence of the attacks therefore epitomized a violent “protest” against the system it embodied (41). See Blake, Angela M. How New York Became American, 1890– 1924. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006. eBook Collection (EBSCOhost). Web. 14 March 2019; Brooker, Peter. New York Fictions: Modernity, Postmodernism, The New Modern. London: Longman, 1996. Print; Baudrillard, Jean. The Spirit of Terrorism. New rev. ed. Trans. Christ Turner. London: Verso, 2003. Print; and Lindner, Christoph. “New York Undead: Globalization, Landscape Urbanism, and the Afterlife of the Twin Towers.” The Journal of American Culture 31:3 (2008): 302-314. Print. DOI: 10.1111/j.1542-734X.2008.00678.x
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ABSTRACTS
By drawing on current definitions of testimonial witnessing, this study returns to the attacks of September 11th to explore how two 9/11 poems, “First Writing Since (Poem on Crisis of Terror)” by Suheir Hammad and “Alabanza: In Praise of the Local 100” by Martin Espada, challenge the pervasive patriotism of mainstream journalism through acts of transcultural counterwitnessing. I explore how these 9/11 poems oppose, and engage with, pervasive patriotism, and emphasize the value of transcultural poetry in the face of extreme violence. The notion of the transcultural counterwitness has the potential to redefine how third-party witnesses, like poets, provide new understandings of historical responsibility and national identity in the American imagination.
INDEX
Keywords: 9/11 Poetry, Counterpublic, Counterwitness, Multidirectional Memory, Transculturalism
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“Challenging Borders: Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted as a Subversive Disability Memoir”
Pascale Antolin
“Insofar as the essence of madness is silence, narrative offers an antidote” (Susko 105)
1 In Seuils (1987), a study of paratexts and textual thresholds, Gérard Genette mentions four different functions of book titles, with “description”—the more or less ambiguous content suggestion—playing the leading role (88-89). At first sight, the puzzling title of Susanna Kaysen’s memoir, Girl, Interrupted (1993), hardly exemplifies the descriptive function mentioned by Genette. Only in the last eponymous section of the narrative does Kaysen reveal if not the meaning, at least the origin, of this title: it was borrowed from Dutch painter Johannes Vermeer’s painting, Girl Interrupted at Her Music (1658-1659). However, she covered her tracks by cutting out the context (“at her music”) and introducing an anomalous comma between the two words so that, at first reading, the title barely makes sense. The comma breaks and blurs the syntagma as it represents a dividing line or border threatening syntax and meaning. Yet, after reading the memoir, the readers can infer that this title is also descriptive in its own fashion: it “captures [Kaysen’s] sense of the cost in arrested identity” (Eakin 120) and gives them to apprehend the violence she experienced as her life was interrupted1 at seventeen: “Interrupted at her music: as my life had been, interrupted in the music of being seventeen” (Kaysen 167). In the memoir, she relates her twenty-month experience as a patient in McLean psychiatric hospital near Boston, MA, between April 1967 and January 1969—twenty-four years or so after her institutionalization—when she was diagnosed with Borderline Personality Disorder (or BPD). Published in 1993, the book belongs to the memoir boom from the 1990s to the early 2000s in the United States and the United Kingdom. A “blockbuster memoir” (Rak 9), Girl, Interrupted was even made into a film by James Mangold in 1999, starring Winona Ryder and Angelina Jolie.
2 As for the term “borderline,” it has a long history. It was first used in 1938 by American psychiatrist and psychoanalyst Adolph Stern to define “a large group of patients [who]
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fit frankly neither into the psychotic nor into the psychoneurotic group” (54). Stern further added: “[These] patients in the borderline group belong to a large extent to the narcissistic neuroses or characters….[They] constitute a large indefinite group between the psychoses and the transference neuroses, partaking of the characteristics of both but showing frank tendencies in the direction of the psychotic” (55). For Stern, BPD referred to a borderland or no-man’s-land between categories. It was only in 1980 that the borderline diagnosis acquired an official definition when it first appeared in the third edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorder, or DSM-III (American Psychiatric Association [APA] 1980, revised in 1987).2 Focusing on observable behaviors, and not psychodynamic processes, the borderline diagnosis went as follows: a pervasive pattern of instability of self-image, interpersonal relationship, and mood, beginning in early adulthood and present in a variety of contexts. A marked and persistent identity disturbance is almost invariably present. This is often pervasive and is manifested by uncertainty about several life issues, such as self- image, sexual orientation, long-term goals or career choices, types of friends or lovers to have, or which values to adopt. The person often experiences this instability of self-image as chronic feelings of emptiness or boredom. (346)
3 Further attempts at codification were pursued in the DSM-IV (1994); however, the DSM-5 (2013) eventually defined nine specific criteria to diagnose BPD—but only five of them are necessary to be diagnosed—fear of abandonment; unstable relationships; unclear or shifting self-image; impulsive, self-destructive behaviors; self-harm; extreme emotional swings; chronic feelings of emptiness; explosive anger; feeling suspicious or out of touch with reality.
4 In Women and Borderline Personality Disorder (2001), Janet Wirth-Cauchon underlines “the shifting meanings of the borderline diagnosis” (37): The depictions and definitions of the borderline disorder refer less to a real underlying mental illness—an identifiable personality disorder—than to changes in psychiatric discourse itself. Further, the borderline category is ambiguous and contradictory, frequently applied to the patient who is socially deviant or marginal. The effect of labeling a patient borderline is to produce a new subject of psychiatry —the unstable inhabitant of the borderland between sanity and madness. (Wirth- Cauchon 38)
5 The major defining characteristic of borderline personality disorder today is instability, 3 which applies both to the patient’s personality (or behavior) and to the status of the concept. As Janice Cauwells writes in Imbroglio: Rising to the Challenges of Borderline Personality Disorder (1992), the borderline personality disorder “not only causes instability but also symbolizes it” (82). Kaysen stresses this semantic ambiguity on many occasions—including the title of her memoir—especially in the opening section entitled “Toward a topography of the parallel universe,” where she uses “a set of spatial metaphors to depict the blurred border between sanity and madness” (Wirth- Cauchon 146). Kaysen, however, does not merely employ spatial metaphors in the incipit of her book, but she uses them repeatedly—even when she discusses “[her] Diagnosis,” for instance, in the eponymous section, she speaks of “a way station between neurosis and psychosis” (Kaysen 151). In fact, she appears to be constantly concerned with space and borders, either metaphoric or not.
6 Autobiography specialist Leah White thus writes that “Kaysen provides her readers with an exploration of a life placed along the socially constructed borderlands of illness and sanity,” and further down she calls Kaysen’s memoir “an act of discursive resistance” (White 5, my emphasis). White borrows this notion of autobiographical
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resistance from another autobiography specialist, Sidonie Smith, as Smith’s 1993 book Subjectivity, Identity and the Body is extensively quoted by White in her article. Smith writes that “autobiographical writing has played and continues to play a role in emancipatory politics. Autobiographical practices become occasions for restaging subjectivity, and autobiographical strategies become occasions for the staging of resistance” (156-17).4 Resistance is particularly displayed in what she labels “autobiographical manifesto[es],” that is, women’s autobiographical texts that are “purposeful, bold, contentious” (157). But Kaysen’s is no ordinary memoir—she writes about her personal experience of mental illness and institutionalization. White thus contends that Kaysen’s narrative—like Kate Millett’s The Loony-Bin Trip (1990) and Kay Redfield Jamison’s An Unquiet Mind: A Memoir of Moods and Madness (1995)—is an “autobiographical manifesto”5 in so far as not only does it “articulate personal struggles” with mental illness, but it also “make[s] political statements calling for changes in how society perceives the mentally ill” (White 12). From this point of view, Kaysen’s memoir certainly illustrates key theoretical ideas that were fashionable in the 1990s. However, it remains unusually topical and, on several accounts, even prefigures the testimonial trend represented by #MeToo—a “reckoning with misogyny and the institutions that enable it” and “a vivid example of the autobiographical first-person interrupting dynamics of erasure and silencing” (Gilmore 162).
7 The major strategy used by Kaysen to implement her “resistance,” or fighting spirit, consists in emphasizing borders—whether topographic, mimetic or generic—in order to transgress them all the better. It is as if the adjective “borderline” defined in the Merriam-Webster dictionary as “being in an intermediate position or state; not fully classifiable as one thing or its opposite” and referring—metaphorically—to Kaysen’s mental condition, were turned into a powerful means of subversion throughout the narrative. In his book, Techniques of Subversion in Modern Literature (1991), Keith Booker explains that “transgressive literature works […] by gradually chipping away at certain modes of thinking that contribute to the perpetuation of oppressive political structures” (4). Especially, Booker writes later in the book that “transgression requires boundaries”6 (104). As Kaysen transgresses borders, she destabilizes hierarchies and questions authority—whether medical, social or literary. Hence, Girl, Interrupted can be interpreted as a subversive memoir, exploring and challenging borders, not only the border between sanity and madness but also the boundaries of the disability memoir genre.
8 In The Wounded Storyteller (1995), Arthur Frank defines three major types of disability narratives:7 the “restitution narrative,” the “chaos narrative” and the “quest narrative” (75-136). However, Kaysen’s transcends them all: it does not tell how she recovered her health, or about her suffering or any spiritual journey she experienced. First, the memoir was written when Kaysen hired a lawyer and managed to have access to her case folder (Kaysen 150). Especially, she does not seek recovery but denies her disability. In other words, she does not speak “for” herself, nor does she speak “about” BPD: she speaks against it or, more specifically, against her diagnosis. Her narrative does not even belong in the subgenre “memoir of well-being” brought forward by Tanja Reiffenrath in her eponymous book (2016). Reiffenrath writes that “well-being memoirists […] reconsider and disable the biomedical cure” (13). If Kaysen disables her institutionalization, it is only because she denies ever being a borderliner. And both the singularity and special artfulness of her narrative powerfully illustrate her approach.
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9 My contention, therefore, is that Kaysen’s book cannot be examined as merely a disability memoir within the memoir boom. It affords continued and concentrated examination but requires further tools, like critical discourse analysis (CDA): “CDA is fundamentally invested in the relationship between language and social context, and uses micro-analysis of discourse features (such as word choices, grammatical patterns, and images) to investigate larger dynamics of power,” disability studies scholar Margaret Price writes. And further down Price adds: “CDA and DS [Disability Studies] can complement each other’s methodological strengths and needs […] We need methods which are not merely multidisciplinary but interdisciplinary—that is, methods which not only draw from various disciplines but integrate those disciplines’ similarities and differences to form hybrid kinds of research […]” (15). As it involves close reading of the narrative and micro-analysis of its strategies, only CDA can show to what extent Kaysen subverts the disability memoir as genre. Following Price’s suggestion, therefore, I shall focus on topographic then mimetic and generic borders in order to eventually examine Kaysen’s subversive strategies.
Topographic borders
10 While Kaysen’s one hundred and sixty-nine-page memoir consists of thirty-four short sections,8 each with a specific title, ten of these titles refer to space or space metaphors. 9 Especially, the book begins in medias res with a first section describing “the world of the insane” as “a parallel universe” in which “it is easy to slip” (Kaysen 5). This abrupt incipit dramatizes both Kaysen’s hasty institutionalization and her subsequent puzzlement at suddenly finding herself in a mental hospital. However, Kaysen also underlines that there are many parallel worlds, each gathering marginal people, i.e. those situated on the margin or border of society: “[the] worlds of the insane, the criminal, the crippled, the dying, perhaps of the dead as well. These worlds exist alongside this world and resemble it, but are not in it” (Kaysen 5). This evocation is strangely reminiscent of Michel Foucault’s concept of “heterotopias,” which he defines as follows in his essay “Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias:”10 real places—places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society —which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. […] these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about […]. (Foucault, my emphasis)
11 Kaysen’s description of the mental hospital as a heterotopic site in the opening section of the memoir appears to be programmatic: it allows her to expose her strategy throughout the book. She uses McLean as a reflection of the real world that can thus be “represented, contested and inverted” (Foucault). In other words, she first emphasizes the boundary between the two worlds in order to question it so much the better.
12 After defining heterotopias, Foucault enumerates a series of principles, or characteristics, of these places. The third principle, for instance, specifies that “the heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible” (Foucault). This remark perfectly fits Kaysen’s description of the mental hospital, and of her own ward in particular: “a long, long hallway: too long. Seven or eight double rooms on one side, the nursing station
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centered on the other, flanked by the conference room and hydrotherapy tub room. Lunatics to the left, staff to the right. The toilets and shower rooms were also to the right, as though the staff claimed oversight of our most private acts” (Kaysen 45). While the beginning of the passage could very well refer to a prison ward—even if the rooms would rather be called cells—the quasi absence of verbs highlights the rigid layout of the ward and the imprisonment of the patients, which is further confirmed by the concluding adverbial clause. The evocation of the seclusion room—the last room of the ward and seemingly a hospital version of solitary confinement—significantly concludes or rather culminates the ward description: “[It] was the size of an average suburban bathroom. Its only window was the chicken-wire-enforced one in the door that allowed people to look in and see what you were up to….The real purpose of the seclusion room …was to quarantine people who’d gone bananas” (Kaysen 46, 47). However, Kaysen also adds: “you could pop into the seclusion room, shut the door and yell for a while. When you were done you could open the door and leave” (Kaysen 46). In other words, the seclusion room turns out to be completely ambivalent: it is both the hospital version of a high security prison cell, where the worst patients are confined to for a while, and an occasional refuge for the patients who need to let off steam.
13 According to Foucault’s sixth principle, “heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications” (Foucault). In the evocation of the seclusion room as on many occasions when she describes McLean, Kaysen emphasizes the heavy security system turning doors and windows into barriers between the mental patients and the rest of the world. She thus describes the entrance to her ward as follows: “two locked doors with a five-foot space between them where you had to stand while the nurse relocked the first door and unlocked the second” (Kaysen 45, my emphasis). This description is all the more abrupt since it consists of a nearly three-line sentence without any main verb, but with a dramatic polyptoton11 underlining security and imprisonment again. Kaysen, therefore, uses language mimetically—the security system is not just represented for the reader to imagine, but the passage becomes representation for the reader to experience. The same strategy is used in the description of the windows: “To open a window, a staff person had to unlock the security screen, which was a thick impregnable mesh on a steel frame, then lift the heavy unbreakable-glass-paned window, then shut and relock the security screen. This took about three minutes, and it was hard work. It was the sort of thing aides did” (Kaysen 81). Here, the ternary rhythm (“unlock,” “lift,” “shut and relock”) and the qualifiers—a relative clause and several adjectives, including a long compound adjective with the negative prefix “un”—create the sense of an impassable obstacle. Yet, the last sentence challenges the beginning—no matter how heavy the security system, the windows could be and were opened, albeit only on demand.
14 It is Kaysen’s discovery of the hospital tunnels in section twenty-six, however, that mostly challenges the ward description since she has suddenly access to a completely different space “down a second flight of stairs” (Kaysen 120)—that is, with hardly any barrier or security measure, by contrast. The incompatibility of the tunnels with the ward is underlined by a series of pleasant characteristics: a “wonderful” smell of laundry, a higher temperature, a “quavery yellow light…long yellow-tiled walls and barrel-vaulted ceilings…forks and twists and roads not taken, whose yellow openings
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beckoned like shiny open mouths” (Kaysen 120). Not only does the description suggest an enjoyable space, by contrast—even the image of the mouth, “shiny” and “open,” is positive, not to mention the intertextual allusion to Robert Frost’s famous “The Road Not Taken,” as if the patients were free to choose which way to go like the narrator of the poem—but borders there seem to be abolished: “And there they were, always hot and clean and yellow and full of promise….And everything interconnected, everything going on its own private pathway to wherever it went” (Kaysen 121). Kaysen dramatizes the sense of openness and freedom she experiences there: both the polysyndeton and the anaphoric “and” emphasize connection and, thereby, freedom, as confirmed by the final zeugma. Like the seclusion room, the hospital turns out to be highly ambivalent:12 “For many of us, the hospital was as much a refuge as it was a prison….In a strange way we were free” (Kaysen 94). It even becomes a metaphoric “womb” (Kaysen 122). This recurrent use of ambivalence allows Kaysen to question traditional logic, as it is represented by such conventional binaries as either/or and, especially, sane/insane. The seclusion room and the hospital are both negative and positive as well. To a certain extent, they are characterized by or afflicted with the same instability as the BPD patient. Similarly, ambivalence is to be found in Kaysen’s approach to representation and genre in the memoir.
15 As far as representation is concerned, for instance, the chronology of the whole—from institutionalization to liberation—contrasts all the more with the absence of chronology in the sections since the chronology of the whole relies on the intrusion into the narrative of alien medical documents, turning the memoir into a textual collage.
Mimetic and generic borders
16 The fourth principle of Foucault’s “Other Spaces: Utopias and Heterotopias,” focuses on time. “Heterotopias,” he writes, “are most often linked to slices in time—which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time” (Foucault). Kaysen’s institutionalization represents such a break, and in her opening section she writes: “In the parallel universe the laws of physics are suspended.…Time, too, is different. It may run in circles, flow backward, skip about from now to then. The very arrangement of the molecules is fluid” (Kaysen 6). This early statement is both programmatic and metatextual: while it describes Kaysen’s perception of time in McLean—which is highly suggestive of Helen Samuel’s definition of “crip time”13—it also prefigures the representation of time in her narrative: the strict chronology of the whole, between institutionalization and discharge, contrasts with the absence of chronology inside the book, from one section to another. “Rather than a continuous chronological account of an eighteen-month episode in her life, [the memoir] is a collage of […] different kinds of texts” (Couser “Crossing the Borderline”) and different times as well.
17 Disability studies scholar Thomas Couser’s reference to “different kinds of texts” is essential to the analysis of time in Kaysen’s memoir since the textual collage is inseparable from a chronological collage as well. The chronology of the whole relies on the presence in the book of “a dozen pages that literally reproduce documents from [Kaysen’s] McLean dossier, slightly redacted” (Couser “Crossing the Borderline”). The
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memoir thus opens with the first page of Kaysen’s case folder bearing the admission date April 27, 1967 (3), and ends with her discharge permission dated January 3, 1969 (169). These documents emphasize the sense of a break in Kaysen’s life, and her “heterochrony,” to take up Foucault’s word, lies within these strict chronological borders. However, several other miscellaneous documents from Kaysen’s case record are also interspersed throughout the memoir—an “Inquiry concerning admission” (11), an “Inter office memorandum” (13), progress notes (43, 63, 69, 105, 145), a letter to a telephone company dated September 4, 1968 to support Kaysen’s demand for a telephone (127) and a letter to the Office of the Registry dated July 10, 1973, probably to support a later demand for a car registration (129). While the repeated, albeit irregular, intrusions of these alien texts work as reminders of the chronological authority of the real world, the later letter also challenges this chronology. Especially, these intrusive documents “shatter the border between the private and the public realms.…It is one thing to share [one’s] story publicly, it is another to offer the world physical documentation of very personal experiences” (White 9). Not only does Kaysen expose borders—between the medical discourse of the case folder and her own narrative, between the personal and the public realms—but she also undermines them since the extracts from the case folder are part and parcel of the memoir.
18 While most of these documents bear specific referential dates, Kaysen’s own narrative, by contrast, is characterized by chronological fluidity and freedom: “the order of the vignette-like chapters has no discernible relation to the passage of time” (Couser, Memoir 66). In the opening lines of section seventeen, for instance, Kaysen refers to the beginning of the antagonism between Lisa and Lisa Cody; but the story of the two girls was actually related in the previous section. It does not mean that Kaysen excluded time from her narrative—she did not, as proved by the numerous references throughout the book. She emphasizes both singulative time (“one morning in May” [24], “we had a good summer” [24], “one day” [25, 29, 58, etc.], “one November morning” [31], etc.) and iterative time (“Daisy was a seasonal event. She came before Thanksgiving and stayed through Christmas every year. Some years she came for her birthday in May as well” [31], etc.), thus adding to the sense of chronological confusion. No matter how numerous, these references are hardly significant since they do not allow the reader to clearly identify the dates, let alone reconstruct the chronology; instead, they create a proliferation of signifiers without any clear signified, only producing ambiguity and instability. This instability can be evidenced, for instance, by the oxymoronic incipit of section thirteen: “It was a spring day, the sort that gives people hope: all soft winds and delicate smells of warm earth. Suicide weather. Daisy had killed herself the week before” (Kaysen 52). Kaysen first creates pleasant expectations, and then brutally breaks the spell, as expressed by the short verbless sentence at the heart of the passage (“Suicide weather”). Once again, she suggests a different logic specific to mental patients—for them spring can mean death—and, thereby, challenges the official logic and its authority.
19 In addition to the documents from her case folder, Kaysen’s memoir consists of two other kinds of texts, also introducing two different time-levels: “narrative chapters, which are generally vignettes of life in the institution; these often focus on other patients, either individually or as a group, rather than on Kaysen” and “non-narrative chapters, [that is,] brief discursive essays on topics like definitions and diagnoses of mental illness” (Couser “Crossing the Borderline”). While the narrative sections represent the period when Kaysen was a patient in McLean, the others refer to the later
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period when she was writing the book. But their arrangement in the memoir baffles both chronological continuity and thematic logic. Section three, “Etiology,” is a good example as it comes after a document from Kaysen’s case record and before the section entitled “Fire” devoted to Polly, another patient. Especially, section three consists of a multiple choice question test beginning with “This person is (pick one)” (Kaysen 15), followed by ten incongruous items.14 While Kaysen creates serious expectations in the reader by borrowing from the scientific vocabulary of medical doctors in the title (“Etiology”), she also defies them both by introducing a multiple choice question test, and by juxtaposing colloquial answers borrowed from sundry, more or less reliable, epistemological fields: religion, witchery, psychoanalysis, sociology, etc. In other words, she creates a clash of discourses generating what Booker would call “a polyphonic force that powerfully calls into question all systems of authority” (Booker 35).
20 In section thirty, “Mind vs. Brain,” Kaysen goes a step further in her use of polyphony— defined by Mikhail Bakhtin as “a plurality of independent and unmerged voices” (Dostoevsky 6)—since she crosses generic borders and introduces a dramatic exchange in her narrative. While “Interpreter One” can represent the analysts “writing about a country they call Mind,” “Interpreter Two” can stand for the neuroscientists “reporting from a country they call Brain” (143)—and once again a spatial metaphor is used. “This juxtaposition of [two] voices allows for a…dialogue that highlights the differences among [expert] groups and…calls into question the assumption that would hold [one] group to be ascendant over [the other]” (Booker 34).15 Kaysen, therefore, exposes the limits of conventional mental treatments and questions the reliability of so-called mental health experts. The dramatic dialogue can also be interpreted as a metatextual representation of the whole book since, according to Wirth-Cauchon, “Kaysen’s memoir is…not only an account of her stay in the hospital, but also a dialogue with the psychiatric frameworks of meaning that have defined her as borderline” (Wirth-Cauchon 145)—hence the presence of extracts from her case folder and of a passage from the DSM III (1987) describing Borderline Personality Disorder (Kaysen 147-149, 150-159). By resorting to polyphony, Kaysen puts the authoritative medical voice and her own narrative voice on an equal footing and gives them “equal rights” (Dostoevsky 6), thus subverting the traditional authority of the medical establishment and the no less traditional doctor-patient—and mental patient at that—hierarchy. The choice of polyphony—juxtaposing the doctors’ voices and the disabled patient’s voice— also results in a challenge of the disability memoir, which is usually concerned with the patient’s voice only.
21 Wirth-Cauchon is right, therefore; Kaysen’s memoir is more than an account of her stay in McLean. Kaysen relates her experience there, no doubt, and the narrative and chronological fragmentation she uses can be considered a strategy of mimetic representation. Like the title of the book, this pervasive fragmentation suggests, even dramatizes, the violence and “claustrophobia of incarceration” (Cheever) she experienced as an institutionalized patient. It can also be interpreted as a representation of the splitting of selfhood characteristic of borderline patients: “a fractured but not disassembled psyche” (Kaysen 151)—since the memoir is fractured but not disassembled either. Wirth-Cauchon explains that “the borderline patient’s instability is described as arising from a self that is split or fragmented between a false, surface self or ‘mask’; and an inner realm of either emptiness…or repressed or buried parts of the self that do not or cannot find expression in the patient’s outward
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behavior” (118). However, Kaysen’s evocation of the “Checks”—the title of section fourteen—that all patients were submitted to in McLean shows the limits of this interpretation: “Five-minute checks. Fifteen-minute checks. Half-hour checks. Some nurses said, ‘Checks,’ when they opened the door. Click, turn the knob, swish, open the door, ‘Checks,’ swish, pull the door shut, click, turn the knob.…It never stopped, even at night….” (Kaysen 54, 55). Both the broken syntax—the juxtaposition of short verbless sentences—and the incongruous onomatopoeic chiasmus create the sense not just of a claustrophobic but also of an absurd universe that could drive crazy even the healthiest person.
22 Kaysen’s memoir, therefore, goes far beyond the mere representation of her experience or condition. While she constantly exposes topographic, mimetic and generic borders, as if to give her readers to see the exclusion experienced by BPD and mental illness patients in general, she also transgresses them—both in the etymological sense of the word, trans-gradi means to go beyond, and in a more general sense that is close to Booker’s: “I employ a very general notion of transgression as the disruption of hierarchies, taxonomies or limiting systems of all kinds” (Booker 12). However, the description and abjection—in the etymological sense of the word, ab-jacere, abjectus, to throw away—of Alice, the girl in the maximum-security ward, also discloses the limits of Kaysen’s transgressive approach.
Kaysen’s strategies of subversion
23 Booker’s exploration of the dynamics of transgression and of subversive literature relies on two major notions: carnival, as put forth by Bakhtin, and abjection, as put forth by Julia Kristeva (Booker 5). Booker explains that they “represent two different (potentially transgressive) reminders of the aspects of life that dominant culture seeks to repress.…In either case the reminders…tend to deconstruct all systems of social hierarchy” (14). In Rabelais and His World (1984), Bakhtin defines carnival as a “temporary liberation from the prevailing truth and from the established order; it marked the suspension of all hierarchical rank, privileges, norms and prohibitions. Carnival was the feast of time, the feast of becoming, change and renewal. It was hostile to all that was immortalized and completed” (Rabelais 10). The notion of carnival, however, is used metaphorically by Booker and in a more general sense than Bakhtin’s (Booker 13), a sense that is closer to the view expressed by Peter Stallybrass and Allon White in Politics and Poetics of Transgression (1986)—that is, “as an analytic category [that] can only be fruitful if it is displaced into the broader concept of symbolic inversion and transgression” (Stallybrass and White 15). As for abjection, Kristeva writes in The Powers of Horror (1982) that it represents the darker aspect of human life that “cannot be assimilated…is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses” (Kristeva 1, 2). On the next page, she is even more specific: refuse and corpses show me what I permanently thrust aside in order to live. These body fluids, this defilement, this shit are what life withstands, hardly and with difficulty, on the part of death. There, I am at the border of my condition as a living being. My body extricates itself, as being alive, from that border. Such wastes drop so that I can live…dung signifies the other side of the border, the place where I am not and which permits me to be. (Kristeva 3)
24 When Kristeva discusses the social implications of abjection, she relates it to the “demarcating imperative” (Kristeva 68), that is, “the process through which societies
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base their identities on systems and hierarchies, particularly on the attempt to separate the ‘clean’ from the ‘filthy’ and thus to suppress abject images, which are associated with the latter” (Booker 136). Abjection is at the heart of all social systems, and the narratives that explore it have a subversive potential in so far as they “lay bare, under the cunning, orderly surface of civilizations, the nurturing horror that they attend to pushing aside by purifying, systematizing and thinking” (Kristeva 210).
Abjection
25 Abjection is at the heart of Kaysen’s book since it is represented by the heterotopic mental hospital where mental patients are carefully “excluded,” as Kristeva would say, from the rest of society. Section twelve, “The Prelude to Ice Cream,” provides a good example. When some patients are taken to the nearby ice cream parlor “for a special treat,” Kaysen writes, “the group had an atomic structure: a nucleus of nuts surrounded by darting, nervous nurse-electrons charged with our protection. Or with protecting the residents of Belmont from us.…the arrangement of atoms in our molecule was more complex than it appeared to the engineers’ wives sipping coffee at the counter and graciously pretending not to look at us” (Kaysen 48-50, my emphasis). Once again ambivalence is emphasized since, as Michael Susko explains, “the concept of a ‘diseased mind’ carries connotations that are doubly negative. Not only does it evoke disability, but it arouses fear—and implies that a person is not responsible for his or her mind, or is difficult, unpredictable, and potentially violent” (89). However, Kaysen mocks this traditional reaction by introducing an incongruous metaphor borrowed from physics, which turns out to rely on a double pun with a definite boundary-crossing potential. She plays both on the double meaning of “atomic”—as if the patients were like a nuclear bomb ready to explode and create havoc at any minute —and on the etymology of “nucleus,” from the Latin nux or nut. The puns generate a proliferation in meaning that “calls into question the ostensibly well-ordered system of rules and conventions that define our use of language” (Booker 29). In the field of language, therefore, the pun is like the mental patient in the social arena, a potential threat to order and conventions.
26 To illustrate how abjection works and also escape from it, Kaysen also introduces what she calls “another world” (Kaysen 47) inside the mental hospital, where more drastic security measures are implemented and the patients’ mental conditions are far more serious, and scary. Thus, she concludes the first evocation of her hospital ward as follows: “Our double-locked doors, our steel-mesh window screens, our kitchen stocked with plastic knives and locked unless a nurse was with us, our bathroom doors that didn’t lock: All this was medium security. Maximum security was another world” (47, my emphasis). The minute description of maximum security only comes later when Kaysen evokes a visit to Alice, a patient from her ward who has recently been transferred there. Not only are the rooms called “cells” with merely “bare mattresses” in them, and the patients either “lying” or “curled up against a wall,” but Alice has smeared herself and her walls with feces—so that Kaysen only wants “to get out of [t]here” (Kaysen 113-114); or, as Kristeva would say, Kaysen can think of nothing but to “extricate [her]self” in order to survive. Especially, her description of the maximum-security ward in McLean illustrates Booker’s statement that “the repression of abjection is related to the oppression of marginal groups” (Booker 132). Kaysen here draws a line
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between herself and the patients there. In other words, she creates a boundary among mental patients and, thereby, an even more marginal group than the one she was assigned, in order to resist abjection.
27 The passage strikingly questions the limits of Kaysen’s subversion since here she returns to convention or compliance, and “the binary between Subject and Other” (Caminero-Santangelo 13): these madwomen have to remain in the attic. Following Susan Gilbert and Sandra Gubar’s feminist reading of Bertha Rochester in Jane Eyre, these other patients could be considered “double[s]” of Kaysen, “an image of her own anxiety and rage” against “patriarchal structures”: “female authors dramatize their own self-division, their desire both to accept the strictures of patriarchal society and to reject them” (Gilbert and Gubar 78). Commenting on Gilbert and Gubar’s analysis, Marta Caminero-Santangelo writes that “to achieve happiness, Jane must learn to separate herself in all ways from Bertha, to stifle and finally kill the Bertha in her” (4). Following this approach, Kaysen must separate herself from Alice and kill the Alice in her in order to become “what [she is] supposed to be” (Gilbert and Gubar 78). But Caminero-Santangelo actually dismisses the idea that madness is an appropriate metaphor for feminist protest: “the symbolic resolution of the madwoman as an alternative to patriarchy ultimately traps the woman in silence.…The mad (non)subject [is located] outside any sphere where power can be exerted” (4). It is true that Kaysen’s Alice, like all the patients in the maximum-security ward, has lost articulateness—as suggested by Kaysen’s description: “lying on their mattresses” or “curled up against a wall” (113). Subsequently, Alice stands for utter powerlessness—she is marginalized among the marginalized. By contrast, Kaysen remains a rhetorically enabled subject throughout, even despite, her institutionalization—in other words, she clings to her “rhetoricability,” as disability studies scholar Catherine Prendergast would say (56)— and later becomes the writer she had always meant to be. Language, therefore, represents her most powerful, and probably her only, tool to save herself, and reclaim personal and social empowerment—hence her extensive use in the memoir of the second symbolic strategy of subversion mentioned by Booker, that is, carnival.
Carnival
28 When it comes to Kaysen’s memoir, carnival has to be understood in the broadest sense of the word. In section twenty-two, “Nineteen Sixty-Eight,” for instance, the demonstrations in America at the time literally suggest to Kaysen some kind of carnival. The American demonstrators falling to the ground night after night on television, she writes, “were doing the kinds of things we had fantasies of doing: taking over universities and abolishing classes; making houses out of cardboard boxes and putting them in people’s way; sticking their tongues out at policemen” (Kaysen 92). Thereby, Kaysen likens mental patients with social protesters and political activists, that is, oppressed citizens asking for freedom and justice.
29 In an earlier section, she even goes further: “In our parallel world, things happened that had not yet happened in the world we’d come from. When they finally happened outside, we found them familiar because versions of them had been performed in front of us” (Kaysen 28). The passage is actually an allusion to Georgina’s boyfriend, Brad— both mental patients—who kept saying that his father was a spy and a friend of two impressive men named Liddy and Hunt—hence a nurse writes in his chart: “Patient
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continues fantasy that father is CIA operative with dangerous friends” (Kaysen 30). Years later, Bernard Barker (Brad’s father), E. Howard Hunt and G. Gordon Liddy surfaced in the press in connection with the break-in at Democratic Party headquarters at the Watergate Hotel. Kaysen, however, draws an unexpected conclusion from this episode as if she were drawing inspiration from Plato’s Phaedra: mental patients have a sort of foreknowledge of events. Rejecting the notion that madness is always disastrous, the Greek philosopher shows it can also be benevolent, particularly when it involves the gift of divination (Laxenaire 252-256). In other words, Kaysen suggests an inversion of the conventional value system that sees mental patients as merely defective.
30 The carnival strategy also allows her to introduce what anthropologist Barbara Babcock calls “symbolic inversion” in The Reversible World (1978): “‘Symbolic inversion’ may be broadly defined as any act of expressive behavior which inverts, contradicts, abrogates, or in some fashion presents an alternative to commonly held cultural codes, values and norms be they linguistic, literary or artistic, religious, social and political” (Babcock 14).16 A good example of this strategy is to be found in the opening lines of section seventeen, “Checkmates”: “We were sitting in front of the nursing station having a smoke. We liked sitting there. We could keep an eye on the nurses that way” (Kaysen 65).
31 Throughout the memoir, symbolic inversion especially relies on the recurrent use of grotesque images—that is, images based on laughter, exaggeration and degradation (Rabelais 19)—a major characteristic of carnival. In the opening lines of section twelve, “The prelude to Ice Cream,” for instance, Kaysen situates the hospital “on a hill outside of town” but immediately adds a comparison playing down this separateness: “the way hospitals are in movies about the insane” (Kaysen 48). The image introduces movie fiction and, thereby, fictionalizes the geographic separateness she has just mentioned. In the same section, she even compares the mental hospital with the John Birch Society:17 “The John Birch Society lay as far to the east of Belmont as the hospital lay to the west. We saw the two institutions as variations of each other; doubtless the Birchers did not see it this way. But between us we had Belmont surrounded” (49). The right- wing organization is turned into a mirror image of the mental hospital—equally full of lunatics.
32 Later in the section, Kaysen evokes the nurses accompanying the patients to the ice- cream parlor: “Then there were one-to-ones: a nurse and patient bound together like Siamese twins. Some patients were on one-to-ones even on the ward, which was like having a page or valet” (Kaysen 49). The first comparison introduces some incongruous resemblance, or equality, between nurse and patient (“like Siamese twins”) and the second, going a step further, reverses the traditional hierarchy so that the nurses are turned into the patients’ servants. As Bakhtin would say, Kaysen’s “inventive freedom permit[s] the combination of a variety of different elements and their rapprochement, [it] liberate[s] from the prevailing point of view of the world, from conventions and established truths, from clichés, from all that is humdrum and universally accepted” (Rabelais 34).
33 The most striking passage, as far as grotesque images are concerned, is no doubt the section entitled “Keepers”—a derogatory word normally used for animals or buildings— that she uses to describe and debase the medical personnel, thus lowering their social status as the patients’ are lowered: Dr Wick looked like “the ghost of a horse. When she talked, she sounded somewhat like a horse as well” and “her colonial English accent
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gave her sentences a neighing cadence” (Kaysen 84). Mrs McWeeney, one of the night staff, was “pig-eyed”—a “symbolically base and abject animal” (Stallybrass and White 5) —and had “grey hair pressed into waves that grasped her scalp like a migraine” (Kaysen 88). Not only does the nurse’s carefully pressed hair turn into an ugly scalp but the incongruous image also turns her into another mere sufferer. As for the student nurses, they were a “migratory…flock” (Kaysen 90). Throughout the section, animal images prevail—the keepers are, ironically, the animals—thereby, Kaysen straddles another fundamental boundary: the distinction between humans and animals. Nevertheless, the comparisons and metaphors used for the medical staff are noticeably more derogatory than those used for the student nurses: the young patients can easily identify with the students since they do not stand so much for authority as for “normality” (Kaysen 91): “…when we looked at the student nurses, we saw alternate versions of ourselves. They were living out lives we might have been living, if we hadn’t been occupied with being mental patients” (Kaysen 90-91). Here, Kaysen even challenges the traditional notion of the patient as victim; in other words, her laughter is “universal in scope; it is directed at all and everyone” (Rabelais 11) including herself. The New York Times reviewer Susan Cheever is undoubtedly right when she writes that “Ms. Kaysen […] lets the line between sanity and craziness become so blurred in Girl, Interrupted that often the patients at McLean seem rational and the nurses and authorities crazy” (Cheever). Cheever also calls the book a “triumphantly funny story” but this statement needs clarifying, if not qualifying.
34 It is true that Kaysen is generally funny, no doubt because, as Sigmund Freud explains in his 1927 essay on “Humor,” a landmark contribution to the conception of laughter as a healing strategy: “the essence of humor is that one spares oneself the affects to which the situation would naturally give rise and dismisses the possibility of such expressions of emotion with a jest.” Humor, therefore, “has something liberating about it,” it is “the ego’s assertion of its own invulnerability” and “a means to ward off possible suffering” (Freud 162, 164). Kaysen uses humor in her memoir to counterbalance the vulnerability she experienced as a mental patient—“by its very nature, mental illness makes one’s sense of self vulnerable to attack” (White 7)—and, instead, asserts her own narrative power. However, her humor is always tinged with irony, which involves “interpretation” (Jankelevitch 60). In other words, irony is not meant to represent mimetically but, on the contrary, to challenge conventional representation (Hamon 60-61). For instance, in section fifteen entitled “Sharps,” Kaysen writes: “We ate with plastic. It was a perpetual picnic, our hospital” (56). By means of humorous irony—or ironic humor—she subverts both the laws of descriptive language and the readers’ expectations.
From irony and elision to “counter-diagnosis”
35 Kaysen’s irony is no longer humorous in section twenty-one, however, when she evokes the ward names: “The wards had boarding-school names like East House and South Belknap” (84). The irony of the passage is somehow clarified towards the end of the book when Kaysen writes: “The price of several of those college educations I didn’t want was spent on my hospitalization” (95). In fact, humor tends to disappear whenever she is personally involved: in that case, she relies on irony or/and ellipsis. For instance, as Couser writes, “Kaysen goes out of her way to elide both the run-up and
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the follow-up to her hospitalization” (Memoir 66). Irony is perceptible in particular when she relates her meeting with the doctor that sent her to McLean, an episode she significantly returns to several times in the memoir (sections two, ten, eighteen), each version only degrading the doctor and his diagnosis. The passage from section ten is a telling example: He looks again at the name jotted on the notepad in front of him. Didn’t he meet her parents at a party two years ago? Harvard faculty—or was it MIT? Her boots are worn down but her coat is a good one. It’s a mean world out there […]. He can’t in good conscience send her back into it, to become flotsam on the subsocietal tide that washes up now and then in his office, depositing others like her. A form of preventive medicine. (Kaysen 40)
36 While a medical diagnosis is supposed to represent “the voice of medicine or science” and “institutional authority” (Treichler 65), Kaysen by contrast uses the stream of consciousness technique—that is, an introspective narrative mode—with the doctor as focal character so that he can somehow express his approach to Kaysen’s case and prove his incompetence himself. As a medical expert, he is assumed to “possess ‘right sense and sanity’ and have the expertise to identify those outside such boundaries” (Susko 92). But here, ironically, his diagnosis relies on doubts—interrogative clauses— and all but scientific reasons: the girl’s parents, her ambivalent clothes, his own conscience, and a concern with prevention. The word “medicine” only comes at the very end of the sentence as some kind of cover-up.
37 Throughout the passage, especially, Kaysen remains at a distance significantly abandoning the first-person narrative and her own viewpoint. But the allusion to MIT betrays the real reason for her institutionalization—though she is always allusive about it. She was probably sent to McLean by her parents, her father in particular—Kaysen was the daughter of economist Carl Kaysen, a professor at MIT and former advisor to President John F. Kennedy—as retribution because she did not want to go to college. The same reason is suggested again in section twenty-three, “Bare Bones,” and again she stands at a distance: If our families stopped paying, we stopped staying and were put naked in a world we didn’t know how to live in anymore.… Our families. The prevailing wisdom was that they were the reason we were in there, yet they were utterly absent from our hospital lives.… Lunatics are similar to designated hitters. Often an entire family is crazy, but since an entire family can’t go into the hospital, one person is designated as crazy and goes inside. (Kaysen 95)
38 Right from the beginning, Kaysen has given up the conventional first-person singular— used in the previous sentence—and turned to the first-person plural, which allows her “to form coalitions across space and time” (Price 22). She does not merely speak for herself but also for all the other girls who were institutionalized with her. As White writes: “Positioning herself18 as part of a group allows her to serve more accurately as an advocate for that community” (10). Eventually, she speaks in the third person plural in the last paragraph, even as she introduces an ironic comparison. Here, irony goes hand in hand with generalization, and once again it allows Kaysen to disappear. “It is important to cultivate detachment” (Kaysen 36), she writes in section nine, and this is exactly what she does throughout the book. She hardly talks about herself, her childhood or her family life. As far as she is concerned, the reader is confronted with a sort of jigsaw puzzle that can hardly be completed. In other words, she also subverts
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the genre of memoir writing. While Philippe Lejeune reads first/third person alternation as “the impossibility of expressing identity” (Lejeune 39), Price argues: in autobiographies of phychosocial19 disability, such alternations may in fact be direct expressions of identity. In other words, when the so-called rational world does not truthfully reflect one’s experience, autobiography may be used not just “to play” with the autobiographical pact, but to rewrite its terms altogether. The use of third-person pronouns in these narratives refuses coherence, truth, and resolution, but instead of causing communication to “vanish,” these counter-diagnostic refusals construct a different kind of meaning. (Price 23-24)
39 Kaysen’s book, therefore, stands in sharp contrast with Jane Wanklin’s BPD narrative, A Chronicle of My Life with Borderline Personality Disorder (1997), a detailed chronological account of Wanklin’s family, friends, symptoms and psychiatric hospitalizations. Wirth- Cauchon thus writes that “the narrative structure of Wanklin’s autobiography resembles that of the case history in its search for origins” (Wirth-Cauchon 152). But Kaysen never admits to suffering from BPD, she questions the diagnosis because it turned her into a mental patient and stole nearly two years from her life. In doing so, she exhibits the dangers of the “caseness approach” that prevails in psychiatry: it considers the mental illness as “independent of the environment” and the patient as merely “a series of medical facts” (Susko 89). Except that in her case, they were no medical facts, precisely, only social facts: My ambition was to negate. The world, whether dense or hollow, provoked only my negations. When I was supposed to be awake, I was asleep, when I was supposed to speak, I was silent, when a pleasure offered itself to me, I avoided it. My hunger, my thirst, my loneliness and boredom and fear were all weapons aimed at my enemy, the world. They didn’t matter a whit to the world, of course, and they tormented me, but I got a gruesome satisfaction from my sufferings. They proved my existence. All my integrity seemed to lie in saying NO.” (Kaysen 42)
40 To a certain extent, therefore, Kaysen’s memoir exhibits the same “contrariety” (Kaysen 42) that led to her BPD diagnosis and institutionalization. At first sight, section thirty-two “My Diagnosis,” one of the last sections in the memoir, may be the passage where she seemingly lowers her guard to talk about herself and her symptoms. However, in the extract, she also quotes from and comments on the description of BPD given in the DSM-III-R—and already cited in the previous section. Thereby, she juxtaposes the authoritative voice of psychiatrists with her own voice, thus producing another polyphonic and highly subversive passage, another departure from the conventions of disability memoirs as well: she “rewrite[s] its terms altogether” (Price 24). Not only does her diagnosis turn into “an annotated diagnosis” (Kaysen 150), but she “establishe[s her] own explanations” (Susko 96). While the “caseness approach engenders a certain story and meaning, […] it is essentially the same story for everyone who is so labeled” (Susko 96). Kaysen, therefore, literally appropriates the BPD diagnosis—it is part of the memoir not just in one, but in two sections—and makes it her own in order to contest it all the better. Here again, she resorts to irony and to what Philippe Hamon calls the “im-pertinence” (60, my translation) of ironic discourse —it is not pertinent to the matter at hand, precisely. Referring to “self-mutilating behavior,” for instance, Kaysen writes: “I was like an anchorite with a hair shirt” (153). Interestingly, “impertinent” is also the adjective used by Treichler to refer to the first- person narrator, another so-called mad woman, in Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper.” For Treichler, this voice is “impertinent” because it clashes with the “powerful, ‘ancestral,’ dominant” (Treichler 64) mode of discourse of patriarchal language.20
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Similarly, Kaysen’s voice clashes with the no less powerful or dominant discourse of the medical establishment.
41 Kaysen’s challenge of her BPD diagnosis, therefore, suggests a strategy Price calls “counter-diagnosis”: “In counter-diagnosis, the autobiographical narrator uses language […] to subvert the diagnostic urge to ‘explain’ a disabled mind. […] The counter-diagnosis story does not merely parallel or replace the conventional diagnostic story: it ruins it altogether” (Price 17). And not only does Kaysen subvert her diagnosis, but she also questions her recovery: “Recovered. Had my personality crossed over that border, whatever and wherever it was, to resume life within the confines of the normal? Had I stopped arguing with my personality and learned to straddle the line between sane and insane?” (Kaysen 154). On that occasion, she returns to the programmatic image of the border as she does at the very end of the section: “It’s a common phrase, I know. But it means something particular to me…the shimmering ever-shifting borderline that like all boundaries beckons and asks to be crossed” (Kaysen 159). Here Kaysen comes full circle and confirms her strategy throughout the book—showing this “ever-shifting borderline” and constantly crossing boundaries both literally and figuratively. In other words, she confirms the transgressive dimension of her memoir.
42 Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted, therefore, is more challenging than first meets the reader’s eye—even if her baffling title sends a powerful signal and paves the way for the iconoclastic narrative that follows. It is indeed iconoclastic in the etymological sense of the word—from eikon/eikonos “image” and klastes “breaker”—in so far as it breaks both social and literary conventions. For Couser, the memoir resists [Kaysen’s] conscription into the role of a compliant mental patient, grateful for her restored sanity.…Kaysen undermines and subverts the validity of her diagnosis and the authority of the medical discourse to which she was subjected as a patient. Here, as narrator, she assumes control of her story, which was denied her as a patient, when her chart was composed by others. (Memoir 67, my emphasis)
43 The verbs “undermine” and “subvert” in Couser’s quotation are no doubt the key to understanding the book. Kaysen’s subversive strategy consists in taking over her diagnosis, i.e. Borderline Personality Disorder, or more specifically the metaphoric adjective in this diagnosis—a metaphor, like any image, introduces semantic ambiguity —and turn it into a powerful means of transgression and subversion, even a “counter- diagnosis.”
44 Emphasizing and crossing boundaries—be they topographic or mimetic, semantic or generic, as Keysen does throughout the book—can neither change the past nor erase the long months she spent in McLean. However, this strategy of systematic subversion and border-crossing allows Kaysen to question preconceived ideas and common, often false, opinions about madness, particularly women’s madness, and mental patients. She can thus turn her personal experience of suffering into an indictment of the traditional assumptions about what constitutes mental illness and mental health (Couser, Memoir 67). In other words, her memoir is not just personal but it is political as well. Systematic border-crossing, ultimately, allows Kaysen to break another major boundary: the generic framework of the disability memoir. While polyphony, in particular, challenges the voice of the memoirist, elision questions the very purpose of memoir writing. Since Kaysen seemingly considers she did not suffer from BPD and was unfairly institutionalized, she could not write a recovery memoir about her experience or a
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traditional disability memoir about a disability that, she thought, had never existed. No wonder that the book should “purposefully disrupt readerly expectations about illness narratives” (Cousin, Memoir 67). While she contested her diagnosis as gender-biased, she also called into question the conventional illness narrative. And this is no doubt the specificity, and major quality, of Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted.
45 Kaysen’s subversion, however, significantly stops at one point, when she is confronted with more seriously ill mental patients—like her friend, Alice. As she is confined to silence, the (young) madwoman is not subversive, she is simply powerless. Kaysen, therefore, somehow seems to stand up against the traditional feminist metaphor of the madwoman as “the element of subversion and resistance in women’s writing.” By contrast, Kaysen seems to be “vitally aware of the importance for women of making themselves heard within society, not just ‘outside’ it in some state of pure rejection” (Caminero-Santangelo 1, 2)—where they are actually unable to do so. Kaysen wrote her memoir twenty-four years or so after her institutionalization, thus proving that the vulnerable adolescent she was at the time is long gone and has now become a self- empowered woman and narrator, and a recognized writer as well. Her painful experience of social exclusion is turned into a narrative of self-empowerment and a powerful means of social and cultural integration, sending a strong message to all women—mentally ill or not—that still resonates with today’s readers.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
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Babcock, Barbara A, ed. The Reversible World: Symbolic Inversion in Art and Society. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1978.
Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1984.
-----. Problems of Dostoevsky’s Poetics. Trans. Caryl Emerson. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984. Web. 26 May, 2020. https://monoskop.org/images/1/1d/ Bakhtin_Mikhail_Problems_of_Dostoevskys_Poetics_1984.pdf
Booker, M. Keith. Techniques of Subversion in Modern Literature. Transgression, Abjection and the Carnivalesque. Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 1991.
Caminero-Santangelo, Marta. The Madwoman Can’t Speak. Or Why Insanity Is Not Subversive. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1998.
Cauwells, Janice M. Imbroglio. Rising to the Challenges of the Borderline Personality Disorder. New York: Norton, 1992.
Cheever, Susan. “A Designated Crazy.” New York Times Book Review. 20 June, 1993. Web. 26 May, 2020. http://www.nytimes.com/1993/06/20/books/a-designated-crazy.html?pagewanted=all
Couser, G. Thomas. “Crossing the Borderline (Personality): Madness Interrogated in Girl, Interrupted.” Conference given at the 1999 ALA Symposium in Cancun. Unpublished.
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-----. Recovering Bodies. Illness, Disability and Life Writing. Madison: The University of Wisconsin Press, 1997.
-----. Memoir. An Introduction. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2012.
Eakin, Paul John. “Breaking Rules: The Consequence of Self-Narration.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 24, 1 (Winter 2001): 113-127.
Freud, Sigmund. “Humor” (1927). Trad. Joan Riviere. Web. 23 May 2020. https://fr.scribd.com/ doc/34515345/Sigmund-Freud-Humor-1927
Foucault, Michel. “Des espaces autres. Hétérotopies”. Architecture, Mouvement, Continuité 5 (1984) : 46-49. “Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias.” Trans. Jay Miskowiec. Web. 26 May, 2020. https:// foucault.info/doc/documents/heterotopia/foucault-heterotopia-en-html
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Frank, Arthur W. The Wounded Storyteller. Body, Illness and Ethics. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1995.
Frost, Robert. “The Road not Taken.” Web 26 May, 2020. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/ poems/44272/the-road-not-taken
Genette, Gérard. Seuils. Paris: Seuil, 1987.
Gilbert, Sandra M. and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic. The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. 1979. New Haven: Yale UP, 2000.
Gilmore, Leigh. “#MeToo and the Memoir Boom: The Year in the US.” Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly 42, 1 (2019): 162-167.
Hamon, Philippe. L’Ironie littéraire. Essais sur les formes de l’écriture oblique. Paris: Hachette Supérieur, 1996.
Jankélévitch, Vladimir. L’Ironie. Paris: Flammarion “Champs Essais,” 1964.
Kaysen, Susanna. Girl, Interrupted. New York: Vintage, 1993.
Kristeva, Julia. Powers of Horror. An Essay on Abjection. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia UP, 1982.
Laxenaire, Michel. “Quand Platon faisait l’éloge de la folie.” Annales médico-psychologiques, Revue psychiatrique 171, 4 (May 2013): 252-256.
Lejeune, Philippe. “Autobiography in the Third Person.” New Literary History 9, 1 (1977): 27-50.
Merriam Webster Dictionary. Web 26 May, 2020. https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/borderline
Prendergast, Catherine. “On the Rhetorics of Mental Disability.” Embodied Rhetorics: Disability in Language and Culture. Eds. James C. Wilson and Cynthia Lewiecki-Wilson. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 2001. 45-60.
Smith, Sidonie. Subjectivity, Identity and the Body. Women’s Autobiographical Practices in the Twentieth Century. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1993.
Racelle-Latin, Danielle. “Lisibilité et idéologie.” Littérature 12 (1973): 86-92.
Rak, Julie. Boom! Manufacturing Memoir for the Popular Market. Waterloo: Wilfried Laurier UP, 2013.
Reiffenrath, Tanja. Memoirs of Well-Being: Rewriting Discourses of Illness and Disability. Bielefeld: Transcript Verlag, 2016.
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Samuel, Ellen. “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time.” Disability Studies Quarterly 37, 3 (2017). Web. 27 May, 2020. https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5824/4684
Stallybrass, Peter and Allon White. The Politics and Poetics of Transgression. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1986.
Stern, Adolph. “Psychoanalytic Investigation of and Therapy in the Borderline Personality Disorder” (1938). Essential Papers on Borderline Disorder. One Hundred Years at the Border. Ed. Michael H. Stone. New York: New York UP, 1986. 54-73.
Susko, Michael A. “Caseness and Narrative: Contrasting Approaches to People Who Are Psychiatrically Labeled.” Journal of Mind and Behavior (Winter and Spring 1994): 87-112.
Treichler, Paula A. “Escaping the Sentence: Diagnosis and Discourse in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper.’” Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature 3.1/2 (Spring-Autumn 1984): 61- 77.
White, Leah. “Narratives of Mental Illness: the ‘Autobiographical Manifestos’ of Kate Millett, Susanna Kaysen and Kay Redfield Jamison.” Women & Language 31.1 (Spring 2008): 4-12.
Wirth-Cauchon, Janet. Women and Borderline Personality Disorder. Symptoms and Stories. New Brunswick: Rutgers, 2001.
NOTES
1. In The Wounded Storyteller (1995), Arthur Frank writes: “The anything-but-tidy conventions of postmodern memoir—its lack of linearity and competing voices—fit experiences that are interrupted.…these stories are not only bout interruption; they are themselves interrupted stories” (70-71, my emphasis). 2. This particular version of the DSM is also the version that is quoted from by Kaysen in Girl, Interrupted (147-149). 3. The National Institute of Mental Health defines Borderline Personality Disorder as “a serious mental disorder marked by a pattern of ongoing instability in moods, behavior, self-image and functioning” (my emphasis). Web. 25 May 2020. https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/topics/ borderline-personality-disorder/index.shtml#part_145392 4. In her 2019 article, “#MeToo and the Memoir Boom: The Year in the US,” Leigh Gilmore shows how pertinent Smith’s point has remained: “life writing has proven to be an especially compelling form of testimonial empowerment for those who are marginalized” (162). 5. White examines the six “constituent aspects” (Smith 157) of autobiographical manifesto as they are defined by Smith—“to appropriate/to contest sovereignty” (Smith 157); “to bring to light, to make manifest” (158) the experiences of those situated on the margin of society; “to announce publicly” (159) so as to call into question the dichotomy of the private and public spheres; “to perform publicly” in order “to display a new kind of subject” (160); “to speak as one of a group, to speak for a group” (161); “to speak to the future” so as “to actively position the subject in a potentially liberated future” (162-163)—and shows their relevance to Kaysen’s memoir. 6. For the sake of consistency, I will use Booker’s definitions of subversion and transgression throughout. I am aware, however, that not every critic will agree on his approach. For instance, Belgium scholar Danielle Racelle-Latin in an article entitled “Lisibilité et idéologie” (“Legibility and Ideology,” my translation), in which she studies French writer Louis-Ferdinand Céline’s novels, distinguishes between literary transgression and subversion. She contends that Céline’s subversive texts are legible while his transgressive texts are not (87).
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7. They were taken up again by T. Couser in Recovering Bodies (11-12). 8. Some scholars like Thomas Couser call them chapters but I will rather use the word “sections” considering how short most of them are—often less than two pages long. 9. Section one: “Towards a Topography of the Parallel Universe;” section two: “The Taxi;” section eight: “If You Lived Here, You’d Be Home Now;” section ten: “Elementary Topography;” section eleven: “Applied Topography;” section twenty-seven: “Stigmatography;” section twenty-eight: “New Frontiers in Dental Health;” section twenty-nine: “Topography of the Future;” section 30: “Mind vs. Brain;” section 33: “Farther on, Down the Road, You Will Accompany Me.” 10. “Of Other Spaces: Heterotopias” was the basis of a lecture given by Foucault in March 1967. But the publication of the text was only authorized by Foucault in 1984. 11. A polyptoton is a stylistic scheme in which words derived from the same root are repeated. 12. Interestingly, this notion of ambivalence is also one interpretation for Frost’s poem, in the line “had worn them really about the same.” 13. “Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings” (Samuel). 14. This multiple-choice question test is highly reminiscent of Jose Luis Borges’s “Chinese Encyclopedia” mentioned by Michel Foucault in the Preface to Les Mots et les choses (7). It lacks some common, congruous textual space. 15. Booker’s quotation actually goes as follows: “This juxtaposition of various voices allows for a polyphonic dialogue that highlights the differences among social groups and generally calls into question the assumption that would hold certain groups to be ascendant over others” (34). 16. This symbolic inversion also plays a key role in Bakhtin’s conception of carnival. In Rabelais and his World, he thus writes: “We find here a characteristic logic, the particular logic of the ‘inside out’ (à l’envers), of the ‘turnabout,’ of a continual shifting from top to bottom, from front to rear […] comic crownings and uncrownings” (11). 17. The John Birch Society is a right-wing organization founded in 1958. 18. “Herself” here does not refer specifically to Kaysen. It refers to any memoirist like her. 19. In a footnote, Price accounts for her terminology because, she explains, “words (names, labels, diagnoses) are of life-and-death importance to people with disabilities.” She uses “psychosocial” like Deborah Marks in Disability Studies Quarterly since, she writes, “I believe the term psychosocial usefully describes the spectrum of disabilities; however, I am not completely sold on it, and consider this problem of terminology—like so many others in DS—open to further debate” (Price 12-13). 20. For a detailed analysis of the gender question in Kaysen’s memoir, see American scholar Elizabeth Marshall’s 2006 article, “Borderline Girlhoods: Mental Illness, Adolescence and Femininity in Girl, Interrupted.” Web. 27 May, 2020. https:// muse.jhu.edu/article/192840/pdf
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ABSTRACTS
This article analyses Susanna Kaysen’s Girl, Interrupted as a subversive memoir and “counter- diagnosis,” relying on disability studies, women studies and critical discourse analysis. Taking advantage of the metaphoric adjective “borderline” in her diagnosis of “Borderline Personality Disorder” (BPD), Kaysen constantly emphasizes borders and boundaries—whether topographic, mimetic or generic—in order to cross and transgress them all the better. To achieve her goal, she relies on two major strategies of subversion, that is, abjection and carnival—including humor, irony, “symbolic inversion” and grotesque images. Thereby, Kaysen questions not only her own diagnosis and preconceived ideas about madness—women’s madness in particular—and mental patients, but she also challenges her recovery and the conventional genre of the disability memoir.
INDEX
Keywords: abjection, Borderline Personality Disorder, carnival, counter-diagnosis, disability memoir, heterotopia, Kaysen, subversion, transgression
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Un/Seeing Campus Carry: Experiencing Gun Culture in Texas1
Benita Heiskanen
Politics revolves around what is seen and what can be said about it, around who has the ability to see and the talent to speak, around the properties of spaces and the possibilities of time. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics
1. Introduction
1 On August 1, 2016, SB 11 or “Campus Carry” legislation that had been passed in 2015 went into effect in Texas. The law allows License to Carry (LTC) holders to bring their guns onto public university campuses. The University of Texas at Austin, a campus with a large student population, was forced to conform to the contentious law even though there were strong objections to it by members of the university community.2 The controversy surrounding the implementation process of Campus Carry made Austin the epicenter of national and international debates regarding individuals’ and communities’ sense of security and insecurity in educational contexts. Since the implementation of SB 11, there has been much sociocultural speculation in the United States and beyond about how the law affects Texas university campuses. This article is a direct response to that speculation. Based on fieldwork and interviews conducted in Austin, Texas in the spring semesters of 2018 and 2019, the discussion considers the ways in which members of The University of Texas at Austin community delineate their visual-spatial surroundings and sensory perceptions on campus before and after the implementation of the Campus Carry law. By considering a range of visual interventions by lawmakers and university administrators, as well as counter-visuals created by grassroots activists, faculty, and students, the article demonstrates the interrelatedness among policy-making, quotidian experiences, and visual culture viewpoints.
2 The imposition of the legislation in 2016 created an uproar among the university community, who condemned both its perceived ramifications on the learning
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environment and the symbolic consequences of the timing, with the implementation scheduled on the anniversary of the University Tower shooting fifty years earlier.3 On August 1, 1966, The University of Texas at Austin was a site for the first mass shooting at a US university. The sniper Charles Whitman, a 25-year-old UT Austin student and a war veteran, engaged in a 96-minute-long shooting rampage from the University Tower toward the main mall beneath it, leaving 14 people dead and 31 injured. In years to come, accounts of the murders, complete with portrayals of the shooter and his victims, were documented in such books and films as Gary Lavergne’s A Sniper in the Tower (1997), Elizabeth Crook’s Monday, Monday (2014), Keith Maitland’s (dir.) The Tower (2013), and Jerry Jameson’s (dir.) the Deadly Tower (1975), alongside many other popular culture representations.4 The Tower, which is the site of the University Main Building, stands in the middle of the campus and remains a material reminder of the tragedy. Yet for decades, The University of Texas’s official policy was not to commemorate the tragedy in conspicuous ways. Classes resumed only a day after the shooting and evidence of the scene of the crime was erased.5 The university engaged in actively suppressing the memory of the shooting.6 In multiple ways, the institutional suppression resulted in what Yên Lê Espiritu characterizes as “organized forgetting.”7 In this article, I take the notion of organized forgetting as a starting point for discussing the legacy of the Tower shooting and its ramifications on gun politics and culture on campus in the contemporary context. I argue that by engaging in a form of organized forgetting, the university attempted to suppress the issue of gun violence from memory, while anti-gun activists’ visual interventions served as dissenting acts of memory-making to call attention to their experiences within the armed campus space.
3 In 1999, after three decades of silence, the university made a decision to dedicate the garden behind the Tower to the memory of the tragedy. However, as there was no signage pointing to its function as a memorial, it was not clear to outsiders what that dedicated space stood for. Eight years later in 2007, another decision was made to erect a plaque to commemorate those killed, wounded, or touched by the shooting.8 It took another nine years before the university erected a memorial in 2016, complete with the full names of the victims, in their honor. The text at the bottom of the memorial reads: “The University of Texas at Austin remembers with profound sorrow the tragedy of August 1, 1966. This space is dedicated as the Tower Garden, a memorial to those who died, to those who were wounded, and to the countless other victims who were immeasurably affected by the tragedy.” For the first time in fifty years, both a visual and a verbal acknowledgement were made of the tragedy that had taken place on campus.9
4 This article establishes a bridge between the fifty years of organized forgetting and memory-making from the Tower shooting to the Campus Carry legislation. Moving beyond the much-discussed depictions of the sniper, the victims, and the rescuers of the Tower shooting, my main line of inquiry is to consider the ways in which members of the university community delineate their visual-spatial surroundings and sensory perceptions on campus before and after the implementation of the Campus Carry law.10 Drawing on fieldwork and interviews conducted with faculty, students, and university administrators, my discussion examines visual statements by lawmakers and university administrators promoting forgetting, as well as activist interventions by faculty and students reinstating processes of memory-making.11 I am particularly interested in the where and how of memory-making and forgetting: how such processes are created and maintained, as well as who gets to participate in the creation and transformation of
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remembering. I explore these questions by looking at the ways that remembering and forgetting are linked with visual-spatial interventions which facilitate such processes. I first look at a range of visual statements by lawmakers and university administrators and then consider counter-visuals created by activists on campus. The visuals and counter-visuals demonstrate a tension between seeing and unseeing the armed campus space, revealing a range of metaphors through which guns may be discussed without exhibiting the actual, physical object of a gun.
5 Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s work on the political dimension of aesthetics, I approach Campus Carry as an example of a particular aesthetic-political regime created by the state legislators and negotiated by the university community. My discussion on the implementation of gun legislation and the experiences of an armed campus is inspired by Rancière’s notion that the “relations between saying, seeing and doing themselves belong to the structure of domination and subjection.”12 The article demonstrates that the university’s implementation of Campus Carry is based on the logic that firearms should not be seen, namely, that unseeing weapons is considered a safety issue. The imposition of SB 11 by the state of Texas resulted in aesthetic-political acts at the University that exemplify Rancière’s characterization of “configurations of experience that create new modes of sense perception and induce novel forms of political subjectivity.”13 For the purposes of my discussion, the aesthetic-political framework provides a lens to interrogate the ways in which campus communities experience, negotiate, and challenge processes of organized forgetting and memory-making. Here it is important to note that for Rancière the political is relational in nature, signifying political interventions, rather than partisan politics or governmental actions. Another cornerstone of his thinking is that aesthetics is at the very core of politics. For Rancière, aesthetics relates to broad sensory experiences, perceptions, and identifications of art, rather than traditional understanding of beauty.14 By mapping quotidian experiences through a visual-spatial lens, this article offers a discussion of the theoretical and practical ramifications of SB 11 for the multiple parties involved, complete with broader questions of who gets to decide and participate in representational processes in public and private space.
2. The Visual-Spatial Order as Forgetting
6 The Campus Carry legislation resulted in active reformulations of campus space into zones where concealed guns may or may not be carried or where permissions shift, depending on the present purpose and users. The territory of these zones is communicated through an extensive body of signage, informational publications, and oral notices. The basic premise of SB 11 is that a License to Carry (LTC) holder may carry a firearm into a campus building unless it is part of an “exclusion zone” that has been identified by UT Austin policy or state or federal law.15 A legally concealed handgun on campus must be located “on or about” one’s person (i.e., the handgun must be close enough so that one can grasp it without materially changing position). For example, if the handgun is carried in a backpack, the backpack must always remain close to the person’s immediate reach. Presidents of Texas public universities were accorded the right to make “reasonable rules” regarding concealed carry on campus, including where handguns may not be carried, as long as they did not generally prohibit or have the effect of generally prohibiting the carrying of a handgun by a LTC
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holder.16 At UT Austin, a task force delineated the areas where guns may and may not be carried as follows: 1) handguns may always be present in most university buildings, lecture halls, and cafeterias, with a few exceptions (for example, sometimes a portion of a building is excluded); 2) handguns may never be carried in high hazard labs, daycare centers, any program for minors, sporting facilities, patient care areas (including mental health care), or animal research facilities; 3) handguns may not be carried by LTC holders in campus residence halls, yet they are allowed in common areas, such as lounges, dining areas, and study areas. A resident’s licensed family members may carry in the resident’s room while visiting, and a licensed full-time staff member who lives in University housing may carry and store their handgun in their room. Moreover, UT Austin University Apartments (so-called married couples’ housing) allows the carrying and storage of handguns.17
7 During the implementation process, a major issue arose whether the university would provide gun safes for LTC holders; in the end, citing safety reasons, the task force prohibited the storage of handguns on campus, but permitted the storage of guns in vehicles. As a result, parking places became the only legally available gun repositories on campus. A university administrator involved with the implementation process describes the rationale as follows: We didn’t want storage, because we felt that, number one, storage exposed an individual. If they are going there and putting a weapon in, it exposes you as somebody who is carrying a weapon …. What we were trying to prevent was the number of times weapons are handled. So, if you are taking it off of your belt or out of your boot and putting it in, that’s another time it’s handled. Looking for accidental discharges and trying to minimize that. Then, the third reason was, it’d become kind of a magnet. If I’m wanting to steal guns and I see somebody put a gun in there, if I want to steal a gun, I know where to go look for guns, so to speak. So that was kind of our rationale for not providing storage.18
8 The logic of concealed carry and its implementation is premised on the notion that guns should not be seen, in that concealing weapons is first and foremost a safety measure, both for the carrier and for the university community. One is not allowed to ask anybody whether they are carrying a firearm, and license holders are not allowed to show their weapons in public. In exclusion zones, such as sporting arenas when athletic events are going on, spectators are expected to carry see-through plastic bags, so that the organizers can check their belongings and ensure that guns are not being brought onto the premises.
9 The zoning that emerged on campus as a result of the legislation is informative in its assumption about the campus community’s spatial maneuvering and sensory perceptions of guns—or lack thereof. The exclusion zones are communicated by the university through a body of signage in compliance with state law. The only official sign prohibiting a concealed carrier from entering a building or enterprise is the one based on Texas State Penal Code 30.06. To be legal, the sign must meet the size and English and Spanish language requirements established by the state.
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Image 1. Texas State Penal Code 30.06 sign on campus. Courtesy of The University of Texas at Austin.
10 This sign may only be posted by officials of the University, and they also determine where the signs are located. No other sign, regardless of how informative it may be, is considered legally binding. It is the responsibility of LTC holders to know where a handgun can and cannot be carried. Only two buildings, the Student Services Building and an animal research complex, are complete exclusion areas. Most of the signs can be found outside of “high hazard” laboratories (defined by the types and quantities of particular chemicals), animal research facilities, and patient care areas. Sometimes the sign is only posted for part of the day, such as at the Texas Memorial Stadium: “If you go to the stadium today, the stadium is open. You can go and jog the track, you can carry in the stadium because there’s not an intercollegiate event, so therefore the 30.06 sign is covered. But yet on a football game, we uncover that sign, so you know not to bring your weapon to the game.”19
11 The sign prohibiting Open Carry, based on Penal Code 30.07, is not seen on campus proper, yet it can be found within its immediate vicinity on buildings that are adjacent to campus. Juxtaposing the signage on and off-campus reveals a conspicuous detail: the ones on campus do not show the image of a gun, whereas the ones adjacent to it do. The incongruity of this practice signals contradictory attitudes: while university officials maintain that the presence of guns will not have a detrimental effect on campus, the visual suppression of the image of the gun suggests an opposite value judgment, namely, that the presence of guns—albeit concealed—is not desirable.
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Image 2. Texas State Penal Code 30.06 and 30.07 sign off-campus. Photo: Benita Heiskanen. Courtesy of the John Morton Center for North American Studies.
12 Another sign mandated by state law is the “51% sign,” which dictates that handguns may not be carried into any business that gets 51% or more of its income from the sale or service of alcohol.
Image 3. 51%. Courtesy of The University of Texas at Austin.
13 After the implementation of the law, bars on campus—such as Cactus Café and Gabriel’s —displayed the 51% sign on their premises. However, university administrators were challenged by a threat of a lawsuit arguing that the former is part of the Student Union and the latter is in a building that houses a hotel and, therefore, 51% of the income of
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these buildings does not actually come from alcohol sales. As a result, the sign displayed in both of these establishments was changed to one specifying the need for a license to carry in order to enter:
Image 4. Texas Alcoholic Beverage Commission Notice. Courtesy of The University of Texas at Austin.
14 The Campus Carry law is linked to broader ideological assumptions about constitutional rights in public, semi-public, and private space. The pro-gun contingency based their arguments on the Second Amendment right to practice self- defense and the freedom to make their own choices about guns. The anti-gun contingency argued that the First Amendment granted them the right to exercise freedom of speech without any external threats. Much of the debating and negotiating around the implementation of the law took place behind the scenes, comprising a territorial power play between the pro- and anti-gun forces on campus. Moreover, as the above examples testify, the implementation of the law continues to be dynamic, as university administrators are met with challenges by interest groups taking issue with SB 11 and its everyday ramifications in practice.
15 In addition to Texas state laws, there are areas on campus that fall under the jurisdiction of federal laws prohibiting the carrying of handguns on their premises. Such buildings include the LBJ Presidential Library, the Nuclear Engineering Teaching Laboratory, and the University Post Office on campus.
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Image 5. Title 39, Code of Federal Regulations, Section 232.1 sign. Photo: Lotta Kähkönen. Courtesy of the John Morton Center for North American Studies.
16 At times, an area is only excluded for a small period of time while a particular activity takes place. For example, guns are prohibited during university hearings, active polling places, and during K-12 school programs. School-sponsored events include field trips to specific parts of campus, which require the specific area to be determined as an exclusion zone, complete with appropriate signage in place. In these instances, the signage is not dictated by Texas state law, but University policy, as in the following:
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Image 6. School Sponsored Activity sign. Courtesy of The University of Texas at Austin.
17 The purpose of the sign is informational, rather than regulatory. The understood target group for the sign is the carriers; non-carriers have no way of deciphering that the sign has to do with firearms. That was the explicit intention of the leadership of the university as well as the administrators delineating the law’s implementation in practice: See, the idea is that as a concealed carrier, a licensed concealed carrier, I know when I see that sign that there’s a school activity. I can’t carry. So, I don’t put up a sign out there that says, “There’s a school activity. Nobody can carry a gun today.” We thought there was no sense to alarm the normal community, but you had to alert the concealed carrier [about] what he could do and what he couldn’t do.20
18 The same logic applies to active polling places,21 where it is the sole responsibility of the license holder to know where a handgun can and cannot be carried: We have some buildings that are used as temporary polling places during general election time…. By state law, the only requirement for that is that there is a polling place sign-up and a “Vote Here” —or something that identifies it as a polling place. Those two meet the regulatory needs, so we have no other type of signage that is put up during those instances. It is the onus of licensed-to-carry holders to realize that they cannot take a concealed handgun to a polling place, so by just seeing a “polling here” sign, it meets the intent of the law.22
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Image 7. Vote Aqui/Here sign. Courtesy of The University of Texas at Austin.
19 The absence of a visual image of guns in the university policy signs creates a certain cognitive dissonance with the reality that specifically allows the campus to be armed. Yet the university policy was intentional: “Because it is concealed, people don’t know who is carrying or not carrying. They have no idea how many people are carrying or not carrying, and as long as no major issue comes up, as a result of it people just get used to it and carry on and pretty much forget about it.”23 The suppression of images of guns, then, serves as a specific example of organized forgetting by which the university attempts to suppress the “memory” of guns—and potential threat of gun violence— from visual perception.
20 Consequently, The University of Texas at Austin knowingly removed all images of guns from its gun-policy related signage. Compare, for example, the official UT Austin 30.06 sign to the one at the entrance of St. Edward’s University—a private educational establishment in Austin—that prohibits guns on campus:
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Image 8. Entrance to St. Edward’s University, Austin, Texas. Photo: Albion M. Butters. Courtesy of the John Morton Center for North American Studies.
21 Allowing guns on campuses but at the same time barring visual depictions of them on signage led to some obvious discrepancies. First, as interviewees for this article were quick to point out, UT Austin is an armed campus! Secondly, if the belief is that guns will not have a detrimental effect on campus, a logical question that follows is: Why should images of them be visually suppressed from the topography of the campus? In its positioning, the university presupposes what Rancière deems as the “intolerable reality” of images, where the image of reality itself becomes suspect: “What it shows is deemed too real, too intolerably real to be offered in the form of an image.”24 In other words, the presence of guns is acceptable, but seeing them (and, by extension, representations of them) is not. The University administrators maintained that as long as guns—including mere images of them—were suppressed from visual perception, actively unseen, the policy implementation was successful. At the same time, grassroots interventions by activists were cementing their opposition to the law by means of tangible and conspicuous visual statements in shared space to impose their own version of memory-making, in order to challenge attempts at organized forgetting.
3. Visual Interventions as Acts of Memory-Making
22 Faculty activism against Campus Carry has been vocal and visible ever since the UT community became knowledgeable of the imminent legislation in 2015. The tension between the First and Second Amendments to the Constitution assumed meaning within the context of higher education, with various epistemological consequences. The main question posed was, what impact would the presence of guns—albeit concealed ones—have on knowledge production processes? In two town hall-style
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meetings organized by the University prior to the implementation of the legislation, both the pro- and anti-Campus Carry contingencies had a chance to express their viewpoints.25 The proponents emphasized the crux of the issue, as they saw it, as a fundamental right for individuals to practice self-defense, as determined by the Supreme Court case District of Columbia v. Heller in 2008. In their opinion, violence on campus would decrease when so-called “good guys with guns” could function as a deterrent. The argument went that law-abiding “good guys” were needed to counter “bad guys” who did not respect the law. Moreover, the pro-gun contingency argued, licensed women would be better able to defend themselves against assault. The anti- gun contingency delineated the discussion around freedom of speech: that the threatening presence of guns had a chilling effect in the classroom, which was meant to be a sanctuary for the free exchange of ideas and a safe space for learning. Their argument maintained that guns undermined the freedom to seek and debate the truth —especially in relation to sensitive and controversial issues—and the right to safety and life. Countering the pro-gun contingency’s insistence on the right to bear arms, anti- gun proponents demanded what their rights were as teachers in academia.
23 The epistemological fight against SB 11 was led by the largest anti-gun activist group on campus, Gun Free UT, a grassroots organization comprising UT faculty, staff, students, alumni, family, and community. Their campaign was largely centered around “GUN FREE UT” signs and “ARMED WITH REASON” graphics printed on bright orange and posted on office windows and doors:
Image 8. GUN FREE UT sign. Photo: Benita Heiskanen. Courtesy of the John Morton Center for North American Studies.
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Image 9. ARMED WITH REASON sign. Photo: Benita Heiskanen. Courtesy of the John Morton Center for North American Studies.
24 To complicate the pro-gun contingency’s representations of gun carriers, members of the Gun Free UT group used posters and online discussions to ask, “Who is the Bad Guy with a Gun?” Conversely, they challenged, “Who is the Good Guy with a Gun?” The presence of the GUN FREE UT signs prompted a similar response as the 51% signs discussed in the previous section. The university administrators allegedly received complaints from pro-gun groups, arguing that the signs were detrimental to the public image of the university and represented a one-sided take on the issue. However, a faculty member of the anti-gun faction saw the signs as “political dialogue,” emphasizing, “This is our First Amendment right and we want to talk about things. That’s our job.”26 The purpose of the signs was to keep the resistance movement going and maintain awareness of the issue, even though the anti-gun activists themselves had scant hope that their activities would have any actual impact in terms of overturning the legislation.
25 Although UT grassroots activists were insisting on keeping alive the memory of gun policy debates on campus, The University of Texas resorted to what amounted to another measure of organized forgetting. On September 6, 2018, citing official signage policy, UT requested that faculty take down GUN FREE UT signs from “outward facing” windows.27 According to a comment by a university spokesperson, All students, faculty and staff have the right of free speech and expression on the UT Austin campus. Consistent with U.S Supreme Court rulings, the university has policies that use a content-neutral approach based on “time, place and manner” to regulate speech on campus, including the placement of signs. The University’s rules do not allow signs on windows that face externally to campus.28
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26 The crux of the argument around the signs depended on a subtle interpretation of the legal language involved. While the law prohibited banning guns on campuses, the anti- gun activists considered themselves not to be in technical violation of the law: the signs did not make a statement about banning guns but instead expressed the name of an organization that the office holder was a member of.29 The pro-gun contingency, however, argued that the signs themselves were a disruptive element for learning.30
27 According to a survey of UT Austin undergraduate students on the ramifications of the Campus Carry legislation, when asked about their opinions on the signs around campus opposing Campus Carry, two thirds (67.8%) either favored or strongly favored the signs, while 12.8% opposed or strongly opposed them, with 19.4% expressing no opinion on the issue.31 Notwithstanding the majority student viewpoint, in this case, as with the 51% sign, university officials sided with the pro-gun perspective: The signage is placed on an external-facing window and the content of those signs is really irrelevant to the policy. You really can’t post any sign externally facing. And so, I think people inside the confines of their office should be able to put up things that reflect their opinion, but when I use my university window for a political statement, I think it’s a slippery slope. And I don’t think we should allow people to use the public’s property for their political agendas, or for any agenda. I mean, they’re not supposed to be posting signs on those external-facing windows. So, I think they should probably come down. And they should reposition to internal windows or their office structure.32
28 Given that the notion of “neutral content” in shared space is likely viewed by most parties as a slippery slope itself, the issue resists easy closure. Although many non- tenured staff members, in particular, complied with the request, senior faculty members chose to disobey and refused to take down their signs, unless the university chose to pursue more stringent measures.
29 One of the most contentious issues during the implementation process was whether guns could be brought into offices. This debate was about the understanding of individual and collective rights to defend oneself and one’s property. The task force delineating the implementation of the law came up with a series of rules dictating that the “owner” of a sole occupancy office could choose to prohibit the concealed carry of a handgun there. However, the office space must be assigned to only one person and not be shared; it could not be generally open to the public. As the rules stand now, if the office occupant chooses to prohibit concealed handguns, the occupant must: 1) provide oral notice that handguns are prohibited in that office, and 2) make reasonable arrangements to meet people in another location at a convenient time. However, it is not allowed to ask whether a person is carrying. The separation of sole occupancy and shared offices resulted in a situation where faculty are granted the right to exclude gun-carriers from their offices, but staff and teaching assistants and assistant instructors—who share offices—are not. Some of the latter group responded by holding office hours in bars where guns were not allowed, such as the Cactus Café, which in turn may have led to the lawsuit discussed in the previous section.
30 According to the university administrators interviewed, the point of establishing oral communication as the means of banning guns from offices was to avoid having a plethora of notices on office doors contributing to a visual landscape not conducive to a learning environment: We did not want a situation where when you walk down the hall of any building where there are offices, someone would see a gun sign after a gun sign after a gun
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sign after a gun sign. … What came to my mind immediately was, we are recruiting somebody to join our faculty and, walking around, what do they see about this campus? Guns. Every office they go to, they would see a sign, because almost every faculty member would put such a sign up if they could. That would so overemphasize the importance of this issue on this campus. It would make it seem like this was the predominant thing that this campus was about is guns.33
31 Yet the response of faculty resulted in exactly that: a sea of grassroots counter-visuals that did not violate the law but overtly criticized its implementation. Consider, for example, the following signs found across campus, if mainly in buildings housing humanities and social sciences, and generally not the hard sciences.
Image 10. UVa quote and unofficial “No Guns Allowed” sign, History Department. Photo: Benita Heiskanen. Courtesy of the John Morton Center for North American Studies.
32 In the image above, the anti-gun message—“No student shall within the precincts of the university, keep or use weapons of any kind”—quotes a contrasting weapons policy that was established at a different time and place. Taken from a meeting of a University of Virginia Board of Governors, chaired by Thomas Jefferson and James Madison in 1824, this quotation provides the reader with historical context and precedent. Here, the issue is not whether carrying firearms is constitutional; the point is to call attention to the Founding Fathers’ negative opinion of students’ right to “Campus Carry” on university premises. In the transcript of the original document, the punishment was no less than expulsion without appeal: “Fighting with weapons which may inflict death, or a challenge to such fight, given or accepted, shall be punished by instant expulsion from the University, not remissible by the Faculty.”34 Given that gun rights proponents frequently refer to the Founding Fathers to justify their position, this form of visual irony serves as a valid counter-argument for the opposing side.
33 The following sign at UT Austin’s German Department takes issue with the policy dictating oral notifications in lieu of visual signage by not only defiantly posting a
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picture and text communicating no guns allowed but also presenting a written “contract” to document that oral notification has been issued.
Image 11. Unofficial “No Guns Allowed” sign and contract, German Department. Photo: Benita Heiskanen. Courtesy of the John Morton Center for North American Studies.
34 In both of the instances above, by specifically deploying visual images of guns, faculty members resisted the measures taken toward organized forgetting by university administrators and instead augmented the memory that they worked within an armed campus space.
35 Not all resisting visual statements draw on traditional imagery. Akin to the official signs that did not display any visual image of guns, the activists’ statements opposing the presence of guns in offices reference implicit, cultural tropes to get their message across. Animal motifs in general, and furry cat imagery in particular, were used as tools to channel displeasure about guns on campus, with intentional queering of university policy requiring individual oral notifications. The juxtaposition of a cute kitty with discussions of firearms underscored the cognitive dissonance of having guns on campus.
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Image 12. Furry cat sign, Department of American Studies. Photo: Benita Heiskanen. Courtesy of the John Morton Center for North American Studies.
36 A range of other popular culture images was also common, as in the following graphic image on a pink background:
Image 13. Pop-art “Gun Policy” sign, Department of English. Photo: Lotta Kähkönen. Courtesy of the John Morton Center for North American Studies.
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37 Through such images, faculty and graduate students were able to challenge official policy by using shared space for their own agendas. Campus hallways, then, provided a forum to comment on ongoing events and create visual representations of them, thus enabling the activists to take a stand on the policy implementation.
38 The variety of official and unofficial parallel signage on campus raises the question of the right to produce images. According to Rancière, “images are the object of a twofold question: the question of their origin (and consequently their truth content) and the question of their end purpose, the uses they are put to and the effects they result in.”35 Image-making becomes a statement of agency, the right to express individual opinion and to participate in public affairs. The visual statement above (Image 13) serves as a subtle act of what Rancière refers to as “dissensus,” or the “division between the visible and the invisible, the audible and the inaudible, the sayable and the unsayable.”36 In this instance, civil disobedience and dissent assume meaning as an intersection of policy-making, visual statements, and sensory experience. In Rancièrian thinking, such interventions are the praxis of politics par excellence, as the visual statements expose many of the issues that official policy sought to suppress. By dialoguing through visual statements in the hallways of the campus, faculty were able to participate in political interventions, albeit without immediate impact on state legislature. This particular form of messaging is also a grassroots strategy to influence public opinion on a contentious issue.
39 Juxtaposing the official and unofficial signage creates a tension that asks the ethical question of how much one is looking/seeing or looking away/unseeing one’s reality through the medium of these images. These questions, in turn, tie the act of looking/ seeing to broader actions: do we see or do we attempt to “un-see” what is around us and, in both cases, whose interests do we hold dear at heart? Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson inquire about the motives of a person choosing not to look: “Does not looking absolve us from complicity, or is the ostensibly respectful act of averting one’s eyes in fact to deny responsibility and foreclose knowledge?”37 In the instance of Campus Carry, visual imagery becomes key for both organized forgetting and memory- making. As evidenced by the examples discussed here, the visuals and counter-visuals related to SB 11 serve the purposes of members of the University community in multiple ways. The heterogeneous official and unofficial signs prompted by the SB 11 legislation respectively reinforce and challenge the imposition of the legislation on the campus community, highlighting individuals’ rights to maneuver within public, private, and shared space as determined by both state and federal law, as well as university policy.
4. Conclusion
40 This article’s visual-spatial lens provides a way to penetrate policy discourses through a people-centered focus that interrogates the ways in which campus communities experience, negotiate, and challenge questions of security and insecurity imposed by gun laws and their implementation. The contestation of the aesthetic-political order occurs when some parties seek to express dissenting views on a contentious policy issue imposed by state legislators. My examination suggests that a people-centered visual-spatial approach offers a fruitful way to delineate the significance of gun laws within educational establishments in the United States. The many competing visual
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statements discussed in this article thus call attention to particular modes of knowledge production that are contested by competing agents of organized forgetting and memory-making within existing state, university, and inter-group hierarchies. The university’s organized forgetting produces a lack of knowledge, or a suppression of knowledge, that seeks to hide the presence of firearms on campus. The officials who promote forgetting are enforcing state weapons laws while occluding their visibility, and those who are competing with them are doing it in an asymmetrical, unofficial manner. The strategies used by members of the community to delineate and critique the legislation exemplify the dynamic relationship between the various power players involved, ranging from state legislators, university administrators, stakeholders, and members of the university community, each with their ideological and political leanings.
41 On an everyday level, the contestation between organized forgetting and memory- making at UT Austin has taken place primarily between university officials and anti- gun activists, with the administrators insisting on suppressing guns from the visual topography of campus space and activists reminding the public of the presence of guns through visual statements. The pro-gun contingency, which has little visual impact in campus space, effectively pushes its agenda through online forums, backdoor channels, and direct appeals to the university. Thus far, it seems to be on the winning side, as the university has in many instances bent to its will. The activists interviewed for this article who were against Campus Carry were well aware of the limited chance they had to effect a change. Although a group of professors filed a lawsuit against the state and the university based on the freedom of speech argument, there was little actual belief in the potential for success in court.38 As one activist put it: My feeling about the lawsuit was that it was never going to be about winning or losing. It was really just going to be about creating a platform to be able to continue to express our dissent and to try to move the needle on public opinion about this law but really about the much broader question of the role of guns in school society in the United States.39
42 Given how little faith there was in the (now failed) lawsuit, it is small wonder that almost none of the activists considered overturning the Second Amendment to be feasible.
43 By way of a conclusion, I want to return to the memory-bridge between the Tower shooting in 1966 and the implementation of the Campus Carry legislation. In both instances, the issue has to do with seeing or unseeing guns and their potential impact on people operating in campus space.40 With or without visual imagery of guns, the University Tower continues to stand as a haunting landmark of events that took place over fifty years ago, while having left an indelible mark on both the campus and contemporaries who are still grappling with their memories. In the words of Claire Wilson, a survivor of the tragedy, “Every year, when August approaches, I start trying to forget… but as any rational person knows, when you try to forget something, you just end up thinking about it more.”41
44 Wilson’s statement captures the tension between fifty years of individual and collective memory-making and active forgetting that ensued from the tragedy. As with the Tower shooting, the University’s first impetus with the Campus Carry legislation was to suppress visual reminders of guns on campus. Yet, examining everyday experiences of gun culture through the visual-spatial intersection of the where, what, and how reveals
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the intrinsic entanglement of organized forgetting, memory-making, and knowledge- production processes. By capturing the visual-spatial practices of the UT campus community in their quotidian surroundings, we may expose multiple linkages between policy-making, the aesthetic-political regime, and acts of dissent. The displaying of visual statements reveals the profoundly hierarchical nature of campus as place, with unequal claim to space by members of the university community. The assigning of space thus manifests as a top-down, bureaucratic process, one which is determined by rank and tenure. Through their ingenuity around production of visual images, however, members of the community may overstep their preconceived spatial boundaries and, in so doing, participate in public debate. Ultimately, the visual-spatial analytical approach to gun laws is important in that it does not reduce societal change to political abstraction alone, but calls attention to individuals’ agency in dealing with everyday experiences of policy-making, from the grassroots up.
NOTES
1. This work was supported by the Academy of Finland grant 310568. I would like to express thanks to the anonymous reviewers and my colleagues in the Campus Carry research team for comments and suggestions on earlier drafts of the manuscript. Thanks also to all the interviewees and sources for this article, as well as the Department of American Studies at UT Austin, for hosting our fieldwork in Texas. A version of this paper was presented as a plenary address for the biannual NAAS conference in Bergen, Norway in April 2019. 2. At the time the law took effect, the student body at UT Austin numbered 50,950. 3. Shaundra K. Lewis and Daniel Alejandro De Luna, “Symposium on ‘Texas Gun Law and the Future’: The Fatal Flaws in Texas’s Campus Carry Law,” Thurgood Marshall Law Review, 41:2 (2016), 135–150. 4. Gary Lavergne, Sniper in the Tower: The Charles Whitman Murders (Denton, TX: University of North Texas Press, 1997); Elizabeth Crook, Monday, Monday (New York: Farrah, Strauss and Giraux, 2014); Keith Maitland, dir., Tower (ITVS, 2016); and Jerry Jameson, dir., The Deadly Tower (MGM, 1975). 5. “Behind the Tower: New Histories of the Tower Shooting,” http:// behindthetower.org/, accessed July 7, 2019. 6. On the various ways in which the 1966 shootings have been remembered and forgotten, see Rosa A. Eberly, “‘Everywhere You Go, It’s There’: Forgetting and Remembering the University of Texas Tower Shootings,” Framing Public Memory, in Kendall R. Phillips, ed., Framing Public Memory (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2004), 65–88. For a psychoanalytical viewpoint, see JoAnn Ponder, “From the Tower Shootings in 1966 to Campus Carry in 2016: Collective Trauma at the University of Texas at Austin,” International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies 15:4 (2018), 1–14. 7. Yên Lê Espiritu’s book, Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2014), uses the term organized forgetting in the context
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of the Vietnam War, in which US perspectives of the war were valorized, while the Vietnamese perspectives were actively ignored. 8. “Memorial Plaque in Tower Garden Commemorates Victims of Aug. 1, 1996 Shooting Tragedy,” UT News, January 10, 2017, accessed July 7, 2019, https://news.utexas.edu/ 2007/01/10/memorial-plaque-in-tower-garden-commemorates-victims-of-aug-1-1966- shooting-tragedy/. 9. On the effects of “blind-spots” related to constructing/not constructing memorials, see Trevor Hoag, “Elusive Memorials: Blind Spots, Insight, and Gun Violence at the University of Texas at Austin,” InVisible Culture 19 (Fall 2013), accessed July 6, 2019, http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu. 10. A. Jason Huebinger, “Progression since Charles Whitman: Student Mental Health Policies in the 21st Century,” Journal of College and University Law, 34:3 (2008), 695–716; Joe Scott-Coe, “But What Would She Say?: Reframing ‘Domestic Terror’ in the 1966 UT Austin Shooting,” Pacific Coast Philology, 52:2 (2017), 294–313. 11. The article is based on a total of 28 interviews conducted at The University of Texas at Austin and St. Edward’s University in Spring 2018 and Spring 2019. 12. Jacques Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, trans. Gregory Elliott (London: Verso, 2009), 13. 13. Jacques Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, trans. Gabriel Rockhill (New York: Continuum, 2004), 9. 14. Here Rancière is referring to an older tradition of the term, used by the Greeks, as pertaining to the body. I would like to express thanks to one of the anonymous readers for calling attention to this distinction. For further discussion, see Terry Eagleton, The Ideology of the Aesthetic (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990). 15. See “Handbook of Operating Procedures 8–1060: Campus Concealed Carry,” The University of Texas at Austin, August 1, 2016, accessed November 26, 2018, https:// policies.utexas.edu/policies/campus-concealed-carry. 16. For general information as well as policy and implementation guidelines of Campus Carry at The University of Texas at Austin, see https://campuscarry.utexas.edu/, accessed March 10, 2020. 17. The University of Texas at Austin, “Handbook of Operating Procedures.” 18. Interview with author, University of Texas at Austin, April 26, 2018, notes in possession of author. 19. Ibid. 20. Ibid. 21. Laws prohibiting the carrying of firearms in polling places in Texas date back all the way to 1866, although the state did not require licensing to carry concealed handguns for personal protection until 1995. The early license holders were not allowed to bring weapons into campus buildings until the implementation of Campus Carry in 2016. See Aric Short, “Guns on Campus: A Look at the First Year of Concealed Carry at Texas Universities,” Texas Bar Journal, 80:8 (2017), 516–517. 22. Interview with author, University of Texas at Austin, June 12, 2018, notes in possession of author. 23. Interview with author, University of Texas at Austin, April 4, 2018, notes in possession of author. 24. Rancière, The Emancipated Spectator, 83. 25. Public Forums #1 and #2 were organized at The University of Texas, Texas Union Ballroom on September 30, 2015 and October 5, 2015. The events were taped and transcribed. Transcriptions of the meetings in possession of the author.
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26. Interview with author, University of Texas at Austin, March 28, 2018, notes in possession of author. 27. Meara Isenberg & Morgan O’Hanlon, “Gun Free UT Signs Face Removal after University Enforces Signage Policy,” The Daily Texan, September 6, 2018, accessed July 6, 2019, https:// www.dailytexanonline.com/2018/09/06/gun-free-ut-signs-face-removal-after-university- enforces-signage-policy. 28. “Signs on Building Window,” UT NEWS, September 6, 2018, accessed July 6, 2019 https:// news.utexas.edu/key-issues/signs-on-building-windows/. 29. Sam Groves, “University Offers Little Justification in Request for Removal of Gun Free UT Signs,” The Daily Texan, September 25, 2018, https://www.dailytexanonline.com/2018/09/25/ university-offers-little-justification-in-request-for-removal-of-gun-free-ut-signs, accessed July 6, 2019. 30. Katherine Horstman and Julia O’Hanlon, “Come and Take my Gun Free UT Sign,” The Daily Texan, November 4, 2018, accessed July 6, 2019. https://www.dailytexanonline.com/2018/11/04/ come-and-take-my-gun-free-ut-sign. 31. John Morton Center for North American Studies, “UT Austin Student Survey on the Campus Carry Law,” 2019. 32. Interview with research team, University of Texas at Austin, April 3, 2019, notes in possession of author. 33. Interview with author, University of Texas at Austin, April 20, 2018, notes in possession of author. 34. https://www.encyclopediavirginia.org/ University_of_Virginia_Board_of_Visitors_Minutes_October_4-5_1824, accessed July 10, 2019. 35. Rancière, The Politics of Aesthetics, 20. 36. Ibid., “Translator’s Introduction,” 3. 37. Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson, “Introduction,” in Asbjørn Grønstad and Henrik Gustafsson, eds., Ethics and Images of Pain (New York: Routledge, 2012), xv. 38. U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit, “Jennifer Glass, et al v. Ken Paxton, et al.,” No. 17-50641, August 16, 2018, http://www.ca5.uscourts.gov/opinions/pub/17/17-50641-CV0.pdf. 39. Interview with author, University of Texas at Austin, April 28, 2018, notes in possession of author. 40. Although there have been minor issues with Campus Carry, such as firearms being left behind in restrooms, the pro-gun contingency’s main argument in Texas is that the policy is working, as there have not been major incidents of gun-related violence, let alone a mass shooting, at Texas campuses in the years after the implementation of the legislation. For opposing views on the issue, see, for example, Florian Martin, “Two Years After Campus Carry Took Effect, Has Anything Changed?” Houston Public Media, September 27, 2018, accessed March 10, 2020, https:// www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/in-depth/2018/09/27/305798/two-years-after- campus-carry-took-effect-has-anything-changed/ and Neelesh Rathi, “The Protests Are Gone, Guns Aren’t,” Daily Texan, October 14, 2019, accessed March 10, 2020. https://thedailytexan.com/ 2019/10/14/the-protests-are-gone-guns-aren%E2%80%99t. 41. Pamela Collof, “The Reckoning,” Texas Monthly, March 2016, accessed July 7, 2019, https://features.texasmonthly.com/editorial/the-reckoning/.
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ABSTRACTS
This article explores everyday experiences and visual-spatial expressions related to the implementation of SB 11, the Texas Senate Bill that allows “License to Carry” (LTC) holders to bring guns onto public university campuses. In particular, it considers the ways in which members of The University of Texas at Austin community delineate their visual-spatial surroundings and sensory perceptions on campus before and after the implementation of the Campus Carry law. It considers a range of visual interventions by lawmakers and university administrators, as well as counter-visuals created by grassroots activists, faculty, and students. Moreover, it discusses the various ways in which policies are drafted to suppress awareness of firearms from the visual topography of campus space. Drawing on Jacques Rancière’s work on the political dimension of aesthetics, the research presents Campus Carry as an example of a particular aesthetic-political regime created by state legislators and negotiated by the university community. The article demonstrates a tension between seeing and unseeing—remembering and forgetting—the armed campus space and the range of visual metaphors through which firearms are discussed without ever exhibiting the actual, physical object of a gun. The focus on lived experiences that explicate the ramifications of the Campus Carry legislation in Texas contributes an important case for broader analysis of U.S. gun politics and senses of security and insecurity within educational establishments.
INDEX
Keywords: aesthetics, Campus Carry, gun culture, remembering and forgetting, security and insecurity, Texas, seeing and unseeing, visual culture
AUTHOR
BENITA HEISKANEN Benita Heiskanen is Professor of North American Studies and Director of the John Morton Center at the University of Turku, Finland. She directs a four-year research project on Campus Carry, funded by the Academy of Finland. Her previous work includes The Urban Geography of Boxing: Race, Class, and Gender in the Ring (New York: Routledge, 2012, paperback 2014).
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A Rational Continuum: Legal and Cultural Abortion Narratives in Trump’s America
Eir-Anne Edgar
1. Introduction
1 “T.V. is finally getting realistic about depictions of abortions,” proclaims BitchMedia. Even morning coffee news stalwart Good Morning America finds that “Hollywood hasn't always done the best job of depicting women grappling with reproductive health care decisions, such as contraception and abortion, but it's gotten better in recent years.” Television shows including Scandal, Empire, Shrill, and movies such as Obvious Child are depicting abortion in nuanced tones and as an everyday occurrence, rather than as a back-alley act of desperation caused by irresponsibility and immature behaviors. Even further, Advancing New Standards in Reproductive Health finds that more and more often, abortions are occurring in comedy shows, rather than in the crime and medical dramas that have traditionally been the genre for such depictions. Yes Magazine notes that “since 2016, Planned Parenthood has collaborated with television and film creators to normalize sexual and reproductive health through storytelling,” which has resulted in depictions of abortion that are designed to combat misinformation and stereotypes. Why are depictions of abortion in media important? Because they influence socio- cultural perceptions of who gets abortions and why.
2 Prior to the very recent changes in the narratives of televised depictions of abortion, these fictional accounts did not represent the reality of most abortion seekers. In a comprehensive study of televised depictions of abortion from 2005 through 2014, Gretchen Sisson and Katrina Kimport found that Compared to statistics on real women, characters who obtained abortions were disproportionately white, young, wealthy, and not parenting. Compared to reports on real women’s reasons for abortion, immaturity or interference with future opportunities was overrepresented; financial hardship or pregnancy mistiming was
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underrepresented… overrepresented reasons were more often self-focused rather than other-focused, contributing to a perception that abortion is a want rather than a need. (446)
3 These onscreen representations “may influence public understandings, contributing to the production of abortion stigma and judgments about appropriate restrictions on abortion care” (446). Though fictional, viewers believe onscreen depictions of abortion to be representative of real experience, no matter how fantastical those depictions may be. As Caron Spruch, director of arts and entertainment engagement at Planned Parenthood states, “Film, TV, and video do so much to normalize sexual and reproductive health and erase the shame that often surrounds it. It’s one of our most important tools for educating people, especially young people” (qtd. in Davis). The importance of cultural narratives in shaping public opinion cannot be overstated. However, depictions of abortion in television and film are just one form of abortion narrative that is circulated in culture.
4 Throughout this article, the term “narrative” is used to refer to stories about abortion. These stories can be found in popular culture, such as depictions in television and film, in the opinions and decisions of law cases, in political speeches, and in other public forums. Stephen Greenblatt states that culture is “a process of circulation and negotiation… a network of negotiations for the exchange of material goods, ideas and people” (230). Because culture is not a given, a variety of contending narratives about a practice or person can be found at any one time. Müller-Funk asserts that “narrative is a very powerful—maybe even the most powerful—symbolic ‘weapon’ in structuring a world that is always in the end, a cultural one” (vii). When considering the contentious narratives about abortion in the United States and the ways in which they can and have transformed over time, Pierre Bourdieu’s discussion of fields and narratives is useful to consider. As Herman and Vervaeck state, “In Bourdieu’s terms, one would say that narratives travel from one field to another, of example, from the journalistic field to the literary field or from religion to law. This traveling goes back and forth, may entail a wide variety of fields, and always involves a transformation of the narrative, which is precisely what give the narrative its own dynamic, interest, and power” (614). As Bourdieu states, these differing narratives contain the interests held by the field that produces them—religion, law, entertainment, etc. That is why, as I will discuss, so many different narratives about abortion can be found in culture at any one time. One major issue with the circulation of different narratives is that they can work to undermine one another.
5 Cultural narratives also appear in public forums in political addresses or speeches. Often, these addresses seem to be informed by legal narratives, especially since they are issued by elected or appointed officials, some of whom are employed in the highest offices. However, analysis finds that political cultural narratives about abortion can be very different from legal narratives. President Donald Trump’s 2019 State of the Union Address illustrates the ways in which the GOP’s position on abortion has worked to circumscribe the legal narrative of abortion established in landmark cases such as Roe v. Wade (1973), Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), and Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016). These cultural narratives threaten to usurp the public’s knowledge of legal narratives of abortion.
6 In order to best understand how the contemporary abortion narrative of the GOP is problematic, it is necessary to look back at decisions and opinions of the Court cases, as
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they determine access to abortion. This article will also analyze Trump’s position on abortion via the 2019 State of the Union address. While Trump’s perspective is merely one of many (and indeed, it is well documented that he has shifted positions over time), as the President, his perspective is incredibly important—particularly when we consider the power he has in appointing Supreme Court justices such as Brett Kavanaugh, who ostensibly share or are representative of his views and have the ability to make changes in federal law, for better or worse. By examining Trump’s State of the Union Address, we get a clear view of the way in which it is a cultural interpretation of legal statutes.
7 Three focal points emerge from Trump’s brief discussion of abortion in the 2019 State of the Union Address: the creation of state laws that regulate abortion; the construction of a pregnant person as a woman/mother and of the fetus as a child (though this article does not address the issue of trans people and abortion, this topic is generally absent on the national level, especially within political discussions); and the violation of privacy and the right to choice in state-level attempts to prohibit abortion. These three points connect to key aspects of the three major Supreme Court cases that address abortion—state laws (Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt 2016), the conflation of woman as mother and fetus as child (Planned Parenthood v. Casey 1992), and the loss of privacy and choice (Roe v. Wade 1973).
8 This article will analyze the three major Supreme Court cases in relation to the legal rights they grant, as well as the ways in which abortion law has changed over time. This analysis will focus on the decisions and opinions of the Court cases as they determine the ways in which individuals have access to abortion (rather than the details of the cases that were brought to the Supreme Court, which are both interesting and important narratives on their own). Examining the legal narratives that address abortion rights is an important corrective to Trump’s cultural narrative of abortion— which attempts to limit abortion rights via misinformation or misrepresentation.
2. Roe v. Wade and Privacy
9 The 1973 case Roe v. Wade was the first Supreme Court case to address abortion access in the United States. In this case, the Court ruled 7-2 that the right to privacy under the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment can be extended to a woman’s decision to have an abortion, but this right must be balanced against a state’s interest in protecting women’s health and protecting potential human life. In order to create said balance, the Court tied the regulation of abortion to the third trimester of pregnancy. Importantly, Roe establishes a person’s right to “transactional privacy” in seeking out an abortion—meaning that privacy in this case is connected to the patient’s right to seek an abortion via a medical provider (Roe). The Roe decision also establishes a trimester timeline to abortion, which limits the right to seek an abortion within the first two trimesters, with the claim that fetus viability in the third trimester corresponds to the State’s interested in protecting potential life.
10 The case claims that Texas statutes improperly invaded the right of pregnant women to terminate pregnancy. This right can be found in the 14th Amendment or within the personal, marital, familial, and sexual privacy said to be protected by the Bill of Rights or its penumbras—this was cited in a range of Sexual Revolution era cases including Griswold v. Connecticut and Eisenstadt v. Baird. Justice Stewart’s concurring opinion in Roe
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cites an earlier case, Poe v. Ullman (1961), in which Justice Harlan stated that the Due Process Clause of the 14th Amendment provided liberty in “a rational continuum.” Harlan called this a “freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints.” Poe v. Ullman (1961) occurred when a married couple and an unmarried woman argued that Connecticut state laws prohibiting the use of contraceptives were a violation of the 14th Amendment. Though the case was dismissed, the language of the dissent had broad influence. The same issues were later heard again under Griswold v. Connecticut (1965).
11 The concept of a “rational continuum” allows for the major cases of the Sexual Revolution (Griswold, Eisenstadt, Loving, Roe) to be grounded within the 14th Amendment. As James Fleming and Linda C. McClain write, liberty as defined by the Court as a rational continuum, rather than an enumerated list, “conceives judgment as a ‘rational process’ of ‘reasoned judgment’ rather than a mechanical application of a bright-line formula, and conceives tradition as a ‘living thing’ rather than a hidebound historical practice” (217). The Court’s definition of liberty as a “rational continuum” and the notion of tradition as a living and flexible thing is maintained in later cases that address abortion rights, including Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt.
12 Prior to Roe, full privacy rights are imagined in contraceptive decisions that are nongendered insofar as the body of the citizen remained abstract (Nelson 123). For example, Griswold recognized that married couples had the right to make contraceptive decisions. Nevertheless, this right was interred in the married couple, not within the individual. The right to privacy, as stated in the Roe decision, is limited. The Court states that a pregnant woman is not isolated in her privacy—which makes Roe different from earlier cases that addressed marital intimacy, bedroom possession of obscene material, marriage and procreation, and sexual education issues. The Court states that is it reasonable and appropriate for a State to decide that at some point another interest—the health of a mother or the potential of human life—becomes involved in the process. The form of privacy cited in Roe is transactional in nature. In the case’s dissent, Rehnquist states: “a transaction resulting in an operation such as this is not ‘private’ in the ordinary usage of that word. Nor is the privacy that the Court finds here even a distant relative of the freedom from search and seizure protected by the 14th Amendment” (Roe). Rehnquist’s note about privacy and its limits is important. Privacy, as imagined here, is a right to self-autonomy, different from the kinds of privacy established in prior cases (such as the right to be removed from public knowledge). As Rehnquist states, Roe created a transactional privacy—a woman’s right to consult with a doctor. This “paradox of privacy” situates the doctor’s supervision at the center of so- called autonomy. As Deborah Nelson writes, The extension of the notion of privacy toward individual autonomy culminated in the paradox of Roe v. Wade, a decision that marked the Court’s greatest expansion of the right and first retraction of it. No longer an issue of the limits of an individual’s private sphere of action, the public debate over privacy began to center on what and when a woman was permitted to choose and, less obviously, what a woman was compelled to say in order to enact that choice. Where in earlier cases addressing a right to privacy, the individual had existed in isolation—alone, autonomous, with rights adhered in to his essentially masculine, although presumptively ungendered body—when privacy became an issue of specially women’s autonomy, a second individual, became instrumental to female privacy (113).
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13 Furthermore, the Roe case limited the right to seek an abortion within the first two trimesters, stating that fetus viability in the third trimester corresponded to the State’s interested in protecting potential life. Significantly, the right to privacy (as granted via Roe) has all but disappeared in the nationwide discussion of abortion, especially within the realm of cultural narratives, such as in Trump’s State of the Union Address.
3. Planned Parenthood v. Casey and Reaffirming Roe
14 Twenty years after Roe, Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992) reaffirmed the legal status of Roe, eliminated trimester restrictions with the addition of the concept of viability, and issued limits to the State’s interest in protecting “potential life.” The case emerged when Pennsylvania amended state abortion law to require informed consent and a 24- hour waiting period prior to the procedure. In this case, “informed consent” meant that a minor would be required to have the consent of one parent. It also meant that a married woman seeking an abortion had to indicate that she notified her husband of her intent to seek an abortion. The Supreme Court justices imposed a new standard to determine the validity of laws restricting abortion. The new standard asks whether a state abortion regulation has the purpose or effect of imposing “undue burden,” which is defined as “a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion before the fetus attains viability” (Planned Parenthood). The only provision to fail was the husband notification requirement.
15 The Court took any deliberation of Roe or the possibility of limiting abortion very seriously. The decision states, “First is a recognition of the right of the woman to choose to have an abortion before viability and to obtain it without undue interference from the State. Before viability, the State’s interests are not strong enough to support a prohibition of abortion or the imposition of a substantial obstacle to the woman's effective right to elect the procedure” (Planned Parenthood). The Court also re-examined foundational premises that the Roe case relies on, particularly the Due Process Clause. Quoting from the 1961 Poe Supreme Court case, of which later cases addressing privacy and sexuality such as Griswold v. Connecticut, Loving v. Virginia, and Eisenstadt v. Baird relied upon, the opinion states: “It is a rational continuum which, broadly speaking, includes a freedom from all substantial arbitrary impositions and purposeless restraints” (Planned Parenthood). Therefore, the Court finds that the Constitutional right to personal liberty found within the Due Process clause allows for individuals to seek an abortion, just as it had allowed for married and unmarried individuals to purchase contraception and allowed for interracial marriage, finding that the Constitution limits “a State’s right to interfere with a person’s most basic decisions about family and parenthood” (Planned Parenthood). The notion of a right to privacy and sexuality, marriage, and family that had been secured through the major Court decisions during the era of the Sexual Revolution were recognized and upheld in this case, over twenty years later.
16 Importantly, the justices recognized that, under Roe, access to abortion had been a legal right for two decades. In the decision, Justice Sandra Day O’Connor co-authored language that connects the right to seek an abortion to gender equality. The decision states, for two decades of economic and social developments, people have organized intimate relationships and made choices that define their views of themselves and
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their places in society, in reliance on the availability of abortion in the event that contraception should fail. The ability of women to participate equally in the economic and social life of the Nation has been facilitated by their ability to control their reproductive lives. (Planned Parenthood)
17 Here, we see not only affirmation of the legality of abortion, but also the ways in which the right to seek abortion is connected to issues of equal rights, identity, and privacy.
18 A major change in the regulation of abortion with the Planned Parenthood case is the Supreme Court’s elimination of the trimester regulation of abortion, which the Court saw as “too rigid.” Crucially, the Court focused on viability instead. For the Court, “viability marks the earliest point in which the State’s interest in fetal life is constitutionally adequate to justify a legislative ban on nontherapeutic abortions” (Planned Parenthood). The Justices note that the timeline for a viable fetus had changed since Roe and would probably continue to change with technological advances— creating potential future issues as prenatal care evolves over time.
19 Another important aspect of the Planned Parenthood case is the Court’s ruling on State abortion regulations and undue burden. They state: A finding of an undue burden is a shorthand for the conclusion that a state regulation has the purpose or effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman seeking an abortion of a nonviable fetus. A statute with this purpose is invalid because the means chosen by the State to further the interest in potential life must be calculated to inform the woman’s free choice, not hinder it. And a statute which, while furthering the interest in potential life or some other valid state interest, has the effect of placing a substantial obstacle in the path of a woman’s choice cannot be considered a permissible means of serving its legitimate ends. Regardless of whether exceptions are made for particular circumstances, a State may not prohibit any woman from making the ultimate decision to terminate her pregnancy before viability.
20 Although the Court finds that the State has an interest in protecting “potential life” after the point of viability, this interest is limited. The State cannot create regulations around abortion that create “undue burden”—regulations whose sole role is to slow or stop women from seeking an abortion, or as the decision states, whose sole purpose or effect is to place “a substantial obstacle” in the path of an abortion seeker (Planned Parenthood). The “husband notification” from Casey was found to be an undue burden by the Court, as it would give husbands power over their wives and could even worsen issues of domestic or spousal abuse. The undue burden standard is widely used in Constitutional law—it is a standard created by the Supreme Court that states that a legislature cannot create a law that is too restrictive or burdensome of one’s fundamental rights.
4. Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016) and Undue Burden
21 In this Supreme Court case, the Court ruled that Texas cannot restrict the delivery of abortion services that would create an undue burden for abortion seekers. The Court found that just because a state cites “women’s health” as a justification for abortion regulations does not make those regulations constitutional if the justifications are not based in credible facts. The Texas state regulations in question included the requirement that abortion centers be designed to meet standards for more
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complicated, hospital-level treatments, as well as an “admitting privileges requirement” which stated that doctors in abortion clinics have standing agreements with doctors in nearby hospitals that would allow them to admit abortion patients in the event of complications instead of just admitting through the ER. These restrictions proved to be issues for several different reasons, especially when examined in light of the undue burden standard established in Planned Parenthood v. Casey. The Texas bill is an example of U.S. regulatory law designed to regulate abortion into non-existence, also known as TRAP laws—“Targeted Regulation of Abortion Providers.” Furthermore, the Court found that the state regulations are unnecessary. As Justice Breyer wrote in the opinion, “Doctors would be unable to maintain admitting-privileges or obtain those privileges for the future, because the fact that abortions are so safe meant that providers were unlikely to have any patients to admit” (Hellerstedt). Admitting privileges are conditional on a certain number of admissions per year—women who need to be transferred to the hospital from the abortion clinic. Therefore, if abortion clinics do not have to send patients to the emergency room because of their relative safely, they would not be eligible to receive admitting privileges as the Texas law would require. The relative safety of abortion also eliminates the first requirement—the Supreme Court found that abortion is far safer than other procedures performed in clinics that are not required to meet those standards, such as colonoscopy, liposuction, and other routine procedures.
22 Hellerstedt is significant because it closely examines proposed state law and applies the standard of undue burden set by Casey—a phrase that had plagued abortion law scholars for almost two decades. Despite Texas’ claims that the laws promoted women’s health, the Court found that they would not in fact promote women’s health. In fact, the Court found that the two provisions would have the prohibited effect of imposing a substantial obstacle for people seeking abortions. Furthermore, as the Center for Reproductive Rights notes, “the undue burden test has features that may advance constitutional jurisprudence around rights other than abortion.” Under the strict scrutiny test, issues such as voting rights and state identification laws will need to be settled in courts that assess “how and whether state interests are furthered, instead of deferring to state claims” (“The Undue Burden Standard”). This is just one of many ways that the issues that undergird abortion rights can have wide applications in different legal contexts.
5. Legal vs. Cultural Narratives of Abortion
23 After reviewing the three major Supreme Court cases that address abortion regulation in the United States—Roe v. Wade, Planned Parenthood v. Casey, and Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt, this article provides a clear idea about the legal state of abortion. One can also see how the most recent challenges to abortion on the federal level have emerged from state bills or legislation – which have continued to surface since the Hellerstedt case in 2016. However, it is impossible to think about the legal narratives of abortion without also considering the ways in which abortion is culturally encoded, particularly within political discourse.
24 This examination of cultural narratives of abortion will focus on President Trump’s 2019 State of the Union Address. The State of the Union is historically an annual message delivered to a joint session of the United States Congress by the President. The
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Address typically includes discussion of the budget, an economic report, and it allows for the proposal of a legislative agenda as well as national priorities. The Address fulfills the requirements of Article II, Section III of the U.S. Constitution, which asks that the President “give to the Congress Information of the State of the Union and recommend to their Consideration such measures as he shall judge necessary and expedient” (U.S. House of Representatives). Interestingly, the State of the Union Address has changed over time. During the 19th century, it was treated as a “lengthy administrative report,” later, under President Woodrow Wilson the Address also served as a platform “to rally support” and with the development of radio and television, the Address came be seen as “a forum for the President to speak directly to the American people” (U.S. House of Representatives). This evolution, from informative budget plan to politically charged platform for rallying support, explains the nature of Trump’s very politically charged Address and the ways in which he discusses the topic of abortion.
6. 2019 State of the Union Address
25 Trump’s anti-abortion stance is not new for the conservative GOP. It is simply the most recent iteration of what Lauren Berlant refers to as the construction of the fetus as “ideal citizenship” (87). The discourse of reproduction in the United States since the “Reaganite right in the 1970’s” has cast “the fetus as a complete and perfect thing and/ or a violently partial thing, somehow ripped away from the mother’s body that should have completed it” which has “unsettled the traditional privacy protections” and generated a “normative image of ideal citizenship…of which the fetus is the most perfect unbroken example” (Berlant 86-87). Trump then, is playing on conservative political and religious nostalgia for the Reagan era, as he did when he chose to use Reagan’s 1980 slogan, “Let’s Make America Great Again” (Pressman). However, Trump has extended Reagan era restrictions. As Daniel Grossman writes, Trump has expanded restrictions against abortion, such as the Global Gag Rule that bans “foreign non- governmental organizations that receive US funding from using any of their financial resources, regardless of source, to provide, inform about or advocate for access to abortion care in their countries” (89). Trump’s fortification of Regan-era restrictions against abortion is a deliberate appeal to an Evangelical base of voters. Despite Trump’s personal life (three wives, many affairs and accused assaults, not to mention the many political conspiracies), Evangelicals strongly backed him in 2016 (with 80% of the white evangelical vote) and will most likely do so again in 2020 (Butler). Gerardo Marti explains Evangelical support of Trump, stating: White Evangelicals neither obscure nor ignore their religious convictions when they declare their allegiance to the 45th president. In fact, their actions indicate a preeminent concern with upholding orthodoxy. In the case of President Trump, observers should focus on discerning the orthodoxy of an actor who is perceived as religiously legitimate primarily because he engages in actions in support of religiously defined group interests rather than as a result of statements of belief or piety of behavior. (2)
26 Whether Trump truly believes his message about abortion is unimportant. As President of the United States, he has the power to alter the composition of the Supreme Court as well as make various federal level judicial appointments. Trump’s discussion of
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abortion in the State of the Union Address quickly reveals not only his position on third term abortion, but, on the regulation of all abortion.
27 Trump begins the Address by stating, “The agenda I will lay out this evening is not a Republican agenda or a Democrat agenda. It is the agenda of the American people.” Ostensibly, this statement signifies that the Address will not be partisan but will instead more closely resemble the neutral budget agenda of State of the Union Addresses of the past. However, close examination of just one topic—abortion—reveals that the Address contains culturally and politically charged language. The State of the Union contains only a small section that discusses abortion. This discussion is sandwiched between mention of a “plan for nationwide paid family leave” and the U.S. security budget. Trump states: I am also proud to be the first President to include in my budget a plan for nationwide paid family leave—so that every new parent has the chance to bond with their newborn child. There could be no greater contrast to the beautiful image of a mother holding her infant child than the chilling displays our Nation saw in recent days. Lawmakers in New York cheered with delight upon the passage of legislation that would allow a baby to be ripped from the mother's womb moments before birth. These are living, feeling, beautiful babies who will never get the chance to share their love and dreams with the world. And then, we had the case of the Governor of Virginia where he basically stated he would execute a baby after birth. To defend the dignity of every person, I am asking the Congress to pass legislation to prohibit the late-term abortion of children who can feel pain in the mother's womb. Let us work together to build a culture that cherishes innocent life. And let us reaffirm a fundamental truth: all children -- born and unborn -- are made in the holy image of God. The final part of my agenda is to protect America's National Security.
28 Placing abortion between family leave and the national security budget makes the issue seem timely and pressing. Despite Trump’s statements above, little has changed in federal abortion law—which ultimately regulates access to abortion in the United States. However, the changes that Trump mentions in New York and Virginia are connected to an increase of bills and laws on the state level in regulating abortion. These state level proposals have little to no effect on the regulation of abortion, since abortion is regulated federally via the Supreme Court through cases such as Hellerstedt, Planned Parenthood, and Roe. However, many states have made changes in the case that the Supreme Court might overturn Roe, which would shift abortion to regulation on the state level. And, in many conservative states, if this were to happen, abortion would quickly be outlawed. Furthermore, given the more conservative make-up of the Supreme Court with the addition of Brett Kavanaugh, some states are hoping that their so-called heartbeat bills (which would effectively ban abortion as soon as a fetal heartbeat can be detected—as early as six weeks in some cases) could erode or even challenge Roe on the federal level. At this moment in time, all attempts to issue state abortion restrictions have been blocked or overturned.
29 On the other side of the abortion debate and in the instituting of state laws, in the State of the Union Address, Trump is referring to the state of New York’s Reproductive Health Act and to Virginia’s similar bill. Trump’s description of the law and bill in New York and Virginia is inaccurate. The Reproductive Health Act allows “a woman to get an abortion after 24 weeks if her health is threatened, not just her life, and if the fetus would be unable to survive outside the womb” (Reilly). The proposed bill in Virginia, struck down by the Virginia House of Delegates, would have similarly allowed for
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abortions in the third trimester for “a fetus that is not viable” outside the womb (“Virginia Late Term Abortion”). However, a close reading of Trump’s address suggests that healthy, happy babies would be executed shortly after birth—which neither New York nor Virginia’s bill proposed. The interchangeable use of terms including “baby” “person” and “children” in the Address is deliberate—this reflects the Christian Evangelical perspective that all abortion is murder and that the termination of a fetus metonymically equates to the murder of a child or person in the world. The reality of a late term abortion is far more complicated and heartbreaking for the individuals involved than Trump’s address suggests. As one woman’s story in “Abortion in the Third Trimester” reveals, third trimester abortions are quite rare and are heartbreaking. The woman and her husband were “preparing to welcome a daughter, when she and her husband were given horrible news: A critical piece of the brain had not developed properly.” Though the stories of third trimester abortion seekers are not often heard, it is important to contrast the details from this NPR story with the narrative that Trump creates in the Address. Not “ripped from the womb,” but third term abortions are rather a series of long and difficult decisions between family members and medical providers.
30 Indeed, the rarity of the third trimester abortion and the difficulties involved in getting one seem to indicate that this issue—third trimester abortion—is not the real issue that Trump wishes to act on. Instead, Trump wishes to eradicate all abortion, especially if it means that he will be appealing to the Christian Evangelical voters that he signals to in the dog whistle line of the Address that states, “all children—born and unborn—are made in the holy image of God.” A Vox article noting Trump’s abortion comments in the State of the Union Address were “uncharacteristically extensive comments on the subject,” and that they “may be a preview of a more aggressive stance on the issue in the run-up to 2020” (North). The perspective that Trump’s abortion comments are connected to voter appeal makes far more sense than the idea that he actually believes that he can create “a culture that cherishes innocent life,” particularly when those comments are followed up by a long and detailed justification for the escalation of military spending.
7. Conclusions
31 In thinking about abortion in Trump’s address, three points emerge: 1. State abortion laws (which are addressed by the Hellerstedt case); 2. The conflation of woman as mother and fetus as child (connecting to the issue of viability in Planned Parenthood); and 3. the loss of privacy or right to choice for pregnant individuals (privacy that is addressed in Roe and reaffirmed in Planned Parenthood). These three points are embedded within the conservative perspective on abortion—one that supports the creation of state abortion regulations, but only when they impede access, one that views all wombs as biopolitical spaces subject to State regulation, and one that views all fetal life as citizenry that needs to be protected. While there is also language in Trump’s address that serves as a dogwhistle for Evangelicals and may be merely connected to concerns with appeal in the 2020 elections, the Address presents cultural narratives about abortion that twist, or even worse, eradicate legal rights.
32 It is important to analyze cultural narratives about abortion, especially those that are issued from the White House that are presented as being part of a neutral, nonpartisan
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agenda, because they threaten to circumscribe legal narratives. Significantly, the erasure of the right to privacy (however limited) established in Roe signals a distressing trend, one that can be qualified as a general loss of self-determination over one’s body, which can be found in similar conservative pushback against transpeople. An underlying thread in Trump’s statements in the Address is that individuals are urged to consider the “biological” imperative—as it is linked to Christian Evangelical perceptions of God or religious authority. Under that aegis, a pregnant person is destined to become the “loving mother” of Trump’s Address. As further attempts to regulate abortion into oblivion occur on the State level, it is my hope that we do not lose track of the legal narratives that underpin the cultural conversations about abortion.
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Nelson, Deborah. Pursuing Privacy in Cold War America. Columbia UP, 2001.
North, Anna. “Why Trump Spent So Much Time Criticizing Abortion During the State of the Union,” Vox. 6 Feb 2019, accessed 1 Aug 2019. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/ 2019/2/5/18212521/state-of-the-union-trump-abortion-northam
Pressman, Matthew. “Donald Trump is Reagan’s Heir,” The Atlantic. 16 Sep 2015, accessed 1 Aug 2019. https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2015/09/donald-trump-is-reagans-heir/ 405484/
Reilly, Katie. “A New York Law Has Catapulted Later Abortion Back into the Political Spotlight. Here's What the Legislation Actually Does,” Time Magazine. 1 Feb 2019, accessed 1 August 2019. https://time.com/5514644/later-abortion-new-york-law/
Sisson, Gretchen and Katrina Kimport. “Facts and Fictions: Characters Seeking Abortion on American Television, 2005-2014.” Contraception, vol. 93, 2016, pp. 446-451.
“State of the Union Address.” History, Art & Archives United States House of Representatives. 1 March 2019, accessed 15 Aug 2019. https://history.house.gov/Institution/SOTU/State-of-the-Union/
Trump, Donald. “Read the Full Transcript of President Trump’s State of the Union Address,” Time Magazine. 6 Feb 2019, accessed 1 March 2019. https://time.com/5521860/2019-state-of-the-union- trump-transcript/
“The Undue Burden Standard After Whole Women’s Health v. Hellerstedt.” Center for Reproductive Rights. 1 March 2019, accessed 15 Aug 2019. https://www.reproductiverights.org/sites/ crr.civicactions.net/files/documents/WWH-Undue-Burden-Report.pdf.
United States, Supreme Court. Planned Parenthood v. Casey. 29 June 1992. Legal Information Institute, Cornell U Law School, accessed 1 August 2019. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/ 505/833
United States, Supreme Court. Poe v. Ullman. 19 June 1961. Legal Information Institute, Cornell U Law School, accessed 1 March 2019. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/367/497
United States, Supreme Court. Roe v. Wade. 22 January 1973. Legal Information Institute, Cornell U Law School, accessed 1 March 2019. https://www.law.cornell.edu/supremecourt/text/410/113
United States, Supreme Court. Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt. 27 June 2016. Legal Information Institute, Cornell U Law School, accessed 1 March 2019. https://www.law.cornell.edu / supremecourt/text/15-274
“Virginia Late Term Abortion Bill Labeled ‘Infanticide,’” BBC News. 31 Jan 2019, accessed 1 March 2019. https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada-47066307
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ABSTRACTS
Since Trump has taken office, the right to abortion is under threat. The composition of the Supreme Court can change quickly, giving the President opportunity to appoint justices he views as like-minded. This article examines Trump’s 2019 State of the Union address and the anti- abortion sentiments contained within in conjunction with the rights to personal privacy and reproductive choice established and maintained by US Supreme Court cases Roe v. Wade (1973), Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992), and Whole Woman’s Health v. Hellerstedt (2016). This article posits that the legal status of abortion on a federal level is resolute, but socio-cultural narratives produced by the evangelical, conservative right threaten to undermine the legitimacy of those rights. Significantly, the attempted erasure of the right to privacy established in Roe signals a distressing trend, one that can be qualified as a general loss of self-determination over one’s body.
INDEX
Keywords: abortion, abortion law, US Supreme Court, anti-abortion narrative, biopolitics
AUTHOR
EIR-ANNE EDGAR Eir-Anne Edgar is Associate Professor of Literature in English at ILU, NTNU, Norway. Her research focuses on sexuality and gender in literature and the law. Her work can be found in a range of journals, including the English Journal, Sexuality & Culture, and Studies in Popular Culture. She has also served as an instructor of Liberal Arts at Interlochen Arts Academy. She completed her PhD in English at the University of Kentucky in 2016.
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Measuring the power of parties within US Government from 1993 to 2018: New key variables
Matteo Laruffa
1. Introduction
1 Recalling the common traits of many theories since the Ancient Greece, Wolfgang Merkel mentions the thought of Plato, Aristotle, Hobbes, Tocqueville, Marx and Weber to remind us that “political theory has posited from the outset that democracy is inconceivable without crisis.”1 As with many phenomena in political science, ones relating to democracies in crisis have captured the imagination of a diverse group of scholars from Classical Greece to our days. In the ancient world, Aristotle was among the first authors to discuss it, while two centuries ago, the French political scientist Alexis de Tocqueville furthered the topic with a focus on the risks for representative institutions. One of Alexis de Tocqueville’s lessons is actually very important for our times and draws striking relevance to the contemporary era. As the author of the famous book Democracy in America realized, new forms of despotism can develop themselves from the dysfunctions of representative democracy.2 Indeed, past studies consider the crisis of democracy as an inevitable circumstance which can occur in this political regime.
2 Recent political changes in European and other western countries suggest that democracy is in crisis where emerging leaderships use the democratic game against democracy itself. That is to say, to put the definition of crisis of democracy in a nutshell, democracy is in crisis when it allows to its enemies to attack its institutions of defense from within. This fundamental change manifests in many risks for democracy, where its institutions are attacked from elected leaders and parties in order to dismantle their fundamental principles as well as constitutional guarantees.
3 In time of risks for democracy questions arise of how to defend its institutions, and above all, if parties balance and limit the power of the incumbent or not. That is why,
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our study concerns a selected group of variables on American parties and the U.S. Government, with the aim to offer a structured case-study approach during the last quarter century.
2. Political parties and the check-and-balance system
4 Adam Przeworski’s words greatly influenced this part of the research, when he wrote that: “We tend to confuse the ideals of founders for a description of really existing institutions. This ideological veil deforms our understanding and our evaluations.”3 Contrary to the mainstream vision of the balance of power as based on the barriers between executive and legislative, this research investigates the idea of limits to political power of the incumbent from a different perspective which rejects what J. Madison called “the purity of the theory.”4 In the past, those who wanted to divide the political power, tried to delve with it imagining a horizontal separation based on giving different functions (for instance, legislative and executive ones) to different institutions. In some cases, this level of division could be increased by a vertical separation between central government and local ones. As Daryl J. Levinson and Richard H. Pildes rightly noted, political competition changed the separation of powers system in the American democracy, and we would not hesitate to add that it is possible to note similar changes in almost all western democracies. Levinson and Pildes argued that: “Just as parties can create the conditions necessary for inter-branch competition to emerge, they can also submerge competition by effectively reuniting the branches.”5
5 With this in mind, it seems reasonable to assume that against the expectations of architects of constitutional design, beyond a conventional idea of the division of powers between legislative and executive, these two branches are ever less competitive one another, as they work together and share most of their functions. One of the most telling indications that these branches are working as a single political decision-maker is that usually the executive proposes and the legislative disposes. For example, in the processes to approve laws and policies. Hence, their actions and functions complete one another, as parts of a single process where the power is handled by some groups of people within institutions, rather than by one institution against the other. It is not unrealistic to reshape our analytical perspective on how the political power has developed itself in the last century, in order to include in the idea of balance of power the actual behavior of executive and legislative branches as well as of the parties which compete in the political decision-making process. This idea reflects the reality of many democracies in a pragmatic way. For example, with reference to the U.S., Francis Fukuyama recently argued: “The normal functioning of our check-and-balance system has been dependent on some degree of cooperation between the parties. It has seized up in recent years as the parties have become more polarized and ideological.”6 The de facto arrangement of political power becomes the hallmark of a new realist view of democratic institutions.
6 Let the issue be phrased as follows: in presidential systems where politics is polarized, the legislative has used powers to check only on presidents of the opposite parties, while these powers are substantially not exercised in other cases. Under these circumstances, presidential systems do not function very differently from the parliamentary ones. Similarly, in parliamentary systems, it is very unusual that the legislative votes against the executive (for example the parliament approves a motion
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of no confidence), because the majority supports the government, and in most of parliamentary democracies, a motion of no confidence implies also the end of the legislature. That is to say that members of parliament avoid to simply be forced to leave their own office and job. As Leonardo Morlino and Wojciech Sadurski stress: “the parliamentary majority supports the government without controlling it or it can be actually controlled by the government.”7 In a few words, it is not just the life of the government that depends on the parliament, but also the life of the parliament depending on that of the government. Finally, if we analyze the actual behavior of the two branches, we discover that things are not different in many semi-presidential systems as well. In this sense, the balance of power and the division of power are not effective.
7 Let see some examples and data confirming these claims on this connection of power in the hand of the majority. As an example, we can observe the disagreement between executive and legislative in the United States by monitoring the voting behavior of the majority within Congress on the president’s position via roll call voting in terms of “vote concurrence.” This measure calculates the number of times the majority within Congress voted with the president’s position on roll call votes. Although this is not the only possible proxy, it might be plausible to use this one. Let consider the data (Source: The American Presidency Project) related to the last three presidents before Donald Trump. During the years of Bill Clinton’s presidency, the vote concurrence was 86,4%, when the Democratic Party held the majority of the Congress (this is an average of vote concurrence before the incumbent party lost the majority). It declined to 48,6% when the majority changed (this is an average of vote concurrence after the opposition became the majority in Congress during the period of divided government). In the first period of Clinton’s administration, the majority controlled both the branches. Indeed, the legislative and executive did not perform like competitive branches or anyway they acted in agreement almost 9 out of 10 times. During George W. Bush’s presidency, similar evidence show that the two branches work as it would be one single deciding institution in more than 8 cases out of 10 before the majority changed, when vote concurrence declined from 80,78%, to 32,3%. Finally, when Barack Obama was president, he had 91,25% of support when the majority was Democrat, and 55,8% (this last average is related to the available data until 2013) after the Republicans controlled again the Congress. This means that, in the first period of the Obama administration, executive and legislative decided together more than 9 times out of 10.8
8 In these cases, the relation between executive and legislative changed when the majority in the Congress changed, and this happened under each president. As obvious as this evidence might be in the perspective of the alternation of united or divided governments occurring election by election, it is not obvious what they demonstrate with regards to perspective of the mainstream theory of division of power. Basically, in a system like the U.S., the division of power between executive and legislative exists and works just when the division within the political power exists and works, producing effective dissent and checks. This example is more relevant because it concerns the American case. Namely, the constitutional system of division of powers that is traditionally seen as perfect. Albeit it is well known as a mechanism of constitutional checks and balances without a flaw, these data tell us that the reality of the limit to the political power in the United States is very different. Because the same party does not control nor engender any form of dissent against representatives of its own group, also when they sit in or chair other institutions. Indeed, when one party or
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a coalition controls the political branches, then there are no incentives to check each- others. If the majority dominates the political power, then the barriers between executive and legislative dissolve, and while a “dominated” decision-making process emerges, the opposition runs into the condition of the spectator as an actor confined to be unable to counterbalance the majority.
9 This is more relevant if we considered the most disregarded part of the doctrine of the separation of power, which M. J. C. Vile described as the “separation of persons.” According to M. J. C. Vile, the three branches of government should be composed of quite separate and distinct groups of people, with no overlapping membership.9 Therefore, we can say that the relation between executive and legislative depends on the relation between majority and opposition. Despite optimism regarding the Enlightenment theories of the division of power, a realist point of view tells us that checks and balances work just if this division is first of all within the political power, rather than between powers, because the second is simply impossible without the first. This is the conditio sine qua non that makes checks and balances effective.
10 Another example of the connection between executive and legislative, which becomes an addition of powers in the hands of the majority, is possible because the use of the delegation of legislative functions to the executive. According to David Epstein and Sharyn O’Halloran, in the U.S., delegation toward the Executive Office of the President and executive agencies is more common and frequent under unified government, while delegation gives more often new functions to independent agencies under a divided government.10 As would be expected, we can say in other words, that Epstein and O’Halloran’s research shows how the Congress more likely votes to delegate discretion to the executive when it is controlled by the same party, while the Congress does it significantly less and with more constraints, when the opposite party holds the executive. Let focus on some paradigmatic examples in which the majority uses both executive and legislative powers in the relation with the opposition. John D. Huber suggested that in a parliamentary system, in a confidence vote procedure, the government is the first-mover which does a take-it-or-leave-it policy proposal.11 Hence, in most parliamentary democracies, in Michael Laver and Kenneth A. Shepsle’s terms, everyone outside the executive does not have a significant impact on the process of legislation.12 Giovanni Sartori described into details other cases like that one of “governing by legislating” where different procedures force the legislative to be under the “take or leave” of the executive, with injunctions that allow little, if any, room for feedback and mutual interaction.13
11 The division of powers between executive and legislative effectively exists when the political power is not wholly concentrated in one party, and hence, the majority controls just one of these branches. Indeed, Fukuyama affirms that: “Institutional checks in a political system are not, after all, like physical barriers to action. They work only to the extent that the people who constitute the system agree to abide by them, and this in turn is a function of politics.”14
12 From this latter perspective, the greatest challenge that emerges is not to look how the institutions are divided between themselves, but how actors divide and unite themselves inside and across the “walls” of the institutions. Leaving aside the classic idea of the Roman principle “divide et impera” (divide and rule), the real political life has been shaped by the opposite principle “unite et impera” (unite and rule) that radically overturns the traditional vision drives political actors towards the coordination within
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institutions. When these institutions are united under a single party which can monopolize the decisions, the political power of the incumbents becomes a mean of imposition without opposition. Particularly noteworthy is to emphasize that many democratic institutional systems are under the risk of being politically dominated, where the boundaries between powers are not those ones of executive and legislative competing one another, as written on the paper, but just those ones between majority and opposition, and the first can divest the second of its purpose with various silencing strategies where legal procedures are used as political weapons. The two broad conditions - the substantial reduction of checks between executive and legislative, and the trend towards the unification of these institutions into a single political decision- maker - had important consequences that need to be studied well beyond the ideal barriers existing on parchment or in our theoretical models of the balance of power. Political parties enter across institutions, as well as the horizontal and vertical separation of powers. Therefore, the line of division of power to be considered is not anymore that one between legislative and executive, it has to be a line of division in the political power that we can observe from monitoring the patterns of behavior between majority and opposition. In this sense, it is more useful to think that the lines that unite the power, rather than those ones which divide it, are the new crucial targets to observe for pursuing our research goals.
13 This suggests, on a broader canvas, that we need to venture beyond what James Madison called “parchment barriers” and follow the power where it goes.15
3. Monitoring political and institutional factors
“The American Constitution, then, was born in crisis and tested in crisis.” - SANFORD LEVINSON, JACK M. BALKIN, Constitutional Crises
14 As briefly mentioned in the introduction, when in crisis, democracies are under attack and their defenses became the target of strategies that the incumbents try to accomplish in order to silence the opposition and push it out of decisions, politicize institutions of vigilance and dismantle constitutional guarantees. The final aim of this attack is to enlarge the power of the incumbents and convert institutions into a mechanism of plebiscitary self-perpetuation of consensus. This strategy of attack can impact in different ways on democracy depending on the institutional strength of the regime. The more the defenses of a democracy are, the stronger a democracy is. When the antidemocratic strategy faces strong institutional defenses, a struggle for democracy to stay alive begins. Our central question, therefore, is why some democracies resist, while others experienced one or more transformations of their institutions which leave them weak and paralyzed in the hands of the incumbents. The consequences of this confrontation between opposite forces can resemble one of the four dynamics between the reaction of institutions and their inertia:
15 1. Institutional containment; 2. Institutional resistance; 3. Institutional compliance; 4. Institutional disarmament.
16 On the one hand, when democracy is easily attacked from within, a gradual institutional disarmament can take place in order to transform the regime into a defenseless democracy. On the other hand, when its institutions react, democracy can
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experience a temporary condition of institutional resistance or containment. Within this framework, political parties can work in order to protect the constitutional structures of the state or follow anti-system strategies against fundamental democratic principles. A halfway situation occurs when political and independent institutions act in a substantial compliance, which consolidates the incumbents. The antidemocratic component inside the institutional system can increase without effective oppositions or counter-powers, although institutions are not de facto changed nor formally reformed. By way of illustration, the case of the U.S. shows how to calculate each variable of the Index of Institutional Strength in order to provide an empirical analysis of the changes occurred in the American institutions since November 2016, when Donald Trump was elected the 45th President of the United States. Thomas Friedman of the New York Times recently wrote that “the biggest threat to the integrity of our democracy today is in the Oval Office.”16 By observing the institutional strength and the political defense of the U.S. during the last years, it is possible to say if Friedman is right or not when he accuses the President of being the main risk for the American democracy. In order to measure the institutional strength, we need to find the value of the following variables: political defense, institutional vigilance and constitutional entrenchment.
17 The three dimensions will measure the limits to a hegemonic political power in terms of level of neutrality of the decision-making, judicial overruling of political decisions, autonomy of independent institutions, and finally, the degree to which is more easily that the constitution can be politically manipulated, that is to say, its entrenchment. In this way, we might try to characterize either the defense system as a whole, or the single institutional defenses in terms of some relevant dimensions.
18 The political defense is symbolized by “p” and its measure is based on his difference between the number of all political decisions and those ones we can consider unilateral decisions, because the majority adopted them by circumventing the opposition. The higher the level of political defense is, the more effective the constraints on the majority are and hence the opposition is able to limit its powers and avoid it can impose unilaterally a direction to democracy. This dimension contemplates the tools that the majority can use to limit the opposition and the likelihood it actually uses them. The space of political defense calculates the exact limits the opposition poses to the majority by measuring the amount of political power of the opposition versus the majority within the political decision-making. By political power we mean: the power to decide that is wielded together by the main political institutions for the approval of laws, policies and appointments. Namely, the power of the elective institutions of the executive and legislative branches.
19 To assess the level of institutional vigilance, we selected the sub-variables whose variations could suggest the direct measure of the degree of insulation of judicial and other independent institutions from the power of incumbents. For instance, one of the sub-variables, the “diversified appointment procedures” monitors how members of each institution are appointed, and if these procedures for appointment involve many political actors from different parties. Particularly noteworthy, we consider “diversified” an appointment procedure which requires the participation of the opposition and cannot be accomplished just by the executive or members of the governing party or majority. That is to say if courts, tribunals and other institutions of vigilance can be easily subjugated and controlled by the majority, or their members are
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appointed through procedures which require the agreement between majority and opposition.
20 The values of these two groups of sub-variables can be aggregated in the single indicator: institutional vigilance (v), which captures the ability of judicial and independent institutions to stay independent and survive.
21 The last component of this index would measure the level of entrenchment of constitution (e), with the aim to assess the limit on the ruling parties to change the constitutional structure. In order to evaluate how resistant the constitution is to stand up against political attacks that threatens its integrity, it is possible to monitor some binary sub-variables.
Table no. 1 - Dimensions of observation; *Scoring on these items is reversed. **To calculate the institutional vigilance the features coded in the second group of sub-variables should be controlled for every independent institution.
22 The data related to the case of the American democracy indicate the variation of institutional strength in the last decade (see Figure no. 1), with details on the current value for each single variable (see Figure no. 3). This analysis then goes on to treat the political defense and its change during the last 25 years. We limit our study over a significant period which started with the presidency of Bill Clinton until the current one of Donald Trump. The most recent data are related to January 31st 2018.
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Figure no. 1 - Institutional Strength U.S. - Sources: The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Federal Register: laws; Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley - The American Presidency Project, 1999-2018; Bipartisan Policy Center.
Table no. 2 and Figure no. 2 - Note: My own calculations based on data provided by U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Federal Register: laws; Gerhard Peters and John T. Woolley - The American Presidency Project, 1999-2018; Bipartisan Policy Center.
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23 Looking back over the past 25 years, the most remarkable phenomenon is the continuity and consistency of the trend of political defense with an average value of 63.5 %. Interestingly, Figure no. 2 now stands at 33 %. Our evidence shows the infrequency of this political condition. In the last quarter of century, the level of political defense has never been so low. The first year of the Trump administration marked an absolute negative record in terms of a continuous abuse of power which has limited as never before the role of the opposition. This extremely low value represents a worrisome increase, that can be seen as abnormal, in the recourse to bypass rules by the incumbent. Hence, the majority has unilaterally imposed laws and policies in most of the time, without leaving any chance for the opposition to participate and contribute to decisions.
24 This is a daunting challenge for democracy. The empirical findings in this study provide a new understanding of radicalization of political elites in the U.S. More specifically, as hypothetised by S. Levitsky on the Republican Party: “The radicalization of the GOP base has generated intense partisan animosity, which has encouraged Republican politicians to deploy increasingly hardball tactics to maintain power.”17
25 What is striking in these tables is that there are two previous periods of minimum political defense. A more complete evaluation requires also to observe other variables and to contextualize them into a wider framework which includes some information from qualitative research. However, in order to give a more accurate portrait of the real conditions of democracy in the U.S., we need to examine in depth this trend and answer to the following questions: why and when the political defense fell down in some moments of recent history of the American democracy? which are the implications of the minimum value that we see today? do these moment of low political defense represent or not a threat to democratic institutions? The first fall and rise of political defense was between 1995 and 1997 under President Clinton, when the majority of both chambers of the Congress became Republican after many decades. In a condition of division of political power, where there is not one single party controlling the key institutions of politics, the risk of an abuse by one group of politicians or one leader is almost unreal as these institutions check one another and are not controlled unilaterally. The increase of unilateral actions by the executive can be explained as the President preferred to avoid being completely eclipsed by a new rival majority. At the same time, as the value of political defense depends also on the total number of decisions approved by political institutions, in a condition of substantial division of power where opposite parties control crucial segments of the decision-making process, the productivity of these institutions can be very low. Hence, the first of these minimum values of the dataset does not represent any particularly dangerous risk for the American democracy as it resulted from a divided government.
26 This argument is certainly pertinent to remind us what said in the previous pages about the unity of political power and the danger of executive majorities. Democratic institutions are under risk to be weakened when the majority or a single party controls the entire decision-making process and abuses of the power by divesting the political opposition. Hence, the other two low values of political defense related to the 112th Congress and the 113th one should not concern us as they occurred in periods of divided government. The successive minimum, that accurately represents the current political conditions, is the tangible clue that democracy is under attack in the U.S. as one single party controls the whole decision-making process of democratic institutions, and as
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showed by empirical evidence, it proves that the majority insists to limit the opposition. The political defense under Trump is a few percentage points higher than half of that one we noted when Obama left the Oval Office. There has been an increase of the power of the majority through bypass rules of 95,92%. This is the first attack we can monitor to democratic institutions, which are weaker today than before Trump got elected as president.
27 The following tables show one by one all the variables and their sub-variables to be added to the political defense for the aggregate measure of the Index of Institutional Strength. As there have been not any relevant reform of these institutions, nor of the constitutional amendment procedures, hence their values are considered as constant in the last 10 years.
Table no. 3 - *Scoring on these items is reversed. Note: The cases were coded using a binary system. Source: The Constitution of the United States of America, Art. 3, 1787; Rules of the Supreme Court of the United States, 2017.
Table no. 4 - Note: The cases were coded using a binary system. Source: United States Public Laws 103rd Congress N. 419, Civil Right Commission Amendments Act, October 25, 1994.
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Table no. 5 - Note: The cases were coded using a binary system. Source: Title 47 of the Code of Federal Regulations.
Table no. 6 - Note: The cases were coded using a binary system. Source: Federal Election Campaign Act, Pub.L. United States Public Laws 92nd Congress, N. 225, enacted February 7, 1972.
Table no. 7 - Note: The cases were coded using a binary system. *Scoring on these items is reversed. Source: The Constitution of the United States of America.
28 Finally, as already mentioned many times in these pages, our analysis includes also some additional information and data which can provide a cross-check indicator. This mixed method of research, which emphasizes the importance of qualitative analysis, provides a complete observation of the Index of Institutional Strength. This cross-check indicator allows us to highlight the crucial cases of substantial abuses of power, which cause the reaction of non-political institutions for preserving the democratic identity of the regime. Because the developments examined here with reference to this cross-
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check are relatively recent, we cannot already draw some definitive conclusions about it.
29 Nevertheless, it is particularly noteworthy to stress that some of the key political decisions approved by the majority over the last year and half of Trump administration have been substantially blocked or changed by the judiciary. They reveal an essential action aimed at counterbalancing the power of the incumbents and protecting the democratic values at the bases of many American institutions and their policies.
Figure no. 3
30 The relationship between Donald Trump and the judiciary might best be described as contentious. From the beginning of his tenure as president, he continuously criticized various criminal justice agencies such as the FBI or the CIA which of course strained the relationship.
31 The judiciary intervened in various crucial cases. While none yet halted the enforcement of Executive Order N. 13767 “Border Security and Immigration Enforcement Improvements” (January 25, 2017), which is famous for the project of the wall along the nearly 2,000-mile southern border of the U.S., or the Energy Independence Executive Order (Executive Order N. 13783, March 28, 2017), many others have been blocked. More generally, courts ruled against the President as never before. An example, maybe the most important, is that one of Trump’s decision to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) immigration program. Notwithstanding these remarkable examples, events may still derail this confrontation, but there are two other reasons to be confident that the institutional defenses will win the ambitions the Trump administration might have and save the American democracy.
32 What is important to remember about the United States judicial system is that it is set up in essentially a branch system. While the Supreme Court is the most important court in the land, having the power to overrule lower court rulings, not all legal issues are
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heard before the nine justices on the court; while the Supreme Court decides around 80 cases per year, appellate courts decide a staggering 58,000 cases annually. Thus it is the entire U.S. court system which is important to identify in its relationship with the president. Additionally, there is evidence that points to a similarly tense relationship with the courts. Most notably, Trump has accused a judge of Mexican heritage of a biased ruling against him. In addition to that, a number of courts that stopped some of his executive orders have been sharply criticized by him. However, the Supreme Court has recently upheld his travel ban, overturning the rulings of lower courts. This last example shows how the courts can limit the President’s power on the one hand, but also strengthening it on the other. Overall, even though Trump might have numerous ways to indirectly influence the political orientation of the judiciary and thus turn the odds in his favor. Ultimately, though, especially the judges generally work free from political pressures and do not have to fear political retaliation by voters, politicians or the administration and thus can rule freely. This might be one of the strongest and most enduring check the American democracy has.
33 Firstly, the Washington community has not completely adapted to the new president. In fact, it has engaged in an unprecedented tussle with the team of Trump’s most vocal supporters. That fight was won over the course of a few weeks after the more complex moments at the start of his presidency (the famous 100 days), which featured the resignation of Michael Flynn and the demise of Steve Bannon. The administration was then filled out with people chosen to mediate between the president, the Pentagon and the Security and Defense Agencies. The man who came to epitomize this new phase was the new National Security Advisor, General H.R. McMaster, who experts claim is much- loved in Washington and despised by the President. However, another interesting aspect to be observed in this regard is Trump’s attitude to dismiss dissenting voices. Just to mention a few examples, it happened with James Comey (head of the FBI), Andrew McCabe (Comey’s replacement), Gary Cohn (head of the National Economic Council), Rex Tillerson (Secretary of State), H.R. McMaster (national-security advisor), David Schilkin (head of Veterans Affairs). These episodes are only a few of the instances of the ongoing power struggle between President Trump and the other institutional forces which are uninterested in radical change.
34 Secondly, elections are not just the beginning of the crisis, as they can be also its end. Indeed, as voters can give the power to antidemocratic political parties, if the incumbents do not damage the institutions, then they can be removed with new elections. As the result of the Midterm elections show, the recurring rounds of voting for renovating political institutions, resemble the flux of a continuous election in pieces, which can scale down Trump’s power and definitively end the attack to the American democracy. Therefore, the future of democracy in the United States will rest also in the hands of citizens.
35 In summary, the American democracy is a case in which, despite unfavorable conditions of political defense and the obstinacy of Trump to act as an antidemocratic leader (for example, with continuous delegitimation of other institutions), extensive measures of vigilance and insurmountable constitutional barriers surround the incumbent. Therefore, notable constrains can limit the impact of the current attack to democratic institutions and values in the U.S.
36 Although the U.S. suffered a worrying decline of institutional strength, its non-political institutions are reacting and we witness a phase of institutional resistance. In a few
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words, while the Trump administration represents an unprecedented menace to political oppositors, independent institutions are fighting back in order to stand up for democracy whenever it is undermined or in danger.
37 Finally, after the first 100 days of his administration Trump blamed the Constitution judging it as: “an archaic system. . . It’s really a bad thing for the country.” Some dangerous scenarios lie behind this veiled threat to the fundamental document of democracy in the U.S. and the basic symbol of the American creed. Indeed, despite the critics to the U.S. constitution, it is quite uncommon that a president attack, also indirectly, the constitution. However, in case of an explicit attack against the constitution and the integrity of the American institutions, the U.S. democracy would resist quite easily and its constitutional architecture would continue to exist untouched. Constitutional rules in the U.S. cannot be changed on a presidential whim, nor by a majority in Congress, nor by the executive and legislative branches working in concert. In other words, the American Constitution protects its democracy from waves of anti-politics because its core principles remain intact. Indeed, the last word on amendment proposals is held by the states, and a qualified three-quarters majority is required in order to approve them. This explains why only 27 constitutional amendments have been approved since 1789. Thus, even though 32 states are controlled by Republican majorities, it is not enough to dismantle constitutional guarantees or revoke rights and freedoms.
4. Conclusion
38 With this in mind, we believe that Trump’s America will have a different story to tell than those of other democracies in which constitutional guarantees have been attacked and weakened by populist leaders in government, as is currently the case in Hungary, where electoral consensus, a political majority and referendums have been used to implement and reforms that have led to a centralisation of power. Unless something unforeseen takes place, American democracy will overcome its T-test (meaning Trump- test).
39 And if it does, it will be among the few that have been able to resist attacks of anti- politics and survive the crisis, further demonstrating the capacity of American democracy to adapt to the challenges of its times while preserving its identity.
40 The recurrent abuse of power showed by the Index of institutional strength could be exactly a case of little-noticed and incremental steps mentioned by Robert Mickey, Steven Levitsky and Lucan Ahmad Way: “If democratic backsliding were to occur in the United States, it would not take the form of a coup d’état; there would be no declaration of martial law or imposition of single party rule. Rather, the experience of most contemporary autocracies suggests that it would take place through a series of little-noticed, incremental steps, most of which are legal and many of which appear innocuous. Taken together, however, they would tilt the playing field in favor of the ruling party.”18
41 As a result, we embrace a different point of view highlighting that the crux of the problem is not merely if the President uses the power in an illiberal way, rather than which level of institutional defense exists in these democracies and how the Members of the United States Congress behave.
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42 The new paradigm suggests a few simple questions: How they will react to the threat when antidemocratic leaders win the elections, open the doors of the institutions and gain the political power to govern? Will they be enough strong to resist to these attacks and eventually limit the power of the President? Will the institutions protect their liberal and democratic political identity? In this night of democracy, the most important unknown remains the future health of American democracy, as its political model and priorities have still a worldwide influence on other societies. Contrary to most of the alarms of those ones who cry wolf on democracy in America as a hopeless case, we argue that the U.S. will be able to succeed in coping with the current menace as its democratic strength depends in considerable measure on the integrity of its institutions and constitutional order. Both these aspects will be barely manipulated, and the effects of this administration - despite all the risks it entails - will not damage in a complete and irreversible way the institutional integrity of the American democracy and its chances to thrive again.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Code of Federal Regulations of the Federal Communications Commission.
Epstein, David and Sharyn O'Halloran. Delegating Powers: A Transaction Cost Politics Approach to Policy Making under Separate Powers, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
Fukuyama, Francis. Checks and Balances, The American interest, 2017.
Huber, John D.. The Vote of Confidence in Parliamentary Democracies. The American Political Science Review, Volume 90, No. 2, 1996.
Laver, Michael and Kenneth A. Shepsle. Making and Breaking Governments: Cabinets and Legislatures in Parliamentary Democracies, Cambridge University Press, 1996.
Levinson, Daryl J., and Richard H. Pildes. Separation of Parties, Not Powers, Harvard Law Review, 2006.
Levitsky, Steven. Memo prepared for “Global Populisms as a Threat to Democracy” conference, Stanford University, 2017.
Madison, James. Spirit of Governments, National Gazette, February 18, 1792.
Mickey, Robert. Levitsky, Steven and Lucan Ahmad Way. Is America Still Safe for Democracy? Why the United States is in Danger of Backsliding. Foreign Affairs, 2017.
Morlino, Leonardo and Wojciech Sadurski. Democratization and the European Union: Comparing Central and Eastern European Post-communist Countries, Routledge, 2010.
Przeworski, Adam. Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government, New York University Press, 2010.
Ragsdale, Lyn. Vital Statistics on the Presidency, CQ Press (various editions).
Rules of the Supreme Court of the United States, 2017.
Sartori, Giovanni. Comparative Constitutional Engineering, NYU Press, 1997.
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Stanley, Harold and Richard Niemi. Vital Statistics on American Politics, CQ Press (various editions).
The Constitution of the United States of America, 1787.
The U.S. National Archives and Records Administration, Federal Register: laws.
Tocqueville, Alexis (de). Democracy in America, 1835.
United States Public Laws 103rd Congress, N. 419, Civil Right Commission Amendments Act, October 25, 1994.
United States Public Laws 92nd Congress, N. 225, Federal Election Campaign Act, enacted February 7, 1972.
Vile, M. J. C.. Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, Liberty Fund, 1962.
Wolfgang, Merkel. Is There a Crisis of Democracy?. Democratic Theory, Volume 1, Issue 2, 2014.
Woolley, John T. and Gerhard Peters. “House and Senate Concurrence with Presidents.” in The American Presidency Project, University of California, 1999-2016: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/ data/concurrence.php.
NOTES
1. Merkel Wolfgang, Is There a Crisis of Democracy?, Democratic Theory Volume 1, Issue 2, 2014, p. 11. 2. Tocqueville Alexis (de), Democracy in America, 1835. 3. Adam Przeworski, Democracy and the Limits of Self-Government, New York University Press, 2010, p. xiv. 4. James Madison, Spirit of Governments, National Gazette, February 18, 1792. 5. Daryl J. Levinson and Richard H. Pildes, Separation of Parties, Not Powers, Harvard Law Review, Harvard Public Law Working Paper No. 13, 2006, p. 12. 6. Francis Fukuyama, Checks and Balances, The American interest, Oct. 18, 2017. 7. Leonardo Morlino and Wojciech Sadurski, Democratization and the European Union: Comparing Central and Eastern European Post-communist Countries, Routledge, 2010, p. 6. 8. Source: John T. Woolley and Gerhard Peters, House and Senate Concurrence with Presidents, The American Presidency Project, University of California, 1999-2016: http://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/data/concurrence.php. For other sources: Lyn Ragsdale, Vital Statistics on the Presidency, CQ Press (various editions). Harold Stanley and Richard Niemi, Vital Statistics on American Politics, CQ Press (various editions). Congressional Quarterly Weekly Report (various editions). 9. M. J. C. Vile, Constitutionalism and the Separation of Powers, Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, (1962) 2012, p. 18. 10. David Epstein and Sharyn O'Halloran, Delegating Powers: A Transaction Cost Politics Approach to Policy Making under Separate Powers, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 154-155. 11. John D. Huber, The Vote of Confidence in Parliamentary Democracies, The American Political Science Review, Vol. 90, No. 2, 1996, p. 268. 12. Michael Laver and Kenneth A. Shepsle, Making and Breaking Governments: Cabinets and Legislatures in Parliamentary Democracies, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p. 3. 13. Giovanni Sartori, Comparative Constitutional Engineering, NYU Press, 1997, p. 166. 14. Francis Fukuyama, Checks and Balances, The American interest, Oct. 18, 2017. 15. James Madison, The Federalist Paper N. 48: From the New York Packet, February 1, 1788.
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16. Thomas Friedman, “Whatever Trump is hiding is hurting all of us now,” New York Times, February 18, 2018. 17. Steven Levitsky, memo prepared for “Global Populisms as a Threat to Democracy” conference, Stanford University, November 2017, p. 4. 18. Steven Levitsky, memo prepared for “Global Populisms as a Threat to Democracy” conference, Stanford University, November 2017, p. 4.
ABSTRACTS
The article describes a new theoretical framework and empirical method to understand the power of parties within the U.S. Government. Political parties are not simply critical means by which citizens participate in their government, but also foundational to a pluralist political society and play an active role in defending the constitutional principles of liberal institutions and democracy. The first part of the article provides an overall glance of the dimensions used for observing the political power during democratic crises. Then, it is concerned with the identification of some “compelling” dimensions of political behavior of parties, and an empirical analysis of the changes occurred in the American institutions conducted in a long-term perspective of the last 25 years. Indeed, the second part accurately refers to the degree of which its political balances, institutional guarantees and constitutional design provide effective defense to democracy. Finally, these results invite us to watch at the current troubles with a moderate share of realism on the future capacity of democracy in the U.S. to survive.
INDEX
Keywords: political power, U.S. Government, institutions, democracy
AUTHOR
MATTEO LARUFFA Matteo holds a PhD from LUISS University. Visiting Fellow at Harvard University in 2017. He is also member of the Council for European Studies at Columbia University since 2014. Matteo taught a course at Freie Universität of Berlin in 2018 and spent a semester at Humboldt Universitat zu Berlin as researcher. In the last years he has given lectures and presented papers in several worldwide institutions, such as universities in the U.S.A., Italy, Belgium, Germany, Hungary, the Netherlands, Spain, France, Finland and U.K. He speaks fluently English, Spanish and Italian.
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Empire?
Wesley Renfro and Dominic Alessio
1. Introduction
1 Students of politics, from the most novice to the most credentialed, should understand that contestation, debate and dissensus in scholarly discourse are common. The study of empire as a form of political organization is no exception. Conclusions about empire are often connected to the disciplinary training of the scholars and students engaged in the task of conceptualizing and researching the topic. Professional historians, especially those influenced by the postcolonial turn, acknowledge that empires take varied forms and continue to shape political outcomes in the 21st century. By contrast, a number of their colleagues in political science and international relations are, on balance, seemingly more skeptical of the proposition that empires still exist. As a result of this gap in perception Biccum suggests that there is a need “to broaden the conversation between IR and postcolonial theory.”1 Saying that, there are still some in the disciplines of political science and international relations, including a number of political theorists, who do concede that empires are very much alive and that the United States fits into this category.
2 Historians, and others, especially in fields including sociology and literature, have produced a rich and nuanced discourse that carefully demonstrates that empires take assorted forms, employ varied tactics and strategies in pursuit of their ambitions, and did not disappear after the conclusion of the Second World War. This narrative also generally accepts that the United States has evolved an empire that includes its westward expansion across North America, its pursuit of small and large territories outside of the contiguous United States (including Alaska, Hawai’i, the Philippines, Cuba, Puerto Rico and more), and continues to use novel tactics, including the acquisition of bases, economic pressure or cultural forms, to behave in ways that look and feel very imperial. Historians in particular appear generally more willing to consider the latter as a part of empire and Immerwahr, a historian, subsequently states that “The proposition that the United States is an empire is less controversial today.”2
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Whilst his work contends that this message is not controversial among historians it argues that it remains more controversial, however, in other parts of the academy.
3 To be sure, scholars in political science and international relations often take the opposite stance on these issues. Take, for example, the renewed debate over American Empire in the years following the September 11, 2001 attacks and the American led invasions of both Afghanistan and Iraq. International Studies Perspectives, a journal of the International Studies Association, dedicated space in the August 2008 issue to the consideration of an American empire. A quick perusal of this section makes plain that most contributors do not believe that there is an American Empire. Indeed, in this section there is considerable resistance to the study of empire. This issue appeared at a time when the United States was occupying both Iraq and Afghanistan not to mention Washington’s myriad other possessions, ranging from bases to small islands to large islands, i.e., Puerto Rico. Writing in 2016, Schumacher notes, “Over the last decade, studies of the American empire have experienced a renaissance.”3 He, in turn, cites Kramer, and it is clear in both cases that historians have their literature on empire and political scientists have theirs and the two do not often meet.4 The divergence between these two epistemic communities reminds the authors of this article of the studies in psychology where bystanders report the sequence of events which caused an automobile accident in very different ways, i.e., smart people observe the same thing but reach very different conclusions about cause and effect.
4 This study on empire is the product of a professional union between a historian and a political scientist and it hopes to connect discussions and conclusions from history with discussions and conclusions in political science. But the aim of this work is not simply to start some sort of open discussion between two groups of scholars who interpret the same events rather differently. Instead, it also aims to synthesize some key literatures and attempts to demonstrate that political science and international relations scholars, and perhaps others as well, would gain some intellectual purchase from more carefully countenancing works from history and other fields as they consider empires; by doing so we hope to open up discussions of empire even further, making the subject “more visible”.5 Finally, this research helps locate and place the United States within broad discussions about the current state and future of imperial polities.
5 The dissensus between some individuals in these academic communities is, in part, inspired by the lack of definitional clarity over what exactly constitutes an empire. According to Münkler: “there is an abundance of historical accounts of individual empires… but the question of what an empire is… has remained virtually unexamined… Political Science has not provided solid definitions.”6 Biccum similarly contends that there is a “lack of consensus on the meaning of the term, a profound sense of confusion and a dearth of systematic theorization”.7 Perhaps predictably this debate has tended to break down over epistemological traditions and disciplinary divides. Mainstream political science remains generally skeptical of empire as a form of political organization in the contemporary era. The reluctance of political science to recognize empires in the modern world is largely a function of the way in which the discipline defines the concept.8 Many in that field are wedded to some variant of the following: one large polity acquiring, usually through conquest, lands that were part of another sovereign polity. Colás, for example, defines an empire as “any single polity that successfully expands from a metropolitan centre across various territories in order to dominate diverse populations”.9 Hoganson and Sexton point out that “Historians
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generally define empire as a political unit that encompasses an extensive sweep of territory containing various peoples or polities.”10 Kramer, also a historian, uses a more encompassingembracing definition when he writes, “Here the imperial refers to a dimension of power in which asymmetries in the scale of political action, regimes of spatial ordering, and modes of exceptionalizing difference enable and produce relations of hierarchy, discipline, dispossession, extraction, and exploitation.”11
6 Many historians, as well as scholars and commentators in other disciplines, including Go in sociology, additionally take it as a given that empires endure despite decolonisation.12 These approaches tend to embrace more expansive definitions of empire. They often recognize that there are many variants of the occurrence in the contemporary world, including informal empire. Postcolonialists, in particular, have focused on some of these informal processes, recognizing that empire entails more than just invading armies and fluttering foreign flags. Therefore, the latter tend to focus instead on the dissemination of an invasory colonial culture that stresses the superiority of the colonising power. As McLeod notes, “representations and modes of perception are used as fundamental weapons of colonial power to keep colonised peoples subservient to colonial rule.”13 As Howe subsequently posits: “Should we see modern empires as first and foremost cultural phenomena, or as political or economic ones?”14 Black British poet Benjamin Zephaniah (2007) nicely sums up the cultural legacy of empire when he writes: Tis true that we have not now our chains Yet we were never free, Still masters [sic] chains corrupt our brains Come children see 15
7 Given its very long history this essay cannot fully grapple with the ontology, historiography and epistemology of empire. Nor, given time and space constraints, does it “write back” and give voice to those First Nation peoples displaced or silenced by empire; but it does examine one critical question that is central to the debate over the continued relevance of empire as a concept: is the United States an empire?16 Taking account of its outsized role in global affairs, its westward expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries, its history of acquiring overseas possessions, its long-standing practice of establishing outposts and a far-flung network of military bases, not forgetting a range of other seemingly imperial actions and policies, many consider the United States an empire.17 Yet this question is not fully resolved as many others also deny the premise: “Most studies of imperial and postcolonial culture omit discussions of the US as an imperial power… [treating it] as an entirely separate phenomenon from nineteenth-century European colonialism rather than related to it.”18 Concerned about this historical myopia Fergusson, as well as Hoganson and Sexton, refer to such unbelievers as living in “denial”; meanwhile Cox calls for people to “drop the pretence that America is not an empire.”19 Put plainly, if scholars cannot demonstrate that one single country like the United States, a so-called super-power, qualifies as an empire, it is highly likely that empire as a form of political organization is not especially useful in the study of contemporary international affairs. Consequently, this work proceeds by: providing an outline of the debate over empire as a form of political organization; considers some reasons as to why there are so many who are skeptical of an American empire; proposes a discussion of some of the ways in which the United States might qualify as an empire; offers some considerations about the on-going political, cultural and historical importance of empire as a typology, as well as its definitional obstinacy;
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and finishes by reiterating the challenge posed by Hoganson and Sexton “to call out empire” by suggesting that America’s entire history is in fact the story of empire, albeit one which changes forms and tack along the way, depending on context and technology, and is thus difficult to pin down.20
2. Defining Empire: Confusion Reigns!
8 Much of the debate on empire stems from the multiple and often contradictory definitions assigned to empires.21 In this work, it should go without saying that the definitions and assumptions tend to vary by field, with some historians starting perhaps with more nuanced or qualitative understandings of the subject and those in political science and international relations approaching the topic with narrower or quantitative conceptions. Restrictive definitions, i.e., one polity gaining territory from another polity through conquest, are helpful as they remain concise. They thus lend themselves easily to more socially scientific approaches as these narrow taxonomies conveniently rule out marginal cases and make it easier to falsify examples of empire. Schake suggests that treating United States overseas colonial conquest the same as westwards expansion “isn’t useful” on the basis such an approach is too expansive.22 Nevertheless, as American satirist and writer H. L. Mencken pointed out : “There is always a well-known solution to every human problem – neat, plausible, and wrong” [our italics].23 Despite the analytic clarity provided by this restrictive stance others argue a need to revise and expand the definition. They base their approach on the premise that whilst the narrow approach may prove simple it comes at the expense of empirical accuracy. As Darwin asserts: “The history of empire is often presented in a single dimension: the assertion of dominance by imperial officials (or settlers) and the experience of oppression by indigenous peoples. But… this is not the whole story.”24 Consequently, these others claim that opening up the definition of empire will enhance our ability to understand the phenomenon and its wider impact more fully, making it clearer that empires remain potent in international and economic affairs - even if they have changed and evolved their tactics.25 Historians Streets-Salter and Getz subsequently emphasise a need to move beyond conquest to examine “the thoughts, doctrines, and ideologies” of empire.26 Similarly, Motyl, a political scientist cognizant of some of the imperial nuances, similarly argues that scholars interested in understanding empire need to move away from just invasion-focused imperial narratives to look at alternative means by which empires could expand, namely through marriage and purchase.27
9 When some definitional agreement exists it usually rests on the foundation stone that conquest is one important mechanism of imperial expansion. As Howe advocates: “A kind of basic, consensus definition would be that an empire is a large political body which rules over territories outside its original borders.”28 Formal empires based on military conquest and the occupation of foreign lands are thus universally recognized because it is supposedly easy to differentiate them from non-empires; and history is certainly littered with numerous empires that conform to this definition. Yet scholars are now increasingly spotlighting alternate mechanisms for empire building, including: purchase, lease, acquisition of basing rights, use of corporate intermediaries, marriage, mandate or writ by international organization. They are also beginning to question notions of size (note Howe’s emphasis above above on “large”), as well as the focus on
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state-led only agency (Alessio 2013: 89). By concentrating on different aspects of empire and picking apart existing models these alternative approaches suggest that empires are not simply one polity annexing another and only holding formerly sovereign territory via conquest. However, much work remains to be done and there is no commonly accepted understanding of what exactly constitutes an empire. By extension there is even less consensus on whether or not the United States qualifies as an imperial power. In discussing definitions of the subject, Colley (2006) subsequently argues that the literature on empire does not include a rich, complete or intellectually satisfying definition of empire. Many other scholars make similar points.29 While they do not all raise identical issues they do all demonstrate that empire remains ill-defined. Indeed, when thinking about empire’s meaning Howe reminds us that the term derives from the Latin word imperium, which in its most simple sense means broadly: to rule.30 This point, without further specification, does not automatically entail direct, physical control of territory. Spruyt, while rejecting that the United States is a formal empire, does simultaneously make an appeal for more nuance when he writes: I conclude that although American foreign policy might be deemed imperialist, the United States with its network of overseas connections at present does not constitute formal empire. It lacks the institutionalized authority relations of core and periphery that typify empire (our italics). Its unilateralist policies, however, which seek to maintain American dominance in military power as well as to prop up “friendly” government abroad, are in many respects imperialist.31
10 Nonetheless, a too narrow approach risks analytic and taxonomical inaccuracy, e.g., the Ottoman Empire. While the Sultan did nominally control huge swaths of land many peripheral areas remained only under nominal control. 32Local rulers in many regions were essentially autonomous so long as they provided tribute to the Sultan and caused him no headaches. Should these semi-sovereign places be properly understood as part of the Ottoman Empire? After all, they were not usually occupied by permanent Ottoman forces? The threat of Ottoman military intervention was, though, often enough to deter these actors from breaking with the regime in Constantinople. Similar arrangements have existed all over the world for thousands of years, and are best understood in the context of informal empire. Informal empire is defined as a relationship between a more powerful polity and a weaker one in which the former has orchestrated an unequal relationship and is often able to compel the weaker to do things that it would not otherwise do. Jürgen Osterhammel characterises this sort of informal control as including: “a legal structure that privileged foreigners, a free trade system imposed by external forces, and the use of intervention either through force or through institutions such as imperial consuls.”33 But as the previously mentioned Ottoman case makes clear it is possible for an empire to simultaneously be formal in some parts and informal in others.
11 Part of the confusion over empires, formal or otherwise, stems from the idea of “original” borders. Linking empire or non-empire to an expansion beyond “original” borders is arbitrary and not especially clarifying, specifically for polities with histories which are measured in centuries. The French Empire, for example, waxed and waned in continental Europe and elsewhere over the course of hundreds of years. Deciding on what constitutes France’s original border seems difficult at best and impossible at worst. Restrictive definitions of empire offer no guidance on how long we are to consider a formerly sovereign unit as a formerly sovereign unit and not something that has now been wholly incorporated? In the French example the acquisition of Artois, a
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swathe of land in the northeast of modern France near Belgium, elucidates these complexities nicely. Originally independent the region eventually came under French control in the 12th century but periodically emerged as either independent or part of another polity when Isabelle of Hainaut became Queen of France after marrying Phillip II in 1180 and brought Artois as part of her considerable dowry. Subsequently, between 1180 and 1237 Artois was part of France owing to Isabella’s marriage (not conquest) to the French crown. In the 13th century the region became once again independent, but shortly after in the 14th century was ruled by the Burgundians, and then was taken over by the Spanish Hapsburgs as part of the Holy Roman Empire. It was finally annexed again by France in 1659. By the start of the First World War it seems impossible now to consider Artois, the scene of the famous Christmas truce between Allied and German troops, as anything other than French soil and thus in the French front line of invading German forces in 1914. Yet it was once on the colonial periphery.
12 While Artois is relatively obscure this kind of case is commonplace and reflects a fundamental truth in international politics: borders are not static. To take a similar example from United States history. When Pearl Harbor was attacked by forces belonging to the Japanese Imperial Navy in 1941 Hawai’i was not a state. That milestone had been reached only in 1959. Instead Hawai’i was an organized incorporated territory of the United States that until 1898 had been an independent kingdom. What is more, it only became American after it was forcibly taken when “United States troops landed on Hawaiian soil over the protest of the legitimate ruler as a deliberate and flagrant act of war.”34 Yet despite having been invaded by the United States and being under occupation for a mere 43 years (compared with Artois’ nearly 300 years of French rule), the Japanese assault on Pearl Harbour was considered an infamous attack upon American soil. As Immerwahr documents, Japan attacked not only Pearl Harbor but additionally a host of other American colonial possessions, including the Philippines, Guam, Midway Island and Wake Islands.35 Former President Roosevelt declared, after hearing news of the attack on Hawai’i, "Always we will remember the character of the onslaught against us [our italics]…”36 Thus, the Japanese attack was perceived in the popular media as an invasion of American soil. It was conveniently forgotten that this territory had been taken by force by the United States from Native Hawai’ians a mere forty-three years earlier. But rather than address the issue of Hawai’ian occupation by the United States, as “the idea runs so counter to the day-to-day administrative and governmental operations in Hawaii… the subject tends to be avoided by Hawaii politicians.”37 Intriguingly, then Congressman Abraham Lincoln had first made a political name for himself when identifying a similar border controversy. In his 1847 ‘Spot Resolutions’ he called out then President Polk to prove exactly where and how Mexico had invaded United States territory, thus precipitating the Mexican-American War, when Mexican forces had never actually crossed onto so-called American soil.
13 Another area of confusion, one related to boundaries, revolves around trying to differentiate between nation-states and empires. Streets-Salter and Getz argue that empires occur when a polity “comes to exert control over other states or peoples without fully integrating them.”38 Others, including Immerwahr, have noted that the United States has a long history of such behavior, e.g, Puerto Rico.39 Once these conquered peoples have been assimilated some suggest that empires cease being empires and evolve into states. Colás, a professor of International Relations, proposes that modern state formation, symbolised by fixed boundaries/frontiers and liberal internationalism which “actively seeks to promote self-government, civil liberties and
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territorial integrity”, is thus now replacing older imperial systems.40 To make his point about the differences between an empire and a nation-state he suggests that “War and violence are intrinsic to imperial rule in a way which is not true of other political orders.”41 But such a position only further confounds our understanding of empire. Firstly, empires can also try to fix their boundaries permanently, as occurred under the Roman Emperor Augustus at the Rhine and Danube Rivers in the 1st century AD. So fixed borders are not unique to nation-states. Secondly, modern nation-state boundaries are themselves not necessarily as fixed or as collaborative as Colás makes out. Nazi Germany was a nation-state but that did not stop it wanting to invade both eastern and Western Europe in 1939. Historians Hoganson and Sexton call this the “gray zone where nations shade into empires”.42 Thirdly, nation-states, like empires, can also be multi-ethnic units and frequently minority groups within said nation-states can feel much very much like the colonised in an empire, despite apparently being part of a state. As Hobsbawm warned: “nation-state frontiers could not structure the areas formerly under imperial rule without creating new minorities, injustices and repression.”43
14 Therefore, by emphasizing such distinctions between nation-states and empires it seems too easy to forget how or when a particular nation state was formed. The Samoan writer Albert Wendt drew attention to this incongruity in history when discussing this silencing of the indigenous voice: “...look at the way New Zealand history has been constructed. It has been constructed by the colonizers who took over this country, and write it to suit themselves. Their histories are their version of things, and they do not want other competing versions.” (Albert Wendt, qtd. in Ellis 83).44 Kumar, a sociologist, also comments upon these paradoxes when he says that there are “significant similarities between nation-states and empires. Many nation-states are in effect empires in miniature.”45 Delay makes this point forcibly too in relation to the history of U.S. foreign relations when he states that the “The Bureau of Indian Affairs was our Colonial Office, and the long history of U.S. relations with native polities [our italics] was more than a dark prelude to or a formative context for U.S. Empire. This was U.S. Empire.”46
15 Whilst trying to define empire Doyle concedes that their histories are often intertwined with conquest and territoriality but suggests that “economic, social, or cultural dependence” are also their hallmarks.47 Given his more expansive view of empire and the convergences between empire and nation-states discussed above, it becomes less clear that a polity, as the Ottoman example demonstrated above, must always exercise some kind of physical control of lands beyond its original borders. This tension illustrates another critical divide in the study of empire: formal versus informal. Formal empires tend to closely match Howe’s definition and are almost always easily recognized by fluttering imperial flags and marching troops. By contrast, informal empires involve arrangements other than formal annexation of territory and are more contentious. In the Ottoman case the relationship between the imperial policy and the subjugated areas is perhaps best called suzerainty. Once a common way of thinking about political and imperial organization the term has largely died in recent decades. In 1899 Wallwyn P.B. Shepheard, writing in a legal journal, defined it thus: Suzerainty is a term applied to a certain international relations between two sovereign states, whereby one, whilst retaining a more or less limited sovereignty, acknowledges the supremacy of the other. Such a relation may be either feudatory, by the grant at some early period of sovereignty as a fief; or conventional, by some
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treaty of peace or alliance. The difficulty is to define what juridical relations are implied by the use of the term suzerain in the language of the treaty; and, further, to settle whether any given relations established by a treaty may be property referred to as suzerainty.48
16 Well over a century later, and despite the fading of suzerainty as a concept in international relations, Shepheard’s conceptualization remains useful and important. The words have changed, i.e., hegemony replacing suzerainty in the literature, but the concept closely matches more inclusive definitions of empire, especially informal empire. Indeed, both terms suggest power disparities and the ability of one actor to influence a less powerful actors. However, hegemony also suffers from a lack of definitional clarity with various scholars understanding the term in multiple ways.49 Go captures some this confusion: If empire is not the same thing as hegemony, and if imperialism is not the same as imperialistic activity, at stake in current debates on America’s empire today is the relationship between them. Most pro-empire commentators suggest that empire, hegemony, and imperialistic activity are logically and historically intertwined.50
17 Ferguson notes that hegemony in its classical meaning sprang from an Athenian-led and relatively voluntary anti-Persian alliance.51 That, at least, is the official position as outlined in Herodotus, the ‘father of history’. Intriguingly, this alliance soon turned into the Athenian-dominated Delian League, an empire in all but name. Norwegian historian Lundestad seems to be of similar thinking in his discussion of an American empire in post-war Europe as he posits an “empire by invitation” that is impossible to fully parse from alliance politics.52 Keohane finds Lundestad’s analysis compelling but balks at equating empire and hegemony since the latter is less formal than the former. 53 Thus, for Keohane, hegemony is a more accurate description. But as O’Reilly and Renfro posit, “This contentious debate [defining empire] often hinges on semantics.”54 This seems especially true when one considers that many empires include formal pieces and informal pieces. This split is especially relevant to the study of American empire as Washington has, across time and space, included formal pieces, e.g., Puerto Rico, and informal pieces, e.g., military bases in many parts of the world. Interestingly, Ferguson believes that the United States had an informal empire in the wake of World War II, but that it no longer does.55 Yet ironically, whilst doing so, Ferguson also over-looks all of its Pacific colonies as well as its history of continental land expansion. Immerwahr, in his discussion of “the pointillist empire” more fully explicates how Washington gained a vast network of imperial possessions in the Pacific.56 Worth (2015) offers a near exhaustive accounting of the definitions of hegemony but his analysis underscores the many and different ways in which the term is used.57 On some level, many of these terms are perhaps interchangeable; but this question of nomenclature, while problematic, only serves to bring us back to where we started, namely the lack of agreement over how to define and understand empire, and now also hegemony, informal empire and suzerainty.
18 Part of the confusion over the status of the United States is the narrow focus on conquest as the primary mechanism through which polities may expand into empires. As Fernandez-Armesto argues, imperial history has “over-emphasised conquest”.58 If one understands that empire by conquest is one, though not the only path to empire, it becomes much easier to accept informal empire. As others have pointed out, conquest has been central to formation and expansion of empires; but there are many other ways for this to happen and these are not mutually exclusive. They include: marriage /
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dowry contract, voluntary association, invitation, mandates or awards by international organizations, land swaps, purchase / lease, and economic or political coercion.59
3. An Empire in Denial?
19 Because empires form and expand in multiple ways there is no consensus on what constitutes an empire. This confusion makes it more possible for many to not view the United States as an empire. The literature does, however, show that there are generally two ways of differentiating empire from non-empire. The first is structural, i.e., one polity acquiring (via whatever means - though often conquest, war, or conflict) land outside of its original borders. This generally matches formal empire. The second is based on outcomes, i.e., regardless of structure or land can one polity compel other actors to do things that they would not otherwise want to do? This generally matches informal empire. Both of these lenses are appropriate when examining the question of the American empire, as some argue that the United States qualifies as an empire by both means.60 These two methods of acquiring empire are not mutually exclusive, however. Lundestad argues that the United States, at the behest of its allies, formed a series of both formal and informal arrangements this way in post-war Europe that some consider imperial.61
20 The literature on American empire shows that the United States, using conquest and other means, obtained huge amounts of land from formerly independent polities, including First Nation peoples, European powers and other American nations, such as Mexico and Columbia. The process began immediately after independence from Britain. Indeed, one might even argue that if the desire for land west of the Appalachians was a driving force behind the Revolution, then the very act of American independence might have also been itself an imperial first move. According to Ostler: Jefferson’s denigration of “merciless Indian savages” signaled that the war for independence from Great Britain would also be a brutal war to seize indigenous lands. From 1776 to 1783, U.S. troops and colonial militias destroyed more than 70 Cherokee towns, 50 Haudenosaunee towns, and at least 10 multiethnic towns in the Ohio Valley, killing several hundred people (including civilians) and subjecting refugees to starvation, disease, and death…62
21 This divide between the historical record and the willingness of others to concede that the United States was and is an empire has not gone unnoticed. Burns, writing after World War II but before American involvement in Vietnam, suggested that Americans dismiss entirely the idea that their country was ever an empire: “When the average American thinks of ‘colonialism’, or of the Colonial Powers, he is apt to confine his thoughts to European ‘colonialism.’”63 Finlay makes a similar argument when he writes that “No one speaks about the colonization of the Midwest and west of the United States.”64 This point is crucial to understanding the argument that the United States is an empire. After all, a considerable amount of land that now constitutes the continental United States had formerly belonged to other polities and peoples, but over the decades (only four in the case of Hawai’i!) had ceased to be considered as taken forcibly. Others, including Mann and Bush, spotlight this gap between reality and public and scholarly consciousness.65 It is worth noting that historians, starting with the revisionists in the 1970s, have been much more willing to accept that the United States is an empire. Historians, including Williams and LaFeber, have made the case for the American empire.66 More recently Ferguson, O’Reilly, Johnson, and others have attempted to
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draw attention to what they consider to be an American empire.67 This claim, as noted, still remains contentious, especially with scholars from political science. This bundle of definitional and other issues is further confounded by at least two elements: the fact that the United States has relied upon multiple means of expansions, including purchase and lease (as opposed to solely relying on conquest), and by elite political rhetoric which almost often loudly denies that Washington is imperial.
22 Frymer demonstrates that the United States during its territorial expansion in the 18th and 19th centuries behaved similarly to states that were unabashedly imperial. 68 Hopkins, considering the 20th century, provides comparable evidence that the United States, through its foreign policies, behaved in ways that often looked imperial.69 Thus, for some scholars, it is clear that the United States has always been an imperial enterprise though the mechanisms of imperial growth and maintenance may have shifted. During the 18th and 19 th centuries many European powers were trumpeting their imperial status. The United States frequently engaged in similar behavior but often, though not always, denied its empire and cloaked itself in the language of democracy, freedom and republicanism. Indeed, Washington disguised its imperial expansion by using less overt language to describe its political development. While it is undeniable that the United States led various campaigns of conquest against First Peoples over a long period of time these campaigns are often not billed as wars or conquests but rather as ‘removals’.70
23 Moreover, the history of the United States is replete with expansions outside of conquest, especially via purchase and lease. Some of those were truly exchanges of money for land that did not involve war, e.g., the Louisiana Purchase. Others were nothing short of conquest that was later labeled as something less imperial sounding, e.g., Florida, which Washington purchased from Spain in 1819. Yet a close examination of the latter suggests that this is not a straight forwards purchase. While Washington did eventually pay Spain in exchange for land the outcome only came after United States forces had essentially conquered most of that territory. Later, after the Spanish American War, in which Washington acquired Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam and the Philippines, Washington similarly disguised its imperial status by paying Spain $20 million for the Philippines and Guam, and by describing Puerto Rico not as a colony by the more neutral sounding term “commonwealth”. Later still, after WWII, the United States gained control over a series of possessions in the Pacific from 1947 – 1986 under the more benign sounding label of Trust Territory of the Pacific Islands. As Hoganson and Sexton attest: “Misleading terminology keeps us from understanding the politics of transimperial pasts.”71 While the cases mentioned here vary in terms of mechanism of acquisition (with some being conquest, others being real purchases and others still being awards by outside agencies, such as the United Nations), they all involved the transfer, sometimes on an enormous scale, sometimes not, of land from another polity. In no case were the local inhabitants consulted.
24 Additionally, in many of these cases Washington used non-imperial sounding labels to depict its expansion. Both Johnson and Bush have described the ways in which the United States relied on euphemisms to cover practices that in reality are imperialism.72 There are also ideational and rhetorical explanations that explain why many do not ask if the United States is an empire. From its founding documents until the present-day Washington has sought to cast itself a bastion of freedom and liberty and this idea is mutually exclusive with empire.73 Lake writes: “The phrase [empire] remains contested.
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To many Americans, it is inconceivable that their country, born in anticolonial struggle, could be an empire.”74 Indeed, the United States was born in a revolution against an overtly imperial state and takes considerable pride in being a republic and a democracy. Presidential rhetoric too has denied the existence of an American empire, formal or otherwise. Rather, American presidents tend to emphasize American exceptionalism. This approach conceives of American democracy as the antithesis, and perhaps antidote, for empire. Bill Clinton, for example, opined that, “Americans never fought for empire, for territory, for dominance but many, many American gave their lives for freedom.”75 This message is entirely compatible with George W. Bush’s proclamation that “We have no desire to dominate, no ambitions of empire.”76 The claims of the 42nd and 43 rd presidents are not novel. Ronald Reagan, in a Cold War flourish, drew the distinction between “free” Americans and “imperial” Russians when he labelled the Soviet Union an “evil empire.”77 Straining credulity Lyndon Johnson discussed American foreign policy in Vietnam saying: “It is not conquest; it is not empire; it is not foreign bases; it is not domination.”.78 While these are isolated quotes many scholars note that presidential rhetoric both reflects the political landscape and also exercises an independent influence on citizens’ beliefs. Indeed, Neustadt in a seminal study of presidential leadership, spotlights the ability to persuade as critical.79
25 Immerwahr’s work on American empire makes a compelling case that the machinery of the United States government actively worked to make Washington seem less imperial. Discussing the 1940 decennial census and the ways and amount of people included or not, he writes, “Nearly nineteen million people lived in the colonies, the great bulk of them in the Philippines.80 He continues: Another way to consider those nineteen million territorial inhabitants is as a fraction of the U.S. populations. Again taking 1940 as our year, slightly more than one in eight (12.6 percent) of the people in the United States lived outside the states. For perspective, consider that only about one in twelve was African- American. If you lived in the United States on the eve of World War II, in other words, you were more likely to be colonized than black, by odds of three to two.81
26 Indeed, as Immerwahr notes, the census was very state-centric and largely downplayed the huge amounts of land and people that constituted what some considered the “greater United States.” Given its self-avowed ethos of freedom and liberty and the attempts to disguise its own imperial actions, it is not surprising that the United States has engaged in a collective act of cognitive dissonance vis-à-vis its own expansion. Colley, therefore, describes Americans as “disengaged” with respect to what she considers their own imperial nature.82 Having spotlighted some of the reasons as to why so many do not believe in the concept of an America empire this work now turns to a discussion of why some believe the United States has both a formal and an informal empire.
4. An American Empire
27 As previously noted, the literature on empire generally includes two variants: formal and informal. In the former, one polity acquired territory from another polity often, though not necessarily, through conquest. In the latter, one polity has such a degree of power or influence that it is able to compel other polities to do things that they would not otherwise do. What is more, this control or influence is not necessarily tied to the annexation of land. Part of the confusion over empire generally, and the American
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empire specifically, involves the various means by which expansion occurs. While everyone recognizes that empires by conquest are real there is some confusion about other mechanisms that may create empire. As Doyle notes, empire is when one state is able to control another and this can be achieved by conquest or other means, including collaboration and economics.83 This definition is close to the one offered by Peers in that it is not explicitly tied to territory and is rather a function of power asymmetry.84 Nevertheless, Ferguson disagrees, arguing that “Doyle’s thoughtful definition is shot full of holes…”85 He goes on to discuss the “elusive ideal type”, concluding that: Whatever one’s ideal-type definition, old and new empires-like sovereign states and all other polities-exhibit remarkable variety, and the things that make them different often are at least as interesting as the things they share. Perhaps, then, it is best to look at “empires” as a continuum, where some polities fit the model drawn from the “usual suspects” better than others.86
28 Ferguson’s commentary is especially useful for two reasons. First, it offers a way of thinking about empire that recognizes that power, control and empire do not always come in a standard package. Secondly, when scholars and others adhere to very inflexible understandings of empire it makes it easier politically for some imperial states to decry their own imperial status, e.g., the United States. How different, therefore, is such a US disavowal from Moscow’s maskirovka tactics along Ukraine’s borders?
29 Nonetheless, the literature makes a compelling case that the United States has a formal empire and may have evolved a significant informal empire too. By the narrower definitions of formal empire, i.e., one polity taking land from another polity, usually via conquest, the United States certainly qualifies because of its campaigns against First Peoples and others. The Mexican Cessation that followed the Mexican-American War of 1848 also meets this definition. In this case, one republic fought another republic and at its conclusion the losing polity, Mexico, ceded huge swathes of its territory to the United States. This transfer of land was crucial to the development of the modern United States and represents the third largest territorial acquisition by the United States after both the Louisiana Purchase in 1803 and the Alaska Purchase in 1867. This, too, was billed as a purchase, though the transfer of funds only occurred after the United States had bested Mexico in the war. There are other qualifying incidents, including the American “purchase” of Florida, but which was also really a conquest, that additionally clearly qualify the United States as an empire, even by this most narrow of definitions.
30 Interestingly and unlike other 19th century European powers which have lost most of their overseas colonies, the United States remains in possession of a number of overseas territories, notably Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the US Virgin Islands, and Guam.87 While the United States calls Puerto Rico a “commonwealth” and not a colony, this linguistic sleight of hand does not change the basic, and imperial, structural relationship between Washington and the island. Moreover, American practices in Puerto Rico, including denying the commonwealth Electoral College votes, the continuance of the Jones Act and Washington’s lackluster response to a massive hurricane that crippled the island in 2017, also strongly suggest that this relationship, whatever it is called, is distinctly imperial. What is interesting is that many scholars who conclude that the United States is not, and perhaps cannot be an empire, are examining the United States after it completed its westward expansion and after it bested Spain in 1898. They do not look at territory in the longer durée which, like France’s Artois, has been under direct US control for a century or more, even if it was
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taken by conquest. Cooley and Nexon, for example, are grappling only with American bases and conclude that these bases do not make an empire.88 While others, including Vine and Johnson disagree with this conclusion, it is important to point out that this debate in the literature is quite understandable since examples of the alleged American empire in the postwar period usually do not entail formal agreements and are less definite.89
31 Using more expansive definitions of empire which include, in addition to conquest, the transfer of territory though means other than conquest as well as informal empire (which hinges on power asymmetries), the United States probably still qualifies. The Louisiana Purchase of 1803, the Platte Purchase of 1836, the Gadsden Purchase of 1853, the Alaska Purchase of 1867, the United States Virgin Islands Purchase of 1916, as well as the leases of Diego Garcia in 1966 and Kwaj in 1983, are all examples of territorial aggrandizement first and foremost by purchase or lease - not conquest. Moreover, there had been additional attempts in the 1930s to buy Easter Island from Chile and the Galápagos Islands from Ecuador for the purposes to developing military bases.90 Additionally, President Trump drew global attention to this process in his failed bid to purchase Greenland from Denmark in 2019.91 On informal empire, it is also clear that the United States has behaved imperially in places like Iraq. It is, therefore, perhaps not surprising also that given its ongoing possession of Puerto Rico, American Samoa, Guam and the US Virgin Islands the United States is still listed on the UN’s list of Non- Self-Governing Territories.
32 For many the staggering amount of power that the United States wields seemingly makes it an empire in the postwar era – even if Washington is not actively seeking formal arrangements that meet the strict definition of empire. For many in the developing world the United States is imperial not because it directly controls territory but because it wields considerable power. Immerwahr points out that the United States has a formal empire but then cites American economic power in global affairs, Washington’s use of military interventions, its network of bases, its ability to create scientific and linguistic standards and its subjugation of African Americans, as additional markers of empire.92 Most common in the work of Critical Studies scholars this outcomes-based conceptualization of empire suggests that Washington’s role in international institutions, from the United Nations to the World Bank and International Monetary Fund, coupled with the actions of its private proxies, including multi- national corporations, all help the United States to achieve imperial aims in unconventional ways.
5. Conclusion and Discussion
33 Several important conclusions emerge from this work. First, and despite some excellent scholarship on the topic, empire remains under-theorized and somewhat ill-defined. In a related point, there are rather serious divergences that seem closely tied to disciplinary training. This divide is reminiscent of Miles’ Law in public administration which states, “Where you stand depends on where you sit.” Many, though not all, scholars in political science and international relations conceive of empire in more narrow ways, often emphasizing the contemporary. This lack of recognition of empire’s various historical forms and permutations has resulted in its more extensive tentacles being hidden from public view. It is perhaps no wonder then that so many in the United
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States fail to conceive of their polity as imperial even though it is apparent to so many others, ranging from professional historians to First Nation Peoples and to inhabitants of places like Puerto Rico. As Immerwahr demonstrates in his aptly title work How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States, most Americans are in a state of denial about their nation’s own imperial status.93 This is perhaps not surprising given the myriad ways in which Americans have denied or attempted, via euphemism, to conceal their empire. Discussing this Schumacher opines, “This omission is in part the result of a century of obfuscation in American commentary on colonialism. With its discursive recourse to exceptionalist nationalism and its rhetorical demarcation from European imperialism, such commentary helped to obscure the U.S. colonial project as anti-European decolonization.”94 A good example of this obfuscation occurred after the United States invaded of Mexico, wherein it took California, Arizona, Utah, Nevada, New Mexico and parts of Colorado in return for giving the defeated Mexican nation $15 million, and one American contemporary newspaper commented “we take nothing by conquest.”95
34 Disciplinary conventions, competing epistemologies and issues of national identity and historical narrative further confuse the topic of American empire. And while some might consider the question of empire the worst sort of academic navel gazing it does matter if the world’s most powerful actor, i.e., the United States, is an empire or something else. In particular, it has bearing on how Washington views and understands its own sense of legitimacy and standing in other parts of the world and on how others, including its own Pacific Islander or First Nation citizens, perceive it. After all, if the United States views itself as an exemplar of liberty but others view it as a very conventional empire, processes and outcomes in foreign affairs are likely to be muddied - at a minimum. Recognizing a range of diverse actions as potentially imperialistic might also enable Washington to critique its rivals more easily and see their perspective more clearly. How different, for example, is the US’s leasing of a military base in the Pacific from China’s island-building program in the South China Seas?
35 This work establishes that narrow definitions of empire, namely one polity gaining territory from another polity and usually through conquest, are insufficient in capturing the full range of imperial possibilities. The restrictive definition seems poorly suited for describing the world as it exists for at least two reasons. Firstly, it places too much emphasis on conquest as the mechanism by which empires form and expand. This is not to suggest that conquest is not an important mechanism but rather that others exist. Moreover, this work points out that there is much scholarship that demonstrates that as conquest became less palatable and more costly, empires simply change their modus operandi, e.g., seeking bases and islands and not large polities. This work also suggests that the literature in political science and international relations would do well to more seriously consider the case of American expansion in less myopic ways. Empires appear to be durable forms of political organization but that is not to say that they do not change and adapt. Indeed, scholars in all fields would do well to consider the ways in which contemporary empires are evolving and responding to changing conditions in politics, technology, and business. Consider, for example, the ideal type of democracy. While there is much ink spilled over defining the concept, scholars from various fields have worked to incorporate new developments, e.g., the adoption of universal suffrage as a necessary condition, into the study of the topic.
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Scholars of empire should do the same. The fact that polities have generally stopped more overt forms of “land grabs” doesn’t obviate empire, but it does warrant more sustained study so that we can understand how this form of organization has changed. Immerwahr comments on the durability and flexibility of empires and concludes, “You might see the intrusions of colonialism into recent politics as a sort of hangover – a price paid for yesterday’s excesses. In this view, empire is an affair of the past, even if its effects longer on.”96 He continues and is explicit when he writes: Empires live on, too, in the overseas bases that dot the globe…Britain and France have some thirteen overseas bases between them, Russia has nine, various other countries have one – in all, there are probably thirty overseas bases owned by non- U.S. countries. The United States, by contrast, has roughly eight hundred, plus agreements granting it access to still other foreign sites. Dozens of countries host U.S. bases. Those that refuse are nevertheless surrounded by them. The Greater United States, in other words, is in everyone’s back yard.97
36 The empirical record is clear; there is no contesting that the United States expanded beyond its original borders by conquering lands held by indigenous neighbours, making war with other European empires, and by purchasing or leasing territories, both large and small, in North America and beyond. In a very formal sense the United States has previously held or controlled, though not annexed, any number of polities, including Cuba and the Philippines. The fact that Washington did not seek to control these polities in a long durée arrangement doesn’t make them any less imperial. Furthermore, the United States has fully incorporated some imperial possessions, namely Alaska, Hawai’i, and the states that Washington “won/purchased” in its war with Mexico in the 19th century. Admission to the United States does not mean that the methods of “acquisition” were not imperial. It might be tempting for some to conclude that these acquisitions and gains are somehow too long past to qualify the United States as an empire. This work rejects that notion since these processes are such a critical part of the political and economic development of the United States.
37 In addition, there is considerable evidence suggesting that Washington sought territory and influence in ways that looked like empire long after the idea of trumpeting imperial grandeur seemed distasteful. Indeed, acquiring and administering whole polities became both unsavory and wildly inefficient. In the Cold War and the decades that followed, Washington increasingly relied on acquiring bases or other small possessions as a means to build imperial networks that gave the United States many of the advantages of formal empire without bearing the costs, real and psychic, that come with being a more traditional empire interested in occupying large amounts of territory. This does not mean, of course, that the United States is unwilling to engage in military interventions that produce quasi-imperial outcomes, e.g., Afghanistan in 2001 and Iraq in 2003. Owing to reasons of scope, this work does not grapple with other alleged instantiations of American empire, e.g., globalization or cultural hegemony. Kramer briefly mentions “structural adjustment” as a marker of this kind of empire in the context of the post-Soviet era, and connects this to variants of informal empire.98 Westad also takes up the less visible but very real connections between the United States, the Soviet Union, and empire during and after the Cold War.99
38 Nevertheless, in the post-war era it seems that Washington largely abandoned the practice of formally occupying big territories. It has, however, assembled a truly astounding network of military bases that span the globe. Johnson notes the special role that military bases play when he writes, “This vast network of American bases on
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every continent except Antarctica actually constitutes a new form of empire -- an empire of bases with its own geography and not likely to be taught in high school geography class”.100 We partially disagree with Johnson’s assessment, namely that this practice constitutes an entirely new form of empire; indeed, Blower suggests that this base-building practice extends back in time to the early colonial period and a history of factories and forts.101 Furthermore, many previous imperial powers have behaved similarly, though merely just not on the same scale as the United States. Germany, after its unification in 1871, aggressively sought to build a network of coaling stations that provided a similar function as US bases. Indeed, it could be argued these bases kick- stated the second Reich. On balance, though, Johnson’s point is useful. Cooley and Nexon have some reservations about equating bases to empire, but they at least are open to the possibility that they may be related and suggest that the field needs to do more theorizing vis-à-vis empires and bases.102 Often cloaked in the language of mutual defense treaties or leases this seems like a mostly benign practice. Unless, however, you live in an area now occupied by an American military base, e.g., the inhabitants of Diego Garcia who were forcibly “resettled” in 1971, or unless you live in a nearby polity that is affected by the presence of American bases, i.e., collateral damage often in the form of civilian casualties caused by direct air or drone strikes or irradiated air and water that originated from those bases.103
39 Recognizing that empires may be built on comparatively small plots of land opens the door further for a wider recognition of informal empire. Indeed bases, which tend to be small in terms of their size, may well be the best indicator of an empire today. After all, occupying large amounts of territory is financially draining and politically risky. More overt forms of imperialism that involve occupation, for example, additionally create a host of obligations for the imperial actor, including maintaining some monopoly on the use of force, providing a degree of infrastructure and basic services and upholding the area’s territorial integrity. At the same time most inhabitants do not welcome occupation and this often creates push back. This resistance is often costly to the imperial agent. Thus, according to their logic, following World War II and decolonization empires moved from the overt to the covert. As previous sections outlined, the United States is something of a trailblazer in that Washington used a variety of tactics to disguise its empire during a period when most other states were busy loudly proclaiming their empires.
40 This combination of smaller holdings and a reliance on means other than conquest, some argue, have become hallmarks of more modern empires.104 After all, there has been a considerable shift in how citizens and political elites value empire. Being an empire used to be a point of national pride and a goal for rising powers, e.g., Germany in the 19th century. Nevertheless, in the contemporary period great powers seek to avoid the label as it is almost always carries a negative connotation. Shifting public opinion and changing contexts aside, this does not fundamentally alter the geopolitical and economic reasons why polities might seek to become empires. Powerful actors, after all, still want to be able to compel other actors to act in ways that they want. They also want basing rights and cooperative agreements that allow them to more readily project military power. Immerwahr in his discussion of American bases in Saudi Arabia notes, “It wasn’t only the fighting that had gone pointillist. To launch planes and fire missiles, the Unites States needed platforms. Bases and ships, not too far from the combat zone, were essential. Hence the buildup of a basing network in Saudi Arabia, especially at Dhahran.”105 Immerwahr also chronicles the ease and speed with which
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the United States can find replacement bases when political or security “blowback” occurs, as it did for the Americans in Saudi Arabia. Bases, after all, are easier to administer, move and hide than entire polities.
41 In addition to projecting power, empires want to create a political order that creates economic advantages, often in the form of access to raw materials at low prices and access to foreign markets. Hopkins chronicles this sort of behavior in the historical context of what he considers the American empire and the conclusion is that these forces and incentives matter a great deal (2018).106 What modern empires do not want though is to be called imperial. Nor do they want the obligations, costs and negative press that come with administering large amounts of territory with potentially large and unruly populations. This bundle of issues is perhaps the thorniest set of questions about both empire as a form of political organization and the lingering question of the American empire. While this work cannot fully resolve these contentions here it does point out that the literature is incomplete. Whilst it cannot give too much space to the indigenous voice either it can at least help to explain why that voice have been subordinated. Moreover, the American case nicely illustrates the fact that empires can change over time and may include both formal and informal parts simultaneously. Washington thus has a formal empire that includes areas annexed into the Union, i.e., the territories added after independence from Britain. It also has a formal empire that encompasses overseas possessions that Washington has not granted full and equal status, e.g. Puerto Rico, the U.S. Virgin Islands, American Samoa and Guam. Certainly, it is also true that Washington once controlled other overseas polities, e.g., the Philippines, and that it still dominates a few of them (Hawai’i) as well as other continental lands taken by conquest or purchase over the course of the 19th century. More contentiously, some argue that the United States has evolved or co-evolved a flourishing and sprawling informal empire which, at a minimum, includes bases and islands. Indeed, Blower argues that an “outpost strategy appears as a constant throughout American history”, although those outposts can vary between frontier trading stations to today’s high-tech listening posts.107 Returning then to the question of definition and the issue of an American empire, perhaps the best approach is to see the phenomenon of empire as fluid, one that best employs the analogy of a river. Sometimes empire can be a raging torrent (formal conquest of large spaces by invading armies), whilst at other times it can merely threaten to flood and burst its banks (hegemony). Like a river, empire can also change its course and forge new channels and river banks whilst older contours get forgotten or swept away until what was at one time a river bed is now so old and dried up that it is not even thought about by some as a river anymore (Artois, First Nation Lands and Hawai’i). Consequently, in aiming to clarify the definitional conundrums of empire we helpfully suggest the following: empire is a river even when it is a river no more!
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NOTES
1. April Biccum, “What is an Empire? Assessing the postcolonial contribution to the American Empire Debate,” Interventions 20, no. 4 (2018): 697-716. 2. See Paul Kramer, “Power and Connection: Imperial Histories of the United States in the World,” The American Historical Review 116, no. 5 (2011): 1348-1391. See also Daniel Immerwahr, How to Hide an Empire: A History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2019), 13. 3. Frank, Schumacher, “Embedded Empire: The United States and Colonialism,” Journal of Modern European History 14, no. 2 (2016): 202-224, 207. 4. Kramer, Power. 5. Biccum, Empire, 4. 6. Herfried Münkler, Empires. The Logic of World Domination from Ancient Rome to the United States. Trans. Patrick Camiller. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 4. 7. Biccum, Empire, 10. 8. Hendrik Spruyt, “American Empire as an Analytic Question or a Rhetorical Move?” International Studies Perspectives 9, no. 3 (2008): 290-299. See also Daniel Nexon and Thomas Wright, “What’s at Stake in the American Empire Debate,” The American Political Science Review 101, no 2 (2007): 253-271. 9. Alejandro Colas, Empire (Cambridge, Polity Press, 2007), 28. 10. Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton, “Introduction,” in Crossing Empires. Taking U.S. History into Transimperial Terrain, eds. Kristin Hoganson and Jay Sexton (Durham: Duke University Press, 2020), 4. 11. Kramer, Power, 1349. 12. Julian Go, American Empire and the Politics of Meaning (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008). See also Julian Go, Patterns of Empire: the British and American Empires, 1688 – Present (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2011). 13. John McLeod, Postcolonialism (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2002), 17. 14. Stephen Howe, Empire. A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 20. 15. Benjamin Zephaniah, Untitled. 2007. Poem accompanying exhibit from “Uncomfortable Truths: The Shadow of Slave Trading on Contemporary Art and Design” (London: Victoria and Albert Museum) 16. Bill Ashcroft, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin, The Empire Writes Back (London: Routledge, 2002). 17. Brooke Blower, “Nation of Outposts: Forts, Factories, Bases, and the Making of American Power,” Diplomatic History 41, no. 3 (2017): 439-459. 18. Barbara Bush, Imperialism and Postcolonialism (New York: Pearson, 2006), 199. 19. Niall Ferguson, Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2002). See also Doug Stokes, “The Heart of Empire? Theorising US Empire in a Transnational Capitalism,” Third World Quarterly 28, no. 2 (2005), 217-236, 218.See also Hoganson and Sexton, Introduction, 5. 20. Hoganson and Sexton, Introduction, 1. 21. Yale Ferguson, “Approaches to Defining Empire and Characterizing United States Influence in the Contemporary World,” International Studies Perspectives 9, no. 3: 272-280.
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22. Kori Schake, “Review of The Lion and the Eagle: The Interaction of the British and American Empires, 1783-1972,” Times Higher Education (London), September 20, 2018, 63. 23. H.L. Mencken, “The Divine Afflatus,” New York Evening Mail (New York), November 16, 1917. 24. John Darwin, Unfinished Empire. The Global Expansion of Britain (London: Allen Lane, 2012), 265. 25. Dominic Alessio and Wesley Renfro, The Voldemort of Imperial History: Rethinking Empire and US History,” International Studies Perspectives 17, no. 3 (2016): 250-266. See also Dominic Alessio and Wesley Renfro, “The Island of Thieves: Rethinking Empire and the United States in Micronesia,” Foreign Policy Analysis 15, no 1 (2019): 83-98. 26. Heather Streets-Salter and Trevor Getz, Empires and Colonies in the Modern World. A Global Perspective (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2016), 9. 27. Alexander Motyl, “Empire Falls,” Foreign Affairs 85, no. 4 (2006): 190 – 194. 28. Howe, Empire, 14. 29. Colas, Empire; O’Reilly, Bittersweet; Alessio and Renfro, Voldemort. See also George Steinmetz, “Return to Empire: The New U.S. Imperialism in Comparative Historical Perspective, Sociological Theory 23, no. 4 (2005): 339-367. 30. Howe, Empire, 13. 31. Spruyt, Empire, 291. 32. Jesse Dillon Savage, “The stability and breakdown of empire: European informal empire in China, the Ottoman Empire and Egypt, European Journal of International Relations 17, no. 2 (2010): 161-185. 33. Quoted in Streets-Salter and Getz, Empires, 235. 34. Michael Dougherty, To Steal a Kingdom. Probing Hawaiian History (Waimanalo: Island Style Press, 1992), 169. 35. Immerwahr, Hide. 36. St. Louis Post-Dispatch (St. Louis), December 8, 1971. Available online: https:// www.newspapers.com/clip/21590482/congress_declares_war_on_japan_1500/ 37. Breena Kerr, “Hawaii politician stops voting, claiming islands are ‘occupied sovereign country’”, Guardian (London), November 30, 2018. 38. Streets-Salter and Getz, Empires, 7. 39. Immerwahr, Hide, 227-241. 40. Colas, Empire, 178. 41. Colas, Empire, 8-9. 42. Hoganson and Sexton, Introduction, 4. 43. Eric Hobsbawm, The Age of Extremes: The Short Twentieth Century, 1914-1991 (London: 1994), 31. 44. Albert Wendt, Interview with Juniper Ellis “The Techniques of Storytelling: An Interview with Albert Wendt.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 32 no.2 (1999): 82-85, 83. 45. Krishan Kumar “Nation-states as empires, empires as nation-states: two principles, one practice?” Theory and Society 39 no. 2, (2010): 119-143, 119. 46. Brian Delay, “Indian Polities, Empire, and the History of American Foreign Relations,” Diplomatic History 39, no. 5 (2015): 927-942, 935. 47. Michael Doyle, Empires (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1986), 45. 48. P.B. Shepheard, “Suzerainty,” Journal of the Society of Comparative Legislation 1, no. 3 (1899):432-438, 432. 49. Niall Ferguson, Empire
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50. Julian Go, “Waves of Empire: US Hegemony and Imperialistic Activity from the Shores of Tripoli to Iraq, 1787-2003,” International Sociology 22, no. 1 (2007): 5-40, 9. 51. Ferguson, Empire, 156. 52. Gier, Lundestad, “Empire by invitation? The United States and Western Europe, 1945-1952,” Journal of Peach Research 23, no.3 (1986): 263-277. 53. Robert Keohane, “The United States and the Postwar Order: Empire or Hegemony?” Journal of Peace Research 28, no. 4 (1991): 435-439. 54. Marc O’Reilly M and Wesley Renfro, “Evolving Empire: America’s ‘Emirates’ Strategy in the Persian Gulf,” International Studies Perspectives 8 no.2 (2007): 137-151, 139. 55. Ferguson, Approaches, 278. 56. Immerwahr, Hide. 57. Owen Worth, Rethinking Hegemony (London: Palgrave, 2015). 58. Felipe Fernandez-Armesto, “How Empires Happen: the Stranger-Effect,” Imperial & World History Seminar, Institute of Historical Research, University of London, February 24, 2014. 59. Dominic Alessio, “’Territorial acquisitions are among the landmarks of our history’: the buying and leasing of imperial territory,” Global Discourse 3, no. 1 (2013): 74-96. 60. O’Reilly and Renfro, Evolving. 61. Lundestad, Empire. 62. Jeffrey Ostler, “The Shameful Final Grievance of the Declaration of Independence”, The Atlantic (Washington, DC), February 8, 2020. 63. Alan Burns, In Defence of the Colonies (London: George Allen and Unwin, 1957). 64. M.I. Finlay, “Colonies: An Attempt at a Typology,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 26 (1976): 167 – 188, 173. 65. Bush, Imperialism. See also, Michael Mann, “American Empires: Past and Present,” Canadian Review of Sociology and Anthropology 45 no.1 (2008): 7 – 50. 66. William Appleman Williams, The Tragedy of American Diplomacy (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1959). See also Walter LaFeber, The New Empire: An Interpretation of American Expansion, 1860 – 1898 (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1963). 67. Ferguson, Empire. See also Niall Ferguson, Colossus: The Rise and Fall of the American Empire (New York: Penguin, 2005) and Marc O’Reilly, Unexceptional: America’s Empire in the Persian Gulf, 1941-2007 (Lanham, MD: Lexington, 2007) and Chalmers Johnson, The Sorrows of Empire: Militarism, Secrecy, and the End of the Republic (New York: Metropole, 2004). 68. Paul, Frymer, Building an American Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017). 69. A.G. Hopkins, American Empire: A Global History (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018). 70. Frymer, Building. 71. Hoganson and Sexton, Introduction, 11. 72. Bush, Imperialism, 204. See also, Johnson, Sorrows, 2004. 73. Frank Schumacher, “The United States: Empire as a Way of Life?” in The Age of Empires, Robert Aldrich, ed. (London: Thames and Hudson, 2007): 278-303, 283. 74. David Lake, The New American Empire. International Studies Perspectives 9, no.3 (2008):281-289, 281.
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75. William Clinton, “Remarks at a Memorial Day Ceremony in Arlington, Virginia,” The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States of America, May 29, 2000. Available online: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-memorial-day-ceremony- arlington-virginia-1. 76. George W. Bush, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the State of the Union,” The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States of America, January 20, 2004. Available online: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/address-before-joint- session-the-congress-the-state-the-union-24. 77. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Annual Convention of the National Association of Evangelicals in Orlando, Florida,” The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States of America, March 8, 1983. Available online: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-the- annual-convention-the-national-association-evangelicals-orlando-florida. 78. Lyndon Johnson. “Remarks in New York City Upon Receiving the National Freedom Award,” The Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States of America, February 23, 1966. Available online: https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/documents/remarks-new-york-city-upon- receiving-the-national-freedom-award. 79. Richard Neustadt, Presidential Power and the Modern Presidents: The Politics of Leadership (New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1960). 80. Immerwahr, Hide, 11. 81. Ibid. 82. Linda, Colley, “The Difficulties of Empire: Present, Past and Future,” Historical Research 79, no. 205 (2006): 367 – 382. 83. Doyle, Empire, 19. 84. Douglas Peers, “Imperial History,” Encyclopedia of Historians and Historical Writing, Kelly Boyd, ed. (London: Fitzroy Dearburn, 1999). 85. Ferguson, Approaches, 275. 86. Ibid., 276. 87. Immerwahr. Hide. 88. Alexander Cooley and Daniel Nexon, “The Empire Will Compensate You: The Structural Dynamics of the U.S. Overseas Basing Network,”. Perspectives on Politics 11, no. 4 (2013): 1034 – 1050. 89. David Vine, Base Nation: How U.S. Military Bases Abroad Harm American and the World (New York: Metropolitan Books). See also Chalmers Johnson, “America’s Empire of Bases,” Japan Focus 1, no. 5 (2003) 1-6. 90. Blower, Outposts, 456. 91. Peter Baker and Maggie Haberman, “Trump’s Interest in Buying Greenland Seemed Like a Joke. Then It Got Ugly,” New York Times (New York), August 21, 2019. 92. Immerwahr, Hide. 93. Ibid. 94. Schumacher, Embedded, 206. 95. Howard Zinn, A People’s History of the United States (London: Harper & Row, 1980), 166. 96. Immerwahr, Hide, 398. 97. Immerwahr, Hide, 400. 98. Kramer, Power, 1373. 99. Odd, Westad, The Global Cold War: Third World Interventions and the Making of Our Times (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007).
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100. Johnson, Bases, 100. 101. Blower, Outposts 102. Cooley and Nexon, Empire. 103. David Vine, “War and Forced Migration in the Indian Ocean: the US Military Base at Diego Garcia” International Migration 42, no. 3 (2004): 111 - 143. 104. Johnson, Sorrows. See also Christopher Saunders, America’s Overseas Garrisons: The Leasehold Empire (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000). 105. Immerwahr, Hide, 379. 106. A.G. Hopkins, Empire. 107. Blower, Outposts, 459.
INDEX
Keywords: United States, Empire, Leasing, Military Bases
AUTHORS
WESLEY RENFRO Wesley Renfro is an Associate Professor of Political Science and an Associate Dean in the College of Arts and Sciences at Quinnipiac University in Hamden, Connecticut, USA. In addition to his work on American Empire, Renfro writes and publishes on American presidential decision-making and United States foreign policy.
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American Messiahs: The Narrative Strategies of FDR and Reagan, 1933 and 1981
Theo Zenou
1 In July 2012, while running for re-election, President Barack Obama was asked about the biggest mistake of his first term. For a politician on the campaign trail, his reply was surprisingly candid: “The mistake of my first term … was thinking that this job was just about getting the policy right. … But the nature of this office is also to tell a story to the American people that gives them a sense of unity and purpose and optimism, especially during tough times.”1
2 Armed with Obama’s insight, this article goes back to two instances of “tough times” in modern American history: the Great Depression and the late 1970s-1980 stagflation. It asks what stories did Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan – the presidents respectively elected to solve these crises – tell the people and why. It looks specifically at the period when they entered office, in 1933 and in 1981, and seeks to illuminate how Roosevelt’s and Reagan’s stories illustrated their political strategy.
3 No historical analogy is ever perfect, and neither is this article’s. While the crises in 1933 and 1981 were both severe, it is obvious they were not on par. The Great Depression devastated the American economy far more than stagflation. And yet, in early 1981, comparisons were drawn between the two. Reagan himself said: “We’re in the worst economic mess since the Great Depression.”2 However tempting it might be to dismiss so dramatic a pronouncement as alarmism serving the president’s agenda, it actually reflected a sentiment prevalent at the time. For instance, New York Times economic columnist Leonard Silk wrote that “stagflation threatens America’s economic strength as seriously as did depression in the 1930’s.”3 Hindsight now tells us this did not happen. But while history is written with hindsight, it is experienced without. Hence, to many in 1981, stagflation felt like a dangerous crisis that could well spiral into another Great Depression.
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4 Beyond a dire economy, what made the situation in 1981 similar to that in 1933 was the lack of confidence people had in the future and, crucially, in politicians’ ability to make things better.4 As Silk reflected when comparing the two periods, “Now, as then … the nation is plagued by anxiety over its economic future … a key part of the job of reconstruction will be psychological.”5 In other words, the role that Reagan would have to play once in office was not so different from the one Roosevelt had played upon ascending the presidency: To reassure and motivate a weary nation. That is why journalists frequently likened the Republican to his Democratic predecessor – a parallel that greatly pleased Reagan. In fact, he had laid the groundwork for it by appropriating Roosevelt’s own terminology during the 1980 campaign, leading The New York Times to run a provocative headline that read: “Franklin Delano Reagan.” As William E. Leuchtenburg succinctly puts it: “Reagan presented himself as Rooseveltian.”6
5 The rationale for focusing on these two presidents, and the starts of their tenures, also lies in the scholarship of political scientist Stephen Skowronek. According to him, Roosevelt and Reagan were “reconstructive presidents” – meaning presidents elected in volatile times who birthed a new political “regime,” and a new political philosophy underpinning this “regime.”7 This article, then, aims to explore the narrative strategies with which these two “reconstructive” presidents opened their time in office.
6 The argument is that – despite manifold political differences – the stories Roosevelt and Reagan told were similar, and advanced their ambition to transform American politics. The two presidents formulated their stories in the wake of economic crises that had left Americans with little faith in the status quo. Consequently, they bore striking parallels. By way of speeches, Roosevelt and Reagan both depicted America as a land in the grip of blight, ruined by the avarice and duplicity of elites. Men of intense faith, the presidents portrayed themselves as messiahs sent by God to make America rise from the ashes. Ultimately, the presidents both used their stories to signpost the radical change they wished to engender, and shape a new political imagination.
The Literature
7 In The Power and the Story, Evan Cornog claims “the essence of American presidential leadership, and the secret of presidential success, is storytelling.”1 Cornog’s is the first major work that looks at the U.S. presidency through the lens of political “storytelling.” It is panoramic (spanning 43 presidents) and multi-focused (dealing with all kinds of presidential stories from biographies to political and media narratives). Cornog chooses to structure his study according to “the trajectory of an archetypal man of power … from the politician’s first emergence as a public figure through his rise to national prominence, the presidential campaign, the exercise of power, reelection and defeat, and then his efforts to reinterpret and redefine the story until his death.”2 As a consequence, while Cornog offers a systemic interpretation, even a kind of unified field theory, of the presidency along the lines of storytelling, he does not – cannot – sharpen his focus to offer in-depth analysis of any single president. The Power and the Story, therefore, leaves plenty of room for more pointed studies like this article’s.
8 Following in Cornog’s footsteps, other scholars have tackled political storytelling with approaches ranging from the theoretical to the historical.3 Those whose work is most relevant to this article are Christian Salmon and Jan Hanska. Salmon has authored a key conceptual text, the monograph Storytelling, in which he details how politicians,
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advertisers and military leaders have used narrative – the “storytelling machine” – to accrue their control over society. He makes no mention of Roosevelt, but he identifies Reagan as a master practitioner of “‘narratocracy.’”4 Hanska, meanwhile, explores that narratocracy in Reagan’s Mythical America.5 His approach differs greatly from that of this article. Broad, he surveys Reagan’s entire political career. As such he allows, invites even, approaches that look at a specific period of Reagan’s presidency.
9 Beyond the relatively recent literature concerned with political storytelling, one can also turn to studies of presidential rhetoric for insights into Roosevelt and Reagan. Mary E. Stuckey and Paul D. Erickson are successful in showing how both leaders respectively deployed biblical imagery.6 Robert Dallek, meanwhile, provides a strong assessment of Reagan as a leader apt at using symbolism.7 However, these scholars – unlike this article – do not try to identify overarching “stories” in the presidents’ rhetoric, much less during a single, specific period of Roosevelt’s and Reagan’s tenures: their first months in office.
10 While much has been written about Roosevelt’s famed “first hundred days” (March to June 1933), it mostly pertains to policymaking.8 A notable exception is David W. Houck’s FDR and Fear Itself, which focuses on the inaugural address.9 Few studies, meanwhile, have been attempted about Reagan’s own “first hundred days”-period, which actually spanned six months (January to July 1981) – the time it took him to launch his presidency, argue for Reaganomics, and achieve enactment of the Economic Recovery Tax Act.10
A Note on Theory
11 Story, narrative, storytelling: These terms originate from the fields of literary/dramatic theory where they have specific, often hotly-debated, meanings. It is worth nothing that, with this article, no attempt is being made to contribute to those fields. Indeed, I am borrowing insights from theory to shine a light on presidential leadership and political strategy, not the other way around.
12 This article defines a political story as the narrative that pervades the public communications of a statesman (speeches, interviews, TV and campaign appearances, etc.). This is in keeping with Roland Barthes’ capacious definition of narrative: “Among the vehicles of narratives are articulated language, whether oral or written, pictures, still or moving, gestures, and an ordered mixture of all those substances; narrative is present in myth, legend, fables, tales, short stories, epics, history, tragedy, drame [suspense drama], comedy, pantomime, paintings … stained-glassed windows, movies, local news, conversation.”1
13 Roosevelt and Reagan were not only the narrators of their stories; they were also the protagonists at the heart of those narratives, what Hanska calls the “dramatis, or rather the narratis, persona.”2 By being both in the story and the ones telling the story, Roosevelt and Reagan were thus able not only to propose their own version of events, but also to portray themselves as they wished to be seen.
14 As of the question of authorship – ie. who deserves credit for the presidential narratives: the presidents or their strategists/speechwriters? – this article sides with Hanska when he writes that “in a political narration the narratorship is more important than the origins of the words that combine into a story.”3 Indeed without the
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narrator-president, there not only cannot be a story, there is also no one to tell that story.
15 To make a cinematic analogy: Roosevelt and Reagan were the “auteurs” (if not always the writers) of their stories.4 This observation was actually made by journalist Sidney Blumenthal, in 1981, when covering the Reagan administration. He surmised that “the former actor is more than White House leading man; he’s the auteur.”5 This article similarly regards presidents as the “auteurs” of their stories – since they are the narrators. And it ultimately draws attention to the way Roosevelt and Reagan used narrative as a tool to fulfil their ambition to transform American politics.
Roosevelt as Messiah
16 A narrative reading of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s speeches shows that he portrayed himself as a messiah. This might be because, according to Frances Perkins, a close friend as well as political associate, he saw himself as fulfilling God’s will. Indeed, Roosevelt believed that he was “an actor placed on the stake [sic] by Divine providence.”1 This belief stemmed from his non-dogmatic yet intense faith – one of the hallmarks of the president’s character.2 Even so, as Gary Scott Smith notes, Roosevelt’s piety has seldom been analysed by historians.3
17 This might be because, as Andrew Preston remarks in his study of religion in U.S. foreign relations, most “modern historians[’] … worldview is not framed by religious faith.” Consequently, scholars have often dismissed politicians’ religiosity as having little to no bearing on their policies or decisions.4 But in the case of Roosevelt, this is beginning to change thanks to Christine Wicker. She holds that the president’s “worldview and much of his personality was shaped by the strength and vibrancy of his Episcopal faith, which was fed by his sense of a continuing relationship by God.” Elsewhere, Wicker writes plainly that “he believed God communicated with human beings, himself in particular.”5
18 On the morning of his inauguration on March 4, 1933, Roosevelt attended services at St. John’s Church along with members of his inner circle. The rector had written a special hymn for the new president, beseeching God for “Thy blessing upon Thy servant, Franklin.”6 The story he told the American people would indicate that – as Perkins revealed – Roosevelt did share the sentiment prevalent in the prayer. Indeed, he sought to become a kind of American prophet, a redeemer with the necessary inspiration to revive sacred values and place them at the heart of society. Roosevelt cast himself in the halo of the spiritual repeatedly. The most direct evidence of this can be found in his proclamation that he was ordaining an assembly of “prophets of a new order.”7 He labelled his policies a “common covenant,” of which he was the keeper, and he urged the American people to keep the faith despite the criticisms or fabrications – in other words the heresy – they might hear about Roosevelt’s plans.8
19 Scholars have long tiptoed around the argument that Roosevelt depicted himself as messiah. Gary Scott Smith contends that Roosevelt “frequently asserted that God directed history, considered himself to be God’s agent” adding that he “saw himself as carrying out God’s purposes.”9 Smith stops short, however, of following through on the messianic implications of his observation. Mary E. Stuckey does but then dismisses them, stating that “while the president employed rhetoric that enabled such [messianic] associations, he was more likely to assume the role of preacher than of
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biblical character.”10 But Moses and Jesus, the biblical characters to whom she is referring, were also preachers.11 In the biblical tradition, most prophets are preachers, even if the opposite is not so. In the framework of his story, Roosevelt was both preacher (narrator) and prophet (“narratis persona”). The president’s messianism was deftly woven through the story, hinted at rather strongly but never expressed in such outright terms as to become boastful or, worse, clumsy. Raymond Moley, who wrote the bulk of Roosevelt’s inaugural address, certainly seemed aware of the prophetic parallels evoked by that speech.12
20 One way for Roosevelt to present himself as a messiah was to make biblical references, widely known in society, and using them as shorthand for characterisation. A memorable instance can be found in Roosevelt’s inaugural address. The president described the American elites – the bankers and politicians whom he held responsible for the Great Depression – as the “money changers … in the temple of our civilization.”13 As has already been noted by Ronald Isetti in an article exploring Roosevelt’s religious language, this alluded to an episode in the New Testament in which Jesus casts out the wicked merchants from the temple’s courtyard.14 But Roosevelt did more than simply infuse his rhetoric with the vernacular of scripture.
21 Indeed, his very story played out like a modern re-telling of Biblical myths, all leading to the inevitable portrayal of Roosevelt as the anointed one. He depicted America as a land ruined by the avarice of self-seeking elites and the hypocrisy of “false” leaders.15 They were personified as “false prophets” that had led “many amongst us [to] have made obeisance to Mammon.”16 Darkness engulfed the country, and the people were crying out for a saviour.17 The people, Roosevelt proclaimed, had “to seek new leaders of our own choosing.”18 To quote an aide of the new president, “the stage was obviously set for the entry of … Roosevelt as the hero of the new drama.”19 Indeed, against this grim backdrop, an age-old battle – in narrative terms a conflict – was being waged, juxtaposing the forces of good and evil. Roosevelt, as Stuckey observes, frequently resorted to Manichean oppositions over his twelve-year presidency.20 And at the start, it was to castigate the “evils of the old order” and contrastingly exalt his brand of righteous leadership.
22 Moreover, part of Roosevelt’s political playbook was to have avowed enemies.21 It was also an important device in his story. Repeatedly, he accused the members of the old order – though he seldom referred to them by their actual names – of engendering the demise of America. They were labelled blind whilst Roosevelt had vision, selfish whilst he was selfless, venal whilst he was ethical.22 He strongly hinted they were foul when he insisted his party was the one with “clean hands.”23 Even once he was in office, Roosevelt continued to narrate this high-stakes conflict, although, by then, most likely because he was no longer campaigning, his antagonists had become more abstract. In his inaugural, the president famously proclaimed that “the only thing we have to fear is fear itself,” subsequently turning “the phantom of fear” into the people’s ominous adversary.24
23 Historians have remarked that, in 1933, Roosevelt described the Great Depression as a war, and the narrative reading of the president as messiah means this war carried spiritual connotations. William E. Leuchtenburg was the first to notice this allegory of the Depression as war.25 It was not a metaphor but an apt description of reality for many Americans. As Leuchtenburg argues – and this statement also applies to the reasoning behind this article – “the metaphors a nation employs reveal much about
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how it perceives reality. The words people use bare the bedrock of its beliefs. Moreover, they are not neutral artifacts; they shape ideas and behavior.”26 Roosevelt, it would seem, was very much aware of this. He made his martial leadership explicit when he affirmed that “I assume unhesitatingly the leadership of this great army of our people dedicated to a disciplined attack upon our common problems.”27 He frequently extolled military values, most notably the merits of discipline, commitment to the mission and loyalty to the group. Roosevelt put military language in the service of his messianic story. He presented his campaign, and by inference his presidential mandate, as more than political. It was, in his words, “a call to arms … [a] crusade” he was to lead.28
24 And only a week after assuming power, he used narrative to influence reality. In his first fireside chat, Roosevelt spoke like a general commanding his troops. The mission was simple. Due to overwhelming cash withdrawals, he had ordered the closure of all banks to stabilise the market. They were to re-open, however, to enable economic recovery. Yet, for this plan to succeed, it was paramount that ordinary Americans deposit their cash back into the very banks they had thought insolvent. After laying this objective starkly – and explaining why the course of action was sound – Roosevelt urged, in essence, for his foot soldiers to obey his orders unquestioningly, and do so for the good of the nation.29 Perkins observed that the president’s “quality of being one with the people” – in other words, his convincing show that he was speaking on their behalf, that he was being literally their spokesman – “made it possible for him to be a leader without ever being … a dictator.”30 The people, after all, were the flock Roosevelt’s messianic protagonist was to lead to the promised land.
25 If the Moses-like interpretation of Roosevelt appears far-fetched by today’s standards, a portion of the American people, in 1933, actually believed in it. The flurry of letters mailed to the White House during the first hundred days was unprecedented in the history of the presidency.31 Many of these letters were not concerned with policy but were, instead, emotional reactions to Roosevelt’s story. The letters were tinged with spiritual connotations. Writing after the first fireside chat on banking, one woman wrote that in the years previous America had “lost [its] soul.” The people had “cried for a Leader.” And, according to her, out of this misery Roosevelt had emerged as “the passionate … crusader.” She ended her letter by sharing her view of Roosevelt as “Leader.” Indeed, she suggested that he was not only the people’s president, but also God’s president. In fact, to her, they were one and the same, as she professed to believing that “the voice of God was the voice of the people last November,” referring to the presidential election.32 Another ordinary citizen literally compared Roosevelt to the prophets he had, in his story, modelled himself after but never outrightly named: After listening to your wonderful talk Sunday a week ago – we all felt … that you were sent for our delivery. When in times of deep distress God took pity on His people. He sent Moses to deliver the oppressed. Then He sent Jesus Christ – to show His people how to live – to redeem them – Then you a Comforter to put confidence in this so great a people.33
26 Some Americans, then, perceived Roosevelt as a messianic figure. When examining letters from the public to Roosevelt (in this case during a longer period from 1933 to 1936), Isetti found that his supporters often compared the president to Moses, with one woman claiming that God had sent him “to deliver us from the hands of the oppressors as truly as He did Moses.”34 This image of Roosevelt as a divine agent was pervasive enough that in December 1933, at the annual meeting of the Protestant Episcopal Church’s New York Diocese, a reverend felt the need to state on the record that
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Roosevelt was not a messiah. The man of God expressed his genuine disgust “at the baselessness of this pathetic and pitiful superstition,” which, he deplored, was nonetheless espoused by “thousands of men.”35
27 It is unknown to what extent the White House reflected on these reactions to their story, but officials knew of the quasi-religious devotion their story had engendered, particularly amongst the most disfranchised classes. In 1934, Harry Hopkins, then administrator of the New Deal’s Federal Emergency Relief Association, hired a team of journalists to investigate poverty in the country.36 Among them was future star journalist Martha Gellhorn. Her reports were impressionistic dispatches from an America hit hard by the Great Depression. The young reporter meticulously documented her interactions with those people who saw themselves as living embodiments of Roosevelt’s “forgotten man.” With each story Gellhorn related, the president emerged more and more as a figure of intense popular worship, the subject of an emotional phenomenon that bordered on the religious. Indeed, in a report of November 11, 1934, Gellhorn revealed to Hopkins that she heard someone say, with earnestness and gravity: “We trust in the Supreme Being and Franklin Roosevelt.”37
28 Similarly, in her study of religiosity in the Depression-era South, Alison Collis Greene writes that for many people in those days, “it was time for a higher power to intervene. They looked to God, and then they looked to Roosevelt.”38 For some, it seemed that the president’s power was divinely sanctioned. The primary role of (his) government was to accomplish, under his stewardship, God’s work on Earth. After all, the opening line of his inaugural address – which Roosevelt had added himself at the last minute – was: “This is a day of national consecration.” According to Houck, that is because the soon- to-be president had “wanted something to mark this moment as sacred, ordained by [God] … God should be invoked from the outset of his administration.”39
29 In a report dated April 25, 1935, Gellhorn observed that many she encountered had an “almost mystic belief in Mr. Roosevelt”40 This “belief” – what the Episcopalian reverend had called a “superstition” – was no accident: Roosevelt’s story had had a lot to do with it (and presumably, of course, so did other factors such as the New Deal’s relief programmes). It all pointed back to the president’s self-characterisation as a prophetic figure – one that stemmed from his conviction he had been chosen by providence to lead America out of the Great Depression. In his speeches, he had systematically and consistently explained the Depression by telling a story. He presented America as laden with sin, and the political and financial classes as crass worshippers of Mammon – one of the princes of hell. In contrast, he portrayed himself as a messiah sent by God to purge America and lead the people to greener pastures. To tell this story, Roosevelt drew primarily on the Bible, which he knew intimately, although he cared little about nuances of theology and interpretation.41 What mattered was the story.
Reagan as Messiah
30 A narrative reading of Ronald Reagan’s speeches shows that, just like Roosevelt, he presented himself to the American people as a messiah. It seems, too, that his rationale was the same as Roosevelt’s. Reagan was also a believer and faith played an important part in his life, even if he wasn’t a regular church-goer. As H.W. Brands notes: “[Reagan] explained that his attendance disrupted the [church] services, which was true enough. But his faith was internal rather than institutional.”1 Indeed the
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president’s religiosity was idiosyncratic, albeit anchored in Christianity. He thought that the Bible contained the solutions to all man-made issues.2 Jesus Christ was the individual he most admired.3 He, too, felt he had a special relationship with God, to whom he referred as “the man upstairs.” In fact – following the attempt on his life of March 30, 1981 – Reagan believed he had been spared for a reason, so he could pursue a divine will.4
31 His story, nonetheless, already had hues of the spiritual before this sombre episode. He wished to “renew the American spirit and sense of purpose,” as he said in his acceptance address at the 1980 Republican national convention.5 For Michael Deaver, his deputy chief of staff, faith was Reagan’s principal “source of inspiration.”6 It was also the fundamental attribute he urged Americans to find in themselves, in others and indirectly in his leadership.7 Just as Roosevelt promised Americans that the Great Depression could teach them a lesson about service, Reagan pleaded for them to believe that the country’s difficulties also had a redemptive purpose.8 Tragedy, in his mind, could beget transcendence.
32 Scholars have correctly identified that Reagan depicted himself as a “political messiah” who would bring back hope and prosperity to his country.9 This article shows that, whilst Reagan did portray himself as a messianic protagonist, he was subtler and less strident than Roosevelt in doing so – which might be explained by the context of his times.10 Still his language and self-characterisation came close to Roosevelt’s, and depicted the Republican as having the necessary traits of a messiah. For instance, Reagan emphasised his almost supernatural sense of vision, his ability to perceive what others did not. “Some say that spirit no longer exists,” he lamented. “But,” he added, “I have seen it – I have felt it – all across the land [emphasis mine].” 11 In saying this, Reagan differentiated himself not only from other politicians but also, quite literally, from most other Americans. He could see, more importantly feel, things no one else did. Armed with his unique insight, Reagan invited the people to join him on a “crusade” – just as Roosevelt had done 48 years prior when he too accepted his party’s presidential nomination. For Reagan, as he said upon accepting the Republican nomination in 1980, the “crusade” was “to make America great again.” For Roosevelt, it had been to “restore America to its own people.”12 In this crusade, Reagan identified as the most important weapons not “‘bombs and rockets’ but belief and resolve.”13 Faith, in other words, was all that was needed to win.
33 Reagan, like Roosevelt, relied on the vocabulary of populism to depict his antagonists as wicked – and thus contrast himself as a messianic protagonist. As Michael Kazin observes, Reagan, borrowing from Roosevelt, claimed he was on the side of common folk against political elites.14 For both presidents, populism was a natural and logical strand of their story – a way to build upon their messianism. They presented themselves as anointed saviours who would lead the people to newfound success. It begged one question: who did the people need saving from? Populist rhetoric offered the answer. By adopting the “us vs. them” structure of populism, Roosevelt and Reagan were able to zero in on the antagonists of their story. Although they did not have the same antagonists – Roosevelt leaned towards blaming corporate America, whilst Reagan was a staunch critic of government bureaucracy – both men shared a common enemy: the political class.
34 Reagan chastised the political class for their wrongdoings. He depicted politicians as inhumane, profligate and reckless.15 They were double-faced liars who had betrayed the
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sacred trust of the people. They had taken advantage of their good will, demanding more and more of their hard-earned money to keep alive a bloated system. Their cardinal sin – in other words the grave misdeed committed by Reagan’s antagonists – was “a theft from [the people’s] pocketbooks.”16 In so doing, they had stripped America of its greatness, making it feeble and leaving its citizens “frustrated and … a little afraid.”17 In contrast, as protagonist, Reagan stood for candour and a spirit of sincerity in all things. He consistently emphasised he spoke the truth, even if it was not an uplifting one. As a messenger, he refused to be a false prophet, one who “said, ‘Trust me,’” but ignored the harm he caused.18 Although he promised to improve the country’s situation, he confessed it would not be easy.19 Reagan presented himself as a reliable truth-teller, unafraid to emphasise the difficulties and challenges that would arise. That is why he spoke of “regret[ting] to say” the country was in an economic maelstrom, of being “afraid [his] message … was grim and disturbing.”20 He recognised he “painted a pretty grim picture,” but insisted it was only a mirror of reality.21 Whilst both are remembered as optimists, Reagan could have been channelling Roosevelt who had made a similar point amidst crisis, conceding that “only a foolish optimist [could] deny the dark realities.”22 It was against this similarly ominous backdrop that Reagan could starkly define the conflict of his story. He symbolised it as the choice between two roads. It is worth considering his own words in context here: One road is all too familiar to us. It leads ultimately to higher taxes. It merely brings us full circle back to the source of our economic problems, where the government decides that it knows better than you what should be done with your earnings and, in fact, how you should conduct your life. The other road promises to renew the American spirit. It’s a road of hope and opportunity. It places the direction of your life back in your hands where it belongs.23
35 Reagan portrayed himself as a liberator, granting freedom to a people held captive by an oppressive and ubiquitous government, the very government that he famously lambasted as “in this crisis … not the solution [but] … the problem.”24 Richard Wirthlin, his pollster and strategist, observed that the president spoke of liberty as a gift that could only be bestowed by the grace of God.25 And yet in his story, Reagan suggested his command would give America back its freedom. His programme was about a “vision of society that frees the energies and ingenuity of our people.”26 His leadership was about granting a new “compact of freedom” to the people – a sort of covenant between them and him.27 Therefore, although for Reagan liberty came from providence, he was the intermediary that made this divine endowment even possible. In the context of his story, he did so by getting Americans to “believe” once again. As a protagonist, he therefore fulfilled – in the same manner as Roosevelt – the basic tenet of the messiah. He got the people to rekindle their faith. As Reagan later put it in his memoirs, his first and foremost objective had been to “bring about a spiritual revival in America.”28 But what exactly did he mean by this?
36 According to Gary Scott Smith, in 1983, two years after he entered office, Reagan detailed the “spiritual awakening and moral renewal” that the country was undergoing. He rejoiced in surveys showing a great majority of Americans disapproved of promiscuity and drug use, opposed abortion, and extolled family values and religious faith.29 But Reagan’s definition of a “spiritual revival” did not limit itself to championing the conservative values of God and country. It primarily meant restoring the people’s faith in America itself and its “unique sense of destiny.” They had been lost, Reagan believed, since his predecessor Jimmy Carter had presided over a
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weakening of the nation’s moral fibre.30 Thus, Wirthlin’s campaign plan advised Reagan to integrate “a morale-building element” to his “leadership,” pointing to the presidencies of Roosevelt and John Kennedy as inspirations.31
37 Reagan’s “spiritual revival,” then, had an ineffable quality to it. He saw it as mystical. This is why, writing in 1982, barely a year into Reagan’s first term, Garry Wills ironically dubbed his presidency the “papal presidency.” “His appeal is not to reason but to faith, to his vision of America as an infallible mother church.”32 Wills implied that Reagan was a leader animated by a naïve faith, and that this faith was in fact all he really offered the people. As such, much like the pope, the president became a spiritual leader rather than a squarely political one.
38 For Reagan but also for Roosevelt, the messianic overtones of their stories dovetailed with the concept of American civil religion. As Robert Bellah explains: “Behind the civil religion at every point lie biblical archetypes: Exodus, Chosen People, Promised Land, New Jerusalem, Sacrificial Death and Rebirth.” Indeed American civil religion, though distinctive and distinctly American, relies on universal motifs, namely religious ones. “It is,” according to Bellah, “an understanding of the American experience in the light of ultimate and universal reality.”33 But, with their stories, the two presidents did more than implicitly rely on American civil religion. They also strengthened it. By depicting America as a land needing divine intervention, and portraying themselves as the agents of that intervention, Roosevelt and Reagan stressed the trope, so key to American civil religion, that the U.S. was special and set apart by God. And that prosperity would come about when God’s will was finally carried out in the nation’s politics.
Story as Political Strategy
39 In 1933 and in 1981, Roosevelt and Reagan both presented themselves as modern messiahs operating in conflicted times, times they depicted as rife with spiritual malaise. The two presidents proclaimed a crusade to right society’s wrongs. But what were the presidents hoping to achieve by telling these stories?1 On a basic level, of course, they were hoping to successfully launch their presidency. Yet, as has been hinted at throughout this article, their ambition ran much deeper.
40 Both presidents looked to reinvent the political imagination of their day. They wanted to change political ethos. Telling a story was a strategy to fulfil this lofty ambition. (Whether or not one considers they did so is irrelevant to the claim that storytelling was a way in which they tried to.) The focus here is on proving intent, not assessing effect or substantiating a result. And Roosevelt and Reagan both intended to change the assumptions around which American politics revolved. But first, it is necessary to ask why telling a story would even contribute to this end. In other words, how does story help develop new political ideas?
41 Stories are a way to hold the public’s attention. In 2004, a Democratic “spin doctor” was asked why his party had lost the presidential election. His reply was succinct: “They [the Republicans] produced a narrative, we produced a litany.” What he implied is that whilst Democrats ran on the issues, Republicans framed these issues around a narrative. As he put it: “They say, ‘I’m going to protect you from the terrorists in Tehran. … We say, ‘We’re for clean air.’”2 Roger Stone, the political strategist whose career includes work for Reagan campaigns, made a similar point: “Put out a white paper on your environmental positions, you will bore [everyone] … no one will pay
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attention.”3 But while it is easy to see how political storytelling can grab people’s attention, why would it also help to spread ideas to the public?
42 According to Roland Barthes, that is because story is a “cognitive category” that enables humans to comprehend the world they live in.4 For Hayden White, “narrative is a meta-code, a human universal on the basis of which transcultural messages about the nature of a shared reality can be transmitted.”5 But perhaps no one has put it better – or rather surmised the connection between stories and human beings better – than evolutionary psychologist Jonathan Gottschall: “[We are] the primate Homo fictus (fiction man), the great ape with the storytelling mind.”6 Storyteller and film historian Martin Scorsese goes further. He argues that stories “fulfil a spiritual need that people have: to share a common memory.”7
43 If Scorsese’s pronouncement of a “common memory” sounds like it could have been made by Roosevelt or Reagan, given the way that they have been discussed so far, it is because they shared the sentiment. Roosevelt felt he had a grasp, in his words, of “a strange and weird sense known as ‘public psychology.’”8 It seems to have been a mix of intellect and intuition – what Reagan called a “feel” – that enabled both men to get a sense of what people were thinking, and the kind of ideas to which society would be receptive.9 To be sure this was only one of the many ways they did so. However, in regard to their perception of public psychology, it is worth noting that both men exchanged letters with ordinary citizens. A perusal of Roosevelt’s speech files shows that he received suggestions and ideas from segments of the American public. Reagan, meanwhile, spent a considerable amount of time exchanging letters or telephone calls with ordinary Americans.10 It was a way for them, in show business parlance, to “know their audience.”
44 Both Roosevelt and Reagan, moreover, understood the emotional power stories had over the public’s psychology. During the transition period, Roosevelt actually contributed to a film titled Gabriel over the White House (1933). It was conceived as a vehicle advertising the merits of an activist presidency. The film’s fictional president bore strong similarities with Roosevelt, which critics did not fail to notice. The plot focused on that president’s attempt to solve the Great Depression, and his transformation into a literal messiah after he is visited by the archangel Gabriel, leading him to carry God’s will on earth. Roosevelt provided extensive notes on the script, and advised on the final edit. He later thanked the film’s financier, William Randolph Hearst, for an engaging film that “should do much to help.”11 The implication was clear. Roosevelt felt that Gabriel over the White House would contribute to advancing not only his agenda, but also furthering his standing as a new president. This illuminates his thinking at the time that this article covers. And although Roosevelt would most likely not have used the term political storytelling – it is only very recent – he certainly understood the power of story, and the role it played in promoting his politics. Interestingly, earlier in his life, Roosevelt had also tried his hand at scriptwriting.12 He had a demonstrable interest in the craft of narrative, hiring dramatists Orson Welles and Robert E. Sherwood to serve as speechwriters.
45 In Reagan’s case, storytelling was not only his enduring passion, but also the way he viewed the world. In his youth, Reagan “recreated” baseball on the radio. Sitting in a studio, he was wired three-character summaries of the game, play by play. He had to use his imagination to fill in the gaps, keeping listeners hooked by telling a story about a game he knew almost nothing about. One day, the wire broke midway during a game.
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Untroubled, Reagan simply continued narrating the game, literally inventing it. Of his stint as a sportscaster, Reagan said: “Making things up. Mixing fact and fiction. [Pause]. What great preparation for politics.”13 Later, Michael Deaver, White House deputy chief of staff, explained that the president thought in terms of film plots, often justifying his decisions according to character and scenes from his own Hollywood pictures.14 Journalist Frances FitzGerald surmises that many collaborators depicted him “as living in a world of rhetoric, performances and perception” detached from facts.15 George Shultz, Reagan’s Secretary of State, explained this in powerful and evocative terms: Sometimes President Reagan did not seem to care that much about facts … and it bothered me. On occasion, I would try to correct the inaccurate chronology of a favorite story about something he had done earlier in the presidency. … He nodded in agreement and kept right on telling the same story. … Over time, I began to see another side to his love of storytelling: he used a story to impart a larger message – and sometimes that message was simply more important to him than the facts. … People, he felt, believe in and act on the stories they hear and tell about the past. Stories create meaning. … To Ronald Reagan, today’s events always seemed rooted in … some story he had incorporated long ago.16
Story as a Tool of Transformation
46 The stories of Roosevelt and Reagan both imparted a larger message: change was coming. In depicting themselves as messiahs, they gave this change a redemptive quality. They would, in fact, save the nation from the crisis befalling it, and instil new values. These new values resulted from the radical re-thinking of political orthodoxies that Roosevelt and Reagan advocated. Beyond the examples highlighted in their speeches, their collaborators attested to their transformative ambition – the end goal of their stories.
47 Perkins remembered Raymond Moley’s reaction after Roosevelt’s inaugural address. Moley was one of the president’s oldest aides and a close advisor. (In Reagan’s time, he would have been called a strategist.) Moley had contributed to the text of the inaugural but, upon hearing it, he soon realised that Roosevelt had made considerable edits. They were all about fundamentally changing the role of government. Overwhelmed with angst because of the sheer breadth of the change Roosevelt was talking about, he turned to Perkins. “Well,” he said in a state of exasperation, “he’s taken the ship of state and he’s turned it right around. We’re going in the opposite direction.”1
48 Of Reagan, Wirthlin said in no uncertain terms that “he had entered office with a mission. … He hadn’t sought the presidency for fame or fortune. … No, Reagan wanted to be president for a simple reason: he wanted to transform the world. He wanted to reshape the way future Americans would live.”2 Wirthlin’s comment was not just an attempt at legacy-building years after the fact, a nostalgic homage to his mentor.
49 Indeed, internal White House documents from January 1981, when Reagan launched his presidency, show that the president and his team were already definite about their desire to profoundly alter America. According to Gil Troy, “[the president’s] aides understood that mandates were construct.” Theirs was certainly ambitious.3 In a presidential briefing given five days before the inauguration, the following points were made. First, “Reagan’s mandate is ‘change.’” The 1980 election which had seen him triumph two months before was described as “an axial event demarking a major political opportunity.” It was not a mere “bestowal of power,” but rather a
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“stewardship opportunity for us to reconsider and restructure the political agenda for the next two decades.” The conclusion was unambiguous: “The public has sanctioned the search for a new public philosophy to govern America.”4 Reagan’s conservative philosophy would be the answer.
50 The Reagan administration connected their transformative ambition to Roosevelt. In preparation for the president’s first State of the Union, Richard S. Beal, director of the Office of Planning and Evaluation, reviewed all similar messages given by predecessors. On Roosevelt’s first State of the Union, Beal aptly summarised the spirit of the address as being “no return to the old ways; must go forward to make economic and social structure capable of dealing with modern life.” He concluded his analysis with a succinct but admiring assessment: “people behind FDR; a new era.”5 In so doing, Beal demonstrated the Reagan administration’s historical understanding of Roosevelt as a transformative president. And given its own mission statement to present “a new public philosophy to govern America,” it was clear they hoped President Reagan would be every bit as transformative. For Reagan, just like Roosevelt before him, telling stories to the American people was a way to bring about that transformation.
Acknowledgements
51 I’d like to thank Dr Frank Gerits, senior editor of the European Journal of American Studies, and two anonymous reviewers for their guidance and feedback on the article. I’m also grateful to Professor Robert Mason and Dr Fabian Hilfrich for their insightful comments on earlier drafts of this piece, and to Professor Andrew Preston for enlightening conversations. Many thanks as well to archivists Dara Baker (FDR Library), Jennifer Newby and Cole Puente (Reagan Library) for helping me locate primary sources. Lastly, I’m grateful to the School of History, Classics and Archaeology at the University of Edinburgh for an award that partly funded this research.
NOTES
1. Quoted in Lindsey Boerma, “Obama Reflects on His Biggest Mistake as President,” CBS News, 12 July 2012. 2. Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on the Economy,” 5 February 1981, The American Presidency Project. 3. Silk did recognize that, nonetheless, the “present situation is not as grim and urgent” as the Depression, but feared it could, and would, worsen. See Leonard Silk, “Reagan: Can He Cure Stagflation?,” The New York Times, 11 January 1981, NE1. 4. In 1981 Americans’ lack of trust in government was not only due to stagflation and President Carter’s underwhelming tenure, but also to prior events in the 1970s that remained scars on the national psyche (notably Watergate and the Vietnam debacle). 5. Silk, “Reagan.” 6. Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR: From Harry Truman to Ronald Reagan (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1983), 201, 225.
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7. Stephen Skowronek, “Presidential Leadership in Political Time,” in Presidential Leadership in Political Time: Reprise and Reappraisal (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2008), 27-78. 1. Evan Cornog, The Power and the Story: How the Crafted Presidential Narratives Has Determined Political Success from George Washington to George W. Bush (New York: The Penguin Press, 2004), 1. 2. Ibid., 9. 3. See Pere Franch, “Praising the Fallen Heroes: Storytelling in US War Presidential Rhetoric, from Johnson to Obama” Language and Literature, Vol. 27, No. 4 (2018), 311-328; Andrew Leslie, “How Stories Argue: The Deep Roots of Storytelling in Political Rhetoric,” Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring 2015), 66-84; Francesca Polletta, It Was Like a Fever: Storytelling in Protest and Politics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Francesca Polletta, “Characters in Political Storytelling,” Storytelling, Self, Society, Vol. 11, No. 1 (Spring 2015), 34-55. 4. Christian Salmon, Storytelling: Bewitching the Modern Mind, trans. David Macey (London: Verso, 2017), 90. 5. Jan Hanska, Reagan’s Mythical America: Storytelling as Political Leadership (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). 6. Mary E. Stuckey, The Good Neighbour: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Rhetoric of American Power (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013); Paul D. Erickson, Reagan Speaks: The Making of an American Myth (New York: New York University Press, 1985). 7. Robert Dallek, Ronald Reagan: The Politics of Symbolism (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984). 8. Besides Jonathan Alter, The Defining Moment: FDR’s Hundred Days and the Triumph of Hope (New York: Simon & Schuster Paperbacks, 2007) – a narrative account which recounts Roosevelt’s fireside chats – other studies focus on how the first hundred days witnessed the foundation of the New Deal. See Anthony Badger, FDR: The First Hundred Days (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008); Adam Cohen, Nothing to Fear: FDR’s Inner Circle and the Hundred Days that Created Modern America (New York: Penguin Books, 2009). 9. David W. Houck, FDR and Fear Itself: The First Inaugural Address (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2002). 10. Leuchtenburg covers such ground in his analysis of Roosevelt’s influence on modern presidents – looking specifically at the press coverage Reagan received during the period. See Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR, 228-232. 1. Roland Barthes, “An Introduction to the Structural Analysis of Narrative,” trans. Lionel Duisit, New Literary History, Vol. 6, No. 2 (Winter 1975), 237. 2. Hanska, Reagan’s Mythical America, 27. 3. Ibid., 32. 4. In film studies, the “auteur theory” developed by Cahiers du Cinéma critics holds that, while filmmaking is a collaborative process, the director is the film’s auteur (French for “author”) even if he is not its writer, as he’s the one ultimately telling the story. 5. Sidney Blumenthal, “Marketing the President,” New York Times Magazine, 13 September 1981, 1. Oral History interview with Frances Perkins (1951-1961), Notable New Yorkers, part IV, p. 29, Columbia Center for Oral History Archives, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University in the City of New York. 2. The fervour of his faith is not the best-known fact about Roosevelt, perhaps because he was private about his religious beliefs. But faith was an important driving force of his leadership. See Thomas H. Greer, What Roosevelt Thought: The Social and Political Ideas of Franklin D. Roosevelt (East Lansing: The Michigan State University Press, 1958), 3-6. 3. Gary Scott Smith, Faith and the Presidency: From George Washington to George W. Bush (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 192. 4. Andrew Preston, Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy (New York: Anchor Books, 2012), 157.
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5. Christine Wicker, The Simple Faith of Franklin Delano Roosevelt: Religion’s Role in the FDR Presidency (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Books, 2017), 3, 6. 6. Oral History with Perkins, part IV, pp. 16-18. 7. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago,” 2 July 1932, The American Presidency Project. 8. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat (Recovery Program),” 24 July 1933, The American Presidency Project; Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat on Banking,” 12 March 1933, The American Presidency Project. 9. Smith, Faith and the Presidency, 192, 219-220. 10. Mary E. Stuckey, The Good Neighbor: Franklin D. Roosevelt and the Rhetoric of American Power (East Lansing: Michigan State University Press, 2013), 35. 11. Moses sermonised the Hebrew people, in the Book of Deuteronomy, before they entered the promised land. Jesus, called “rabbi” multiple times in the Gospel, delivered his teachings through a famous Sermon on the Mount. 12. Houck, FDR and Fear Itself, 68-70. 13. Franklin D. Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address,” 4 March 1933, The American Presidency Project. 14. Ronald Isetti, “The Moneychangers of the Temple: FDR, American Civil Religion, and the New Deal,” Presidential Studies Quarterly 26 (1996), 680. 15. Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address.” 16. Roosevelt, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination.” 17. Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address.” 18. Roosevelt, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination.” 19. Donald R. Richberg, My Hero: The Indiscreet Memoirs of an Eventful but Unheroic Life (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1954), 153. 20. Stuckey, The Good Neighbor, 47. 21. This observation was actually made by Texas Governor John Connally to President Richard Nixon. See Leuchtenburg, In the Shadow of FDR, 172. 22. The conflict between blindness and vision is particularly important, because the latter is key for a messiah. In a well-known episode of the New Testament (Matthew 9:28 and 9:29) Jesus cures two blind men. This is the connotation that accompanied Roosevelt’s paraphrasing of Proverbs 29:18 that “where there is no vision the people perish.” The hint was that he had the vision to bring the people back to life. See Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address.” 23. Roosevelt, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination.” 24. Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address”; Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat on Banking.” 25. William E. Leuchtenburg, “The New Deal and the Analogue of War,” in The FDR Years: On Roosevelt and His Legacy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), 35. 26. Ibid., 36. 27. Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address.” 28. Ibid. 29. Roosevelt, “Fireside Chat on Banking.” 30. Frances Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew (New York: The Viking Press, 1946), 72-73. 31. Anthony Badger, FDR: The First Hundred Days (New York: Hill and Wang, 2008), xi. 32. Letter, Marie Berrell to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 13 March 1933; Folder: 200B Public Reaction 3/13/33 B-J; PPF 200 Public Reactions Letters; The President’s Personal File; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 33. Letter, J. R. Adams to Franklin D. Roosevelt, 13 March 1933; Folder: 200B Public Reaction 3/13/33 A-B; PPF 200 Public Reactions Letters; The President’s Personal File; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York.
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34. Isetti, “The Moneychangers of the Temple,” 687-688, quote 688. 35. Quoted in “Holds Roosevelt Is Not a Messiah,” The New York Times, 6 December 1933, 20. 36. Rachel Arons, “Chronicling Poverty with Compassion and Rage,” The New Yorker, 17 January 2013. 37. Martha Gellhorn to Harry Hopkins, “Report to Mr. Hopkins,” 11 November 1934; Folder: FERA Narrative Field Reports; Box 60, The Papers of Harry L. Hopkins; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 38. Alison Collis Greene, No Depression in Heaven: The Great Depression, the New Deal, and the Transformation of Religion in the Delta (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 2. 39. Houck, FDR and Fear Itself, 140. 40. Martha Gellhorn to Harry Hopkins, “Re. Camden, N.J.,” 25 April 1935; Folder: FERA Narrative Field Reports; Box 60, The Papers of Harry L. Hopkins; Franklin D. Roosevelt Library, Hyde Park, New York. 41. Perkins, The Roosevelt I Knew, 144. 1. H.W. Brands, Reagan: The Life (New York: Anchor Books, 2016), 405. 2. Ronald Reagan, “Remarks at the Annual National Prayer Breakfast,” 3 February 1983, The American Presidency Project. 3. Smith, Faith and the Presidency, 330. 4. Wirthlin with Hall, The Greatest Communicator, p. 100; Ronald Reagan, “Diary Entry,” 10 April 1981, White House Diaries. 5. Ronald Reagan, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination at the Republican National Convention in Detroit,” 17 July 1980, The American Presidency Project. 6. Michael K. Deaver, A Different Kind of Drummer: My Thirty Years with Ronald Reagan (Harper Collins, 2001), 3. 7. Ronald Reagan, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Program for Economic Recovery #2,” 28 April 1981, The American Presidency Project. 8. Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address”; Ronald Reagan, “Election Eve Address ‘A Vision for America,’” 3 November 1980, The American Presidency Project. 9. Hanska, Reagan’s Mythical America, 26; Erickson, Reagan Speaks, 86-87. 10. A plausible explanation is that America in 1981 was less pious than America in 1933. It had become “secularised.” What is more, religion, in particular Christianity, had retreated from the mainstream and been associated with evangelism – an important but nonetheless fringe movement in the culture. See Walter Sundberg, “Religious Trends in Twentieth-Century America,” Word & World XX, no. 1 (Winter 2000), 22-31. 11. Reagan, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination.” 12. Ibid.; Roosevelt, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination.” 13. Reagan, “Election Eve Address.” 14. By characterising himself much the same way as his Democratic hero, Reagan, Kazin explains, was able to win over a portion of white Democrats. See Michael Kazin, The Populist Persuasion: An American History – Revised Edition (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1998), 261. 15. Reagan, “Election Eve Address.” 16. Reagan, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination.” 17. Ronald Reagan, “Address Before a Joint Session of the Congress on the Program for Economic Recovery #1,” 18 February 1981, The American Presidency Project; Reagan, “Election Eve Address.” 18. Reagan, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination.” 19. Reagan, “Address on the Program for Economic Recovery #1.”
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20. Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on the Economy,” 5 February 1981, The American Presidency Project; Ronald Reagan, “Address to the Nation on Federal Tax Reduction Legislation,” 27 July 1981, The American Presidency Project. 21. Reagan, “Address on the Program for Economic Recovery #1.” 22. Roosevelt, “Inaugural Address.” 23. Reagan, “Address to the Nation on Federal Tax Reduction Legislation.” 24. Reagan, “Inaugural Address.” 25. Liberty was a central term for Reagan. See Wirthlin with Hall, The Greatest Communicator, 93. 26. Reagan, “Election Eve Address.” 27. Reagan, “Address Accepting the Presidential Nomination.” 28. Reagan, An American Life, 219. 29. Smith, Faith and the Presidency, 338. 30. Reagan, An American Life, 219. 31. 1980 Campaign Plan, folder “[Reagan for President Campaign Plan 6/29/80 (Draft)],” box 177, Richard Wirthlin – Political Strategy, Ronald Reagan 1980 Presidential Campaign Papers, Ronald Reagan Library, 33. 32. Garry Wills, Lead Time: A Journalist’s Education (Boston: Mariner Books, 2004), 261, 263. 33. Robert N. Bellah, “Civil Religion in America,” Daedalus, Vol. 96, No. 1. (Winter 1967), 18. 1. For a reminder, Obama had suggested it is to “give a sense of unity and purpose and optimism” to the people in crisis-ridden junctures. See Boerma, “Obama Reflects.” 2. Quoted in Salmon, Storytelling, 85. 3. Roger Stone, “Nixon’s Dirty Trickster,” Breaking the Set, RT, 4 November 2013. 4. Salmon, Storytelling, 87-88. 5. Hayden White, The Content of the Form: Narrative Discourse and Historical Representation (Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1987), 1. 6. Jonathan Gottschall, The Storytelling Animal: How Stories Make Us Human (Boston: Mariner Books, 2013), xiv. 7. Martin Scorsese in A Personal Journey with Martin Scorsese Through American Cinema, directed by Martin Scorsese and Michael Henry Wilson (London: BFI, 1995). 8. Quoted in Greer, What Roosevelt Thought, 112. 9. This is taken from an oft-quoted remark by Reagan: “An audience has a feel to it and, in the parlance of the theater, that audience and I were together.” Quoted in Dallek, Ronald Reagan, 18. 10. Ralph E. Weber, ed., Letters from the Desk of Ronald Reagan (New York: Broadway Books, 2005), Introduction. 11. Alter, The Defining Moment, 184-187, quote 185. 12. Ibid., 59. 13. Curt Smith, The Presidents and the Pastime: The History of Baseball and the White House (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018), 284-285, quote 285. 14. Deaver, A Different Kind of Drummer, 83. 15. Frances FitzGerald, Way Out There in the Blue: Reagan, Star Wars and the End of the Cold War (New York: Touchstone, 2001), 15. 16. George P. Shultz, Turmoil and Triumph: My Years as Secretary of State (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1993), 1133. 1. Oral History with Perkins, part IV, pp. 30-31. 2. Wirthlin with Hall, The Greatest Communicator, 113. 3. Gil Troy, Morning in America: How Ronald Reagan Invented the 1980s (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 53.
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4. Presidential Briefing, 15 January 1981, folder “First 90 Days, Presidential Briefing,” box 7 OA 12390, Richard S. Beal Files, Office of Planning & Evaluation, Ronald Reagan Library. 5. Strategic Evaluation Memo, “Franklin D. Roosevelt,” undated, folder “SEM, State of the Union Messages,” box CFOA 188, Richard S. Beal Files, Office of Planning & Evaluation, Ronald Reagan Library.
ABSTRACTS
This article investigates the rhetoric of Presidents Franklin D. Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan when they took office, in 1933 and in 1981, at two moments of crisis. More specifically, it compares and contrasts the stories the two presidents told the American people through their speeches. It finds that the stories had strong parallels: Roosevelt and Reagan both depicted America as a land in decay, and portrayed themselves as messiahs who would redeem the nation. Ultimately, this article argues that the presidents both used story as strategy. That is to say their stories had a political endgame. Indeed, Roosevelt’s and Reagan’s messianic stories were tools to help transform American political ethos, and in so doing foster support for their reform agendas.
AUTHOR
THEO ZENOU Theo Zenou is a PhD candidate in American history at the University of Cambridge, working on JFK, leadership and the Cold War.
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Only Dead Metaphors Can Be Resurrected: A Review of Jill Lepore’s These Truths
George Blaustein
1 Historical narratives of the United States have never not been shaped by an anxiety about the end of it all. Will we, in the end, sink or soar? Are we a new Rome or a new Zion? Even the driest textbook turns lofty on its final page. Nor have such narratives ever been without a corresponding civic intention, stated or unstated: the point is to push the ending back awhile, to ensure a futurity for the American experiment, to endure.
2 Most textbooks push that ending back by returning, in those final pages that few students ever read, to founding principles—to the truths expressed in the Declaration of Independence, say, or in the Constitution’s preamble—and concluding with the hope that American reality will one day meet them. If the historian is committed to democracy, as most textbook writers are, then the agents of history are presumed to be “the people.” We the people need a national history because, after all, America still exists, and the course of our history will depend, tautologically, on us—the same us that is also, in theory, history’s readers. The textbook, like the jeremiad, recalls founding ideals and chastises the present for not living up to them. As Sacvan Bercovitch argued, both the Jeremiah doing the yelling and the listeners doing the hearing are already in on the rhetoric. We know, implicitly, that the yelling lets us carry on.1
3 It is intriguing to imagine a narrative that altogether relinquishes this generic civic obligation. It could be structured around a frank acknowledgement of American decay. Perhaps write of America not as something “great” but as something small, tawdry, and provisional. Admit that the Constitution is a terrible scripture. Give up on newness and jump straight to American age. Or write American history as if from thousands of years in the future. Mark Twain played this melancholy game while touring ruins in Europe and the Holy Land, in 1867, two years after the Civil War. The ruins made him wonder, “What may be left of General Grant’s great name forty centuries hence?” So he conjured this helpful entry from an “Encyclopedia for A.D. 5868”:
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URIAH S. (or Z.) GRAUNT—popular poet of ancient times in the Aztec provinces of the United States of British America. Some authors say flourished about A.D. 742; but the learned Ah-ah Foo-foo states that he was a contemporary of Scharkspyre, the English poet, and flourished about A.D. 1328, some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it. He wrote “Rock me to Sleep, Mother.”
4 My favorite detail is the deadpan clarification that “Graunt” flourished “some three centuries after the Trojan war instead of before it”—a glimmer of what else one would learn from this future Encyclopedia of error and inversion.2
5 But we are all condemned to live in the present, and the present seems like an apocalyptic moment for the American historical narrative, at least of the textbook variety. A unique national future cannot be presumed, and not only because a future in general cannot be presumed. The veil has been drawn back: the history of the United States is cut from the same cloth as everything else. It is dismal to admit that American history is continuous with history’s general “panorama of sin and suffering.” That was Hegel’s phrase for the basic human experience of worldly time, before the historian steps in to lift a narrative out of it.3
6 * * *
7 These Truths: A History of the United States is the eleventh of the prolific historian Jill Lepore’s twelve books, a number that includes one co-authored work of historical fiction. This one is her most ambitious. It is also a throwback to an older genre: the national history. “I wrote this book,” she writes with candor and caveat, “because writing an American history from beginning to end and across that divide hasn’t been attempted in a long time, and it’s important, and it seemed worth a try.”4 It is worth a try! And These Truths may take its place as a standard history, partly because of its pedigree—Harvard and the New Yorker—and partly because of its elegance and digestibility.
8 It is not entirely true that such an American history “hasn’t been attempted in a long time,” but as a textbook, or textbookish antidote to textbooks, the book is notable for making its civic purpose explicit rather than implicit, and for its more direct acknowledgment of political urgency. “The United States is founded on a set of ideas,” Lepore writes, “but Americans have become so divided that they no longer agree, if they ever did, about what those ideas are, or were.” So These Truths is “meant to double as an old-fashioned civics book, an explanation of the origins and ends of democratic institutions, from the town meeting to the party system, from the nominating convention to the secret ballot, from talk radio to Internet polls” (xviii-xix). The book’s outermost frame is a yes-or-no question: “Can a political society really be governed by reflection and election, by reason and truth, rather than by accident and violence, by prejudice and deceit?” (xiv). This is a loaded question, the only acceptable answers being yes, maybe, and I hope so. (In fact These Truths will arrive, maybe despite itself, at a remarkably bleak assessment of present-day national political resources.) The book’s real task is to demonstrate that history, when animated in a particular way, can lift us toward a humane or enlightened politics. Read me, it whispers, and you will be equipped to steer the ship of state through the storm.
9 It is no easy thing, nowadays, to tell an inspiriting national history. Lepore’s attempt has received admiring reviews and critical reviews. The criticisms are usually about what is muted or left out—voices, regions, whole methodologies and historical processes. For Christine DeLucia, the core flaw is methodological: Lepore’s exclusive
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“reliance on written literacy and record-keeping as powerful determinants of history and memory” blinds her to indigenous historiography and to “non-textual knowledge systems and cross-cultural translation,” and leaves the book without fully-rendered indigenous voices. For Richard White, the flaws are methodological as well as stylistic. Lepore’s inattention to political economy as a decisive factor in history makes her account cursory and superficial, especially of the Gilded Age and the histories of the West and Midwest. The style of the book, meanwhile, crystallizes a lamentable “New Yorkerization of American history.”5
10 My concern here is not the book’s exclusions, exactly, nor its more-or-less familiar ideological project. By now, most respectable college-level textbooks already have the same liberal-progressive oomph, and the same aspiration toward enlightened consensus. What is remarkable about These Truths is its storytelling, the structure it grafts onto the past, its attempt to revive national history as a serious genre—in other words, its narrative form. It represents the pinnacle of contemporary liberal nationalist history-writing. If we seek an anatomy of that historiography, and if we want to know its limits, These Truths is a good place to look. It is an occasion to ask what national history is, and what it is for.
I.
11 Historical narratives need a beginning, and These Truths begins, as it must, with conquest and catastrophe. “We saw naked people,” Columbus wrote in his diary, describing the Taíno people on the island he called Hispaniola. The Taíno, Lepore notes, had no writing; “they sang their laws, and they sang their history.” The context is soon saturated by colonization, slaughter, and disease. “There were about three million people on that island … when Columbus landed; fifty years later, there were only five hundred; everyone else had died, their songs unsung.”
12 So begins Part I, “THE IDEA, 1492-1799.” It starts with European colonization and will arrive at revolution and the national founding. A book like this cannot convey the fullness of colonial devastation, but only gesture with solemnity toward the exponential horror. “Meanwhile, the people of the New World: they died by the hundreds, they died by the thousands, by the tens of thousands, by the hundreds of thousands, by the tens of millions.” English and French colonization followed Spanish and Portuguese; Lepore invokes the 17th-century English vicar Samuel Purchas, whose history of the world suggested that Europeans’ “literall advantage” explained their colonial dominance in America (13). Literacy itself, in other words, enters the narrative as one more tool of subjection. The legal and historical foundations of what will become the United States lie here, in slavery above all. “In one of the more unsettling ironies of American history,” Lepore writes of colonial Virginia, “laws drafted to justify slavery and to govern slaves also codified new ideas about liberty and the government of the free” (48). There is nary an American branch without that root.
13 The workings of oppression nevertheless give way, over three centuries, to revolution and, by the end of the period, to an antislavery impulse that has become its own moral force in history. By the 1780s the institution of slavery “had begun to break, like a plane of glass streaked with cracks but not yet shattered” (105). This progression from the darkness of point A to the promise of point B hinges on a central claim: “long before American independence was thought of, or even thinkable, a revolutionary
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tradition was forged, not by the English in America, but by Indians waging wars and slaves waging rebellions. They revolted again and again and again. Their revolutions came in waves that lashed the land” (55). Most of these revolutions were unrealized in their own era and aren’t detailed in Lepore’s account. But proleptic revolution is always present, as an ambient potential. One proof of that potential is the fact that European colonies had to operate, in effect, as massive counterinsurgency regimes.
14 With that origin of a revolutionary tradition in place, what we call “the American Revolution” thus becomes a white man’s pale borrowing from it, an etiolated version of more radical uprisings and insurgencies. After slave rebellions rocked New York in the 1730s and 1740s, white colonists in turn rebelled against the royal government, but they did so only in order to defend the racial order. “One kind of rebellion was celebrated, the other suppressed—a division that would endure,” Lepore writes. “In American history, the relationship between liberty and slavery is at once deep and dark: the threat of black rebellion gave license to white political opposition” (64).6 White Virginians, meanwhile, articulated abstract rights in order to defend their non- abstract prerogatives as slaveowners. “Inevitably, slavery cast its long and terrible shadow over these statements of principle,” Lepore writes of the 1776 Virginia Declaration of Rights and Form of Government, whose author, George Mason, owned slaves; “slavery, in fact, had made those statements of principle possible” (96). That the American Revolution was in fact such a borrowing would not have been clear to Thomas Jefferson, but it can be clear to us.
15 Call it a morally absurd irony, a contradiction, a paradox, a crime—it has been central to serious American historiography for decades.7 The Revolution would not have happened as it did, the Constitution would not have emerged as it did, without the political economy of slavery there as a precondition and to some degree a cause. Jefferson’s ideas depended on enslaved labor, insofar as slavery made possible his freedom to have ideas at all. These Truths does not have to re-grapple with such questions in any sustained analytical way, because the predicament itself can be conveyed with the show-don’t-tell sharpness of anecdote: James Madison, author of the Constitution, buys a copy of Leviathan in 1782, the same moment he was “short of cash and complaining that he would soon be ‘under the necessity of selling a negro’” (106).
16 But These Truths is a national history, and it has to draw at least some inspiration from the founding. The irony must be transcended. Positing a broader “revolutionary tradition” that emerged organically out of the histories of colonization and slavery—a tradition forged “by Indians waging wars and slaves waging rebellions”—lets Lepore fold even the American Revolution, with all its irony and hypocrisy, into a nobler story. “The American political tradition was forged by philosophers and by statesmen, by printers and by writers, and it was forged, too, by slaves” (64). The narrative of Part I— and thus the founding of the United States—can encompass, that is to say, the revolutions that were realized and the ones that were not. The reader can hold aloft THE IDEA, because THE IDEA is many things: reason, revolution, independence, emancipation, enlightened self-government, a new beginning. History can begin in chaotic and catastrophic darkness, but ideas can rise above the circumstances of their creation.
17 The IDEA will not be fully achieved in the national founding; genuine consummation must remain in the future if the rest of the book is to be necessary and interesting. But the wished-for-ness of it makes the narrative all the more thrilling. The Declaration of
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Independence can now be “a stunning rhetorical feat, an act of extraordinary political courage” (97), even after we know its contradictory origins. The brilliance of the Constitution can outshine the grayness or villainy of its authors and assume mythic proportions: the “giant W” of “We the People” is “as sharp as a bird’s claw” (xi). Historical events can now be page-turningly suspenseful: “Ratification proved to be a nail-biter” (128). The era’s more radical potentialities, meanwhile, are also given vivid narration; they convey a parallel thrill of expectation. Those as-yet-unrealized revolutions can be incorporated, narratively if not historically, into the national aspiration. The “unsettling ironies” of the political prehistory of the United States—the articulations of liberty that depended on slavery—are re-settled into a more open, a more sprawling, and a more heroic plot.
18 Heroism itself—individual heroism and moral heroism—has become possible in a way that it was not possible before. As Part I arrives at the actual founding of the United States, its focus falls on family dramas. The latter parts of the book do not. Historical figures who lived in the shadow of the familiar founders are given the spotlight— Benjamin Franklin’s sister Jane, for instance. Jane’s story conveys the social-historical fact that “girls, like slaves, were hardly ever taught to write (they were, however, taught to read, so that they could read the Bible)”; Jane’s story also imparts a retrospective grandeur to a formerly-unrecognized individual (59).8 The familiar story of George Washington is juxtaposed with the parallel quests of Harry Washington, “who had once been Washington’s property.” Harry escaped from Mount Vernon to the British side during the revolution, made his way to Sierra Leone, “another unruly republic,” and eventually led a rebellion there (147-148). The American founding needs Founders; the ingenuity of Lepore’s storytelling is to make Harry Washington a Founder, too. There becomes part of the here.
19 * * *
20 Part I casts the national founding and its colonial prehistory into a particular narrative form. The narrative runs, in effect, on two tracks. One is the grisly epic of colonization, an epic that “raged on,” as epics do, one crime after another (34). The other track is the emergence, over three centuries, of a moral sense that can rise above it. Part I, in other words, narrates not only the era’s cruelties and contradictions, but also the emergence of our own capacity to recognize them as cruelties and contradictions at all.
21 This is an effective way of pulling a redemptive national founding from an otherwise unredeemable past. It acknowledges history’s fundamental atrocities but rescues us, in the end, from those fundaments. As a narrative, it adheres to the archetypal plot structure that the historian and theorist Hayden White called a Romance, in his classic study of historiography, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe. “The Romance,” White wrote, “is fundamentally a drama of self-identification symbolized by the hero’s transcendence of the world of experience, his victory over it, and his final liberation from it.” The hero in this case is “the IDEA,” and the array of enlightened or emancipatory things contained within it. The Romance “is a drama of the triumph of good over evil, of virtue over vice, of light over darkness, and of the ultimate transcendence of man over the world in which he was imprisoned by the Fall.”9 Plotting the national founding this way is as much a literary act as it is, strictly speaking, a historical one. It is not the kind of thing one can simply call true or false, although one can certainly argue with it. The emplotment, to use White’s term, is an act of narrative, a derivation of meaning and drama from the past’s warp and woof.
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22 The colonial prehistory can begin as a chronicle of devastation but become, ultimately, a triumph of light. This romantic frame, with its redemptive ending, makes it possible to approach so terrible a history with something like wonder. It is, after all, marvelous that Harry Washington would so perfectly echo George Washington’s pro-slavery revolution with an anti-slavery revolution in Sierra Leone. That the historical record provides such improbably vivid stories—that the national founding can be emplotted as a Romance at all—is a marvel unto itself, with hints of providential design. None of it had to be; chaos did not have to yield to light. Romantic history allows for accidents and miracles. The word “America” was the coinage of a couple mapmakers who happened to read Amerigo Vespucci’s account of the New World in 1507. “The name stuck by the merest accident,” Lepore writes, while “much else did not last.” By the 18th century, “a word on a long-ago map had swelled into an idea.”
23 Hayden White died in 2018; Metahistory appeared in 1973. His main premise was that history is more art than science, that a historical text is, first and finally, a literary artifact. This premise was not the bland observation that historians are “biased”; it was a suggestion about the deeper cognitive and aesthetic structures of historical narrative itself. Any work of history emerges from the alchemy of a historian’s expectations or longings, their self-awareness or inner blindness, their prefiguration of past events, their interrogated or uninterrogated theories of how the world’s gears turn, their narrative license. There would be no history without that alchemy, no history without that narrative imagination. Moreover, we can only approach historical narrative with language, itself an imperfect (and therefore artful) way of apprehending the world. Good history is good not because it denies these workings of the imagination; it is good because of them.
24 The vocabulary of Metahistory is well-suited to the task at hand, for These Truths is a conspicuously emplotted book. One can see affinities, for instance, between Lepore and the 19th-century historian Jules Michelet, who emplotted the French Revolution as a Romance and whose books were similarly vivid. Michelet, White suggests, “conceived his task as a historian to be that of the custodian of the dead, whether they be conceived as good or evil by him, though in the interest finally of serving that justice in which the good are finally liberated from the ‘prison’ of human forgetfulness by the historian himself.”10 Lepore would likewise bring the vividness of Romantic quest even to those who were crushed or silenced in their own era, precisely because her own historical writing has exhumed them and given them life. As a historian, she is both the custodian of what was, and the deliverer of the Romantic might-have-been.
25 There are in fact four grand plots in These Truths, one for each of the book’s four chronological parts—a Romance, a Tragedy, a Comedy, and a Satire—each with their own implications for the workings of historical change. Within each plot are many voices, contrary moods and episodes, and sub-plottings, which might run counter to the grander arcs, adding tension and pathos to the drama, and thus making the grander arcs all the richer. The four broad emplotments determine what kind of heroism is possible in the world and era being narrated, or whether heroism is possible at all.
26 Lepore’s work is marked less by a coherent philosophy of history than by a commitment to storytelling. This can read as mystifying or precious, as when she describes history as a method: “The work of the historian is not the work of the critic or of the moralist,” she writes in the prologue, “it is the work of the sleuth and the storyteller, the philosopher and the scientist, the keeper of tales, the sayer of sooth, the
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teller of truth.” As often happens in a Lepore sentence, the flourish and the treacle pile up and topple. But it is remarkable—poignant even—that into the vacuum of our moment, when the familiar center of the US history textbook no longer holds, there would come a book like this, harkening back to the historical imagination of earlier eras, and throwing everything and the kitchen sink at the problem of national history.
II.
27 Part II of These Truths is about “THE PEOPLE, 1800-1865.” Emplotting this period as a Tragedy would seem like a more straightforward task than the problem of pulling a Romance from the history of colonization. “The United States was born as a republic and grew into a democracy,” Lepore writes, “and, as it did, it split in two, unable to reconcile its system of government with the institution of slavery” (191). Part II chronicles territorial expansion and Indian removal, the market revolution and the dawn of “a distinctively American idea of progress,” the political crisis of the 1850s, and finally the Civil War (191). The United States’ first major national historian, George Bancroft, enters the drama as something of a prototype for Lepore herself. In 1826, Bancroft proclaimed that “The popular voice is all powerful with us; this is our oracle; this, we acknowledge is the voice of God,” and he embarked on a massive, multivolume History of the United States in the age of Andrew Jackson. 11 But he was fated to write Romantic histories in an era that Lepore emplots as Tragic. Bancroft could not see America as “a nation looking down the barrel of its own gun” (238).
28 Blindness is a recurring metaphor. THE PEOPLE believe that progress is inevitable, that destiny is manifest. But they cannot see, until it is too late, that cathartic cataclysm is also inevitable. Historical figures who played a part in the Romance here become tragic heroes. When Thomas Jefferson dies in 1826, Sally Hemings takes “a pair of Jefferson’s eyeglasses to remember him by—a man of sight, a man of blindness” (186). References to Greek tragedy are explicit. In the wake of the Dred Scott case (1857), in which the Supreme Court declared that blacks could never be citizens, Lepore has Frederick Douglass look on in despair at the tragic hastening of contradictions: “it was as if the nation, like Oedipus of Thebes, had seen that in its own origins lay a curse, and had gouged out its own eyes” (271). Douglass is both an actor in the drama and its chorus. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—a surrogate narrator, and a mark of the book’s poetic as opposed to historical aspirations—noted in his diary that “the dissolution of the Union goes slowly on … Behind it all I hear the low murmur of the slaves, like the chorus in a Greek tragedy” (301).
29 The Civil War is the Tragedy’s agon, the scene of suffering. It marks, in White’s terms, “the fall of the protagonist and the shaking of the world he inhabits,” but Tragedy brings “a gain in consciousness for the spectators of the contest. And this gain is thought to consist in the epiphany of the law governing human existence which the protagonist’s exertions against the world have brought to pass.”12 Out of the Civil War comes Lepore’s war-weary Abraham Lincoln, his face “sunken and craggy, as chiseled as a sea-swept rock.” As he rises to deliver the Second Inaugural Address, “the skies cleared and the sun broke through the clouds” (304).
30 Lincoln himself, in the Second Inaugural Address, emplotted the Civil War in tragic terms: “All dreaded it, all sought to avert it,” he observed, and all knew that the slaveholding interest was “somehow the cause of the war.” The conflict had its own
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inexorable logic, producing a result—the “fundamental and astounding” end of slavery —that neither side, in its partial blindness, could see beforehand. “Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease.” Narrating the war this way gave it meaning in 1865, as it came to an end. The gain in consciousness for Lincoln and his listeners was theological and ideological: Lincoln articulated the theological epiphany that “the Almighty has his own purposes,” and heralded the ideological triumph of free labor over the now-purged evil of slavery. 13
31 The emplotment in These Truths is similar to Lincoln’s own: the tragic conflict is between sections, or between different visions of progress, or between slavery and freedom. Ironically, this is problem for Lepore’s narrative, because Lincoln has already stated the moral of the story, which makes Part II’s denouement more summary than history. History, after all, needs retrospect. Tragedy delivered a gain in consciousness to Lincoln’s listeners, but the gain in consciousness that it is supposed to deliver to us, history’s readers, is redundant or at best uncanny. American readers already have the sense that the war was “tragic”—it is there in advance, like a movie we’ve seen.
32 As an alternative, one might position, say, capitalism and democracy as the forces standing in inexorable conflict. Another theorist of history from the period, Karl Marx, defined the bourgeoisie by that more robustly tragic self-contradiction: the bourgeoisie, according to the Communist Manifesto, cannot exist “without constantly revolutionizing the instruments of production, and thereby the relations of productions, and with them the whole relations of society,” which would lead dialectically to its demise. (Marx, it so happens, wrote rapturously about Lincoln and the Emancipation Proclamation, and he celebrated Lincoln as a bourgeois figure “sui generis in the annals of history.” At the same time, he prophesied the bourgeoisie’s self- destruction, emplotting the bourgeoisie’s Tragedy within the broader historical Comedy of the proletariat’s emergence.14) Lepore’s account of the mid-19th century tends to downplay these internal structural contradictions. It emphasizes the more straightforward villainies of political violence and territorial expansion, and the novel cacophony of the era’s news media, but it is not a decisively tragic account of political economy. The capitalism of that era, in fact, reads as more humane than our era’s version, for instance forgiving debts in ways our society no longer does. “A nation of debtors, Americans came to see that most people who fall into debt are victims of the business cycle and not the fate of divine retribution or the wheel of fortune” (226). This looser narration is more about how “Americans” saw things than about the things that structured their seeing. It might stir a nostalgia for a kinder, gentler free labor ideology.
33 “As if the nation had gouged out its own eyes,” Lepore writes—the as if hints that Part II is not a complete Tragedy but a near-Tragedy or pseudo-Tragedy. (In tropological terms, White would say it operates by simile rather than by a more decisive metonymy.) Narrator and reader enter the drama already looking for things that will be salvaged from the wreck. A vague spirit of democracy is salvaged even as we lament what the tragically-flawed democracy tragically did to itself. What the democracy did to others is attended to, certainly, but it is not an essential element of the consciousness gained in the denouement.
34 It is instructive to read These Truths alongside An Indigenous People’s History of the United States, by Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, which appeared in 2014. Like These Truths, it
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announces itself as a corrective to the standard story, though where Lepore’s corrective takes the form of liberal reconciliation, Dunbar-Ortiz’s is blistering. Both are, so to speak, post-revisionist narratives, though from opposite directions. An Indigenous People’s History is an emphatically anti-national textbook: by design, it defies incorporation into any liberal American narrative, however demographically capacious that narrative may be. It is pitched against “post-civil-rights-movement US history revisionism”—that is, against the now-diversified historical canon, with its noble black heroes and its “nation of immigrants.” It reveals the palliative veneer of “multiculturalism” to be “an insidious smoke screen meant to obscure the fact that the very existence of the country is a result of the looting of an entire continent and its resources,” merely the last insult heaped on the injury of colonization and genocide: “With multiculturalism, manifest destiny won the day.”15 These books are narratively irreconcilable, even at those moments when they range over similar territories of dispossession. Books in the tradition of Howard Zinn’s People’s History of the United States, like Dunbar-Ortiz’s, do not have the structure of Tragedy or any other emplotment; they have the structure of a trial. As narratives, they appeal to a legal and moral authority that stands above the scene of the crime, as it were, and they pronounce a verdict.
35 In These Truths, certain kinds of art and certain kinds of technology, certain democratic expressions and certain technological inventions, can be celebrated, insulated from Tragedy, even if the era tips inexorably toward the Civil War. Photography, for instance: “A photograph stops time, trapping it like a butterfly in a jar,” Lepore similizes. “No other kind of historical evidence has this quality of instantaneity, of an impression taken in a moment, in a flicker, an eye opened and then shut.” Whitman thought “all art will be democratized” by photographs, and Frederick Douglass loved to pose for them. Photographs are democratic insofar as they “capture the ordinary, the humble, the speechless,” insofar as they don’t discriminate “between the rich and the poor, the literature and the illiterate, the noisy and the quiet” (273). Maybe. This is no longer romance, but it is not quite tragedy.
36 Lepore is also fond of Henry David Thoreau, who found in Walden Pond just the right angle from which to watch the train of industrialization go by. “Thoreau’s experiment wasn’t a business; it was an antibusiness; he paid attention to what things cost because he tried never to buy anything.” Thoreau withdraws from the democratic wreck in order to preserve a liberal national narrative for future Lepores. Walden is read as if it was written deliberately for us, the national us: a message of calm and narrative continuity in a transhistorical bottle, an organic jam to be opened and savored in the ignobly mechanized era that will close the book. The pastoral is thus shielded from economic determinism. This is what is meant by Lepore’s otherwise curious line, “Instead of Marx, America had Thoreau” (231). Thoreau can emerge, in his own time and in ours, as a gardener in the machine.
III.
37 Part III, THE STATE (1866-1945), chronicles the rise of the nation-state proper. It begins with Reconstruction and the emergence of Jim Crow. It acknowledges that, tragic catharsis of Civil War notwithstanding, the Confederacy “won the peace” even if it “lost the war” (360). The regime of Jim Crow spans the era, blatantly or mutedly, and it
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extends abroad: “The relationship between Jim Crow and the war in the Philippines was not lost on black soldiers who served in the Pacific,” Lepore notes (369). (Part III is also an account of empire-building, although empire as such is rarely the focus in this inward-facing national history.16) The immigrant restriction law of 1924 was a triumph for eugenics and an extension of “the black-and-white racial ideology of Jim Crow to new European immigrants” (410).
38 Still, even from within the darker moments, there comes the articulation of a liberal nationalism that Lepore can embrace. The articulation is given to Frederick Douglass, her favorite ideologue, who called for a “Composite Nationality” in 1869. (This is also the centerpiece of Lepore’s subsequent programmatic essay, This America: The Case for the Nation.17) Douglass’s vision failed in his own time, but Part III will arrive at a partial achievement of it. Emplotted as a Comedy, Part III arcs toward America’s rise to world- redemptive heights, to the creation of the New Deal and the victory of liberal democracy over fascism. I do not mean Comedy in the laughable sense; this era contains many of American history’s more brutal aspects—lynching, for instance. To call it Comic is to see how even these brutalities, even these descents into hell, are assimilable into a broader narrative of resolution. The liberal international order stands as the reconciliation, the promise of redemption or fulfillment, toward which the Comic arc can bend.
39 The narrative lens falls on vivid personalities and ideologues who, as characters working in, around, and against THE STATE, illuminate a governmental ushering-in of harmony. Labor history and the history of capitalism, which do not lend themselves so tidily to the Comic emplotment, are relegated to the background. The history of populism is chronicled through the lives of Mary Lease and William Jennings Bryan, among others.18 Progressivism is given more real estate and more complexity, from Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson (presidents and historians both), to legal thinkers, muckraking journalists, and well-intentioned but overzealous engineers of “efficiency.” In general, “Populists believed that the system was broken,” Lepore writes; “Progressives believed that the government could fix it” (364). From out of the Great Depression, at long last, comes the New Deal, which feels like a happy marriage. Franklin Roosevelt’s rise to the presidency marked “a new brand of liberalism that borrowed as much from Bryan’s populism as from Wilson’s Progressivism” (431).
40 In this emplotment, American intervention in World War I was a betrayal, a diversion from the nobler course.19 The isolationism of the 1920s reads as the temporary absence or death of the hero before a return or resurrection in World War II and the Atlantic Charter. “The United States, a nation founded in an act of severing, had tied its fate to the fate of the world,” Lepore waxes. “A nation that had refused to join the League of Nations had taken the lead in establishing its replacement.” The Comic redemption is all the more satisfying after so long a winter. She is also careful to locate, in this period, the origins of the Civil Rights Movement, such as the “scattered sit-ins” organized by Pauli Murray beginning in 1939, as well as the germs of “what would become the UN’s language of human rights.” The American Dream is first dreamt here, too, a phrase coined in James Truslow Adams’s Epic of America (1931)—another model for Lepore herself.20 The language of the American Dream will “stir leaders of later generations, from Martin Luther King Jr. to Barack Obama,” even if noble dreams will become mere dreams in the melancholy irony of Part IV. The book ensures, that is, that these triumphs have a foot in the Comic narrative before Part IV whisks so much away.
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41 Comedy does not mean unalloyed happiness; it is a measured achievement of harmony. “In Comedy,” White observes, “hope is held out for the temporary triumph of man over his world by the prospect of occasional reconciliations of the forces at play in the social and natural worlds….the condition of society is represented as being purer, saner, and healthier as a result of the conflict among seemingly inalterably opposed elements in the world; these elements are revealed to be, in the long run, harmonizable with one another, unified, at one with themselves and the others.”21 Balance prevails, in both plot and historical argument. Part III of These Truths balances undoubtedly bad things with redemptive things. World War II brought American concentration camps for Japanese Americans, “and yet the war cultivated new forms of resistance to the racial order.” The violence was immeasurable, but “the millions of American sailors and nurses and airmen who fought on all four corners of the globe gained a cosmopolitanism unknown to any previous generation of Americans” (515).
42 While Part II gestured toward Greek tragedy, Part III invokes the rise of Rome, with overtones of Virgil’s Aeneid. (The book boasts a parade of epic epithets—Billy Graham, “broad-shouldered and brylcremed”—and the epilogue will call “the American experiment” “a stirring, terrifying, inspiring, troubling, earth-shaking epic.”) (788). The Aeneid tells of the Trojan king Aeneas’ escape from the destruction of Troy by Greece, setting off with divine sanction to found Rome. Rome needed such an epic, and the emperor Augustus commissioned one. In These Truths, Reconstruction is something like an American Trojan War. From the Trojan Horse, in this analogy, spring the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow, the revenge of white supremacy, which sends the hero (America) into a period of wandering. Greece founded the epic tradition, and was therefore to be admired, but in Virgil’s saga the Greeks have become perfidious villains. 22 The Aeneid allows Rome both to supersede Greece and to carry on the Homeric tradition, just as These Truths allows the American Century both to supersede an ignoble past and carry on a Constitutional tradition.
43 Lepore’s account never descends into sheer boosterism. As in the Aeneid, one feels the author’s ambivalence about war and rage, a certain sadness about a warring world even as we read of our own civilization’s ascendancy. Virgil is a prototype for all national historians writing from within the nation. The world around the hero descends into brutality, and the hero has no choice but to partake of it. The last chapter of Part III is titled “The Brutality of Modernity,” but the brutality that is so grimly revealed, the Holocaust above all, is mostly elsewhere. Even with these melancholy reflections, the emplotment is ultimately Comic: victory in Europe, and an American-led redemption that can, one hopes, make modernity less brutal.
IV.
44 The honeymoon is brief. Part III closed with a redemptive victory over fascism in Europe; Part IV, THE MACHINE (1946-2016), begins with the atomic bomb. Other machines follow: television, the appliances on display at the Kitchen Debate in Moscow, the mainframe computer, the personal computer, the Internet, the gun. The MACHINE is as capacious as the IDEA and is in fact the IDEA’s nemesis. War becomes a kind of machinery: while the Comedy of Part III pointed auspiciously toward a welfare state, what happened instead was that “the United States built a national security state” (538). The Vietnam War is a mechanical as much as a moral failure. Lepore points to
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figures like the MIT social scientist Ithiel de Sola Pool (later author of Technologies of Freedom), who along with other modernization theorists convinced the Kennedy administration to commit more resources to Vietnam. “Convinced that, with enough data, a computer could simulate an entire social and political system, Pool would eventually earn a $24 million contract from ARPA for a multiyear research project in Vietnam” (604). Bitterness is the prevailing mood. Often, potential benevolences are reduced to machinery. Science itself is made an instrument of war. Politics is corrupted by amoral “political strategists” and “well-paid political consultants,” who are able to succeed because political discourse has been made mechanical by the odious technology of polling. Polls are flashbulbs that reveal everything yet illuminate nothing.
45 Technological change, in Part IV, is now more consequential than other kinds of change—political, geopolitical, moral. This is one reason why, for example, the end of the Cold War does not mark a fundamental historical shift. Americans may have imagined something grand when the Berlin Wall fell, but “they were unable to imagine the revolution in information technology that would resist regulation and undermine efforts to establish a new political order” (695). THE MACHINE thus names an era in which technological change hinders rather than catalyzes political progress. In contrast to the earlier emplotments, technological advance now creates the conditions of political regression, and renders moral or liberal victories fleeting. The causes of and preconditions for Donald Trump’s election are shown to be decades old, or older. The vacuum didn’t suddenly start sucking in 2016.
46 That mechanical background effectively determines how ideas are expressed and which ideologies prevail. Conservatism prevails because powerful conservatives are more cynical than liberals, and because they capitalize more cleverly on the new mechanics of politics. Liberalism, meanwhile, alienates itself from the people—first through an understandable worry about mass politics in the wake of fascism, eventually by cultural elitism and suspicion of mass culture, and finally by an embrace of a “knowledge economy.” (There are exceptions: Dwight Macdonald personified the liberal disdain for mass culture but he also, in a heroic New Yorker article in 1963, made plain “the atrocity of poverty in an age of affluence” [611].)
47 One noble and paradigmatic liberal in this account is the journalist Edward R. Murrow, who, at the close of Part III, was Lepore’s lens onto the Holocaust. In the 50s, Murrow maintains a “faith in the American creed, in the triumph of reason over fear, in progress over prophecy.” But it is “a shaken faith.” Liberals like Murrow are admirable only to the extent that they discern their own predicament; their discernment does not lead to effective action. “Between the unreasoning McCarthy and the coldly calculating computer,” Lepore has him wonder, “where was the independent-minded American voter, weighing facts and searching for truth?” (565). Aeneas has to navigate between Scylla and Charybdis; America will crash stupidly into both.
48 Part IV is emplotted as a Satire. Its world is not laughable, and there is much to lament, but Satire tends toward wry fatalism rather than catharsis, toward melancholy rather than outrage. The righteous outrage of the Vietnam era is given a place, to be sure. Noam Chomsky, after all, also exposed the machinery of foreign policy and mass media; the key term of Manufacturing Consent (1988) is “manufacturing.” 23 But Satire will render righteousness feckless and pitiable. In 1969, Lepore writes, Chomsky argued that “much of academic life in the United States—the production of knowledge itself—had
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been suborned for the purpose of waging a grotesque war in which all the courage had been shown by the young, by young soldiers who fought the war, and by young students who protested it” (635). Chomsky’s reckoning comes across as necessary then, but it will slide down a slope toward self-defeating shrillness.
49 Leftist critiques of liberal or American mythologies are damned with faint praise and then crunched into the plot of political breakdown. Of revisionist history: “A revolution on the streets produced a revolution in scholarship: a new American past” (635). Yes, it was “long overdue,” “but in the context of the war in Vietnam, questioning academic authority and pointing out the biases of experts began to slip into a cynicism about truth itself.” This is a straw man. “In some corners of the left, the idea that everything was a lie became a fashionable truth,” Lepore laments. “Poststructuralism and postmodernism suffused not only American intellectual life but American politics, too. If everything is politics, and politics is a series of lies, then there is no truth” (636). The reductio ad absurdum is irritating, yet necessary for the broader emplotment: even the dissents that Lepore herself might agree with have to become mechanical versions of themselves—doomed, in effect, to manufacture their own dissent—in order to fit into the grinding erosion of enlightened truth.
50 The Civil Rights Movement is an episode of genuine moral heroism, but it does not endure. Thurgood Marshall is a heroic figure, not least for his abiding faith in the Constitution, but even Marshall must face the fact that successful civil rights litigation depended to an extent on the Cold War. (Everyone gets a simile, and Marshall’s is a “thin mustache as pointed as a punctuation mark”—fine, but which punctuation mark?) He ends up both fighting and dancing with that machinery: “The Cold War would keep overshadowing the civil rights movement, and also propelling it forward” (586). Lepore also notes the downsides of court-driven, rights-based desegregation, which “often resulted in black teachers losing their jobs” (581).
51 Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech, in this emplotment, is a majestic portal in time to an earlier and more dignified plot: “It was as if every bell in every tower in every city and town and village had rung.” Another as if: the simile indicates that King was both saint and anachronism. In mechanical reality, people watched the speech on television. Two years later, during the Watts riots of 1965, “King flew to Los Angeles and preached nonviolence; no one really listened.” The machinery of Army tanks and helicopters that crushed the riot prefigures the militarized police of our own day. “From the outside, it looked as if rights had been answered with riots, as if the entire project of liberalism were collapsing in on itself” (623).
52 Part IV sometimes foregrounds the direct origins of our own present—Donald Trump first appears as the protégé of the odious Nixon hand Roy Cohn—or it offers prefigurations of our own present. Before Cambridge Analytica, there was Ithiel de Sola Pool’s Simulmatics Corporation, a machine for political data first deployed in John F. Kennedy’s election. The Cold War-era debate over a nuclear winter—the projected environmental impacts of a nuclear war—marks the moment when “conservatives extended their longstanding critique of the ‘liberal bias’ of the media to science.” That episode thus “established the themes and battle lines of the debate over climate change” (682-683). One senses history repeating itself, first as farce and then as bigger farce.
53 Themes and figures from the earlier in the book can now make an ironic return. “Fake news” is as old as fascism. Our era’s ideological polarization looks a lot like the
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polarization of the 1920s. Slaveowners before the Civil War were a “1 percent” that “deployed the rhetoric of states’ rights and free trade …, but in fact they desperately needed and relied on the power of the federal government to defend and extend the institution of slavery” (223). The telegraph prefigures the Internet, though the Internet —a machine of shame, loneliness, and hatred—is so much worse (772).
54 The reader is thus equipped to measure our own era against the past. The sequel does not come off well. There are echoes across time, certainly, but the moral and aesthetic satisfactions of previous emplotments are negated or made unavailable. Satire, in White’s terms, “presupposes the ultimate inadequacy” of the other emplotments’ visions of the world. It “signals a conviction that the world has grown old.”24 And so our era is not Tragic, but absurd. At least the Tragic phase could sustain some moral and aesthetic depth; even the grief-in-advance that Lepore finds poetically expressed in the pre-Civil War years is unavailable in our era. Our protagonists are ignoble or stupid rather than grand and grandly flawed. The similes reflect this. In the 1850s, it was “as if” the nation gouged its own eyes out with something like tragic grandeur; the closest our era comes is Lyndon Johnson, passing a tax cut that undermines the Great Society program, “as if he’d cut off one of his own feet” (618).
55 Our era is not a Comedy, but an anti-comedy. Where THE STATE arrived at a harmonious marriage, in the form of the New Deal coalition and the liberal international order, THE MACHINE arrives at hideous mis-marriages. In an earlier era, the Left had achieved some “solidarity across difference” (a good marriage), but it “abandoned” that solidarity “in favor of the meditation on and expression of suffering, a politics of feeling and resentment, of self and sensitivity” (a divorce and a bad remarriage) (701). The Right, meanwhile, marries the worst of mass politics to the worst of plutocracy. “Populism” ends up in an absurd situation of trans-ideological bigamy: “If the Tea Party married populism to originalism, Occupy married populism to socialism” (759). (These -isms are stretched thin, and veer into tendentious false equivalence.)
56 The quests of our era are not Romantic but perverse. Lepore has proper scorn for the “New Democrats” of the Democratic Leadership Council. The Clinton-era Democratic party became “technocratic, meritocratic, and therapeutic.” Democrats believed personal computers would pollinate the empowered, therapeutic self, but the computer proved to erode that self—which was an anemic model of selfhood to begin with. Democrats made a fetish of market competition but only ushered in Google, here correctly identified as the largest and most insidious monopoly of all time. “The party stumbled like a drunken man,” Lepore writes, “drunk with technological utopianism” (696).
57 Left-liberalism no longer strives for equality but for identity. Such a quest drifts not toward actual fulfillment but toward feckless martyrology. The moral heroes of the post-1945 era remain sources of sentimental inspiration but are useless as pragmatic models, despite their indisputable nobility. Identity politics, this account would suggest, will ultimately bring little more than the bitter satisfaction of righteous suffering. And it will lose to a reactionary conservatism that also strives for identity, albeit in a more demonic form.
58 The narrative of Part IV thus threatens to negate everything that has come before, leaving us in a state of dismal irony. Americans “believed they were fighting for the meaning of America, but, really, they were fighting for raw political power” (691). Even
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the book’s aspirational title, These Truths, turns grim: the enlightened Romance of a we that can hold these truths devolves into a farcical we that bickers over incompatible certainties, this truth divorced from that truth.
59 * * *
60 A Romance from which emerges a Tragedy, out of which climbs a Comedy that devolves into a Satire. That is what the national history is. Even when it drifts toward bitter lamentation, These Truths has a pleasing rhythm—a rise and a fall, followed by a second rise and a second fall. One can disagree with these emplotments while acknowledging that the narrative architecture, as a narrative architecture, is an achievement of writing and assembly.
61 In the theoretical tradition of White’s Metahistory, Romance, Tragedy, Comedy, and Satire are really the only four ur-emplotments in the Western historical imagination, which, if true, would make These Truths that rarest of achievements: the total work of history. A Gesamtgeschichte. A quadruple threat! So perfectly do the parts line up with these emplotments that my paranoid mind did wonder whether Lepore reverse- engineered the book from Metahistory, or from Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, or from some older theory of literary archetypes. That would be its own remarkable feat.
62 A reverse-engineered history becomes its own circular proof: if those archetypal narratives are, so to speak, the fundamental ingredients of historical consciousness, and if a national history can sustain all four of them, then that national history has, in some mythic or Hegelian sense, fully realized and fully transcended itself. But in These Truths, cunningly, each of the emplotments leaves a deliberate sliver of non-resolution; each of them yearns for closure. That yearning for closure becomes our yearning for closure. The national narrative arrives at the threshold of the reader’s experience of the present moment and swells our experience of the present with historic import. This, we feel, is what a national history is for. A reader’s absorption into the book effects a mystical absorption into the life of the nation: we are metamorphosed into citizen-readers, keen to rescue the protagonist, who is after all an extension of ourselves.
63 * * *
64 And yet the spell will break. Stepping back to the book’s outermost frame—to the question of whether a people can govern themselves “by reflection and choice” rather than “by accident and force”—you may find yourself breaking the taboo and answering: No. If the national history has run its grand historical cycle, as the book’s narrative form would suggest, then is it really possible to revive the enlightened romance? These Truths is both occasioned and constrained by its enormous civic purpose. It cannot entirely give up on “the people,” since that would undermine its stated commitment to democracy and popular sovereignty. Since it doubles as an assignable US history textbook, it has to assume that the people are in fact educable. It has no choice but to hang from a cliff, though the question and the cliff we’re hanged from are ideologically routine.
65 Hope, if there is hope, lies in old poetry and the power of wishful thinking. In 1849, Longfellow began writing a poem called “The Building of the Ship,” Lepore writes, “about a beautiful, rough-hewn ship called the Union.” He wrote two endings for it. The first was despairing, for “he could imagine nothing but disaster for this worthy vessel.” Then Charles Sumner “convinced Longfellow that the Union might yet be saved, and
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that he ought to write a more hopeful ending to his poem.” That’s why we have Longfellow’s more hopeful ending: “Sail on! Sail on! O Ship of State! / For thee the famished nations wait! / The world seems hanging on thy fate!” (259-260). That’s the version FDR memorized and sent to Churchill, who then read it on the radio. These Truths pulls this nugget up through the narrative layers of tragedy and farce and holds it aloft. Longfellow’s poem is a miniature for the book itself, in which the first yes-or-no question gives way to a second yes-or-no question, more desperate and sentimental: Can we change the ending?
66 Can history help? Could it have helped? This national history might well reflect a genuine liberal hope that it can. It insists that nations need poetic mystifications, even if we admit that they are, after all, only mystifications. But it is also a self-conscious exercise in the genre of national history—hence its stylized archaism, from the intro (“the Question Stated”) to the epilogue (“the Question Answered”), to the bedraggled master metaphors of the storm and the ship of state. “To steer that ship through wind and wave,” the epilogue finally concludes, a new generation of Americans “would need to learn an ancient and nearly forgotten art: how to navigate by the stars” (789). The poetry of nationalism on which These Truths ultimately relies itself becomes, well, mechanical.
67 The most obvious problem with the metaphor of the ship of state is that it has little to say about the ocean, nor about the ship poisoning the ocean it sails on—nor, for that matter, about other ships. But this is, by design, a book for the readers still on that ship, which for narrative purposes is the only ship, and if I am honest, I too would prefer that the ship not sink. National histories are mystification machines, but a salutary remystification of the American past is better than nothing.
NOTES
1. Sacvan Bercovitch, American Jeremiad (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1978). The journalist and historian Frances FitzGerald’s reflections, in 1979, on history textbooks in the twentieth century are worth a mention here, for she keenly identified the predicament of “democratic histories” in a bureaucratized age. Any work of civic-minded history will have to place history’s “moral burden” somewhere, FitzGerald argued—it is built into the genre. And starting in the 1930s, high school textbooks “developed the habit of displacing [the moral burden] from the real offenders onto the heads of children.” The readers, that is, become “the people” on whom the duty of democracy falls. “Their history is a catechism, except that it deals with institutions, not individuals. In its flatness and its uncritical conformism, it is a kind of American Socialist realism.” Frances FitzGerald, America Revised: History Schoolbooks in the Twentieth Century (Boston: Little, Brown, 1978), 161-162. 2. Mark Twain, The Innocents Abroad; or, The New Pilgrims’ Progress (Hartford: American Publishing Company, 1869), 336. 3. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (London: Henry G. Bohn, 1857), 23.
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4. Jill Lepore, These Truths: A History of the United States (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), xvi, hereafter cited parenthetically. 5. Christine DeLucia, “The Vanishing Indians of These Truths,” LA Review of Books (January 10, 2019), https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-vanishing-indians-of-these-truths/; Richard White, “New Yorker Nation,” Reviews in American History 47 no. 2 (June 2019), 159-167. 6. These events are the focus of Lepore’s earlier book, New York Burning: Liberty, Slavery, and Conspiracy in Eighteenth-Century Manhattan (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2005). 7. The classic account of Virginia is Edmund S. Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom: The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia (New York: Norton, 1975). 8. Jane Franklin is the subject of Lepore’s earlier book, Book of Ages: The Life and Opinions of Jane Franklin (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2013). 9. Hayden White, Metahistory: The Historical Imagination in Nineteenth-Century Europe (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973), 8-9. 10. Ibid., 161. 11. George Bancroft, Oration Delivered on the Fourth of July, 1826, at Northampton, Massachusetts (Northampton, 1826), 20; Lepore, These Truths, 185. 12. White, Metahistory, 9. 13. Abraham Lincoln, Second Inaugural Address, March 4, 1865, in The Collected Works of Abraham Lincoln (New Brunswick, N.J: Rutgers University Press, 1953), 8:332-333. 14. Karl Marx, “On Events in North America,” translated and reprinted in On America and the Civil War, ed. Saul K. Padover, The Karl Marx Library, vol. 2 (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1972), 222. Marx’s article originally appeared in the Vienna newspaper, Die Presse (October 12, 1862). White, Metahistory, chapter 8. 15. Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Revisioning American History (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 5. In both texts, the violent past speaks directly to present, though in different ways. Lepore’s epilogue frames the Charlottesville riots of 2017 as a grimly poetic return of the Civil War: “In Charlottesville, Virginia, where a statue of Robert E. Lee had been slated to come down, armed white supremacists marched through the city; one ran down a counter-protester and killed her, as if the Civil War had never ended, she the last of the Union dead.” Lepore, These Truths, 787. For Dunbar-Ortiz, it is a straight line from the first permanent English colony of Jamestown, Virginia, founded in 1607, to the Virginia Tech mass shooting 400 years later, in 2007—with no “as if” to shield the present from the past. “The Virginia Tech killings were described… as the worst ‘mass killing,’ the ‘worst massacre,’ in US history.” Dunbar- Ortiz notes. “Descendants of massacred Indigenous ancestors took exception to that designation.” Central to this narrative of America, and built into the American psyche, is the deep continuity of frontier violence. “The shooter himself was a child of colonial war, the US war in Korea.” What Lepore called “unsettling ironies” cannot, in Dunbar-Ortiz’s account, be resettled. Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous People’s History, 175. 16. Here it is worth mentioning another historical synthesis from 2018 that is aimed at a general reader. Daniel Immerwahr’s How to Hide an Empire: A Short History of the Greater United States (New York: Farrar, Strauss & Giroux, 2018) could stand as a geographical inverse of Lepore’s These Truths. is framed not around the fate of IDEAS but of territory. It is a chronicle of the American possessions that are not part of the continental United States. Those possessions include places that became states, like Hawaii and Alaska, and places that did not become states but were nevertheless bombed along with Pearl Harbor. It also includes the uninhabited Pacific Islands that were acquired for their agriculturally useful bat guano in the 19th century, and the eight hundred or so military bases that make up the American “pointillist empire” of our own time. Immerwahr’s narration tends, revealingly, toward the mode of Satire, befitting a long and often murderous farce.
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17. Jill Lepore, This America: The Case for the Nation (New York: Liveright Publishing Corporation, 2019). 18. Starting that history with Mary Lease lets Lepore trace a “female political style” that drove populism, at times heroically. But the style turns toxic in the cynical pseudo-populism of the twentieth century: Richard Nixon’s aggrieved and “maudlin” Checkers Speech marks one culmination of it. Lepore, These Truths, 331, 563. 19. That betrayal, in Lepore’s account, tarnishes figures who are otherwise heroic. W.E.B. Du Bois first enters the narrative as a cool-headed sociologist who turns heroically radical upon witnessing the brutality of lynching: in 1899 he cast aside dry academic inquiry “and decided that ‘one could not be a calm, cool and detached scientist while Negroes were lynched, murdered and starved.’” (370). He was then “brought to heel” in 1916, and drifted with the tide of militarism: “Let us, while this war lasts, forget our special grievances and close our ranks,” he wrote, “shoulder to shoulder with our white fellow citizens and the allied nations that are fighting for democracy” (396). But Du Bois will reemerge in the second world war to “put pressure on local and state institutions, and especially on the federal government, to dismantle desegregation” (496). 20. James Truslow Adams, The Epic of America (Boston: Little, Brown, and Company, 1931). 21. White, Metahistory, 9. 22. I have relied on Stanley Lombardo’s translation. Virgil, Aeneid, trans. Stanley Lombardo (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, Inc., 2005). 23. Edward S. Herman and Noam Chomsky, Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (New York: Pantheon Books, 1988). 24. White, Metahistory, 10.
ABSTRACTS
Traditionally, U.S. history textbooks announce a civic function when aimed at U.S. readers: they exist to read America into the future, to imply a futurity for the American “experiment.” But present-day political breakdown has presented deep challenges for the familiar national narrative. Jill Lepore’s recent synthesis—These Truths: A History of the United States (2018)—is the most prominent such text to emerge in the wake of the 2016 presidential election. It represents the pinnacle of liberal nationalist historiography and will likely take its place on college syllabi inside and outside the United States. It is also the most substantial attempt in recent years to revive the national history as a serious intellectual genre. This essay takes the form of a narratological interpretation of These Truths. The book is an occasion to consider what national history is and what it is for.
INDEX
Keywords: historiography, historical revisionism, jeremiad, narratology, national history, textbooks
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