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Scenes of Instruction, Scenes of Seduction: Figurations of Adolescence on the Late Twentieth-Century Stage

A dissertation submitted by Carolyn E Salvi

In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In English Tufts University August 2011 Copyright 2011, Carolyn E Salvi Advisors: Dr. Joseph Litvak and Dr. Martin Harries

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Abstract

This dissertation seeks to trouble our culture's overvaluation of innocence by exploring the literary consequences of theatrical situations in which the scene of seduction and the scene of instruction are presumed to be one and the same. Because the adolescent stands in between the more actively theorized positions of child and adult, partaking of characteristics of both but not fully either, the adolescent crystallizes our cultural anxieties about what it means to pass on culture linguistically, morally, aesthetically, and politically. By focusing on the figure of the adolescent as the proto-citizen I am able to investigate the degree to which the overvaluation of innocence is connected to a desire to deny possibilities for radical social transformation. Chapter 1 reads Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia in order to establish norms of discourse around adolescence: more specifically investigating how the text participates in fetishization of the child figure in order to stave off the threat of the teenager's uncanny knowledge. Chapter 2 uses Peter Shaffer's play Equus to map out the widespread influence of Freud's legacy on our modern conceptions of adolescence and adolescent sexuality, exploring how deviant sexuality is constructed as a potent threat to the social order which dangerously reduces the adolescent‘s ability to take their place in the machinery of citizenship. While my first two chapters delineate the rhetorical tactics used to keep adolescents from achieving full citizenship, my second two chapters explore what happens when youth act as citizens anyway, disregarding their structural disenfranchisement in attempts to remake the civic sphere. Chapter 3 contrasts the different models of citizenship articulated by Arthur Miller's The Crucible and Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive. Drawing heavily on Lauren Berlant's theories of infantile and diva citizenship I argue that these plays investigate the relationship of private trauma to public embodiment, reframing the relationship between intellectual and sexual knowledge as the capacity to successfully enter into critical consciousness. Chapter 4 gives a reading of the film The City of Lost Children to demonstrate how a reimagining of the child and adolescent through aesthetics rather than ideology can support the development of new epistemologies.

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Acknowledgments

This may well be one of the longest sets of acknowledgments ever, but I believe in practicing gratitude and I have much to be grateful for. Every name on this list deserves to be here, and doubtless I will find later that I have left someone out.

It is both right and proper that I should thank here the members of my dissertation committee who have given this project their time and attention. At Tufts, Joseph Litvak, Judith

Haber, and Radiclani Clytus have given both dutifully and generously and I am grateful to them for all they have given me during my time at Tufts. Martin Harries deserves deepest thanks for the excellent quality of his criticism, incisive questions, and patience.

What I think of as the "heavy lifting" and day-to-day support for this project has come from colleagues and friends near and far. For their brilliance, excitement, and sense of humor I want to particularly thank my dissertation working group: Cynthia Williams, Anne Moore, and

Claudia Stumpf. My gratitude to you ladies is exceeded only by the deep pleasure of working with you. Other colleagues at Tufts have also provided generously of their time and insights.

Most especially, and in no particular order, I want to thank Nathan Paquet, Cheryl Alison, Marta

Rivera Monclova, Jessica Wandrei, Kellie Donovan Condron, and Greg Schnitzpahn. Thanks go to Nicole Flynn and Laurel Hankins for organizing the dissertation writing retreat last summer during which I completed Chapter Three. Kristina Aikens deserves a special mention for helping me get access to additional disability services when I most needed support, and for helping me know that my requests were both reasonable and easily accommodated. Barbara J. Orton and

Anne Moore (again) deserve thanks for being wonderful proofreaders who have helped me IV deliver a much cleaner manuscript than I would've been able to manage on my own. Noah

Barrientos and Chantal Hardy deserve special awards for administrative sainthood. Special love and thanks goes to Elizabeth Leavell for her extraordinary friendship.

Colleagues outside of the Tufts English Department have also been invaluable support.

Shane Landrum of the Brandeis History Department, Michael-Beth Dinkler of Harvard‘s

Religion Department, Courtney VanVeller of Boston University‘s Religion Department, and

Ellen Goldstein of Tufts‘ Math Department all made and kept commitments to come and work with me during long "dissertation retreats" (which Marta gets double-credit for introducing me to) and without which I certainly would not have finished this project. Beatrice Gruendler of

Yale deserves special mention for cheerleading and unwavering belief in my intellectual abilities. For consistent and persistent study-hall company for literally years of my life as a graduate student I must thank John Kraemer, formerly of MIT, one of my best friends who also happens to be wicked smart. To my weekly writing partner, Jessie Stickgold-Sarah of Brandeis‘s

English Department, I say a thousand ―thank you‘s‖ and ―hell yes, now we can talk about something else!" and ―time for beer!‖

Gratitude for emotional, logistical, and even culinary support go to the following: the

Abraham family, Leah Bloom, Michael Feeley, Johanna Bobrow, Eric Mumpower, Sarah

Whedon, Bridget Kraemer, Brenna Yovanoff, Sierra Black, Martin Hunter, Rio and Serena

Hunter-Black, Meg Grady-Troika, Ry Strohm-Herman, Laura Pang, Julia Starkey, Deborah

Kaplan, Alan Peterson, Marc and Rebecca Moscowitz, Sam Musher, Michelle and Lance

Nathan, T. Thorne Coyle, Michel Fitos, Sabine Bartlett, Simone Fitos, Vicka Corey, Michael

Walz, Joanne McLernon, Sarah Twichell, Sarah Wachter, Ofer Inbar (Cos), Rachel Silber,

Rachel Mello, Daniel Miles, Terra Brown, Shana Brown, Aaron Bailey, Megan Manley, Martin V

Chase, Matthew Major, Luke and Rose Campagnola, Tom Radcliffe, and Van Lepthien. My cats, Maggie, Thalia, and Diego deserve thanks for helping me sit still and write and think. I want to thank Roseann Ridings, Marcus Schulkind, Dean Vollick, and the community of dancers at Green Street Studios and The Dance Complex for helping me keep doing all of the different things I love.

And the best for last: to my brother, Kenneth Ralph Knox, who died on April 12, 2011, my deepest love. You were always my best teacher. To John Hill, my mother's partner, thank you for joy and love and for picking my grapes off the stems when I couldn't. To my amazing mother, Mary Berg, who has fretted and cheered, laughed and cried with me, there are not enough words. I wouldn't be half the person I am without you, and my pride at being your daughter is matched only by my awe at the great good fortune that lets us be each other's family.

The real hero of this dissertation, however, is my husband Aatish Salvi, who has supported me on every conceivable level on each and every day of this long process. Friend and lover, reader, interlocutor, confidant, conversationalist, cheerleader -- you have been all that and more. I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to having years and years more of my life with you.

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Table of Contents

Introduction: Scenes of Instruction, Scenes of Seduction 1

Chapter 1: Wanted Dead or Alive: Teenagers and the Threat 51 of Prophetic Vision in Arcadia

Chapter 2: Puppy Dog Tales: The Adolescent Male in Equus 100

Chapter 3: Child Brides: The Seductiveness of Innocence 150 in The Crucible and How I Learned to Drive

Chapter 4: A Krank‘s Dream: Aesthetics and Ideology in 202 The City of Lost Children

Works Cited 245

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Scenes of Instruction, Scenes of Seduction:

Figurations of Adolescence on the Late Twentieth-Century Stage Salvi 1

Introduction

Scenes of Instruction, Scenes of Seduction:

Figurations of Adolescence on the Late Twentieth Century Stage

To the best of my knowledge, the one and only production of Frank Wedekind‘s highly controversial play Spring‟s Awakening to ever cast actual thirteen and fourteen-year-olds in the roles took place in Boston in April of 2009 by the Zeitgeist Stage Company. In 1891, Frank

Wedekind had the play published at his own expense. Over time, this text would prove to be one of the most censored plays in all of theater history. The play would not see its first performance until 1906, when Max Reinhardt directed the world premiere in Berlin. 1917 saw the first

American production of the play in English, a single matinee which almost failed to take place because the City Commissioner of Licenses tried to stop it from going forward.1 Only an injunction from the Supreme Court of New York allowed the curtain to rise. According to translator Eric Bentley, "Wedekind was so ‗explicit‘ in this play that he seems to many of his readers closer to the underground erotica of the Victorian age (which abounded) than to any dramatic literature above ground" (x). And what was it, precisely, that Wedekind was so explicit about? In short, all of the issues of sexuality culture still fights over: homosexuality, rape, abortion, masturbation, parent-child incest, and sadomasochism, not to mention suicide, censorship, and reform schools.

Bentley opines that while his own translation is now one of several reasonably accurate texts available, in production the play continues to be censored because it is always performed by adult actors, or at least those who have reached their legal majority. "To cast Spring‟ s

1 The first American production of the play was performed in German in 1912 at The Irving Pl. Theatre, NY. (Bentley viii)

Salvi 2

Awakening with these older people is to continue to censor it and thereby render it bland and innocuous" (Bentley xv). And certainly the play does play differently when the bodies on stage remain clearly and unmistakably immature, although whether this makes the play‘s content seem more or less shocking is up for debate. In a post-performance discussion of the Boston production, director David J. Miller explicitly commented on his desire to cast young actors as part of his effort to fully honor Wedekind‘s goals.2 The young actors spoke openly about the social and personal difficulties they faced by signing onto the project. Cameron VanderWerf, who played the role of Ernst, revealed that his father was extremely uncomfortable with the fact that his son had chosen to play a role that involved homosexuality – so much so that it was uncertain if his father would attend a performance or not. Sam Harnish, who played the roles of

Otto and Rupert, revealed that his church youth group leader had been "very very uncool" with the play's content and had spoken to him about it at length. A number of young actors withdrew from consideration during callbacks because either they or their parents had reconsidered their involvement in the show once they were more familiar with the text‘s content.

This text gained new social traction when it served as the basis for a musical of the same name, with music by Duncan Sheik and lyrics by Stephen Sater, which won the Tony award in

2007 for best new musical. Sheik and Sater keep the play's original setting of 1890s Bavaria but employ pop-rock music, using a contemporary soundscape in order to highlight the idea that the characters‘ emotional situations are not unique to the historical circumstances in which they are set. In effect, the combination of historical setting with modern music works to essentialize and normalize the emotional experiences of adolescence. During performance the actors pull out handheld microphones and rock into them with abandon, only to sink once again into something

2 This post production discussion took place on April 17, 2009, at the Boston Center for the Arts.

Salvi 3 more closely approaching realism during the spoken sections. As we might expect for a play awarded such a prestigious honor as a Tony, it generally found favor with critics. In his June 16,

2006, review of the play for the New York Times, Charles Isherwood wrote that, despite a few caveats, the play‘s "arching sense of adventure makes an unforgettable statement nonetheless.

Imprinted on the memory is the happy sensation of having witnessed something unusual and aspiring, something vital and new."

In most respects, Sheik and Sater stay close to their source. Though they add some scenes and rework others, their largest departure from the Wedekind lies in their depiction of the relationship between Melchior and Wendla.3 In the Wedekind, Melchior rapes Wendla in a hayloft, an act which leads to Wendla's pregnancy and her subsequent death by botched abortion.

In the musical version Wendla still dies but Sheik and Sater protect Melchior from the stigma of the rapist, turning the hayloft scene into a gentle and mutual seduction. Aside from this major plot point change – and of course, the changes necessitated by turning the play into a musical in the first place – the most striking alteration between the original and the musical version is how the musical plays up the relationship, only latently present in the Wedekind, between the adolescents‘ experiences in school and their sexual awakenings. In both versions Melchior is suspended for having provided his friend Moritz with an illustrated essay explaining the mechanics of reproduction, but only in the musical is Melchior able to fully give voice to the hypocrisy of this action. In the show‘s second musical number (long before his expulsion),

Melchior is already chafing at the effectiveness of his education, singing "all that's known/in history, in science/overthrown… All they say is,/‘trust in what is written.‘/Wars are made, and

3 Lea Michele, most famous for her role as Rachel Berry on the television show Glee, originated the role of Wendla on Broadway and began her history with the show in workshop productions when she was just 14. This actress, now in her 20s, has gone straight from one career-defining role as an adolescent on Broadway to another career-defining role as an adolescent on television. Salvi 4 somehow that is wisdom." Later he sings, "on I go,/to wonder and to learning –/name the stars and know their dark returning." Thus the text invokes, again and again, the relationship between the paucity of satisfaction given by the students‘ education and the critical existential questions of life which, the play implies, are directly linked for these characters with their growing sexual maturity. Sexual and intellectual hunger are imagined to go hand in hand. Furthermore, both versions of the text (Wedekind's original and Sheik and Sater‘s musical) build a relationship between intellectual and sexual health: Wendla, whose mother refuses to tell her how babies are made, dies of a botched abortion, while Moritz‘s paralyzing anxiety about both sexuality and the fate of his academic career leads him to commit suicide. Happy endings are assured for none of the play's characters, but those who have adequate knowledge of sexuality, academics, and the world at large are those most likely to survive.

Spring‟s Awakening, like the other texts I study here, illustrates the complex conjunction of ideas about what adolescence is or what it means with issues of sexuality and pedagogy. These texts, as performed public speech, require audiences to examine their discomfort with how certain types of bodies (those typed by the performances as ―youthful‖) interact with, embody, or push against social norms. This dissertation argues that in our marked cultural ambivalence towards the figure of the adolescent, the conjunction of a teenage character with themes of sex and learning highlights potent discursive moments at which the meaning of citizenship begins to be defined. The concurrence of these factors reifies stagnant models of citizenship, but also points towards moments when the teleology of that citizenship has not yet been assured. This in turn highlights numerous possibilities for radical social change.

Why Theater? Salvi 5

Of course, the shape and structure of this project begs the question: Why theater? What

makes the stage a useful and productive site for these investigations? The answer to that

question is complex and is broached by both a consideration of the function of theater in our

present artistic and literary culture and by what theater is uniquely privileged to do, given its

form. To begin with, the short temporal duration of a play‘s performance helps keep the focus

on the teenager as such.4 In the theater, teenagers are more likely than in other mediums to

escape the problem of insertion into the telos of adulthood.5 Rather than depicting the teenager

as the means to an end, that of normalized heteroreproductive maturity, the theater allows a

thorough investigation of our (adult) projections and assumptions about what it means to be a

teenager. Furthermore, since ―legitimate‖ theater (a term I will come back to soon) is produced

almost exclusively for adults, these texts do an excellent job of isolating the figure of the teen

from other kinds of discourse about adolescents, such as texts produced for teens about

themselves (teen movies, young adult novels, television shows, etc.) or the discourses about

teenagers produced by the social sciences.

In terms of its social function, theater (like adolescence) occupies a complex and ambivalently marked space. Many critics, understandably invested in maintaining and shoring up theater against charges of irrelevance and elitism, argue that theater is a unique site for the creation of community in an increasingly fragmented society and also offers up the display of possibilities for social change. Thus Christopher Bigsby asserts that while ―[l]iterature requires… an act of renunciation…. theater offers a special grace….It is a re-entry into the

4 This could also be said of film, or of some films, which is one reason I include film in my conclusion.

5 There are texts in this project that, to one degree or another, look explicitly towards the adolescent‘s future adult self. Certainly, How I Learned to Drive deals explicitly with adulthood as defined by economic and emotional independence from the nuclear family. I have, however, found this so useful a formulation—that the texts I deal with focus on the teenager and not on a narrative of development—that it has been one of my guiding criteria for the choice of texts. Salvi 6 world‖ (Modern 9). While reading a novel might encourage readers to withdraw their attention from the social space, attending theater is at least in part about investment in a communal experience. This re-entry is hailed by Jill Dolan in her book Utopia and Performance as a possible means for theater to ―reanimat[e] humanism and [see]… more effective models of more radical democracy [that] might reinvigorate a dissipated Left‖ and ―resurrect a belief or faith in the possibility of social change‖ (21). Dolan's enthusiastic vision is a lot to ask of theater, and not all performances will (or are even meant to) live up to the possibilities for social change

Dolan imagines. At the same time, it is true that theater is remarkably hard to contain, potentially subversive even in seemingly conservative moments. Since its physical enactment can threaten the comfort of the audience in ways that the novel and the poem often cannot, this quality in theater has led to the historically pervasive presence of anti-theatricality so thoroughly traced by

Jonas Barish. In the words of Elin Diamond:

Theater itself may be understood as drama‘s unruly body, its material other, a site where

the performer‘s and the spectator‘s desire may resignify elements of a constrictive social

script. Theater may also be understood as a symptomatic cultural site that ruthlessly

maps out normative spectatorial positions by occluding its own means of production.

And yet—any set of seemingly rigid positions is available for revision. Conservative

and patriarchal, the theater is also, in a complex sense, the place of play, and unlike other

media, in the theater the same play can be played not only again, but differently. (iii)

But while theater‘s form may grant it certain subversive possibilities, utopic possibilities, to

follow Dolan, that I do believe in, we must also recognize that ―legitimate‖ theater,

commercially and critically successful plays like those examined here, is only available as a

cultural form in the West to those with significant amounts of capital to spend on the experience Salvi 7 of attending a live performance.6 While all of these plays have gone on to have significant lives in community and school productions, the importance of their origins in the expensive realm of professional theater lends them legitimacy in the second life these texts have in nonprofessional venues. The commercial success of these texts has led to their cultural success; the broad appeal of these plays cannot be extricated from the value they have been assigned by the marketplace.7

This in turn lends cultural capital to the depictions of teenagers these plays give, both in the moments when they reify paranoid models of adolescence and in the moments when they reach towards Dolan's utopic possibilities. The approval given to these plays in rarefied and elite spaces is part and parcel of how the messages are given new life in the less exclusive instances of amateur production. And even in amateur productions, we must remember that the important material constraints of theatrical production -- the costs of productions and tickets, theater‘s increasing status as a rarified and bourgeois art form — also limit, in revealing ways, the audience for these discussions to those very adults who have, at least potentially, the largest ability (though perhaps the least incentive) to change how we talk and think about teenagers.8

David Savran convincingly argues that theater is ―the most emblematic Midcult genre because it is the one in which art and commerce are most complexly and irreducibly interwoven‖

6 For an important critique of the privileging of the ontology of liveness in live performance, see Philip Auslander, Liveness: Performance in a Mediatized Culture. It also behooves me here to note that I'm only considering live performances of these texts, not taped productions or, alternately, the more recent development of simulcasts in movie theaters.

7 Another version of this project might look more closely at the interplay between professional and amateur theatrical productions of these plays. For reasons of space and scope, I have chosen to limit my investigation to a textual examination of these plays without attempting to thoroughly account for their production histories in a variety of venues.

8 There can be no disputing that theater is getting more expensive to produce, more expensive to see, and thus more limited in its audience. According to David Savran, in ―1992 college-educated theatergoers outnumbered those with a high-school education or less by a factor of six to one‖ (22) and ticket price increases ―outpac[e] inflation, jumping from about seven dollars in 1970 to forty-eight dollars in 1996‖ (23). If taking your date to a movie can easily run $40 if you buy drinks and popcorn, going to the theater becomes too expensive for anything more than very occasional special treat faster than you can say ―Arthur Miller.‖ Salvi 8

(Materialism 15). Savran‘s definitions of the Midcult and the middlebrow accurately describes

theater‘s ―promiscuous mixture of commerce and art, entertainment and politics, the banal and

the auratic, profane and sacred, spectacular and personal, erotic and intellectual‖ (Materialism

15). Thus I argue that theater in the twentieth century can be a unique site to investigate how

the teenager, already largely imagined as middle-class and white, is consistently re-imagined

and re-interpreted against this exclusive and false ―normal‖ within the largely middle-class and

white world of mainstream theatrical performance.9 These plays are imaginatively written for

precisely those who have the most solid material investment in maintaining the status quo.

I am working with these "middlebrow" figurations, as Savran would define the term, not because I believe them to be the sole location through which to investigate our rhetoric about adolescents, but because theater‘s current function in culture consistently highlights the

―normal,‖ while at the same time theater's attempts to lay claim to parts of higher culture push these texts to examine those norms more closely. Our participation in a variety of cultural mediums is more complex than a divide between ―high‖ and ―pop‖ culture can easily encompass, and the readers I imagine for the texts I focus on in these project would doubtless also be influenced by a more ―commercial‖ or ―low brow‖ set of assumptions about teens. But pop culture participates in a temporality of the ―now‖.10 Middlebrow culture, on the other hand, attempts to write itself into the canon. In so doing it implicitly claims to write an archetypal — which is also to say, universal — teenager, one who can exist across boundaries of history, class, and race. No such archetype could ever be truly reflective of the liminality of adolescence, but

9 Even in Europe, where state funding for the arts is much more prominent, theater after the advent of the movie theater has been a primarily middle-class genre. As historian Tony Judt notes, "Ever since the decline of the music halls, theatre had been the purview of the middling sort – even when the subject matter was ostensibly proletarian. Playwrights might write about working-class life, but it was the middle class that came to watch" (379).

10 There is, of course, a strand of thinking which critiques this idea. See Jonathan Freedman, "Autocanonization," Yale Journal of Criticism 1.1. Salvi 9 the claim to universality, despite its limitations, can show us how these figurations move between doing cultural work, actively shaping our expectations for what teenagers are and do, and reifying the myths of adolescence that the real live teenagers we know experience every day.

In short, I emphasize how the middlebrow status of these plays is crucial to my reading of them insofar as the middlebrow demands constant mediation between already-available images and ideas and a pull towards the avant-garde which would legitimate these artworks as genuinely intellectual, and thus deserving of attention and praise. Because theater is, arguably more than other literary forms, a commodity with a persistent political edge, these plays are uniquely important to our cultural debates about adolescence.

It is important to remember, following Elin Diamond, that any piece of drama can be played against itself depending on how it is staged. Theater can illustrate, in a way that few other mediums can, the possibilities for subversion. And because theater depends on real material bodies, it continues to have a certain power bolstered by presence, by the ―reality‖ of its fictions.

In theater we must confront and deal with our reactions to the bodies on stage, perhaps encountering facts of our own embodiment such as attraction, repulsion, interest, or fear, even as we watch. In the case of adolescents this can be a particularly fraught encounter, since popular understanding of what adolescence means is in no small part defined by our understanding and memories of the physical and hormonal turmoil that accompany puberty. In most productions of the plays I examine here, the actors who play the adolescent roles are in fact legal adults whose bodies can still be costumed in ways that make their "youth" believable. At first glance, this fact might seem to run counter to my above suggestion that theater makes us confront life in ways that other texts do not. I would suggest, however, that the presence of adult bodies playing teenage roles can have a disruptive effect on the audience's interpretation of the scene at hand. Salvi 10

As with Brecht's notions of alienation, confronting the difference between the bodies we expect and the bodies we actually see can disrupt our understanding of the "naturalness" of the situation presented to us. One example of this might be seen in various productions of Arcadia, where the fact that thirteen-year-old Thomasina is played by an actress in her mid-20s subtly disrupts our sense of whether the girl‘s effusive energy comes from a genuine expression of her personality or whether it is a more calculated performance designed to elicit the reactions she desires from the adults around her. Another example (which I discuss in more detail in Chapter Three) can be found in How I Learned to Drive, where the script explicitly calls for the part of the Teenage

Greek Chorus to be played by "a young woman who is of ‗legal age,‘ that is, 21 to 25 years old who can look as close to 11 as possible. The contrast with the other cast members will help. If the actor‘s too young, the audience may feel uncomfortable" (viii). The Teenage Greek Chorus plays, at various points in the production, the Grandmother, high-school girls, and the voice of the eleven-year-old Li‘l Bit, a range of roles that entirely disrupts notions of essentialism in age not only for this character but also for the other characters in the play.

Finally, theater has historically had an important role to play in public debates around

sexuality and intimacy, issues of particular importance to this project. As Julie Stone Peters has

noted, at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth centuries, modernism,

theatricality, and obscenity were closely linked terms, resulting in new and peculiar forms of

anti-theatricality. During the 1909 investigation by Parliament of British stage censorship, for

example, the inextricability of these terms was made clear in the testimony of the many experts

to the committee. Sir William Gilbert said, "In a novel one may read, 'Eliza stripped off her

dressing gown and stepped into her bath', without any harm, but… if that were presented on the

stage it would be very shocking" (qtd in Peters 211). "It was, in part," Peters notes, "the actor Salvi 11

who gave the theater its power of material realization, its power to bring images from the

ethereal imagination and transform them suddenly into gross bodily presences" (212).

Furthermore, "The public nature of theater transformed what might be private titillation into

public shame, and public shame into scandal" (212). These issues persist in the theater, and in

the texts I examine here, for all that a hundred years of history and cultural change have

intervened. If the late Victorians were made particularly uncomfortable with this public display

of private matters, it is precisely this juxtaposition which makes theater illuminating in this

discussion. These plays remain shocking, to one degree or another, and they do so because of

this relationship between shame and scandal. Practically speaking, it may be true that

adolescence may be a time during which the individual begins to exit the nucleus of the nuclear

family, but conceptually the adolescent remains a minor, and thus mired in the domestic sphere.

The public nature of theater allows me to expose the rhetoric of our public conversations about

these private matters.

Pedagogy, Sexuality, Citizenship, and the Adolescent

Western concern with the relationship between epistemology and sexuality can be traced all the way back to the Book of Genesis, but takes on, as Foucault points out in Volume I of A

History of Sexuality, increasing speed and force in the nineteenth century. As Eve Sedgwick writes in The Epistemology of the Closet:

The process… by which ―knowledge‖ and ―sex‖ became conceptually inseparable from one

another — so that knowledge means in the first place sexual knowledge; ignorance, sexual

ignorance; and epistemological pressure of any sort seems a force increasingly saturated

with sexual impulsion;…. was a process, protracted almost to retardation, of exfoliating the Salvi 12

Biblical genesis by which what we now know as sexuality is fruit — apparently the only

fruit — to be plucked from the tree of knowledge. Cognition itself, sexuality itself, and

transgression itself have always been ready in Western culture to be magnetized into an

unyielding though not unfissured alignment with one another. (73)

This project investigates what Sedgwick calls here the "unyielding though not unfissured alignment" of sexuality and epistemology in conjunction with the similarly structured relationship between what our culture may be said to "know" about the teenager‘s psychology and what it believes to be true about the teenager‘s functions in the civic sphere. I am interested particularly in moments when the transgression of both covert and overt social norms by teenage protagonists forces the audience into an examination of the benefits and risks of holding on to this alignment of concepts. I focus on the twentieth century, particularly the years following the

Second World War, when these intertwined dynamics began to exhibit a differently complex relationship to each other as new cultural mores concerning sex and sexuality arose out of the material luxury of advanced capitalist consumer culture.

Part of how this relationship between epistemology and sexuality became differently complex had intimately to do with new definitions of adolescence that arose during the time period I focus on. The word ―teenager‖ was in fact coined in 1941, and was originally used primarily by advertisers to describe the increasingly vibrant youth market (Savage, Palladino).

While the word ―adolescent‖ was popularized in the late nineteenth century by G. Stanley Hall to describe the psychological life state he believed accompanied the physical shifts of puberty,

―teenager‖ specifically describes the adolescent as he or she exists within the framework of Salvi 13 capitalism (Savage).11 Thus, it is important to remember that while "adolescent" and "teenager" at one point in time described two distinct ideas – the first relating to the private, internal aspects of developmental psychology, the second to the public implications of a specific marketing demographic – the two terms are now used synonymously.12 The merging of these two terms in the second half of the twentieth century illustrates a process by which what we assume about the interior and private life of adolescents has been made inextricable from their public market function. The consequences of merging these two terms have prompted this investigation of how our private conception of what the adolescent is has affected our public rhetoric about adolescents.

This persistent blurring of the psychology (or interiority) of adolescents with their position in public structures is a key component in the deep ambivalence culture feels about teenagers. Of the political consequences of our attempts to make separate and fully distinguishable the public and the private, Michael Warner writes:

Often the impression seems to be that public and private are abstract categories for

thinking about law, politics, and economics. And so they are. But their power, as

feminism and queer theory have had to insist, goes much deeper. The child's earliest

education in shame, deportment, and cleaning is an initiation into the prevailing meanings

of public and private, as when he or she locates his or her ‗privates‘ or is trained to visit

the ‗privy.‘ (The word "public" also records this bodily association; it derives from the

Latin poplicus, for people, but evolved to publicus in connection with pubes, in the sense

11 While Hall is best known for his hugely influential work on adolescence, he ought also to be recognized for founding gerontology and the study of senescence. For a brief overview of Hall's work on aging, see Jill Lepore, "Twilight: Growing Old and Even Older," The New Yorker March 14, 2011.

12 For an interesting investigation into the widespread social effects of the power of the teenage consumer, see Marcel Danesi, Forever Young: The „Teen-Aging‟ Of Modern Culture, University of Toronto Press, 2003. Salvi 14

of adult men, linking public membership to pubic maturity.)… Like those of gender, the

orientation of public and private are rooted in what anthropologists call habitus; the

conventions by which we experience, as though naturally, our own bodies and movement

in the space of the world…. They can seem quasi-natural, visceral, fraught with perils of

abjection and degradation or, alternatively, of cleanliness and self-mastery. They are the

very scene of selfhood and scarcely distinguishable from the experience of gender and

sexuality. (Publics and Counter Publics 23)

Unsurprisingly, in the wake of deconstruction, we find that the dichotomies between public and private mapped here do not hold, and that the terms are deeply implicated with each other.

Warner's attention to the learned nature of our understanding of what constitutes public and private, so thoroughly ingrained in culture as to be all but invisible, highlights the explosive potential inherent in moments when these categories begin to disintegrate. For the teenager, the blurring of the terms "adolescent" and ―teenager‖ means that our conception of what they are is continually constructed in precisely this space of disintegrating categories. Further complicating this dynamic are our complex notions of what the key terms of sexuality and pedagogy mean for young people. Sexuality, commonly (if mistakenly) mapped onto the private, becomes all too public for the teenager, while the public responsibilities of pedagogy are frequently given short shrift. Warner's emphasis on the relationship between these ideas and our own lived senses of

―abjection and degradation‖ or ―cleanliness and self-mastery‖ also point to the heart of the adolescent dilemma, not only in terms of what we imagine (or remember) teenagers to feel, but also our fears about what we hope they will become.

I use the theater, where private bodies are made public, where intimate scenes are played out in front of audiences, to explore the overlap between these terms. By investigating theatrical Salvi 15 situations in which the scene of seduction and scene of instruction are one and the same, I trace out the literary consequences of producing depictions of adolescents where what we already know or fear about them is either reified or in which our reification of our ideas about them is challenged. The very publicness of theater is a large part of what makes it ideal for my investigation: collaboratively produced and collectively viewed, it takes place in spaces that definitionally cannot be contained within the private/domestic.13 Theater is public speech, and its publicness forces us to contend with problems of performativity, embodiment, and the conventions of ―habitus‖ in different ways than other literary forms do, as discussed by Warner.

All of the texts I read here problematize through performance the conventions of pedagogy, pedagogy's relationship to sexuality, and the hierarchical relationship between youth and adults.

By focusing on the figure of the adolescent as the proto-citizen, I am able to investigate the degree to which the overvaluation of innocence is connected to a desire to deny possibilities for radical social transformation.

I argue that it is in the figure of the teenager that we find crystallized the tension between intellectual knowledge and sexual knowledge, and what these categories mean for our ability to pass on culture and citizenship. Caught between the conceptual categories of ―childhood‖ and

―adulthood,‖ adolescents are widely acknowledged by society as sexual beings even while society engages in moral panic over what, precisely, teens might be doing with their bodies as sexual beings. With the protean physical shift into maturity comes, socially, a concomitant shift in our attitudes towards the no longer ―cute‖ child. As James Kincaid argues, ―Puberty [is when] we drop the camera, start screaming at [teens], search their room for drugs, and long for

13 For a thorough discussion of how early television positioned itself as a way for audiences to have a theater experience without having to deal with the hassles of theaters publicness, see Philip Auslander, Liveness. Salvi 16

the day they‘ll leave home‖ (Erotic 107). The idealized, fresh-faced child morphs, in our

cultural imagination, into the sullen, rebellious, or dangerous teenager.

While culture holds up the child, as Lauren Berlant argues in The Queen of America Goes to

Washington City, as the ultimate model of the citizen, innocent and idealized, teenagers are almost universally viewed with suspicion and derision. ―A child is not, in itself, anything,‖ argues James Kincaid. ―Any image, body, or being we can hollow out, purify, exalt, abuse, and locate sneakily in the field of desire will do for us as a ‗child‘‖ (Child-Loving 5). This process of hollowing out the child is primarily a conceptual one that has the persistent consequences of sacralizing innocence. But teenagers are different. The fact that teenagers are not ―empty‖ or

―pure‖ or ―innocent,‖ as we so commonly imagine children to be, requires us to recognize in them a greater degree of autonomy and individuation. At the same time, no one who has had any personal contact with a teenager would argue that they are not still highly malleable people.

Because this malleability is already coupled with experience, opinion, and a degree of selfhood, for the teenager the future seems to contain not ―promise‖ but ―threat,‖ and their legitimate claims to knowledge and responsibility threaten adult sensibilities of power, wisdom, and control.

Drawing heavily on the work of Lauren Berlant and James Kincaid and using an interdisciplinary, cultural-studies approach, I use the plays I read to ask what it is that we as adults are telling ourselves about teenagers when we think teens aren‘t paying attention, and what it is, precisely, that we are so afraid of them knowing. Using texts from both Britain and

America, I explore how Anglo-American theater constructs the adolescent as a powerful threat to the prevailing social order. Moreover, my reading of these plays invite us to consider adolescence –and consequently other life stages as well—as performative categories that can be Salvi 17 strategically deployed to different political ends depending on the mode of their enactment. That the adolescent roles and dramatic situations I read here are built as performance vehicles in the first place, often in texts which stretch the boundaries of realism, prompts my methodological engagement with issues of performativity, public speech, and civic embodiment.

Before I continue I want to sketch out, briefly, some of the axiomatic assumptions which have guided this project. To begin, following the work of James Kincaid, I assume that our public discourse in news, television, film, and literature works hard to convince us that two contradictory things are simultaneously true about youth. First, it tells us stories that convince us that children and teens are in danger, under threat, imperiled by a number of shadowy and monstrous figures: pedophiles, kidnappers (often conflated with pedophiles), the media, downwardly sliding moral values, and other children, just to name a few. The social effects of our overblown fear of pedophiles, and how that fear allows us to deny our own libidinal investments in sexualized images of children, has been extensively theorized by James R.

Kincaid and Richard Mohr. Our extensive and vocal discourse about child sexual abuse ―keep[s] the subject hot so we can disown it while welcoming it in the back door‖ (Kincaid Erotic 6), and also distracts from the more statistically prevalent problems of poverty, neglect, and physical abuse of children.14 Second, we believe that children and teens are a threat, that they are dangerously swayed by impulses, hormones, and their own freedom (because of their assumed

―blankness‖) from the forces of proper socialization. To a startling degree, whether we see teens as imperiled or as a peril depends on the teen‘s shifting relationship to our conception of childhood. When we see teens as ―children‖ we try (sometimes erroneously) to protect them.

But when we see them as malformed, not-quite adults, we are much more likely to feel

14 For more on this, please see Jonathan Kozol, Savage Inequalities. Crown Publishers, NY: 1992. While the statistics Kozol presents are dated at this point, the fundamental inequalities he maps out between different school districts have not lessened in the sixteen years since he first published this important work. Salvi 18 threatened by them. Put another way, our ability to value teens is directly correlated to our perception of their entry into in the mutually constitutive categories of sexual and epistemological maturity. Are they having sex or not, or should they even know about sex in the first place? Is their education serving them, or the country, or the world? What are the right kinds of knowledge for adolescents to have? Can we or should we trust them? All of these questions bear directly on how we imaginatively construct the adolescent proto-citizen. This dissertation demonstrates that it is in the figure of the teenager that we most frequently confront the moral, linguistical, material, and aesthetical difficulty of what it means to pass on culture.

In the Anglo-American world these texts were written in, questions of citizenship have also to do with questions of class and consumerism. This dissertation is not an investigation into the teenager as consumer, though it recognizes and works with the implications of that construction.

Rather, I want to think here about how Western adult audiences use the figure of the teen as a thing to be consumed. I use the term ―figure‖ here to signal the methodological intersection of literary and cultural studies where ―figure‖ is understood to mark the site at which material experiences and fictional representations co-mingle and conjoin. While at some moments it has felt it imperative for me to gesture beyond the texts I'm working with towards a larger social landscape, throughout this project my focus remains on the figural, rather than the actual, teenager. This distinction is important to maintain insofar as I must make it clear that my arguments do not bear directly on the lived experience of modern adolescence. Instead, I emphasize the importance of recognizing that these plays provide a unique space for adults to talk to each other about what they think adolescence means. To focus on the figural is, in this Salvi 19 case, to focus on the rhetoric surrounding the adolescent with the aim of illuminating what I identify as a deep ambivalence towards or fear of futurity.15

Just as I acknowledge that I do not focus on the teen as consumer, it is important to note that while this project occasionally draws on the theories of psychoanalysis, recognizing the impossibility of dealing with topics of sexuality and subject-formation without acknowledging psychoanalysis‘ important insights, those theories are not the project‘s theoretical home. There are two important reasons for this. First, because psychoanalysis is already our primary model for explaining human development, to use it extensively here would run the risk of recapitulating an already familiar set of questions and answers around the figure of the adolescent. Second, psychoanalysis is always, necessarily, retrospective, explaining the present through the events of the past. But I am not interested in thinking about the adolescent through a Wordsworthian model that understands development through thinking of "the child [as] the father of the man."

Following the insight of Natasha Bruhm and Stephen Hurley, who note that writings about children (or teens) focus, often subtly, on the assumed teleological endpoint of adulthood, the emphasis of this project avoids the arc of the Bildungsroman, attempting to side-step the inevitability of thinking of the adolescent as an adult in training and concentrating instead on the productive confusion generated by the very state of adolescence.16 I acknowledge that such teleological models may, in fact, be impossible to entirely avoid when writing about a particular life stage. However, I maintain that different things about our rhetoric surrounding adolescence are brought into focus when we stop taking the kind of teleological view Bruhm and Hurley

15 My thinking here is indebted to the work of Lee Edelman, about which more later.

16 Bruhm and Hurley state that: ―The story of the child shifts almost imperceptibly to the story of the adult at a key moment: the ending. If writing is an act of world making, writing about the child is doubly so. Not only do writers control the terms of the worlds they present they also invent, over and over again, the very idea of inventing humanity, of training it and watching it evolve. This inscription makes the child into a metaphor, a kind of ground zero for the edifice that is adult life and around which narratives of sexuality get organized‖ (xiii). Salvi 20 highlight. We see, in fact, the degree to which ambivalence and fear mark these discourses, not because we are so afraid of what kind of adult the adolescent will become but rather because of the teen‘s already disruptive effects on the rhetoric of the social order. This disruption is exhibited in a number of different ways throughout this project. In Arcadia we see that even the benign and likable character of Thomasina has a profoundly destabilizing effect on the life of her tutor, and consequently on the lives of adults far in the future. This pattern is repeated in Equus, where the character of Alan Strang is overtly dangerous to the worldview of his psychiatrist, Dr.

Dysart, while simultaneously discomfiting the audience. Thus Arcadia and Equus largely reify old models and meanings of adolescence, particularly insofar as they read the adolescent as a potent threat to social order. Abigail in Arthur Miller's The Crucible functions similarly: she frightens because she knows how to manipulate the public sphere to destructive ends. A rhetorical turn comes when we approach Paula Vogel's play How I Learned to Drive, where Li'l

Bit elicits our sympathy but also makes us confront her own involvement in her abuse. Her act of radical pedagogy lies in being public about the shameful secrets she embodies and the fears she gives voice to, fears about how abuse and trauma reshape public life. The discourse turns again when the project comes to the film The City of Lost Children, which rejects the idea that sexuality is a problem for these figures and gives us a way to think about progress towards knowledge in terms besides the sexual.

This project is also an attempt to trouble the primacy of the discourse of sexuality in

explaining adolescence, which of course requires that I engage this discourse extensively. The

emphasis on the sexual at the expense of the sensuous is particularly fraught with complications

in our figurations of teenagers. In a peculiar way, the ―biology is destiny‖ argument that various

scholars in gender and race studies have worked so hard to dispel crops up again when we talk Salvi 21 about the teenager. A recognition of adolescence as a distinct epoch in human biological development in fact furthers this line of thought. What is meant to be a compassionate recognition of the powerful effects of hormones on personality all too often becomes a single track in discourse. This is precisely the discourse which seeks to anxiously police adolescent sexuality while simultaneously voicing the fear that powerful hormonal forces will overrun all such policing attempts. If sexuality becomes the primary discourse with which to discuss adolescence, then it covers over the possibility for other conversations, ones which may in fact be rather more urgent. It acts as a distraction for issues of economics, education, and abuse. This redirection of our attention is what we see, for example, in Equus, where sexuality becomes the measure of passionate life and also functions as a way of distracting the audience from some of the text‘s more potent moments of cultural commentary. Or we might look to The Crucible, where Abigail's illicit relationship with John Proctor provides one kind of motivation for her behavior but also distracts us from other potential motivations, such as her powerlessness within the structures of Salem life.

A recognition of adolescence as both a biological reality and a social construct might disrupt the primacy of this paradigm of sexuality. On the one hand, such a move makes sense; at this juncture we all seem to agree on the social benefits that accrue from the recognition of childhood — and by extension adolescence — as a special and protected status. It seems logical and self-evident that the conception of what it means to ―grow up‖ should include growing into competence and responsibility, thus the existence of child labor laws, juvenile courts, and the

Department of Child Welfare Services. But crucially, these ideas adhere with greater tenacity to Salvi 22 that invisible boundary of childhood, as the increased prevalence of trying juveniles as adults attests.17

It may be true that childhood and adolescence are, like old age and the aging process generally, one of those few areas in which it does make sense to speak of the biological. Many of the processes of physical and neurological development make young humans biologically distinct from mature humans. It is too soon to say how much of the science will hold, and too soon to fully anticipate the kinds of critiques its methodologies will face. At the same time, the critiques that have been leveled with such devastating accuracy at the structurally identical rhetoric that surrounds gender and biology or race and biology alert us to the need to proceed with extreme caution.18

Nor is science the only position from which we can critique the view that teens are

"destined" to act in particular ways. Let's also remember that all bodies are potentially subject to critique based on notions of the performative. As Judith Butler writes, ―Bodies are not inhabited as spatial givens. They are, in their spatiality, also underway in time: aging, altering shape, altering signification — depending on their interactions — and the web of visual, discursive, and tactile relations that become part of their historicity, their constituent past, present, and future‖

(Undoing Gender 217). Are not the behaviors, attitudes, modes of dress, use of language, and social responsibilities given to or acted out by teenagers as clear a set of performative gestures as we could wish for? And if there is some resistance to applying these critiques to the body of the teenager, does that not tell us something about how firmly we entrenched we are in our notions

17 For an excellent overview of the history of the juvenile justice system and changing social attitudes towards underage criminals, see Elizabeth S. Scott and Laurence Steinberg, "Adolescent Development and the Regulation of Youth Crime,‖ Juvenile Justice 18.2, Fall 2008, 15-33.

18 See, for example, the excellent work of Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories About Women and Men, New York, Basic Books, 1985. Salvi 23 of what it means to be a child, an adolescent, a grown-up? Is it not worth questioning how well those norms are serving us?

Historical and Social Contexts

A more thorough grounding in the context in which the texts I examine here were produced helps to ground my argument and the particular historical constructions of adolescence in which I am interested.

In F. Scott Fitzgerald‘s first novel, This Side of Paradise (1920), one of the main characters expresses his experience of youth, and the mature nostalgia for youth, thus:

Youth is like having a big plate of candy. Sentimentalists think they want to be in the

pure simple state they were in when they were eating the candy. They don‘t. They just

want the fun of eating it again. The matron doesn‘t want to repeat her girlhood—she

wants to repeat her honeymoon. I don‘t want to repeat my innocence. I want the

pleasure of losing it again. (qtd. in Savage 201)

This Side of Paradise captures the particular set of life possibilities that were opening up for the young, white, and middle class throughout the early part of the twentieth century. The book was a bestseller when first published, and the popularity of Fitzgerald's novel suggests a certain degree of emotional resonance and accuracy in its depiction of youth for the readers who snatched it off the shelves. Raised to a new prominence through the complex interplay of mass media with a growing demographic, given the protection and freedom of a newly-defined

―adolescence‖ that kept them out of the workforce and in schools, the upper-class youth

Fitzgerald depicts were simultaneously empowered by the potential luxuries of life in a consumer culture and devastated by the destruction wreaked by the First World War. These Salvi 24 factors gave a new power and voice to the younger generation and allowed them, for the first time, the space to voice their hunger for knowledge, and particularly for sexual knowledge, in terms this blunt.

The flappers and dandies who snatched up This Side of Paradise lived through (and sometimes died during) the Second World War and became the parents of the first ―teenagers.‖

The power, visibility, and freedom youth had experienced for the first time in the ‘20s was directly responsible for the soda-shop and the sock-hop. To be a teenager in the West after

World War II is then, in no small part, to be understood as someone whose basic financial needs are met by someone else, usually parents, and who has the freedom and ability to engage in a large amount of discretionary spending. Thus ―teenager-ness‖ can be expanded or contracted to reflect a number of different life positions with little regard to specific ages. More importantly, it is a construction that relies on economic and class privilege. In so doing, it marks itself as primarily and fundamentally imaginatively white.19 Thus the end of World War II, with its new definition of ―adolescents‖ as ―teenagers,‖ marks the beginning of my investigation. It is important, however, to trace the persistence of various tropes about adolescents, some of which, as in the Fitzgerald quote, precede the boundaries of my project's proper timeframe.

Roughly the same period that saw the rise of the term "teenager" also saw a number of rapid and important changes taking place in both pedagogy and sexual norms. In the realm of pedagogy, schooling and formal education took an increasingly central role in the lives of youth, partly because new models of work demanded a more highly educated task force, and partly

19 Though it is not fully within the purview of this dissertation to investigate these questions, it is important to note that this imaginative equivalency between ―teenage-ness‖ and ―whiteness‖ has important social and material consequences for our policies regarding young people. I strive, throughout this project, to be self-reflexive in my intellectual engagement with how our construction of youth reifies and helps to uphold an ideology of ―invisible‖ and normalized whiteness. My thinking in this area has been crucially informed by Toni Morrison‘s work in Playing the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination.

Salvi 25 because, particularly in the tumultuous economic climate of the early years of the twentieth century, keeping youth in school kept them out of the workforce, leaving jobs open to family men. In the United States, the number of high schools in the country increased between 1880 and

1900 by more than 750%, although schools often didn't do a very good job of stopping attrition, with some urban areas seeing dropout rate of high school students of up to 88% (Savage 69, 97).

By the time Fitzgerald's first novel was published, college attendance had increased over 400% since 1890, and by 1940 approximately 75% of youth between the ages of 14 and 17 were in high school (Savage 208, 363). The demographics on the later end of my time period were similar in Europe, where the post-World War II baby boom meant that in France in 1968, "the student age cohort, of persons age 16 to 24, was eight million strong, constituting 16.1 percent of the national total" (Judt 391). Thus one of the primary challenges facing Europe in the ‘60s and

‘70s, according to historian Tony Judt, "was not how to feed, clothe, house and eventually employ a growing number of young people, but how to educate them" (391). Where it had previously been true that high school was available only to the upper classes, the understanding that education was the path to upward class mobility became increasingly prominent throughout the twentieth century. The increasing importance of education for young people went hand in hand with a rising youth culture fueled by new patterns of mass consumption. Housing young people in schools where they interacted primarily with people their own age created feedback loops in patterns of consumption, ideology, and language. This, in turn, led in both Europe and

America to an increasing sense of distance between generations.

The changes in social attitudes towards education that began before World War II met up, after World War II, with changing attitudes towards sexuality and gender and increased access to contraception. Marriage, the realm through which society had most successfully and persistently Salvi 26 controlled sexuality, began to fragment in newly visible ways, with divorce tripling in the twenty-odd years between 1960 and 1982 (Coontz 3). But while attitudes toward sexuality changed dramatically, much research suggests that sexual behavior did not, in fact, alter as much as the cultural attitudes towards that behavior did. Stephanie Coontz notes that the 1950s were the time when "‗heavy petting‘ became a norm of dating… [and] teen birth rates soared, reaching highs that have not been equaled since" (39). This issue was dealt with primarily by encouraging the teenagers involved to wed, much as in earlier periods when sexual activity that resulted in pregnancy led to a marriage which was implicitly accepted by the community. Tony Judt suggests that "the ‗sexual revolution‘ of the Sixties was almost certainly a mirage for the overwhelming majority of people, young and old alike…. On the evidence of contemporary surveys, even the sex lives of students were not very different from those of earlier generations.… But when compared with the 1920s, or the European fin-de-siecle, or the demi- mond of 1860s Paris, the ‗Swinging Sixties‘ were quite tame‖ (396). Stephanie Levine agrees with Judt, providing evidence that if we compare the sex lives of teenagers now with those of their parents and grandparents "we can see that rates of youthful sexual activity are not galloping upward" (xxiv). Furthermore, teenagers who receive appropriate sex education are "more consistent condom users than their elders," which doesn't stop professionals from listing sexual activity in youth "as a ‗risk factor,‘ along with binge drinking and gunplay" (Levine xxvi-xxvii).

Regardless of the actual degree to which sexual behavior changed in the general populace following World War II (sexual behavior being a notoriously difficult thing to accurately measure and study), the appearance of rapid change has led to a high degree of anxious discourse around what sex means for adults and adolescents alike. The historical shifts around both sexuality and pedagogy during this time period emphasize the importance of these terms to this Salvi 27 investigation. I argue that this rampant discourse surrounding promiscuity in teenagers gained the traction it did after World War II because it was a convenient scapegoat for larger concerns about the status of citizenship and the problems attendant upon trying to imagine possibilities for greater social inclusivity, which became more pressingly important after the horrors of two world wars.

Theater also changed dramatically during the time period covered by this project. The rise of the nickelodeon in the early twentieth century and the increasing power of the Hollywood star system were directly correlated with the demise of popular theatrical forms such as the dance hall and vaudeville. By the time of this project‘s earliest text, The Crucible, television was making further inroads on the audiences for live theater. As I discuss further later in this introduction, the new economic realities for theater necessitated by a decreasing patron base led to the further development of what critic David Savran has accurately described as "middlebrow" theater, a theatrical form with its base in the late the Victorian theater, but which became more and more prevalent during the twentieth century, with the effect of making theater an increasingly bourgeois art form. In short, theater became more thoroughly aimed at the parents of those newly-minted white and middle-class teenagers arising during this era.

Given this project‘s emphasis on adolescence as a construction, and given the fact that

―teenager‖ wasn‘t even a familiar cultural term before the 1940s, it is important to remember that the teenager, no less than any other identity category we might imagine, can and should be understood as historically constructed and contingent. What it ―means‖ to be a teenager is subject to conceptual shifts based on population rise and fall, economic conditions, and the talking points of election cycles, among other factors. The participation of youth in publics or counter-publics is also vitally important to how we perceive them since "these public contexts Salvi 28

necessarily entail and bring into being realms of subjectivity outside the conjugal domestic

family. Their protocols of discourse and debate remain open to effective and expressive

dimensions of language. And their members make their embodiment in status at least partly

relevant in a public way by their very participation" (Warner 58).

In keeping with this attention to historical constructions, it is important to note that many of our fears about juvenile delinquency are founded not so much on fact as they are on hyperbole, and that this anxiety too has an important cultural history. Speaking of the fears surrounding youth crime in the 1950s, Palladino writes that:

Official government statistics drew no real distinction between violent crimes (like rape,

assault, and armed robbery) and status crimes (underage drinking, curfew violation, and

driving without a license). As far as the adult public was concerned, ―the numbers were

going up,‖ and that was all that mattered. According to the FBI, juvenile delinquency

rose 45 percent between 1945 and 1953, and 55 percent between 1952 and 1957, but a

closer look revealed that truancy and incorrigible behavior led the list in Jacksonville,

Florida, for instance. In Chicago, it was curfew violation and disorderly conduct. In

fact, according to police estimates, only one teenage gang in ten ever committed violent

crimes, and only 1 percent of the teenage population ended up in court, despite an

exceedingly broad definition of teenage criminal behavior. (161)

Furthermore, how we treat adolescents within the judicial system is often linked to gender, with

young men historically being punished for violence and young women for acting on their

sexuality. "Whereas misbehaving boys found themselves in court for the same transgressions as

adult men might commit – say, theft or assault – girls were punished more harshly than boys and Salvi 29

for lesser, victimless infractions, especially for the crime of ‗precocious sexuality‘… . By the

1960s, three quarters of all arrested girls were charged with sexual misconduct" (Levine 81).

Even today, our uncertainty about who counts as a child, an adolescent, or an adult

complicates how we deal with people within the legal framework. Pat Califia describes statutory

rape laws, which vary from state to state, as ―a hodgepodge … which designate a wide range of

ages at which young people supposedly become able to give informed consent to engage in

sexual activity‖ (55). Researcher Stephanie Levine writes that "the age of consent range[s],

literally, all over the map: in Hawaii in 1998 it was fourteen; in Virginia, fifteen; Minnesota and

Rhode Island, sixteen; Texas, seventeen; Wisconsin eighteen" (88). At the same time that we

continue to treat those well past puberty as children when it comes to sex, we throw the book at

even very young teens who commit violent crimes. America tries an ever-growing number of

teens as adults within the judicial system, even while a number of important psychological

studies show that emotional maturity and decision-making capabilities continue to develop long

after the body reaches reproductive adulthood. The United States saw a 34 percent increase in

the number of minors incarcerated in adult facilities between 1994 and 1997 (Califia 80). These

juridical conundrums, and the extremely different ways they affect teens of different race and

class positions, point out the political and social stakes of defining what constitute childhood,

adolescence, and adulthood.

All of these historical and social factors play an important role in how the texts under examination here construct, reify, or trouble our assumptions about adolescence. While I work to read the texts as texts and as performances, or, as I have previously described them, as acts of performed public speech, I also situate my readings within these social debates. The axiomatic assumptions I outlined earlier in my introduction centrally shape how I make sense out of these Salvi 30 texts. Many societal benefits accrue from continuing to promote and uphold a figuration of adolescents as dare-devils, risk-takers, and hoodlums, especially among the lower classes and especially in times of war when ―the nation depend[s] on inexperienced boys whose hunger for adventure outweigh[s] their sense of risk—a quality that often mark[s] them as ‗precocious‘ or even ‗delinquent‘ in civilian life‖ (Palladino 65). I argue that as long as we continue to fear teenagers we are more likely to punish them than to help them, or to take seriously a compassionate program of educating them to be full citizens. It is, in other words, important to attend to the ways in which our construction of teens-as-peril serves its own function in culture.

If our discussion of teens-as-imperiled allows us to enact a wide variety of protectionist and educational processes whose actual value to teens is dubious, the discussion of the teen-as-peril enables the conscription of young bodies into a variety of dangerous service positions. My work intervenes in this dynamic in a number of ways, so that in my discussion of Equus, for example,

I demonstrate the variety of levels on which the text constructs Alan as a peril to the adults around him, while in my discussion of Paula Vogel's play How I Learned to Drive, I explore how the character of Li‘l Bit circumvents our expectations about what sexual trauma means for young women.

Theoretical Contexts

In order to understand how the figure of the teenager functions, we must first attend to

the figure of the child that precedes the teenager both chronologically and theoretically.20 ―The

Child,‖ and the Child‘s relationship to the key categories of epistemology, pedagogy, and

sexuality, is a figure whose rhetorical value and function has been widely discussed by a number

20 By ―precedes theoretically‖ I mean that many theorists have paid attention to figurations of the Child, while attention to the Teen as differentiated from the Child is, as yet, rather harder to find. Salvi 31

of important critics. Furthermore, I want to briefly situate my own argument within the context

of current conversations around what child/teenager "means." Very little of the theorization most

prominent in childhood studies deals explicitly with the adolescent, or thinks about adolescence

as a phase of life in some ways distinct from childhood. When I use the word "child" in the

following pages, it's not because I wish to blur childhood and adolescence into one another.

Indeed, it is precisely this slippage I endeavor to avoid. I talk about children here because that is

what scholarship in cultural and literary studies has most intensely focused on. At some points in

my thinking it makes sense to extend the theorization of the child to encompass the theorization

of the adolescent. At other points this would be a false logic to follow, and I do my best to mark

such departures. Because adolescence is most commonly understood as a liminal state, a middle

ground between childhood and adulthood, it follows that the way we talk about adolescence

would tend to veer dizzyingly between how we talk about adults and the way we talk about

children, only occasionally settling into a mode that we could accurately describe as unique to

the teenage years. In fact, when we talk about teenagers it is important to note precisely the

points at which our language works to either falsely infantilize the figure or prematurely mature

it. Moments when our language veers decidedly in one direction or the other mark, I argue,

moments when there are particularly important political implications at play in the way we think

about the adolescent as a figure.

Children are more than simply figures, of course, and it surprises no one that as figures they are the bearers of so much weight. What is surprising, however, is the degree to which the representation covers over and subsumes lived realities. The child‘s privileged position as a figure (shared with the reproductive potential of the Mother) as the bearer of futurity, charges the discourse that surrounds it with a peculiar vehemence. Bruhm and Hurley argue that the child Salvi 32

―becomes the bearer of heteronormativity, appearing to render ideology invisible by cloaking it in simple stories, euphemisms, and platitudes. The child is the product of physical reproduction, but functions just as surely as a figure of cultural reproduction‖ (xiii).

The over-determination that attends figurations of children relies upon and is facilitated by the inscription of the child as ―pure,‖ blank, and ―innocent.‖ This emptiness allows us to project onto and into children a host of desires and expectations. Karin Lesnik-Oberstein and Stephen

Thompson in fact argue that ―[t]he identity of the child is over-determination….it is the difference it is charged with excluding‖ (35). Lesnik-Oberstein and Thompson go on to state that:

[T]he child is made to wander around within the discourses of many disciplines,

accruing and fulfilling many and varied functions…. it is the carrier of meanings and

ideologies wherever it is encountered. Sometimes these are deployed purposefully, but

more often without a clear recognition that the dynamics of the narratives within which

the child finds itself may be powerfully directed, redirected, diverted, accelerated, or

dragged to a virtual standstill by its presence. (35-6)

Our attention is called, then, to the multiple ways which the child is used by different types of

genres and discourses. Nor can any of these deployments be said to be ―innocent‖ insofar as

while calling on the figure of the child is in some cases reflexive, it is in every instance meant to

evoke powerful memories and loyalties.

Current debates about the figure of the child tend to either idolize the child or to decry its

censoring effects on public discourse. Lee Edelman, for example, in No Future, argues that the

figure of the child operates as: Salvi 33

the citizen as an ideal, entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation's good,

though always at the cost of limiting the rights "real" citizens are allowed. For the social

order exists to preserve for this universalized subject, this fantasmatic Child, a notional

freedom of more highly valued than the actuality of freedom itself, which might, after all,

put at risk the Child to whom such a freedom falls due. (11)

For Edelman the figure of the child operates as the ultimate censor in the politics of national life.

The emphasis that futurity places upon the figure of the child has the effect of constantly forcing enfranchised adults into positions of deferment and abnegation. The child is the figure in whose name we say "don't rock the boat," and in whose name a conservative politics, which seeks to shore up the privileges of the traditionally privileged, is deployed. Edelman also links this figuration of the child with the politics of the American right, arguing that:

the political right…invit[es] us to kneel at the shrine of the sacred Child, the Child who

might witness lewd or inappropriate behavior; the Child who might find information

about dangerous "lifestyles" on the Internet; the Child who might choose a provocative

book from the shelves of the public library; the Child, in short, who might find an

enjoyment that would nullify the figural value, itself imposed by adult desire, of the child

as unmarked by adult‘s adulterating implication in desire itself. (19-20)

We see here the image of the child hungry for knowledge, willing and able to use that knowledge

– a child, in short, who begins to look a lot more like what we think of as a teenager. At stake here is the difference between the real child, who might want this knowledge regardless of whether or not he or she is yet chronologically a teenager, and the figural child who is denied from having this knowledge no matter what his or her age. It becomes an open question, then, whether the child who gets access to this "dangerous" knowledge stays a "child" or becomes Salvi 34 conscripted, willy-nilly, into becoming a "teenager." Consequently, what we actually see at work in the political right‘s discourse is that insistence on the strict maintenance of innocence leads to the denial of any possibility for full maturity or citizenship. It is odd, bizarre even, that our national rhetoric around children works so insistently against instilling competence, judgment, and discernment. Even more alarming, however, is how this rhetoric gets transferred away from the child and back onto the adult citizen, denying full enfranchisement to both.

While Edelman is interested primarily in the figural child, other equally prominent scholars remain invested in the lived experience of adolescence. Scholar Henry Giroux, for example, argues that we must ―register youth as a theoretical, moral, and political center of concern‖ and that ―[d]oing so will remind adults of the ethical and political responsibility to invest in youth as a symbol for not only securing a democratic future but also keeping alive those elements of civic imagination, culture, and education that subordinate economic principles to democratic values‖ (Suspect 21). Giroux investigates how representations of youth can reveal the operations of power and politics, but he is also invested in the idea of a "culture of innocence" surrounding children, as if that is the only discourse that could justify a valuation of youth as a semi-distinct class of citizens. In other words, even in politically motivated and critical work of our modern construction of adolescence, innocence remains a constituent category of what it is to be a child — and by extension an adolescent — and thus innocence remains the rallying cry for the political change he wants to enact. While Giroux's main targets are the processes of capitalism and consumerism that value children as consumers rather than citizens, his emphasis on a protectionist stance towards children often ends up uncannily echoing the right‘s call for a renewed emphasis on family life.21

21 Giroux's stated desire to return the socialization of children to "religious institutions, schools, and family" looks an awful lot like a return to the mythic dream world of Leave It to Beaver. The force of Giroux's critique of Salvi 35

Edelman never directly addresses the category of adolescence, while Giroux's work does

because it is during adolescence that we begin to see youth as threatening, and because the image

of the threatening youth is most clearly articulated through images of black and urban youth that

Giroux is interested in. Even though this study follows Edelman in looking at issues of

figuration, and while this study investigates the "normal" white and middle-class teenager,

Giroux's argument is important here because it conflates two central ideas that need not be

conflated. First, Giroux upholds the idea that innocence is a constituent category of youth that

must be maintained. Second, and more crucially, Giroux implies that if we do not protect the

innocence of youth, the degree to which those same youth are seen as a threat by the society they

live in is exponentially increased. Giroux, by implication, seeks to limit or slow down how the

adolescent enters into many different kinds of knowledge. This is a problematic rhetorical move

for Giroux, invested as his argument is with his claim to want to nurture democracy and

democratic practices, since a well-informed and well-educated citizenry is considered one of the

constitutive hallmarks of democratic practice. To protect innocence is necessarily to work

against such a model of citizenry, even as one claims to be working toward it.22

To move chronologically forward from the child to the teen and to return to the importance of what is at stake in our cultural depictions of the teenager, it is important to think about the teleological endpoint of adolescence — namely, adulthood — and how the categories of child, teen, and adult are variously set in dialogue with our notions of what it means to be a citizen and a knowing subject. Here my thinking is informed most crucially by Lauren Berlant‘s

consumerism and his passionate desire to see the material lives of children and young people change for the better pulls at his readers but the implications of his vision are problematically limited and insufficiently utopian. The rhetorical overlaps between his work and the rhetoric of the conservative right provide concrete evidence of the degree to which the political right has managed to control the terms of the conversation.

22 "Innocence" is a tricky term to define, as it implies not just ignorance but a certain je n‟est se quoi quality of guilelessness as well. For further thinking on the difference between ignorance and innocence see Avital Ronnell, Stupidity. Salvi 36 work in her book The Queen of America Goes to Washington City. As a conceptual category,

―citizenship provides an index for appraising domestic national life, and for witnessing the processes of valorization that make different populations legitimate socially and under the law‖

(Berlant 20). Another useful definition of citizenship is offered by Russ Castronovo and Dana

Nelson in their introduction to the collection Materializing Democracy, where they write that

"citizenship functions as a technology that offers opportunity for participation in governance – provided the actors consents to occupy the calculable, governable space of citizen" (8). This articulation helps us see that citizenship is in fact predicated on a series of concrete actions undertaken in specific configurations. That is, we should understand the use of the term here through the Foucauldian paradigm which is simply summed up by Jim Gerrie as an understanding that ―technology is not simply an ethically neutral set of artifacts by which we exercise power over nature, but also always a set of structured forms of action by which we also inevitably exercise power over ourselves" (―Was Foucault a Philosopher of Technology?‖).

The imaginative reversal of the citizen from adult into child also often enables the citizen to abjure the responsibilities of citizenship by extending to the state the right and responsibility of acting in loco parentis. That is, in its role as national parent, the state offers to regulate public life and give ―protections‖ in the name of ―the child‖ that we may not want, need, or profit by. By infantilizing the citizen we continue to participate in upholding the problematic sacralization of innocence (and a correlated passivity) as an epistemological category and state of being that must be maintained at any cost.

Both Berlant and Edelman argue that the Child has come to stand as and for the ideal citizen, a fact that alarms insofar as it is a figure ―entitled to claim full rights to its future share in the nation‘s good, though always at the cost of limiting the rights ‗real‘ citizens are allowed‖ Salvi 37

(Edelman 11). Thus, while children and teens are not recognized as citizens, in the fullest and most enfranchised sense of the word, our construction of the citizen draws a tremendous amount of power from metaphors of infantalization (cf. Berlant 58-9, 67).

The relationship between the child and the citizen is also of particular import when it

comes to pedagogy. It is easy – but still vital – to assert, as Jeffrey C. Goldfarb does, that "a

liberal education prepares us to take part as citizens in the great conversation about the values of

the good society, providing the means to judge and realize those values; learning in questioning

inherited wisdom's, being capable of engaging in civil conversation about ideas that matter and

capable of subverting civility when it masks things that matter" (353). This is just one of

innumerable comments available to illustrate the long-standing correlation between issues of

education and issues of democracy. (An obvious example here would have to be that of

Rousseau, who was explicitly attempting in Emile to write a pedagogy manual adequate to the

task of preparing a good citizen for life.) In short, education is a key component of democracy in

so far as we must teach people how to be citizens in the first place.

At the same time, we must also follow Goldfarb in heeding Hannah Arendt‘s observation

―that ‗education can play no part in [free] politics, because in politics we always have to deal

with those who are already educated. Whoever wants to educate adults really wants to act as

their guardian and prevent them from political activity.‘ Confusing education with politics

substitutes the authoritative relationship between teacher and students for the democratic

relationship among citizens" (Goldfarb 345). At some point, then, we must trust that the

education has been satisfactorily completed, trusting the citizen. Arendt's warning comes, of

course, in the wake of fascism, but the urge to educate citizens "correctly" is hard to resist. In her

essay "Uncle Sam Needs a Wife," Lauren Berlant reminds us that "since the 1840s thousands of Salvi 38 citizenship training manuals have been generated in the United States for the purpose of making both native-born and immigrant occupants literate in national culture and its various locales"

(149). Berlant's essay highlights moments like the struggle for suffrage highlight the degree to which standards of education have often been used as benchmarks for those who could and could not be trusted with full enfranchisement.23 In the citizenship manual which gives Berlant's essay its title, "women's impractical lack of knowledge engenders an image of what Uncle Sam Needs a Wife calls a political ‗moron‘and an ‗idiot.‘ In this hyperbole resonates the longer struggle with the movement about what it means to be constructing the citizen as someone who's formally educated" (151). The multiple addressees of citizenship primers demonstrate the notion that appropriate pedagogy will achieve a melting-pot effect, ―[nullifying differences] through the meta-cultural form of the nation" (150). But this falls apart in practice, since the logic of these linked concepts suggests that a) one must be educated in order to be a citizen and b) we educate children. Therefore, those who are not educated are, regardless of their actual chronological age, children in the eyes of the state. Since access to education can be circumscribed by so many historical contingencies, the net result of this linkage is that it enables the state to continue in acting its technologies on a wide array of bodies while only fully enfranchising a fractional percentage of its overall population. Furthermore, the existence of the primer subtly suggests the difficulties of training one to citizenship, implying that perhaps it cannot be learned by every audience and consequently that some will never be able to attain the citizenship they seek.

While pedagogy is at the heart of how we conceptualize what it means to be a citizen this fact

23 Berlant reminds us that "the history of civil rights in the United States shows the gaining the franchise is both an event and a process, the zone of individualization that always crackles with contingency.… Still, the franchise is the precise difference between zero and one for members of the historically excluded population; it changes the conditions of survival in relation to the domain of justice. No matter how small an event or gesture of agency, the vote not only signal something like full formal belonging to the body politic but registers a grounding that enables subjects to move across time and space, regardless of their particular or individual genealogies" (―Uncle Sam‖ 149). Salvi 39 also raises up the specter of failed pedagogy and the possibility of failed citizenship. This failure of citizenship could be measured along any number of axes, ranging from failures of civic participation and lack of patriotism to moral degradation.

Sexuality also comes into play here as an axis on which the success of citizenship can be measured, not least because the state also takes an interest in properly training the ways in which its citizens express that sexuality. Berlant articulates multiple times the ways in which properly trained sexuality has often been another key strategy in limiting how broadly citizenship can be imagined to apply. In the case of suffrage, she notes that "respectability was the key. Respectable women would produce a respectable world… [And] respectability was evidenced more readily through proper sexuality than class location" (―Uncle Sam‖ 152).24 To extend this observation outside the specific realm of suffrage, Berlant writes:

It is common to hold still a beloved social norm so that other changes can seem less

threatening. Sexuality frequently plays this role, the role of the potentially anarchic force

that must be bound conservatively so that additions might be made to the hegemonic

field. Repeatedly during the twentieth century, political struggle around rights and

practices not explicitly sexual have deployed the institutions and rhetoric of intimacy to

threaten and promise citizens about the destiny of the good life which they are aiming.…

Sentimental politics risks the running out of control that sexuality also risks, locates the

problem of passion mainly in the subject's heart, addressing citizens as isolated subjects

and charting their capacities for social membership through the manifestations in

conscious of empathic identification and proper self-management. (156)

24 Berlant also implicates practices of consumerism in defining this respectability, examining the logic of the analogy used in the pamphlet which equates women ―getting their ballot‘s worth‖ to the process of being a savvy shopper. Here consumerism works to maintain respectability by channeling desire into appropriate capitalist venues, where the ―new citizen of the world… will be too busy adapting to the urgencies of consumer desire to have surplus or unwieldy desires that register beyond the normative machinery" (Uncle Sam 153). Salvi 40

Sexuality‘s repeated alignment with the private can be seen, then, not only to construct a problematic zone of privacy but also to move our capacity for sympathetic engagement out of the public sphere and back into the domestic. And of course, when it comes to the teenager, we must recognize that the teenager can't display appropriate sexuality under most social structures, since to display sexuality at all is taboo, so it's not surprising that they should be so consistently shut out from the possibilities of citizenship. (This doesn‘t, of course, mean that teenagers don‘t display their sexuality and that many adults manage to cope with this fact. That display remains, however, problematic and heavily policed.) However, we might be able to reclaim parts of this language of national sentiment to more overtly democratic ends.25 As Chris Castiglia writes:

Political theorists C. Douglas Lummis, in describing his own affective state on beginning

his investigation into radical democracy, reports: "it was experience a little like falling in

love with a girl (or boy) next door -- the being you have always known suddenly appears

so new, so fresh, so... unprecedented." If discovering democracy is like developing a

crush, couldn't it also be that developing a crush is like developing democracy? Or, isn't

sentimentality what keeps trust alive in a world that otherwise asks for its surrender?

(212)

Castiglia‘s optimistic reading finds a way to bring the language of the personal (and the erotic) into the public sphere without privatizing that experience because the object of affection is understood not to be something that could be contained within another individual. Rather, what

25 Berlant agrees that the national sentimental could be used more democratically: "It is not empathic feeling is itself a bad thing, as the desire to feel inside of an intimate impersonal collectivity can have many different effects. It might ground resistance to political powerlessness; it might be a counterhegemonic drive that survives on small objects until the right one comes along; it might confirm what we already know, the publicity marks danger while private but collective spectatorship protects ... But the repetition of empathic events does not in itself creates change" (Uncle Sam 164). Salvi 41 we might "crush on" is a system that enables citizenship without relying on the disembodied zone of privacy Berlant critiques.

Middlebrow theater of the type I examine here plays a peculiar role in the operations of sentimental politics because it has the capacity to simultaneously embrace and trouble the sentimental organizations of public and private life that we take for granted. Berlant suggests that:

sentimental national culture educates the viscera so that citizens can meet across death

and disaster in a way that is personal and impersonal. The feeling is personal and ethical;

the structure of feeling remains impersonal.... Publicity serves as a pseudo-neutral

domain in which ones principles and one's affect are trained normatively, such that one

takes one's responses as expression of one's true capacity for attachment other humans

rather than as effects of pedagogy. (163)

Theater is undoubtedly one site where the sentimental public‘s viscera might be trained in these normative and hegemonic paths. However, given theater's current cultural marginalization in terms of numbers of viewers, it arguably functions less under this rubric than systems like cable television and Hollywood movies. Theater plays with sentiment and the sentimental, of course.

Everything I read here works in at least some moments to try to produce empathic identification, and none of the texts of this project can or ought to be categorized as avant-garde. The sentimental is also a key component in the structures of romance. So the middlebrow must embrace the sentimental, and in so doing it may, as Brecht suggested, perpetuate systems in which we believe in individual action and individual responsibility rather than collectivity, collaboration, and structural change. But at the same time, none of the texts under consideration ever bring themselves to fully embrace the normatively sentimental. Stoppard acknowledges the Salvi 42 threatening genius of his young protagonist and prevents audiences from seeing her as merely a precocious butterfly. Shaffer emphasizes the destructiveness of normality, while Paula Vogel teaches her audiences to feel sympathy for a pedophile. City of Lost Children categorically up- ends nostalgia and traditional views of the child in order to disrupt the sacralization of innocence.

In effect, then, these plays use the language of sentiment to question what sentiment makes us do even as it is making us feel.

Finally, how sexuality (or at least sexual behavior) becomes imbricated in issues of citizenship points the way towards another central concern of these debates, that of embodiment.

Embodiment is key to understanding who can be said to count as a citizen and why. Categories of citizenship change over time and geography but a common feature of citizenship, particularly in the United States, is its reliance on abstraction, on an ideal of the disembodied soul in order to yield up a conceptual subject. As Russ Castronova articulated in his book Necrocitizenship, "in contrast to…specific bodies, the trope of the body politic structurally depends on a metaphoric insubstantial body that could be deployed against actual episodes of embodied existence. This virtue of this embodiment romanticizes the liberal fantasy of a real and subversive body neither comprised nor constituted by discourse, representation, and epistemology" (17). Or, to put it another way, "Via the contractual structure of citizenship, the state preserves the body politic by rescuing bodies from politics" (Castronova Necrocitizenship 7). Calling attention to the body is often seen as tantamount to confessing one's inability to act as a citizen. Both Castronovo and

Berlant are interested in articulating models of "dead citizenship," that is, "how illusions of abstract personhood…encouraged living bodies to behave politically as dead citizens"

(Castronovo 8). While Castronovo argues that the state‘s "manifest hostility to lived bodily histories" is a result of the "sensuous residuum the troubles the vagueness of generic Salvi 43

personhood" (8), Berlant is less sure about the importance of this "sensuous residuum" except in

so far as that residuum is a marker by which we can trace how the citizen chooses to operate and

deploy their citizenship. As I'll explore at greater length in Chapter 3, Berlant has articulated how

the Diva citizen must, in order to achieve her active radical pedagogy, disperse the zone of

privacy around her body, opening her up to new threats to her ability to claim citizenship.

All of this has important consequences for the adolescent and serves to point us towards

why adolescence is such a disturbing category: because our construction of adolescence relies on

ideas of the body run amok, taken over by uncontrolled desires and ferocious longings. The

adolescent body threatens notions of individual self-control, consequently threatening

possibilities of social control. This conceptual tension between ideals of self-control and social

control is precisely what we see playing out in both versions of Spring‟s Awakening, where the

emphasis remains so insistently on the powerful pull of the physical. In the words of Stephen

Sater, lyricist of the Broadway musical, "Haven't you heard the word of your body?" Sater' s

lyrics rely again and again on the coming together of embodiment and emotional understanding,

as when the would-be lovers Melchior and Wendla croon to each other, "oh, I'm gonna be

wounded/oh, I'm gonna be your wound./Oh, I'm gonna bruise you./Oh, I'm gonna be your

bruise." Melchior and Wendla can only make sense of their feelings through the body, through

the experience of physical transformation through pain that leaves a readable mark -- a bruise or

a scar -- on the body to mark the transformation‘s occurrence. For these characters, in this text

and in our understanding of adolescence broadly, the emotional and the physical become

increasingly hard to separate.

The ―problem‖ of the teenager, as understood by the culture of infantile citizenship, is that it is impossible to deny the teenager at least some knowledge. Indeed, the problem with the Salvi 44 teenager has specifically to do with the ways teens threaten to escape the boundaries of that most subtle and personal machine of capitalism: the nuclear family. Our criticisms of teens focuses particularly on the sense that they live too much in the world, their investments in pop culture, their participation in forms of expression and concerns alien to many adults, and their ―rebellion‖ against the family unit being some of the most frequently repeated criticisms.26 To look at the teenager as a figure who is striving against the pressures of an infantilizing discourse in a way actively recognized by those voices most anxious about the behavior of teens reveals some limits to Berlant‘s arguments about the degree to which infantilized citizenship can be enforced. I am stepping into this narrative of (non-)development in order to eliminate possibilities for radical social change and resetting the coordinates for the line of civic maturation. Perhaps the discourse is not as hegemonic as we might at first believe.

The Shape of These Things

The study is arranged thematically and focuses primarily on depictions of adolescents found in the theater: Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, The Crucible by Arthur Miller, How I Learned to Drive by Paula Vogel, Equus by Peter Shaffer, Tea and Sympathy by Robert Anderson. My goal throughout is to interrogate different conceptions of the adolescent in relation to the public sphere, even when the scenes in question are coded as intimate and private. My coda takes a left turn, examining how the depiction of children in the French film The City of Lost Children points the way towards possibilities for different conceptions of both the child and the teenager.

26 Of course, another set of common criticisms of teens focuses on their failure to live up to norms of etiquette, hence the popularity of charges made against teens that they are rude, self-absorbed, melodramatic, and inconsiderate. The vehemence with which we castigate teens for these venal sins suggests how easy it is for teens to seriously disrupt our notions of respectability and stability. Salvi 45

The tactic in my first two chapters is to interrogate how our emotional experiences as audiences or readers of these plays influences our public understanding of these figures. In this I follow the lead of Anne Cvetkovich, who persuasively argues in her book Mixed Feelings for the importance of attending to our affective responses in the political register. Cvetkovich argues:

that contemporary theories of mass culture often depend on the problematic assumption

that culture merely reroutes affect rather than actively constructing it. The claim that

mass culture displaces or transforms affect rests on the assumption that affect is a natural

or pre-discursive entity, which exists independently of the cultural forms that structure

and produce it. Furthermore, this model does not account for the fact that mass culture

actually creates affect, by representing complex social issues in simpler and emotionally

engaging terms, that is, by sensationalizing them. (28)

Cvetkovich goes on to trace out the ways in which "sensationalize figures or fantasies actively construct ‗reality‘‖ and ―how a discourse about affect privatizes and personalizes political action…also transform[ing] what we mean by ‗politics,‘ opening up questions about how political life engages affect and psychic processes" (44). I am also influenced here by the work of Glenn Hendler, who has argued about reading publics that "the experience of sympathetic identification…[has] functioned as psychological preparation for reader‘s participation not only in the reading public, but also in the political public" (22). Thus the early chapters attend frequently to the nuances of audience response, tracing out the implications of our moments of sympathetic identification with the characters on stage. In particular, I investigate how these plays often turn our attention away from the teenager and back towards the figure of the adult whose life is disrupted by his or her contact with the extravagant foreignness of the adolescent. Salvi 46

This signals, I suggest, a particular desire to not know the teenager because what teens present us with is too disruptive to be incorporated into our solidified worldview.

Chapter One focuses on Tom Stoppard's play Arcadia, using the text as a barometer to illustrate and establish some of the norms of discourse around adolescence and the convergence of sexuality and epistemology. More specifically, I illuminate how the text participates in a fetishization of the child figure in order to stave off the threat of the teenager's uncanny knowledge. The text achieves this by positioning the adolescent as both a knowing and desiring subject and by simultaneously denying her a meaningful stake in those roles. Thus we can see that at some moments, the text holds up Thomasina as an adorable and unthreatening proto- citizen, but at other moments we see the girl as a repository of impossible knowledge, knowledge that is prophetic, that is uncanny, that has the power to disrupt (and in the case of Septimus, destroy) the lives around her. By reading Thomasina as a figure for adolescence more generally, we can see how the text's fascination with and fear of her can be typified and extended beyond the play, into the realm of our discourse around adolescents more generally.

Chapter Two uses Peter Shaffer's Equus, and to a lesser extent Robert Anderson‘s Tea and Sympathy, to map out the widespread influence of Freud's legacy on our modern conceptions of adolescence and adolescent sexuality. Here I explore how deviant sexuality is constructed as a potent threat to the social order which dangerously reduces the adolescent‘s ability to take his or her place in the machinery of citizenship. These plays, and Equus in particular, suggest that the way to solve the "problem" of the teenager is to figure out the teen‘s sexuality and to correct it, send it back down a normal path. Equus, in a move often overlooked, links Alan's queerness to a far-reaching critique of modern culture: its consumerism, claims of civility and civilization, its emotional sterility and alienating effects. The play uses sexuality as the sine qua non of this Salvi 47 critique; the audience is led to see an unfettered sexuality as a rejection of cultural stability, and a safely heteronormative sexuality as sign of capitulation to the norm. Because the text explicitly links sexuality to issues of religion and worship, labor, consumerism, and psychology, it is easy to follow the text‘s lead and thus to accept the idea that to correct Alan's sexuality would be to

"fix" the problem of his disruption. My argument is that what the issue of sex covers over, vis-à- vis the teen, are the possibilities for a radically disrupted future. By focusing so intently on the teenager‘s sexual behavior and identity, we enable ourselves to avoid looking at the other issues raised by the figure of the adolescent.

While my first two chapters delineate the rhetorical tactics used to keep adolescents from achieving full citizenship, my second two chapters explore what happens when youth act as citizens anyway, disregarding their disenfranchisement in attempts to remake the civic sphere.

Chapter Three contrasts the different models of citizenship articulated by Arthur Miller‘s The

Crucible and Paula Vogel's How I Learned to Drive. Drawing heavily on Lauren Berlant's theories of infantile and diva citizenship, I argue that these plays investigate the relationship of private trauma to public embodiment, reframing the relationship between intellectual and sexual knowledge as the capacity to successfully enter into critical consciousness. The previous chapters demonstrate the workings of fantasmatic scenes of learning predicated on (though not always controlled by) hierarchical student/teacher relationships. In this chapter, I investigate what can happen when the student becomes the teacher. I use concept of allegoresis to examine ways in which the figure of the female adolescent has been co-opted into pressing debates about the status, formation, and the character of national life. Thinking through how allegory often prompts its readers to make sense of the text through a morally dyadic (black versus white, right Salvi 48 versus wrong) framework, I address how moral discomfort becomes a productive rhetorical strategy when confronting how these texts address the key terms of sexuality and epistemology.

In my final chapter, ―A Krank‘s Dream: Aesthetics and Ideology in The City of Lost

Children,‖ I use a reading of this French film to demonstrate how a re-imagining of the child and adolescent through aesthetics, rather than ideology, might make space for a new vocabulary with which to speak about these issues. This is not to imply that the plays I read here are not also aesthetic objects. However, because the film is a fixed text -- unlike the plays, which can, as previously noted, be played in a multiple of different registers -- its aesthetic tactics are easier to identify. I use Baudelaire‘s articulation of the flaneur and the work of Michel De Certeau to articulate how an aesthetic re-valuation of these figures might de-essentialize them, leading us to see them not as fixed generational identities that are once inhabited and then discarded, but rather as productive tactics in different modes of discourse, positions that can be performed as needed, without censure.

All of these texts, in one way or another, have something to tell us about how our rhetoric seeks to deny these proto-citizens the ability to emerge into full citizenship. In Arcadia this denial works through historical nostalgia and death: Thomasina can't emerge into full citizenship because the historical conditions of the play make it clear that she never could have emerged.

Whatever form of citizenship she might have embodied doesn't matter to us now because she isn't of our time; freezing her in the past keeps her intact as a fetishistic site of unrealized possibility. Alan Strang, in Equus, can be read as one so frightened by the possibilities for citizenship that his culture presents him that he retreats into private madness. Though his madness articulates a radical critique of his culture, the pedagogy forced on him through the process of psychoanalysis ultimately assures us (though not without some sadness for this fact) Salvi 49 that his ―healing‖ guarantees his ultimate impotence as a figure for social change. The third chapter explores some of the ways claiming citizenship can go badly awry. In The Crucible,

Abigail is the citizen-gone-wrong through moral failure. In How I Learned to Drive Li‘l Bit‘s trauma history threatens her ability to become a citizen at all. There is plenty to threaten culture in the pseudonymous children of The City of Lost Children, and indeed a sentimental reading might urge us to the conclusion that the scars of their early years will ultimately prevent them from successfully claiming their enfranchisement, even in the dystopian world the film presents.

However, I would suggest that the fact that the children of the film have not yet reached puberty allows us to see them as endowed with greater plasticity than the adolescents I explore in the first part of the project, and thus are figures to whom more hope can be attached. Although this would render the film's characters vulnerable to the kind of critique Edelman deploys, in this particular instance the work done by the rest of the film to both negate traditional images of children's innocence and to re-imagine the family dynamic makes this final gesture of hope less problematic than it would be within a more traditional narrative structure.

This project grew out of a desire to join critics I admire in investigating the persistent sacralization of innocence even within what we have come to understand as an information- based economy. As the work progressed I began to see that this paradox makes a certain amount of sense: the consistent alignment of innocence with a lack of sexuality is but one of society's many tools of bodily regulation. This regulation, in turn, produces more governable citizens remain content to work within the alienating and sterile environments of the information economy. Adolescence, as I have suggested, is particularly threatening to this system because it is so commonly understood as a time when the body threatens to slip out from under all our attempts to regulate its activities and desires. The texts of this project rely on performance, and Salvi 50 as such they insist that we turn our attention to these conflicts between the body and governing social structures. They stage the demands of different kinds of desire: desire for knowledge, desire for family, desire for other kinds of bodies, desire for power. And while these texts often express fear of those desires, they also cannot help but celebrate them. I investigate both the fears and the celebrations, hoping to tease out figural and social possibilities both realistic and hopeful.

Salvi 51

Chapter One

Wanted Dead or Alive: Teenagers and the Threat of Prophetic Vision in Arcadia

Do we feel that a defiled child is of no use to us and might as well be dead?

--James Kincaid, Erotic Innocence (17)

How is a ruined child different from a ruined castle?

-Thomasina Coverly, Arcadia, (11)

A Murder Mystery—Why Must the Teenager Die?

The second law of thermodynamics, roughly and imperfectly translated from mathematics into English, states that the entropy of the universe is always increasing and that certain physical actions and reactions are irreversible. As the character of Thomasina Coverly explains it in the opening scene of Tom Stoppard‘s play Arcadia, observing that once mixed together she cannot re-separate her rice pudding and jam, ―You cannot stir things apart‖ (5). Her tutor Septimus agrees with her assessment, remarking: ―No more you can, time must need run backward, and since it will not, we must stir our way onward mixing as we go, disorder out of disorder into disorder until pink is complete, unchanging and unchangeable, and we are done with it forever‖

(5). While this observation is perfectly sound in accurately describing the irreversibility of physical actions, Septimus makes an odd leap with Thomasina‘s idea when he concludes his thought by saying that ―this is known as free will or self-determination‖ (5). In this moment,

Septimus encourages both his student and the audience to see physics and metaphysics as the same thing, conflating scientific fact with philosophical paradigm, empirical observation with moral maxim.

There is a distinction to be made here between the experience of seeing the play and the experience of reading it. During performance this moment is more likely to register with the Salvi 52 audience as evidence of the sympathy between student and teacher than as logical conundrum: there is little time during the theatrical experience to stop and ask whether or not we really believe that the promiscuous intermingling of the elements of the world is the same thing as free will. The moment passes quickly, and furthermore leads directly into Thomasina's observation that if God follows the logic of Newtonian principles then a mathematical formula for the future would have to exist, giving us one of our first real tastes of the quickness of the girl's mind. But in reading we can slow down, and we would do well to question such an easy equivalency between the laws of the natural world and the norms by which we measure our moral and social choices. The ease with which an audience might pass over this moment of logical fallacy is a hint that Septimus‘s slip can easily become our own. This slip between what is empirically known and what is culturally assumed is especially common in regards to the adolescent, where a de-historicizing view of adolescence leads frequently to the creation of a set of moral maxims about what adolescents ought to be. These moral maxims, in turn, effectively limit not only the free will of the adolescents they are meant to govern (after all, moral maxims are always meant to serve as checks on behavior) but also the ability of adults to see these young people for who they really are, or who they might really become.

While it may be true that when we stir together pudding and jam it results in one hot pink mess, this chapter questions the logic that assumes that innocence acts like the second law of thermodynamics. What factors make possible the assumption that innocence, once ―corrupted‖ through experience and knowledge, is either something you have or don‘t have? Why does this play breezily assume that knowledge about something like, for example, fractals, develops concurrently with knowledge about sexuality? Does innocence always work as a one-way street, like the progression of heat to cold? And if innocence does only work in one direction, does that Salvi 53 fact have to be tragic? What do we gain in place of our lost innocence, and might that not, finally, be more valuable? Arcadia takes place in a school room, and its plot revolves around the acquisition and meaning of knowledge. These questions about innocence, however, bear most directly on the figure of Thomasina and the use-value of the knowledge she both creates and engenders within the play's structure. Thus the questions become, first, what is happening to

Thomasina in the context of her pedagogical relationship with Septimus and, second, why is she killed at the moment of her sexual awakening?

Within the larger whole of this project, Arcadia functions as a benign barometer: benign because the character of Thomasina is herself less overtly threatening than figures I will examine in other chapters, although even here fissures begin to emerge. Arcadia is also benign from a formal point of view. Although the play does not adhere to the Aristotelian unities, its tight construction and verbal dexterity reveal it as the very model of modern well-made play. Unlike other texts investigated in this project it does not require avant-garde staging techniques (Equus), elaborate special effects (City of Lost Children), or casting which relies on Brechtian alienation effects (How I Learned to Drive). Finally, the play works as a barometer because it allows me to both describe and measure a number of the norms and discourses surrounding adolescents.

Patterns in rhetoric that I identify in this chapter reappear throughout the texts and arguments of the project, making Arcadia the perfect place to begin my investigation. Although Arcadia

(unlike texts I discuss later) does not directly address questions of citizenship or social belonging, it is still possible to obliquely answer the question of what the play thinks a citizen is or should be.

Although the play makes use of rhetorical patterns about adolescence common in many different kinds of discourse, it also plays off these norms, putting pressure on our models of Salvi 54 teenagers just as Thomasina herself puts pressure on the model of a deterministic, Newtonian model of the universe. The play is, as I've already mentioned, well-made, but it is also a hard text to read insofar as it deliberately troubles conventions around comedy and tragedy, eliciting from audiences gales of laughter only to end in death. The play undoes the comic/tragic binary, a move which in and of itself destabilizes reading practices. Through the play's comic strains

Stoppard teases out new possibilities of discourse that demonstrate Thomasina‘s literally genius capacity for citizenship, implicitly upholding a model of citizenship predicated on being richly engaged with numerous discourses and characterized by active curiosity. Ultimately, however, its whimsical hopefulness cannot be sustained because of the uncomfortable pressure Thomasina exerts on social paradigms through both her intellect and her sexuality. The only solution to the problem of (proto-) citizenship the text is able to come up with is to isolate the disruptive figure through the stasis engendered by death.

I begin this chapter by examining the critical questions usually asked about this play, in order to situate and differentiate my own reading. I continue by tracing links between pedagogy debates of the early nineteenth century to the debates framed by the play and by my dissertation as a whole, a move which also allows me to illuminate the effects of the play's nostalgic view of history. Then I provide a close reading of the character of Thomasina, working more fully through my claims about her usefulness as a model for our assumptions about adolescence.

Turning then to the confluence in this play of pedagogy and erotics, I demonstrate how a critical insistence on the sexual agency of the teacher has the result of refusing to allow the student to emerge into full maturity and hence, citizenship. The reasons behind this refusal to allow the student to emerge into full agency are explained through a thorough discussion of the dangerous Salvi 55 implications of Thomasina's prophetic knowledge and how the play‘s conclusion works to shut down and protect the audience from these implications.

Critical aporias

Curiously, although the relationship between Thomasina and Septimus is for most audience members the emotional heart of the play, the dynamic between them gets relatively short shrift from most critics, who tend to focus more on the text‘s formal implications, the scientific and mathematic themes, or the relationship between mathematics and the play‘s structure. Susanne Vees-Gulani, for example, focuses her attention on explicating the degree to which Stoppard‘s understanding of the intricacies of chaos theory informs the structure of the play, in addition to providing important content. Much like Vees-Gulani, Lucy Melbourne is primarily concerned with using science as a tool to explicate the play‘s structure and content.

While Vees-Gulani focuses on Chaos theory to explain the complex shifts in the play between events and their eventual, almost impossible-to-predict-from-the-cause effects, Melbourne sees the metaphor of the iterated algorithm, in which results are fed back into an equation to produce a new portion of the graph, as the more accurate description of the play‘s work. In the same vein,

Daniel Jernigan argues that Stoppard ―engage[s] the concerns of the postmodern era‖ through the science and math themes of Arcadia and Hapgood and questions whether or not we can or should read Stoppard‘s work as post-modern because of its engagement with these themes (3).

Ultimately, Jernigan asserts that the assumption that these are post-modern texts ―proves to be incorrect, as much of Stoppard‘s investigation into these theories seeks to normalize them according to a classical interpretation rather than to revel in their anti-epistemological implications‖ (4). Shifting critical focus slightly away from science but towards similar kinds of Salvi 56 questions about the tendency of certain texts to trouble our sense of what is true and knowable,

Irene Martyniuk compares Stoppard‘s play to A.S. Byatt‘s almost-contemporaneously written novel Possesion. Martyniuk asserts that ―by the end of each text, both sets of modern scholars believe that they know the real story and that these new understandings give them the ‗truth‖‘

(269). Martyniuk argues that Stoppard‘s audience never does know the whole truth and has, in fact, (paradoxically) to rely on Bernard‘s insistence on the importance of ―gut instinct‖ in order to fool themselves into thinking that they do know the whole story. Read together, these critics provide a remarkably consistent view of the play and its intricacies, providing readings which all hinge on a concern with formal elements to the exclusion of social and cultural questions.

Indeed, the fascination of the majority of critics of Arcadia with the interlinking of science, mathematics, and drama goes a long way towards explaining the relative lack of attention paid to Thomasina. (There are a few exceptions to this rule, which I will discuss shortly.) While her creativity, humor, and whimsy animate the dual narratives, pushing those in the present towards discoveries they would never have made without the force of her invisible hand, the arc of the story we tell about her is in fact so familiar, so simple, so ―normal‖ that we pass her over, focusing instead on the accuracy of Stoppard‘s description of a science and a mathematics that we usually think of as being far from the concerns of literature. So it is worthwhile to ask: What about Thomasina? Why do most critics so insistently look past or through her, as if she does nothing for the play but operate as a puppet to animate ideas about the fundamental (scientific) nature of structure itself? Why is science seemingly the only structure of knowledge production through which we can think about this play? How does its historical setting play into this dynamic? Salvi 57

This chapter axiomatically relies on the methodological insights of Anne Cvetkovich, who argues for the importance of recognizing how our affective responses to texts are culturally conditioned. The aim of attending to the constructedness of these emotional responses is to uncover the degree to which "a reading of the politics of affect…reveals…that the expression of affect is as much a way to dominate as it is a way to resist domination‖ (10). These subtle forms of domination work through ―the production of scenarios of repressed or silenced affect [which give] rise to strategies of containment that do not appear as such because they operate within a discursive field in which affect is constructed as natural and indubitable" (10). In short,

Cvetkovich argues, objects of mass culture such as novels, some forms of AIDS activism, and the conventions of melodrama, teach us to feel in socially appropriate ways. This teaching is invisible because it relies on sensationalism, which

works by virtue of the link that is constructed in the concreteness of the ‗sensation-al‘

event and the tangibility of the ‗sensational‘ feelings it produces. Emotionally charged

representations produce bodily responses that, because they are physically felt, seem to

be natural and thus to confirm the naturalness or reality of the event. The tangibility (and

hence ‗realness‘ or ‗naturalness‘) of feeling or nervous response is invested with

significance as a sign of the concreteness or reality of the representation. (23)

Theater productions of the middlebrow type I examine in this project are not objects of mass culture, but audiences of these plays have already been inculcated with affective responses shaped by the kinds of mass culture Cvetkovich uses for her archive. Thus the sensationalism of which she speaks can be said to work doubly for theater, particularly for theater in the realist vein, where our bodily responses to the bodies on stage are often even more visceral, the sensations of our voyeuristic engagement stronger and collectively reinforced by the experience Salvi 58 of being in the audience. Furthermore, in a play like Arcadia where the political implications of the text are latent, rather than manifest, tracing our affective response is the most effective way of uncovering how this text is part of creating a set of regular responses to the figure of the adolescent. Finally, Cvetkovich reminds us that these conditioned affective responses usually work through disciplinary power (rather than through the power of punishment), which is most commonly seen operating in "institutions gendered as feminine, such as the household and…the culture industry, which exert their power through the mobilization of pleasure and desire and not through an overt force that makes pain or oppression directly evident" (41). I am interested in how these operations of pleasure and desire, which in this text have the effect of fetishizing

Thomasina, end up working to contain her subversive threat. We don't see the discipline exerted by this containment because of our affective response to her character, but the discipline is there all the same.

The chapter title, ―Wanted Dead or Alive‖ comes out of my recognition that while it presents us with an appealing adolescent character, Arcadia also makes at least one move that is very familiar to us: it kills off a female protagonist at the moment at which we as readers and viewers become most aware of the woman‘s sexuality.27 Arcadia, though, takes the trope one step further, killing off the woman, still in many ways a girl, not as punishment for her sexuality but at almost the very moment when that sexuality blossoms. In other well-known texts in which the sexual female dies (I am thinking here of narratives like La Traviata, or more recently of the film Moulin Rouge), the death serves to contain the transgressive threat of unabashed and unfettered female sexuality. In Arcadia, however, Thomasina‘s death works to contain not only sexual threat but a potentially ―dangerous‖ set of intellectual ideas as well. Thus the play, in a

27 Ffor a thorough examination of the aestheticization of dead female bodies, see Elisabeth Bronfen, Over Her Dead Body: Death, Feminity and the Aesthetic. [Finish citation] Salvi 59 move I read as paradigmatic of how we treat figurative (and sometimes real) adolescents, not only conflates sexual and intellectual knowledge but also displays a deep uneasiness about the possibility of allowing the adolescent to have real intellectual agency, even though precocity is a hallmark of her appeal. In effect, Arcadia engages on the linguistic, textual level, in a valorization of Thomasina, her work, and her personhood while simultaneously, on the level of narrative and plot, reducing those aspects of her to almost nothing. Her early death is dramatically effective, lending her story poignancy and tragedy, but is, for the rhetoric of citizenship in which I am interested, extremely problematic. By reading Thomasina as a figure for adolescents more generally, we can see how the text‘s fascination with and fear of her are typical and extend beyond the play to the realm of our discourse around adolescents more generally. Thomasina becomes a repository of impossible knowledge—knowledge that is prophetic, that is uncanny, that has the power to disrupt (and in the case of Septimus, destroy) the lives around her. By killing her, the text allows the middlebrow audience member to continue to fetishize her, and in this fetishization we cover over the force of the knowledge she produces and remove her agency. This fetishization has everything to do with a distinct split in how

Thomasina-as-adolescent is read. The fetish attaches to the childish part of her, the rejection to her emerging adulthood. The ensuing dynamic ensures that on the level of affective response, as well is on the level of plot, Thomasina remains enshrined in the past like the figure of the Hermit in Noake‘s garden sketch, perfectly preserved in the moment just before she could emerge into the larger world beyond Sidley Park and create even larger scandals than Lord Byron himself.

Iterated Algorithms, Or, How History Repeats Itself Salvi 60

First performed in London in 1993, Arcadia follows two plot lines, one in the nineteenth century and one in the twentieth, set in the physical location of the country estate Sidley Park.

While critical attention on the play has largely centered on how the contemporary thread illuminates philosophical questions about how knowledge is produced and what we can properly be said to ―know‖ about history, the emotional center of the play clearly happens through the dynamics established in the nineteenth century thread. Indeed, the degree to which all the characters in the contemporary thread are obsessed with the actions, known and unknown, of the characters of the nineteenth century highlights how the play explores the relationship between history and nostalgia. As Lisa Sternlieb and Nancy Selleck describe it, "in Arcadia, the past is on fire; the future is frozen" (483). The isolation of Thomasina in the nineteenth century, as sole pupil and (almost) sole representative of adolescence, is also a critical tactic in the text‘s fetishization of her. 28 (Thomasina's younger brother, Lord Augustus, also makes an appearance but none of his behavior disrupts how the text is setting up adolescence through Thomasina.) The anxieties that the text continues to project back onto Thomasina, particularly those around the conflation of sexual and intellectual knowledge and the power of the adolescent as almost-adult to initiate radical change, are indicators of anxieties so central to our conception of what the adolescent is and does that we cannot imagine the teenager without them, no matter the period or country the narrative places them in.

History matters in this play: it matters in the formal mechanics of the play's plot and it matters just as much in terms of the types of affective responses the text engenders. It is no

28 This is a slightly risky claim for me to make, insofar as the play text specifies age 15 for the Gus/Augustus character and 18 for Chloe. However, Gus never speaks, Augustus appears for only a few brief moments, and Chloe is, while deeply hormonal, also deemed by Hannah to be ―old enough to vote on her back‖ (74). For these reasons, as well as for practicality of scope, I feel safe in limiting my investigation to Thomsina. Sternlieb and Selleck, however, do make some compelling arguments for reading Gus as equally central to the play‘s development as Thomasina is. Salvi 61 accident that Stoppard stages his investigation into questions of sexuality, the history of ideas, and the terms under which we can produce and achieve knowledge in the two time periods of

1809 and the early 1990s. As Daniel Jernigan has pointed out, both are eras ―when the epistemological dominant was in a state of transition, from the Enlightenment to Romanticism and from modernism to postmodernism respectively‖ (22). Furthermore, a variety of the discourses explored by this project—childhood and its inevitable development into what we now call adolescence, sexuality, education, and knowledge production—have a good deal of overlap in the historical situation of the nineteenth-century characters. It is common, in the wake of

Foucault, for scholars to accept the nineteenth century as the time period in which sexuality was most carefully and extensively codified and catalogued. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick has written of the nineteenth century as a period in which ―‗knowledge‘ and ‗sex‘ became conceptually inseparable from one another—so that knowledge means in the first place sexual knowledge: ignorance, sexual ignorance; and epistemological pressure of any sort seems a force increasingly saturated with sexual impulsion‖ (Epistemology 73). As a corollary to this, James Kincaid writes of the nineteenth century that ―innocence…at one point a theological trope…became more and more firmly attached to this world and this world‘s sexuality. It was, further, a characteristic that outran any simple physical manifestation: innocence became a fulcrum for the post-Romantic ambiguous construction of sexuality and sexual behavior‖ (Innocence 15). That Arcadia stages an anxious guardianship of innocence– sometimes pointedly confusing it with ignorance will be explored in greater depth later in the chapter. However, Thomasina rejects again and again the empty innocence which is forced on her. In so doing she reveals the degree to which that innocence is always unprotectable, not least because those we try to protect with it are completely uninvested in their own ignorance. Salvi 62

In addition to seeing the major epistemological shifts in the world of science, the early nineteenth century‘s major cultural shifts also marked the beginning of a new valuation and understanding of childhood. Not only were children newly recognized as occupying a distinct developmental stage with its own needs and preoccupations, Western society was explicitly engaging with questions of how best to teach young children in order to equip them with the tools of responsible citizenship. In 1761, Jean-Jacques Rousseau‘s publication of Emile worked in part to overturn Augustinian notions of original sin and planted early seeds of a discourse of the ―natural‖ innocence of children and a theory (following in no small part of the ideal of the

―noble savage‖ as written about by Montaigne) of the beauty of the uncivilized state. In his utopian quest to create an uncommon sort of man, Rousseau imagines creating an artificial environment for the pupil in which the tutor can have complete control over every facet of the student's experience. Much of the purpose of this artificial environment is that it allows the tutor to dictate the shape of the interaction between students‘ innocence and their ignorance, not least of all in sexual matters. Writing of the necessity of keeping the student ignorant of the mechanics of sex, Rousseau writes:

The first sentiment of which the well-trained youth is capable is not love but friendship.

The first work of his right imagination is to make known to him his fellows; the species

affects him before the sex. Here is another advantage to be gained from prolonged

innocence; you may take advantage of his dawning sensibility to sow the first seeds of

humanity the heart of the young adolescent. This advantage is all the greater because this

is the only time in his life when such efforts may be really successful. (3686)29

29 All citations to Emile refer to the digital location numbers for the Kindle Digital Edition translated by Barbara Foxley and published by Amazon Publishing Services. Salvi 63

For Rousseau, sexuality is a danger not only because it is a distraction to the youth both intellectually and physically, but also because it actively gets in the way of moral development.

Sex may be instinctual, but even Rousseau's great reliance on the idea that training of young people should follow the model of nature rejects the idea that sexuality should be allowed to develop on its own schedule. According to Rousseau, the "source [of the passions], indeed, is natural; but they have been swollen by a thousand other streams; they are great river which is constantly growing, one in which we can scarcely find a single drop of the original stream‖

(3518). He continues by warning the reader that the passions may "enslave and destroy" if they are not properly tamed. He counts on the plasticity of the young to allow the tutor to shape his pupil‘s character, shielding both the pupil and the society in which he lives from the dangerous effects of sexuality run amok.

At nearly the same time that Rousseau‘s ideas were beginning to enter the continental conversation, John Wesley was preaching the innate corruption of children and advocating a method of education that would make a social services worker blanch. As Alan Jacobs points out in his book Original Sin: A Cultural History, ―It turns out, not surprisingly, that an educational system based on Wesley‘s belief about children differs dramatically from one based on

Rousseau‘s commitments‖ and that these differences and the thinker‘s underlying commitments to notions of original sin have ―the most wide-ranging of consequences‖ (xv). We could say, perhaps reductively, that a model of education based on Wesley‘s theory of innate sinfulness emphasizes obedience to authority and self-discipline, while pedagogy based on Rousseau‘s ideas emphasizes creativity and the development of individuality. And if, following Jernigan, we can see both the early nineteenth century and the present day as periods in which the very nature of epistemology is being continually questioned and redefined with a special vehemence, another Salvi 64 parallel can easily be drawn between the two periods' concern with education and its effects on both the societal and the individual level. The debate between Rousseau‘s and Wesley‘s models over the proper forms of education, a debate that underpinned all education in the early nineteenth century, continues to strongly shape the public discourse in a time when we have an increasing number of children to educate and sharp dissension about how best to do so.

The nineteenth century can also be uniquely understood as a period during which the education of women was complicated by competing claims surrounding what that education should consist of. On the one hand, women had to be educated and their education had to suit them to the demands of the patriarchal culture in which they lived. At the same time, they needed to remain mold-able, impressionable, in order to remain sexually desirable which, once again, served the needs of the patriarchy.

The kind of education that Thomasina receives in the play is itself idealized, not only in its content (about which more later) but also in its form. There were almost no formal systems of education set up for women in the early nineteenth century, and what few there were focused almost solely on inculcating their students with the skills of domestic life and

―accomplishments‖ such as drawing, embroidery, music, and dancing, to make them appealing on the marriage market. While some late eighteenth century writers on women‘s education, such as Hannah More and Maria Edgeworth and Richard Lovell Edgeworth, took pains to note the absurdity of placing too much emphasis on the importance of such accomplishments, all writers on the subject agreed that the most important facet of a women‘s education was its ability to prepare her to serve her family from within the domestic sphere. In 1777, Hannah More urged only moderate intellectual exertion on the part of women, writing that Salvi 65

pretensions to that strength of intellect, which is requisite to penetrate into the abstruser

walks of literature, it is presumed that they [women] will readily relinquish. There are

green pastures, and pleasant vallies [sic] , where they may wander with safety to

themselves, and delight to others. They may cultivate the roses of imagination, and the

valuable fruits of morals and criticism; but the steeps of Parnassus few, comparatively,

have attempted to scale with success …The lofty Epic, the pointed Satire, and the more

daring and successful flights of the Tragic Muse, seem reserved for the bold adventurers

of the other sex. (6-7)

Similarly, Erasmus Darwin‘s A Plan for the Conduct of Female Education in Boarding Schools

(1797) opens with his assertion that

The female character should possess the mild and retiring virtues rather than the bold and

dazzling ones; great eminence in almost any thing is sometimes injurious to a young lady;

whose temper and disposition should appear to be pliant rather than robust; to be ready to

take impressions rather than to be decidedly mark‘d; as great apparent strength of

character, however excellent, is liable to alarm both her own and the other sex; and to

create admiration rather than affection. (10)

Darwin goes on to enjoin teachers of women not to attempt to teach them Latin and Greek but to stick to the ―less difficult‖ languages of French and Italian, which are also more likely to be useful to women in social settings (17). He also asserts that in mathematics, ―so much of the science of numbers as is in common use…should be learnt with accuracy…[while the] higher parts of arithmetic, as algebra and fluxions, belong to the abstruser sciences‖ (20). Of scientific education, he writes that ―it is to be wished that some writer of juvenile books would endeavor easily to explain the structure and use of the barometer, and thermometer, and of clocks and Salvi 66 watches, which supply a part of the furniture of our houses and of our pockets‖ (43). These writings amply demonstrate that Thomasina‘s education, as shown by Stoppard, is unlikely for a woman of her period, even taking into account the wealth of the Coverly family.

The lack of formal education for women was, of course, part and parcel of the fact that education was, in this period, still very much in the process of becoming professionalized: the first British kindergarten wasn‘t established until 1851 (O‘Day 97) and many children of both sexes, even in the upper classes, received a good portion of their education at home.30 Still, the situation for girls was particularly dire. Not until the Endowed Schools Act was passed in 1869 were reformers of education able to start establishing grammar schools for girls, after substantial research and important testimony by Emily Davies established ―the superficiality of girls‘ education, its lack of purpose and obsession with accomplishments, the apathy of parents and the ignorance of teachers‖ (Fletcher 21). That Thomasina would have been able to read and write is assured by her social station, that she should have received lessons in dancing, drawing, and the playing of the fashionable pianoforte it is easy to assume, but the work we see her do in science, mathematics, and Latin would have been rare for all but a few privileged boys in the period and all but impossible for young girls.

These questions of education matter to this project insofar as debates about the shape and structure of education, about who gets education and under what circumstances, are intimately tied to debates about who gets to take part in the public sphere. In essence, questions and debates about education are also always, fundamentally, questions and debates about the status of citizenship. The history of the links between these debates goes as far back as ancient Athens,

30 Several historians, such as Kathryn Gleadle, Jane Rendall, Deborah Simonton, and Tanya Evans, have commented on the degree to which this period saw an increased understanding of maternity as an important role, and mothers as the first, primary, and most important educators of the children in both moral and intellectual terms. See Gleadle, British Women in the Nineteenth Century, ( (New York, Palgrave, 2001) and Women‟s History: Britain, 1700-1850 Eds. Hannah Barker and Elaine Chalus (New York, Routledege, 2005). Salvi 67

where the vote was given only to free male Athenian citizens based on concerns about making

sure that the "right" people were able to decide the fate of the Commonwealth. As discussed in

my introduction, Lauren Berlant has traced how conversations about education were intimately

involved in the suffrage movement. A number of strategies designed to keep African-Americans

from voting have been based on literacy tests. Given the increasing conflation, during the 19th

century, between ignorance and innocence the degree to which these debates have centered

around sexual knowledge, it is crucial to understand how intimately tied up with notions of

citizenship these debates about sexuality and epistemology are. That Thomasina is receiving an

education above and beyond what would be considered normal for a girl of her age and class is

part of how the text positions her as a disruptive force both intellectually and socially.

The Adolescent in Question

Having established a groundwork of historical assumptions about young women and

education, I want to turn now to Thomasina herself, and the scene of pedagogy which is so

central to this play. How does the text display adolescence, and how is adolescence

imaginatively shaped through its immersion in the classroom setting? How and why does the

pedagogical relationship usurp the centrality of the parent-child relationship? What gets

occluded about the teenager/student in our models of pedagogy, and how does Arcadia signal us

to the presence of those elisions?

The centrality of the classroom to this play immediately apparent: Arcadia begins by painting the picture of a spacious but spare room in which a thirteen year-old girl is studying with her tutor. The girl interrupts her study with these words, the first of the play:

THOMASINA: Septimus, what is carnal embrace? Salvi 68

SEPTIMUS: Carnal embrace is the practice of throwing one‘s arms around a side of

beef. (1)

Confronted with a direct question about sexuality, the adult in the scene attempts desperately to redirect the student‘s attention—to the mathematics she is supposed to be working on, to the

Latin roots of the phrase ―carnal embrace,‖ to the poem he had been engaged in reading before his student asked her alarming question. (This tactic of directing the student's attention elsewhere when confronted with questions about sexuality is, in fact, exactly the strategy prescribed by Rousseau in Emile, where he urges the would-be teacher to do everything in his power to distract the student from sex for as long as possible.31) That this question alarms the tutor stems from the fear that in teaching about sex and sexuality, what gets transmitted is not simply knowledge but somehow sex itself. Thus, the first moments of the play set the stage for us by placing front and center the possibility that curiosity, once aroused, will lead to an entirely different kind of arousal. Thomasina here threatens to break down the boundaries between different kinds of knowledge and is remarkably cheerful about the prospect of jettisoning her innocence along with her ignorance.

Indeed, Thomasina affirms that this slippage of knowledge has taken place just a few moments later when Septimus, battered by Thomasina‘s refusal to forget the subject and her outright condemnation of his obfuscation, is forced to come clean:

SEPTIMUS: Carnal embrace is sexual congress, which is the insertion of the male

genital organ into the female genital organ for purposes of procreation and pleasure.

31 Rousseau in fact go so far as to at this point prescribe hunting as a means of keeping young men distracted, Formatted: Font: 10 pt a pastime he has heretofore castigated as violent and corrupting. However, it is his view that everything must be done to keep the student from sexual precocity. He writes: "I would not have the whole of the meals youth spent in killing creatures, and I do not even profess to justify the school passion; it is enough for me that it serves to delay a more dangerous passion, so that he may listen to me, when I speak of it, and give me time to describe it without stimulating it" (location 5877). Salvi 69

Fermat‘s last theorem, by contrast, asserts that when x, y, and z are whole numbers

each raised to the power of n, the sum of the first two can never equal the third when

n is greater than two.

(Pause.)

THOMASINA: Eurghhh!

SEPTIMUS: Nevertheless, that is the theorem.

THOMASINA: It is disgusting and incomprehensible. Now when I am grown to

practice it myself I shall never do so without thinking of you. (3)

The pregnant pause following Septimus‘ explanation is, in the embodied performance of theatrical time, the instant at which the strictly technical information imparted by her tutor enters

Thomasina in a quite visceral way. The girl‘s reaction, while comical, simultaneously registers that Septimus‘ words have altered the way Thomasina will think of sex: her memory of him will ever after mark and shape her sexuality. But this is not a traumatic moment. In fact, this moment opens up for Thomasina a number of new ways to understand the behaviors of the adults around her, and her knowledge of the motivations and desires threatens because she herself remains so impenetrable.

That this moment should, however, engender an anxious attempts to retrospectively protect Thomasina's innocence is seen later on in the scene, when Thomasina accidentally lets slip that she now knows "everything" about carnal embrace, "thanks to Septimus" (10). When

Lady Croom and Thomasina's uncle, Captain Brice, turn accusing eyes on Septimus he tries to reassure them that his pupil "speaks from innocence not from experience" (11). Brice, incensed, responds: "you call that innocence?" and anxiously asks Thomasina whether Septimus has

"ruined" her (11). Thomasina is confused and her confusion begins to allay the fears of her Salvi 70 mother and uncle, but Septimus's assurance that he has merely been trying to "elucidate" the classical authors elicits from Brice the sharp retort that "as her tutor you have a duty to keep her in ignorance" (11). Lady Croom immediately seizes upon the absurdity of this statement, warning her brother to "not dabble in paradox… it puts you in danger of fortuitous wit" (11). At this point Thomasina has caught on to the problem and, on being told to retire to her room, cunningly apologizes to her tutor:

I did not intend to get you into trouble, Septimus. I am very sorry for it. It is plain that

there are some things a girl is allowed to understand, and these include the whole of

algebra, but there are others, such as embracing a side of beef, that must be kept from her

until she is old enough to have a carcass of her own. (11)

This seems to settle the matter, and bails Septimus out of the hot water the incident had gotten him into, earning him only the rebuke from lady Croom that "ignorance should be like an empty vessel waiting to be filled at the well of truth – not a cabinet of vulgar curios" (11).32

Astute enough to call out her tutor‘s lie, clever enough to dream up a new mathematics, shrewd enough to hide her new ―carnal‖ knowledge before her protective family, Thomasina is too fully-formed a character to be one onto whom we can project a comfortable and reassuring blankness. Thus it would be naïve of the audience to think of these exchanges as instances in which Thomasina‘s innocence, about either sex or mathematics, is transformed into corrupted knowledge. These moments cannot be seen as a ―fall‖ into knowledge because Thomasina is not an innocent, as long as we acknowledge that innocence is constituted not only by sexual experience or the lack thereof. She is not an innocent not only because she now knows about

32 I am indebted to Martin Harries for pointing out to me that Stoppard is here riffing off of one of Lady Formatted: Font: 10 pt Bracknell's lines from The Importance of Being Earnest, where during the course of Act I she declares "I do not approve of anything the tempers with natural ignorance. Ignorance is like a delicate exotic fruit; touch it and the bloom is gone" (265). Wilde's play also contains scenes of instruction, but Cecily Cardew is hardly the apt pupil we see in Thomasina. Salvi 71 carnal embrace, but because she immediately figures out what she can and cannot do with that knowledge. This ability to use knowledge is true of Thomasina not only in regard to matters of sexuality—it is the case with everything she learns. While the character is often played as a maddening blend of silliness, boisterousness, and verbal brilliance, what confounds about

Thomasina is not the degree to which she is still a child but rather, the degree to which her presence in the play disrupts our well-rehearsed expectations of what children are.

Because of Thomasina‘s position as an adolescent, the various characters that surround her vacillate wildly in their reactions to her disconcerting outbursts of knowingness. While

Septimus generally chooses to answer her questions outright (although not always in full detail),

Lady Croom vacillates wildly in her responses to her daughter, often in direct proportion to how threatened she is by Thomasina‘s display of knowledge. Thus Lady Croom at some moments claims an active engagement and concern with the content and shape of Thomasina‘s education, as when she encourages her daughter to stay in the room because ―a lesson in folly is worth two in wisdom‖ (10). So long as Thomasina‘s behavior allows Lady Croom to maintain a pose of authority her precocity can be excused.

Of course, this pose is bound to be undone by Thomasina. Lady Croom is a forceful personality who enjoys wielding her power and making family, servants, and house guests dance to her own tune. Indeed, the strong influence wielded by Lady Croom and her wit make it easy to draw parallels between mother and daughter, but the difference between them can be seen in

Lady Croom's repeated inability to correctly or accurately deploy the language of culture which, despite her youth, Thomasina is more well-versed in. When Thomasina remarks that Noakes' planned for the garden "is perfect ... is a Salvator!" her mother has no idea what or to whom her daughter is referring (10). Lady Croom also incorrectly identifies the author of the Castle of Salvi 72

Otranto and chides Mr. Chater when he attempts to correct her (13), and insists that Septimus has shot a hare, rather than the rabbit he has actually bagged (68). Thomasina never makes these kinds of mistakes : she is in all things precise and accurate, and her enthusiasm for knowledge stretches to encompass every subject, not just those that might allow her to more efficiently rule over a drawing room.

By far the most important example, however, of the difference between Lady Croom's intellect and Thomasina's occurs during the exchange after Lady Croom has rhapsodically described Sidley Park before the invasion of the landscape architect Noakes:

LADY CROOM: In short, it is nature as God intended, and I can say with the painter, ‗Et

in Arcadia ego!‘ ‗Here I am in Arcadia,‘ Thomasina.

THOMASINA: Yes, mama, if you would have it so.

LADY CROOM: Is she correcting my taste or my translation?

THOMASINA: Neither are beyond correction, mama, but it was your geography caused

the doubt.

LADY CROOM: Something has occurred with the girl since I saw her last, and surely

that was yesterday. How old are you this morning?

THOMASINA: Thirteen years and ten months, mama.

LADY CROOM: Thirteen years and ten months. She is not due to be pert for six months

at the earliest, or to have notions of taste for much longer. Mr. Hodge, I hold you

accountable. (12-13)

This interaction displays Lady Croom‘s discomfort with the notion that Thomasina could know more than her about any subject, though of course it is by now clear to the audience that this is the case in many arenas. The irony of the moment is intensified by the fact that Thomasina Salvi 73 knows that the "I" in the Latin quotation is the figure of Death, who does indeed exist in this garden. Thomasina claims to be correcting her mother's geography but she is also implicitly demonstrating that the fault in her mother's reading lies in a mis-contextualization which leads

Lady Croom to cast herself as the figure of death within paradise.33 Furthermore, Lady Croom‘s assumption that these assertions of ―pert‖ness and taste are taught to Thomasina by Septimus, rather than springing naturally from Thomasina‘s own personality and curious mind, are also worth noting as this moment displays a reliance on a Rousseau-ian model of the tutor's control over the student‘s environment. Lady Croom's preoccupation with maintaining control and authority over her daughter's education demonstrate demonstrates how precarious that control is in the first place.

As we have already seen, Thomasina realizes that she must perform ignorance/innocence in front of her mother and uncle. Whimsy is an important part of Thomasina‘s strategy of distraction, as the patent absurdity of anyone choosing for purposes of pleasure to embrace raw meat works (falsely) to clue her mother into her ―confusion.‖ 34 Further, the fact that Thomasina is able to use this strategy all confirms the fragility of the authority her mother is trying to bind her with. This is a moment of play-acting for Thomasina, a calculated and successful effort to save her tutor, but it is also the real frustration of a person forced to pretend a level of ignorance she does not, in fact, possess.

By the end of the play, this position of falsified ignorance is no longer tenable for

Thomasina. Moreover, her attempt to shed the necessity of performing ignorance is developed by the text in conjunction with her increased interest in losing her sexual innocence. Now

33 Tthere may be something not inaccurate in Lady Croom figuring herself this way, given the sexual rivalry Formatted: Font: 10 pt the mother and daughter subtly engage in over both Byron and Septimus by the play's conclusion.

34 For more on the importance of whimsy as a strategy, see my conclusion. Formatted: Font: 10 pt Salvi 74 seventeen, the girl is obsessed with Lord Byron, but her most important rebellion is against ignorance itself. What she wants is not just sex but, more importantly, to expand human knowledge. Attempting to explain to her mother why she hates geometry, Thomasina exclaims that ―Mountains are not pyramids and trees are not cones. God must love gunnery and cabinetry if Euclid is his only geometry. There is another geometry which I am engaged in discovering by trial and error‖ (84). Lady Croom‘s reaction to this is to remark that ―we must have you married before you are educated beyond eligibility‖ (84), demonstrating that where before she thought she could control Thomasina by threatening Septimus now she sees that the only opportunity for her to rein in her daughter‘s enthusiasms is to turn Thomasina over to a more controlling and overtly patriarchal hand. Lady Croom‘s opinion that Thomasina can only be controlled through marriage is confirmed when even Septimus must confess that he does not understand the girl‘s diagram of heat exchange (86). Lady Croom's reliance here on the mechanisms of on patriarchal authority might be read as ironic, given her own demonstrated ability to circumvent that authority in pursuit of her own pleasures. After all, once Thomasina becomes mistress of her own household her freedom to pursue her own education might well increase rather than decrease. Despite this ironic note, however, the moment reads variably as either a threat or an attempt by Lady Croom to dispose of the "problem" of her daughter in a socially acceptable way.

In her sexuality Thomasina is legible to the audience, and this is to some degree reassuring. But at the same time her restless mind and almost excessive wit make her fundamentally unknowable to the audience. She is not, after all, very much like the teenagers we might remember being or knowing. Her precocity is appealing insofar as it offers a hopeful model of adolescence, a hint that the future might not be so bleak if it were to be ruled by people like this. But it is equally possible that audiences might, like Lady Croom, find themselves Salvi 75 uncomfortable with this character they can neither relate to nor control, whose insights cannot be predicted and whose drives are different from our own. When she can be read and understood and, yes, even controlled we cherish her, as we are taught to do with children, as a precocious and endearing figure, as someone whose imagination we admire and wish, dimly, to partake of ourselves.35 Her desires and her mind are almost too alien for us, especially through the lens of

200 years of history, to really comprehend. This unknowability might, in fact, make her all the more precious, all the more cherish-able, since it allows us to hold her at a distance as an object rather than approach her as a subject. Lauren Berlant, speaking of the national dynamic and rhetoric around adulthood and childhood, has characterized this dynamic as one in which

citizen adults have learned to ‗forget‘ or to render as impractical, naïve, or childish their

utopian political identifications in order to be politically happy and economically

function. Confronting the tension between utopia and history, the infantile citizen‘s

stubborn naivete gives her/him enormous power to unsettle, expose, and reframe the

machinery of national life. (29)

Thomasina, as this text‘s representative of the infantile citizen, presents us with precisely the kind of disruption Berlant theorizes. By cheerfully overthrowing the Newtonian certainties of her historical frame she embodies the play‘s ―skepticism to regard to our attempt at understanding the world and an awareness of the precarious status of the patterns we create in order to explain what we perceive‖ (Antor 348). Once again, the text‘s vacillation between

35 Critic Nathan Rabin, writing for The Onion‟s well-regarded AV club, has coined the phrase "Mmanic Pixie Formatted: Font: 10 pt Ddream Ggirl" to describe characters who "exist solely in the fevered imaginations of sensitive writer-directors to teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures." Other staff at the AV Club chimed in, writing that "like the Magical Negro, the Manic Pixie Dream Girl archetype is largely defined by secondary status and lack of an inner life. She's on hand to lift up the male protagonist out of the doldrums, not pursue her own happiness." The term (MPDG for short) has since gained cachet and recognition. While I do not think that the character of Thomasina actually fits into this archetype, she does at times veer dangerously close to it. The definition of the MPDG also bolsters my assertion that this text is much less about Thomasina that is about the effects she has on those around her. Salvi 76 comic and tragic modes is an integral part of how it simultaneously embraces and rejects

Thomasina as a character. Its comedy encourages us to embrace her, but its final solution to the disruption she presents is managed through the affective container of her tragic early demise.

While it makes her cute, the text also ultimately sees the danger embodied in Thomasina as too dangerous, too disruptive of not only scientific certainty but also of our paradigms about what teenage girls are allowed to know. To use one of the play‘s own metaphors, she is like the rock that breaks the glass, whose heat has dissipated utterly by the time we know her ―full‖ story at the play‘s end.

Thomasina's cuteness has a number of important repercussions. Daniel Harris has argued that cuteness is an aesthetic which "in the eyes of most people, whose conditioned responses to this most rigid of styles prevent them from recognizing its artificiality [creates objects which] are the very embodiment of innocence and as such represent an absence of the designed and manipulated qualities of what is in fact heavily mannered aesthetic‖ (2). This aesthetic "must by no means be mistaken for the physically appealing, the attractive. In fact, it is closely linked to the grotesque, the malformed" (3). And as an aesthetic, argues Harris, cuteness is about lack and emptiness, and ―is not something we find in our children but something we do to them. Because it aestheticizes unhappiness, helplessness, and deformity, it almost always involves an act of sadism on the part of its creator, who makes an unconscious attempt to maim, hobble, and embarrass the thing he seeks to idolize" (5). Cuteness, then, is an aesthetic that makes violence against the vulnerable easier. "Although the gaze we turn on the cute thing seems maternal and solicitous, it is in actuality transformative and will stop at nothing to appease its hunger for expressing pity and big-heartedness, even at the cost of mutilating the object of its affections"

(6). As an aesthetic, Harris illustrates how cuteness is fundamentally about exercising control. Salvi 77

Sianne Ngai reads cuteness similarly, arguing that the "warm and fuzzy" qualities of cuteness align it with the domestic sphere, and furthermore with the relationship, in the contemporary world, "between the artwork and the commodity" (950).36 Cuteness as an aesthetic category emerged, argues Ngai, "as a term of valuation and a formally recognizable style in the nascent mass culture of the industrial nineteenth century United States and so with ideological consolidation of the middle-class home as a female space organized around consumption" (951).

Cuteness‘s relationship to the petite and the domestic illuminates how cuteness becomes a marker of trivialization, a movement towards disenfranchisement. Ngai also points out, through a reading of Gerard Genette, that ―because interesting and cute ... are ‗semi-descriptive or semi- judgmental,‘ they are essentially ‗means [by] which one judges under cover of describing‖ (955).

To link these observations, then, back to the methodology of Cvetkovich that I discussed earlier, to judge something as "cute" is to use the learned language of affective response to an object of culture which, in turn, has distinct political repercussions which are hidden from us by the very affective language we use to describe it.

Cuteness is often linked, Ngai argues, with comedy and more specifically with romance, both of which genres run throughout Arcadia. While for the most part the comedy of this text is what allows Thomasina to push against the paranoid boundaries of our fear of adolescence, moments when the text ropes her into this aesthetic of cuteness ought, then, also to be read as moments when her transformative potential is made absurd, grotesque, and unbearable. Her cuteness and its consequent trivializing of her emerges, jarringly, in the middle of many of her most interesting moments: when, just after learning the truth carnal embrace, she remarks "oh, goody" on hearing that there will be rice pudding for dessert (4), when she expresses her Formatted: Font: 10 pt

36 Formatted: Font: 10 pt, Italic The complexity of Ngai‘s argument about cuteness as an aesthetic category with its own peculiar politics is Font: 10 pt, Italic something I cannot fully do justice to here. See, in addition, her article "The Cuteness of the Avant-Garde", Ccritical Formatted: Iinquiry 31.4, 2005, 811-847. [fix citation] Formatted: Font: 10 pt Salvi 78 obsession over lord Byron in the midst of explaining her "rabbit equation" to Septimus (79), when she begs to learn to waltz just moments before working out the diagram of heat exchange

(80). Stoppard's stage directions, at the moment of this last example, read "her interest has switched in the mercurial way characteristic of her", but these are not examples only of the character's temperament (81). Rather, they are evidence of the text's desire to control her, and the difficulty it has doing so.

Pedagogy and Erotics

Since literally all of the action of the play takes place in a classroom, and since so much of this inquiry is directed towards the nature of the pedagogical relationship, I turn now towards an investigation of the tutorial presented on stage as an idealized form of pedagogical interaction.

The tutorial is an intimate scene, and its intimacy is closely related to its material and emotional luxury—the expense of providing one teacher for each student is available only to those with the wealth to pay for such undivided attention. It is also in the nature of the modern tutorial to be supplementary, an aid or boost to learning that largely takes place in other arenas—a factor once again related to the cost of providing such attention. Thus, almost by definition, the tutorial is excessive, evidence of an embarrassment of riches on the part of the family, the particular student‘s intellect, and/or the emotional bond between student and teacher.

This intimacy within the sphere of learning makes the classroom of Sidley Park into the fantasy scene of learning for those audience members who might feel called to identify with

Thomasina, or those who simply embraced and enjoyed their own educational experiences.

After all, what do good students desire if not the undivided attention—and hopefully praise—of their teacher? How do we understand what it means to be a good student if not (in part) through Salvi 79 the student‘s successful performance of mimicry of the teacher, a mimicry which ought eventually to lead to a level of growth and understanding beyond that of the teacher?

At the same time, the intimacy between Thomasina and Septimus leads to some danger in the play‘s conclusion, when the clear hierarchy between student and teacher (never really all that clear in this text to begin with) begins to slip dangerously into the more peer-like intimacy of lovers. While we can read the budding (and foreshortened) romance between Thomasina and

Septimus as sweet, genuine, and perhaps natural, it is also socially inappropriate, whether read through the lens of 1812‘s concerns about the crossing of class boundaries or the 1990‘s concern about intergenerational sexual contact and the potential for teachers to abuse their authority over their students. The possibility of a love story between Septimus and Thomasina challenges the convictions and conventions of both the play's time periods, troubling our understanding of what the relationship between sexuality and pedagogy ought to be with a vision of how it might be if we could find greater comfort with the overlap between the two.

In Arcadia, the tutorial scene also reveals what we might characterize as a tangential relationship between Septimus and Thomasina. At times, such as when the play opens,

Septimus seems more engaged with his own projects than with the practice of teaching. It is important to note that the audience never sees Septimus actually teaching Thomasina anything, signaling an important fissure in this student-teacher relationship that hints that the student has already escaped the control of the pedagogue. The play takes place in the classroom and shows

Septimus listening to Thomasina, correcting her translations, and marking her papers, but never in the act of imparting to her anything that readers or audiences might understand as part of her set curriculum. Thomasina seems always already to know all of the important things—how entropy works, that heat flows in one direction to cold, that you need a new kind of geometry to Salvi 80 describe the natural world, that Septimus is in love with her mother—so that the content of what

Septimus might be said to teach her (waltzing, for example) is, like the tutorial model itself, supplementary. Lisa Sternlieb and Nancy Selleck have commented on the paucity of instruction in the play, and suggest that this problem is central to the play's thesis. They write: "if teaching is the transmission of knowledge, the play makes the process central to all its most crucial issues

– of loss and recovery, order and chaos, love and carnality. But the kind of teaching is also key.

It is not enough simply to impart knowledge or passively to receive it. In this play, teaching means conversation" (484-5). Sternlieb and Selleck also point out that ―there is just as much talk about sex in twentieth century as there had been in the previous one, but there is less of a sense of just how sexy conversation itself can be‖ (497). Their reading contributes to a critical understanding of the centrality of the student/teacher relationship to the dynamic of the entire play but does not quite take into account the degree to which that same relationship, and the fruits of it, act as a weird kind of wish-fulfillment, imagining the production of knowledge as a kind of magical conjuration and coincidence rather than a process of tedium and hard work only occasionally punctuated by revelation. The elision of the difficulties of teaching is another way in which Arcadia presents a fantasy of the classroom: it shows us a space in which the student learns effortlessly and knowledge comes as easily as breathing, very unlike the laborious process of accumulating knowledge that is shown through the contemporary scenes.

The relationship between Thomasina and Septimus, and the nature of the knowledge that passes between them prompts us to ask: What makes learning sexy, and ought we or even can we distinguish between the type of desire that leads to sexual contact and the type of desire that leads to intellectual exploration? A number of critics, notably Jane Gallop and Joseph Litvak, have theorized the relationship between teaching and sexual desire and have explored the Salvi 81 dynamic of role-playing and theatrical metaphors in that confluence. Equally important, and somewhat under-theorized, is the desire of the student to enact the same kind of sexual and performative desire that theorists of the erotics of pedagogy give guilty voice to. Arcadia enacts the desire of the student to learn and the intersection of that learning with sexuality, as demonstrated by the co-incidence of Thomasina's intellectual development (and Septimus's appreciation for her discoveries) with her "paying" for waltzing lessons by kissing her teacher.

However, the critical discourse around pedagogy and erotics often does not address the student's desires, focusing only on the position of the teacher. Is the erotic urge the same for both teacher and student, or different? How might acknowledging the student's desires make space for a simultaneous acknowledgment of their agency? Conversely, how might refusing to acknowledge the student‘s desires be seen not as a protective measure, but as an infantilizing one?

Some of these questions can be answered by turning to a closer reading of some of the moments when the connections between pedagogy and erotics are addressed from the teacher‘s standpoint. In her essay ―Knot a Love Story,‖ Gallop describes the experience of working intensely and intimately with one of her graduate students. Over a difficult but productive meeting over the writing failures of one of the student‘s papers, Gallop found herself first unusually excited by the shared intellectual experience and then, to her horror, saw that energy transform itself into overtly erotic fantasies. Noting that her own writing seems to tend, discursively, along lines that in some moments use the language of the romance and in others the language of good teaching, Gallop notes that ―readerly pleasure‖ and her own sense of dramatic storytelling impel her towards the rhetoric of romance and that ―[t]he only language [she] can summon to describe a powerful experience of doing exactly what I imagine to be good teaching Salvi 82 seems bankrupt‖ (105). Thus her own language tries to split the story into two competing and incompatible stories. But as she observes:

Because I have a fix on where this cathexis arose, I feel certain…that the erotic charge

arose not alongside of the pedagogical relation…but that [it] arose as part and parcel of a

scene of pedagogy. The eros was not a deviation, an addition, an aside; it arose in the

center of what was a purely pedagogical exchange, as pure as any such can be. (106-7)

Gallop‘s account of this situation intentionally plays with the language of morality and of professional ethics. Describing herself as vacillating wildly between feeling as if she is, because of her intellectual and emotional investment in her students, a ―good‖ teacher and, because of her sexual fantasies about them, a ―bad‖ teacher, Gallop seeks to open up a space where we might allow teachers to have a libidinal investment in their students, as a way of respecting the health and fullness of the pedagogical relationship. While Gallop‘s argument applies most clearly to situations like the one she describes in ―Knot a Love Story,‖ where the graduate student is fairly clearly understood by all parties involved as a full legal adult capable of consent, her essay only grazes along thinking about what a libidinal investment in the intellectual scene might mean for the student.

Some theorizations do make more space for the student's desire. Joseph Litvak has suggested that students display their desire to police the [intellectual] ―masturbation‖ of teachers through ―the cool, narrow-eyed gaze that keeps everything, and everyone, under surveillance‖

(23). Considering more closely the implications behind the idea that particular kinds of scholarly performance are a form of masturbation, Litvak writes:

Performing an apparently auto-effective and self-contained act but performing it in front

of others, [the teacher] might be trying to set up a new kind of relation across the Salvi 83

footlights—a relation not between an assaultive pedagogical subject and a bunch of inert,

empty pedagogical objects, but between desiring and performing subjects who, from their

different positions as teacher and as students, might decide that there are better things to

do with the erotics of the classroom than to police them—or who might, since policing is

the dominant mode of eroticism in our culture, at least find ways to do the police in

different vices. (26)

Here, Litvak evokes the metaphor of the theater, the gap between performer and audience, this time as a way of explaining the performance of erotics as a form of sadistic and contemptuous masochism that he would like to turn into a more consensual and perhaps parodic form of play.

While Gallop‘s discussion presupposes a model between student and teacher that upholds a hierarchy between teacher/seducer and student/seduced, Litvak‘s invocation of the auto-erotic introduces into this twisty metaphorical scene a new (and in some dimension deliberately queer) possibility for a mutually constitutive pleasure that, like Thomasina and Septimus, seems to escape the model in which somebody, somewhere, is deceptively manipulating someone else.

Read together, both Gallop and Litvak point the way towards recognizing students as full participants in their educational process, a process which involves a complex and shifting dynamic of cathexis, rebellion, attraction, repetition, and sudden surprising growths in new directions.

But perhaps because of the fact that most of these theorizations are written from the point of view of those former model-pupils-now-teachers, these accounts display a paucity of consideration of the experiences of the students. A subterranean acknowledgment of the possibility of student desire exists, fueled by brief mentions of the writer‘s own early emotional investments in their own teachers—investments always coded as naïve. The power relations Salvi 84 between student and teacher, calcified through the operations of the classroom theater, suggest that only the truly knowing subject—the teacher—can also have a full grasp on the implications of their own desire. Although Litvak‘s language casts both students and teachers as ―desiring subjects,‖ this brief moment in the essay is the only one in which the two roles are not imagined as being almost directly adversarial.37 Thus even while our theorizations work on exploring the most fruitful ways teachers to impart knowledge to their students, the discourse continues to reify a vision of the student who is denied the capability of being a knowing subject. As Chris

Amirault writes, popular models of pedagogy contain ―a culturally valorized fantasy that structures most teaching, that of the selfless teacher who teaches ‗for his students‘ and not ‗for himself‘‖ (65). According to Amirault, even supposedly radical pedagogical models like that of

Paulo Freire ultimately, ―at least in their textual practice‖ end up providing more of a teacher- centered than a student-centered model for pleasure, satisfaction and fulfillment. To return to

Gallop, we might add that that pleasure and fulfillment is both intellectual and sexual, at one and the same time.

Arcadia‟s ability to imagine and posit a way for the student to be a desiring subject within the context of her own pedagogical life without making that development feel creepy or coercive is one of the texts more radical moves, even if it is a move that cannot ultimately be sustained.

This effect is achieved, in part, through a development of Thomasina's character that reads as quite realistic and thus "natural," but which is carefully orchestrated within the text. In scene one,

Thomasina's interest in sex is academic: she wants to know what it is and how it works. She asks

"is it the same as love?" (4) and "does carnal embrace addle the brain?" (38) and takes her tutor's

37 It is also true that our culture has a variety of narratives in which a young, almost always female student, seduces a teacher, leading to disastrous consequences for the teacher in question. I would argue, though, that even in these narratives the desire of the student is rarely seen as sexual, the seduction is more often portrayed as a bid for power and motivated by Machiavellian rather than libidinal desires. Salvi 85 answers ("oh no, it is much nicer than that" and "invariably") at face value. In scene three, she sees sexuality as an impediment to knowledge, declaring of the growing intimacy between Lord

Byron and Lady Croom "let them elope, they cannot turn back the advancement of knowledge"

(37). More decisively, she castigates Cleopatra because

Everything is turned to love with her. New love, absent love, lost love -- I never knew a

heroine that makes such noodles of our sex… If Queen Elizabeth had been a Ptolemy

history would have been quite different -- we would be admiring the pyramids of Rome

and the great Sphinx of Verona ... but instead, the Egyptian noodle made carnal embrace

with the enemy who burned the great Library of Alexandria without so much as a fine for

all that is overdue. Oh, Septimus!—can you bear it? All the lost plays of the Athenians!

Two hundred at least by Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides -- thousands of poems --

Aristotle's own library brought to Egypt by the noodle‘s ancestors! How can we sleep for

grief? (38)

Septimus's response here illustrates that he, at least, understands the distinction between protecting against trauma and protecting innocence. Gently, he tells the girl that she must reconcile herself "by counting our stock ... you should no more grieve for the rest than for the buckle lost from your first shoe, or for your lesson book which will be lost when you are old. We shed as we pick up, like travelers who must carry everything in their arms, and what we let fall will be picked up by those behind" (38). Septimus acknowledges the very real grief his student feels for the knowledge she will never gain, legitimizing her emotional connection to her intellectual life. It makes sense then that later on, in scene seven, the kind of intimacy we see between student and teacher in this moment leads to the physical intimacy of the kiss. However,

Thomasina's death forecloses more expansive possibilities for recognizing the legitimacy of how Salvi 86

Thomasina‘s intellectual and sexual desires come together. In effect, the play creates Thomasina as both a knowing and desiring subject, while simultaneously denying her a meaningful stake in those roles. It comes down, finally, on the side of protecting innocence at the cost of fully exploring the kinds of possibilities for knowledge that Thomasina opens up.

The End(s) of the Play

When considering how Arcadia seems to war with itself in its treatment of Thomasina we must take into account the end(s) of the play and the uses to which the different kinds of knowledge produced throughout the text are put. Of crucial importance to this discussion are the disruptive and dangerous effects of Thomasina‘s explorations of the iterated algorithm and the second law of thermodynamics. Any chance that the story might end differently than it does, with some outcome other than Septimus‘ assumption of the role of the hermit, is undone by

Thomasina‘s intellectual work. As Hannah later discovers, Septimus-as-Hermit was understood even by his contemporaries to be struggling against the implications of Thomasina‘s discoveries:

The testament of the lunatic serves as a caution against French fashion…for it was

Frenchified mathematick that brought him to the melancholy certitude of a world without

light or life…as a wooden stove that must consume itself until ash and stove are as one,

and heat is gone from the earth….He died aged two score years and seven…the proof of

his prediction even yet unyielding to his labours for the restitution of hope through good

English algebra. (65)

In fact, Thomasina‘s discoveries are twofold. On the one hand, as she, copying Fermat --who she has asserted simply wrote his note as ―a joke to make you all mad‖ (6)—writes ―I,

Thomasina Coverly, have found a truly wonderful method whereby all the forms of nature must give up their numerical secrets and draw themselves through number alone. This margin being Salvi 87 too mean for my purpose, the reader must look elsewhere for the New Geometry of Irregular

Forms‖ (43). Second, and equally important, is Thomasina‘s recognition, as hinted at in her diagram of heat exchange, that Mr. Noakes can never ―get out what [he] put in‖ to his steam engine (86). As she almost contemptuously, impatiently explains to Septimus when he bewilderedly comments that everybody knows that Mr. Noakes‘ engine is a failure, ―Yes,

Septimus, they know it about engines!‖ (87).

What everybody else does not know, and what Septimus can only dimly perceive (Val characterizes Thomasina as someone who sees things ―way ahead, as if in a picture‖ [93]) is why the heat equation only works in one direction. Septimus is far more aware of the danger of

Thomasina‘s work than she herself is: as he tells her when scolding her for writing her note in the math primer, her ―joke‖ ―will make [him] mad as [she] promised‖ (92).

Thomasina's prank in the math primer relies for its effectiveness on the conversation she and Septimus had scene one about Fermat‘s last theorem, but it is one of several moments in the text that figure the girl as uncanny or prophetic. Thomasina‘s prophetic ability to see ahead might even be said to extend to her drawing the figure of the hermit into the landscape painting done by Noakes: her imaginative figuration of the Hermit, ―like the Baptist in the wilderness‖

(14) is almost a vision of Septimus as we come to see him later in the play through Hannah‘s eyes, a man crazed with passion, crying out a truth that no one wants to hear. It is also

Thomasina‘s prophetic vision of her own tragic non-future, since without her death, occurring as it does at the very moment a sexual relationship begins to emerge between them, Septimus would never become the hermit. Without the sexual relationship between them to tip Septimus over the edge, we could both imagine and predict a very different end. Salvi 88

Such an end would be both more and less predictable than the one we are given. We might, for example, imagine the play ending in a marriage plot, an elopement between

Thomasina and Septimus, making this into the story of two smart people drawn together by their natural compatability, the familiar narrative of soul-mates. 38 The structure of the play, however, focusing us through Hannah on the quest for the Hermit‘s identity, makes the final revelation of that identity no surprise at all. But Thomasina‘s death is a surprise to the first-time reader or viewer, and in the moment of surprise the astute reader simultaneously feels that of course, it must work out that way, as if we had suddenly returned to the deterministic Newtonian model of the universe that the play seems to be otherwise trying to shed.39 We can see, then, through the lens borrowed from Cvetkovich, that our emotional comfort with Thomasina's early death is something we have already been affectively prepared for. On some level, audiences want the girl to die and crave the catharsis her death will release. This desire for death is, Russ Castronovo suggests, common in many discourses surrounding citizenship, a peculiar kind of necrophilia, which has everything to do with clinging to the abstractions of citizenship rather than the difficulties and complexities of lived histories. He writes that:

Necrophilia "politically deactivates as it affectively charges," as Dana Nelson contends,

by subjecting democratic potential to a morbid sentimentality that reshapes that potential

as hierarchy. Necro ideology… not only annihilates historical consciousness, thereby

immobilizing possibilities for political change; it also generates entities clumped about

38 The marriage plot is another example narrative structure in which the affective charge associated with it often Formatted: Font: 10 pt obscures the plot-structure' s politics from readers. Perhaps not coincidentally, the prevalence of this plot arose in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, in other words, the same time period in which Thomasina would have lived. See Lisa O'Connell, "The Theo-Political Origins of the English Marriage Plot.‖ Novel: A Forum on Fiction, 43.2, Spring 2010, 31-37. Formatted: Font: 10 pt

39 I am indebted here to Lucy Melbourne, whose article felicitously provided me with the notion that in Arcadia ―Stoppard…leaves behind the old ‗Newtonian theatre‘ of the well-made play‖ (558). Salvi 89

the nation-state who leave in their wake social corpses who refuse to transcend the

inescapable effects of embodiment. (Necrocitizenship 14)

We see, then, that the relief we feel about Thomasina's death has everything to do with our fear about how she upsets our worldview and threatens change. Death depoliticizes her, or depoliticizes the possibility of her which is, for a figure, really the same thing. In the nineteenth century plot thread, Thomasina's death is depoliticizing because she dies as a minor and as a member of her father's household--she never has the opportunity to step into the public sphere.

This also depoliticizes her in the 20th century because, as Hannah points out to Valentine,

Thomasina "was dead before she had time to be famous" (76). That Thomasina dies before she has the opportunity to take the world by storm is, of course, a necessity for a play that has created her genius and her work out of whole cloth and placed her within a realistic historical context. But this is precisely my point about her death, that it simultaneously allows the text to hold her up, however briefly, as a model of political possibility before stuffing her back into the nostalgic realm of private affect.

As suggested earlier, Thomasina's budding sexuality is a crucial dynamic in her death.

Thomasina at sixteen, as depicted in the last scene, is in fact becoming more legible as a teenager, a ―knowable‖ and categorizable object by twentieth-century audiences, through one particular facet of her evolving personality and sexuality: her fan-girl obsession with Lord Byron and with her demand to be initiated into the social craze for waltzing.40 It would not be going too far to say that in these obsessions, which are understood from our present historical position as stereotypical teenage behavior, Thomasina begins to threaten us in a new way, one absolutely

40 Of course, in her obsession with Byron Thomasina is very much of her time and place. In many ways the first celebrity, Byron created the kind of stir we see through Thomasina everywhere he went. For an interesting account of the relationship between romantic poetry and science, including Byron's participation in this intermixing, see Richard Holmes, The Age of Wonder: How the Romantic Generation Discovered the Terror and Beauty of Science, New York, Pantheon, 2008. Salvi 90 inimical to theater: she threatens to become boring. Her engagement with these stereotypes makes it increasingly hard for us to hold onto her as an instantiation of the precious and precocious child, providing yet another motive for the text to kill her off. To return to my earlier suggestion that we could almost imagine this play ending through the tying of the knot in the marriage plot, we must recognize that if the text did that it would be killing Thomasina off in another way, one that would also end our ability to hold her up as the charming and eccentric child-prodigy, through tying her into a domestic and probably procreative role that would make her just as comparatively dull to us as her squealing over ―Childe Harold‘s Pilgrimage.‖41 In this, the text displays an insidious normality, both in its characterization of Thomasina and in the operations of its plot.

For if we can only know Thomasina as an object of wonder, not as a subject, then it is equally and vitally important that she not be ―known‖ in the Biblical sense as a sexual object. If

Thomasina were to become ―known‖, then she herself would no longer be able to ―know,‖ she wouldn‘t be a safe and inviolate container for the dangerous knowledge that the adolescent seems always already to have and to be. In the first scene, when Thomasina is confronted with her mother and uncle‘s hysteria over her new knowledge, she asks Septimus, ―How is a ruined child different from a ruined castle?‖ to which Noakes, the unwitting straight man, answers that

―a ruined castle is picturesque, certainly‖ (11). We might stop there, as Septimus does, and dismiss the parallel as frivolous. But the irony of this moment is that, as far as the operations of

41 When describing the hero of Byron's poem, Thomasina says he is "the most poetical and pathetic and Formatted: Font: 10 pt bravest hero of any book I ever read before, and the most modern and the handsomest, for Harold is Lord Byron himself to those who know him, like myself and Septimus" (79). To call this impassioned description "dull" is, of course, a matter of taste, but it is much less interesting to me than, for example, her earlier observation that "if there is an equation for a curve like a bell, there must be an equation for one like a bluebell, and if a bluebell, why not a rose?" (37) Salvi 91 plot are concerned, a ruined child is like a ruined castle, a subject for melancholy reflection but just as useless as a leaky roof.

In scene seven, the final scene of the play, Stoppard‘s two plot lines converge. While in previous scenes various props have moved fluidly between the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, here the bodies and voices of the actors cross, overlap, and intersect within the physical space of the classroom. 42 In this scene we see and understand the ―close‖ of both

Thomasina‘s and Hannah‘s investigations, and Hannah‘s ability to ―prove‖ her argument is an important ingredient in Stoppard‘s reassurance to the audience that there is a teleological end to our investigations. Teleology, after all, promises an end to indeterminacy, a "point" to all the chaos of our lives. Indeed, this desire for a teleological end is very much what is at play in

Castronovo's formulation of necrocitizenship, since death serves as the teleological endpoint which permanently cleans up the messy problems which arise when new groups or generations attempt to enter into enfranchisement. Lauren Berlant confirms Castronovo's assessment of the importance of public mourning in controlling discussions about citizenship, writing that

"collective morning… is the scene of sentimental education; for, like sex, public death must be meaningful, engendering knowledge that in moving us beyond the finality of another ending performance and confirms a future in which we are not abandoned to the beyond or the beneath of history" (Uncle Sam 161). Public mourning, then, not only freezes in place disruptive bodies but also gives to the mourners an emotional payoff for their transformation of the body into figural iconicity. The cathectic, ritualistic, and contained shock felt by an audience who briefly mourns for Thomasina, or somebody like her, replaces the need to extend her work, or follow in her footsteps. Private, affective response stands in place of public action.

42 Stoppard in fact makes a specific note about the necessity of having various props cross time-lines—see the beginning of Scene Two, page 15. Salvi 92

To see how this works in Arcadia we must closely examine how various plot threads are tied up. First, Valentine is able to do what neither Septimus nor Thomasina could: ―[push] her equations through the computer a few million more times further than she managed to do with her pencil‖ (76). The result is a ―beautiful‖ picture, a fractal set of which Val says:

See? In an ocean of ashes, islands of order. Patterns making themselves out of nothing.

I can‘t show you how deep it goes…

HANNAH: Is it important?

VALENTINE: Interesting. Publishable. (76)

In this moment we see Thomasina‘s work made manifest: in a Cambridge, MA production I saw,43 the audience was able to actually participate with Hannah and Val in ―seeing‖ the patterns through the medium of having a scrolling fractal pattern projected onto a screen behind the actors while they stared at Val‘s laptop. In a way, Thomasina‘s understanding of the geometry of the natural world is turned at this moment into art—art which promises to explain the world but which also transcends the boundaries of the directly representational. (As Val says to

Hannah earlier in the play when first describing the concept of the iterated algorithm, ―It‘s not a way of drawing an elephant‖ (47).) In transforming Thomasina‘s math into art (albeit scientific art) Stoppard reassures the reader/audience that although the other thrust of what Val calls ―the

Coverly set‖ is an overwhelming, chaotic, and seemingly random amount of data, order can be found, and in and through that order, beauty and meaning.

This moment also gives us insight into another of this text‘s classic moves when it comes to Thomasina and her work: it trivializes it, even as it seems to be valorizing it. Here, Val has to admit that he was wrong in his earlier assertion that Thomasina couldn‘t have been doing

43 Production by the Longwood Players at the Central Square YMCA, December 2005.

Salvi 93 anything more than ―play with the numbers…[a monkey at] a piano‖ (47). But when confronted with Hannah‘s question about the value or use of Thomasina‘s work, all Val will (or perhaps can) say about it is that it is useful for his own academic career. We already know from scene four that fractals are, to Val, a recent discovery in scientific terms.44 Val can use Thomasina‘s work to help make his career but he can‘t use it to change the course of science any more than she could have done, as a result of her early death—the fact of which is revealed at precisely this moment, just a little further down the page. Thomasina might have ―beat‖ Val and Mandelbrot to an understanding of fractals, but the entropic effects of history, fragile bibliographic records, and Stoppard‟s own text beat her into invisibility. She is, in the end, redundant.

The same thing is true of Thomasina‘s other important discovery, that of the eventual effects of entropy, a discovery which, perhaps unsurprisingly, is both complementary and contradictory. If Thomasina‘s understanding of fractals leads her to (literally) envision how order arises out of chaos, then her understanding of entropy leads her to see how things will inevitably fall back to chaos. It is this insight—not the one about fractals—that the play characterizes as ―prophetic,‖ and it is this insight that leads most directly to the peculiar pathos that surrounds Thomasina as a figure.

The two clearest moments that name Thomasina as uncanny prophet are both contained in scene seven. Septimus, reading a French paper that contradicts Newton‘s model of a deterministic universe, tells Thomasina that ―the author deserves your indulgence, my lady, for you are his prophet‖ (81). Thomasina, after reading the essay for herself, declares that it is ―just as I had said! Newton‘s machine which would knock our atoms from cradle to grave by the laws of motion is incomplete! Determinism leaves the road at every corner, as I knew all along‖ (83).

44 The term ―fractal‖ was coined by Mandelbrot, for whom the famous Mandelbrot set was named, and his ideas about iterated algorithms were first published in France in 1975. Salvi 94

Thomasina‘s satisfaction with herself and her insight at this moment leads directly to her drawing the diagram which Valentine, in a moment of drunken insight, later recognizes as a depiction of heat exchange and of which he says that Thomasina ―saw what things meant, way ahead, like seeing a picture‖ (93). Thus both Septimus and Valentine, within a few theatrical moments of each other, name Thomasina as a prophet.

It is in keeping with the play‘s fetishizaton of Thomasina that we never fully know what happens the night of her death. All Hannah and Valentine know is that she ―burned to death….the night before her seventeenth birthday‖ (76) and the specifics of the event are otherwise as obscure to them as they are to us. Thomasina sneaks downstairs in the middle of the night and blackmails Septimus into teaching her to waltz, a deal she ―seal[s] with a kiss‖

(80). When she comes to him as he reads her essay on the diagram she entreats him to ―teach me now!‖ (91) and while what she means is that Septimus should teach her to waltz here, as in the first moments of the play, the audience also hears the double entendre, the request for more knowledge of carnal embrace. As they waltz they kiss again, and the warmth of their embrace leads Thomasina to invite Septimus up to her room.

SEPTIMUS: Take your essay, I have given it an alpha in blind faith. Be careful with the

flame. [He refers here to the candle he has just literally re-lit for her.]

THOMASINA: I will wait for you to come.

SEPTIMUS: I cannot.

THOMASINA: You may.

SEPTIMUS: I may not.

THOMASINA: You must.

SEPTIMUS: I will not. Salvi 95

(She puts the candlestick and the essay on the table.)

THOMASINA: Then I will not go. Once more, for my birthday.

(Septimus and Thomasina start to waltz together.) (96)

Here the play ends, and there is no other hint in the text to tell us if Thomasina ever received her final lesson in passion from Septimus. We can imagine that she went to her room, flustered and fluttering, and did not heed his advice about the dangers of her candle-flame, leaving it lit while waiting for him to come to her until sleep caused a careless limb to knock over the flame and start the conflagration. In this version of the play‘s end, Septimus goes mad in part from regret that his passion for Thomasina was never requited, as well as from the staggering implications of her work.

It is equally possible, however, to imagine that Thomasina does seduce Septimus; always an apt pupil, she has certainly learned plenty from her mother about the norms of flirtation and seduction, and we know from the incident with Mrs. Chater that Septimus is not, perhaps, fully in control of his sexual passions. His refusal of Thomasina‘s invitation offers him a moral high ground, a clear position from which he isn‘t taking advantage of her.45 Like the play‘s refusal to become either ultimately a comedy or tragedy, the fact that the play keeps open both possibilities for what has transpired between Thomasina and Septimus requires audiences to confront what this incident means to them in their own interpretation. Perhaps the candle gets knocked over in their embrace and Septimus escapes, or perhaps the fire starts after he leaves her room. In this instance, Septimus‘ subsequent madness would be related to his guilt over Thomasina‘s death.

The important thing about this textual lacuna, however, is that its gaping presence allows us to hold Thomasina firmly in place, caught, like a fly in amber, in the moment just before we

45 This data is only anecdotal, but I have never spoken to any reader or viewer of the play who felt that the relationship between Thomasina and Septimus was in any way coercive. Salvi 96 can definitively say whether or not sexual experience caps her maturation. Because we don‘t know if Thomasina has become ―known‖ we can continue to hold her up as a precocious model, rather than a fully experienced woman. The pathos of Thomasina‘s character is increased by the idea that she has died just at the cusp of womanhood. Ironically, the text works to preserve

Thomasina‘s purity and innocence in ways that Thomasina, were she a real person, would probably be completely uninvested in.

Conclusions

I do not want to suggest that Arcadia is, because of its ending, ―simply‖ or ―merely‖ a reactive and conservative text. While there is a strong tendency in Marxist-influenced reading to hang the ultimate ―meaning‖ of a text on its ending, whether its conclusion leaves open or shuts down possibilities for social transformation, it is my contention that to focus solely on the conclusion, as if that narrative conclusion must perforce shut down all radical possibilities, is to give too much weight to the kind of summation that we rarely, if ever, experience in our own lives. In the reading practices which are encouraged by the processes which turn our reading of situations inward, towards the private realm of affect and sentiment, readers and audiences rarely ask whether the meaning of an action is ultimately conservative or liberal in its consequences.

Likewise, writers who are not writing from a strongly recognized ideology probably do not ask this question of themselves. And to make final determinations about what the end ―must‖ mean is to make an assumption that denies readers and viewers not engaged in their own critical projects the ability to find their own meaning in the text. The most we can say, tentatively, is that certain trends in narrative conclusions, or within particular genres, are statistically likely to produce particular kinds of reaction in their audiences, recognizing the real (and perhaps Salvi 97 revolutionary) possibility of statistical outliers in meaning-making; readings and interpretations that may not fit into a neat Euclidean bell-curve but might, if approached from a new angle, produce readings that describe, if I can stretch the metaphor so far, the shapes of coastlines and mountain ranges.

It is important, too, to remember that questions about radicalism and conservatism have shaped debates in theater criticism for many years, strongly suggesting that what theater describes for its audiences is not an either/or situation but one of both/and, just as the adolescent is frequently the site of the both/and. Part of what unsettles about theater is precisely the embodiment of situations that staging requires. To hold the audience‘s interest theater must display a believable conflict through living bodies. To succeed commercially, that conflict must be seen by many spectators, partaking in a collective voyeuristic experience. While it may be, as

Phillip Auslander suggests, naïve to read the temporary communal cohesion of the theater audience as having the kind of utopic possibility for social change that critics like Jill Dolan imagine, it is also, I think, true that theater is a peculiar and particular aesthetic medium whose effects are intricately bound up in precisely the communal and embodied experience that has been so widely and controversially theorized.

In his book The Haunted Stage, Marvin Carlson suggests that traditions of theatrical practice serve to make theater into a site where we are particularly likely to encounter, over and over again, familiar stories. Carlson asserts that theater engages in haunting, by which he means the uncanny repetition of bodies, events, and settings, on nearly every level—from the professional actor who appears repeatedly on the boards to the costumes and set pieces that are recycled from production to production to the plots of theatrical productions which so often adapted from already available and widely known cultural narratives. He argues that: Salvi 98

Drama, more than any other literary form, seems to be associated in all cultures with the

retelling again and again of stories that bear a particular religious, social, or political

significance for their public. There clearly seems to be something in the nature of

dramatic presentation that makes it a particularly attractive repository for the storage and

mechanism for the continued recirculation of cultural memory. (8)

While The Haunted Stage focuses primarily on the more overt forms of repetition within theater, its theorization of repetition in theater points the way for us to consider how cultural recursion in theater may also extend to the realm of its thematic concerns. Carlson's work suggests that theater, in its condensation of bodies, forms, and plots, is a particularly rich site for the investigation of cultural norms. My reading pushes this observation further, arguing that contemporary theater‘s status within middlebrow culture requires these plays to both partake in and trouble the cultural norms that surround these condensations. It makes perfect sense, then, to use theater in general and Arcadia in specific to examine the ways in which this story tells us about teenagers and our own willful occlusions. We make Thomasina into an object because to do so allows us to hold her at a distance, to tell ourselves that we already know about her in order to avoid actually knowing her, as we might feel we know a character like Ibsen‘s Nora, or even

Shakespeare‘s Hamlet. And it is of political significance to us that we make Thomasina into the repository of impossible knowledge because by doing so we avoid needing to inquire too closely into the entanglements of desire, the difficulty in separating (as Freud posited was true) the libidinal into neat categories. Thomasina points directly to the fact that desire is free-form, that it attaches itself both to the intellectual quest and to the body of the lover. But if we saw this in her we would have to acknowledge her personhood, and to do that would be to break her off the pedestal where we so insistently glue her. Salvi 99

In coming to this conclusion, I find myself looping back around to my consideration of what we lose if we insist on reading this play as simply reactive and liberal, and to the words of

Elin Diamond in her introduction to Unmaking Mimesis. Diamond writes:

Theater itself may be understood as the drama‘s unruly body, its material other, a site

where the performers and the spectator‘s desire may resignify elements of a constrictive

social script. Theater may also be understood as a symptomatic cultural site that

ruthlessly maps out normative spectatorial positions by occluding its own means of

production. And yet—any seemingly rigid position is available for revision.

Conservative and patriarchal, theater is also, in a complex sense, the place of play, and

unlike other media, in the theater the same play can be played not only again, but

differently. (iii)

In effect, Arcadia presents us with both symptoms and play. For if Thomasina must die, she also quite literally embodies the very sense of play that Diamond evokes. At the end of Scene One,

Stoppard‘s stage directions tell us that ―Lady Croom is heard calling distantly for Thomasina who runs off into the garden, cheerfully, an uncomplicated girl‖ (14). This stage direction, however, points to a performance which, like all performances, has the possibility of being intentionally inhabited and thus intentionally manipulated. We can imaginatively overturn

Stoppard‘s attempt to make us (and the critics) brush over Thomasina as an ―uncomplicated‖ child, or a silly and star-struck teenager. Perhaps in performance—our own, if not the play‘s— we can play the scenes again differently. Thomasina reveals our fear of the teenager, but she also shows us some of what we might embrace about her. Watching Thomasina and Septimus, Gus and Hannah, at the play‘s end, we might all learn the plasticity needed to waltz through different kinds of knowledge, embracing all our passions together. Salvi 100

Chapter Two

Puppy-Dog Tales: The Adolescent Male in Equus

In June, 2008, an illustrative incident in the world of celebrity gossip hit the airwaves.

Teen singing sensation Miley Cyrus appeared in a "scandalous" picture, taken by renowned fashion photographer Annie Leibowitz, on the cover of Vanity Fair. In the picture, Cyrus's body is in profile. She clutches a white sheet around her upper body, and her nude back is fully visible; the shadows of her ribs and spine highlight her fragility. Cyrus looks at the camera over her shoulder, her dark hair artfully mussed and falling forward, eyes unafraid, lips tinted red against her pale skin. Taken as a whole, the image walks a strange and delicate line. Read one way, the picture tells the story of a young star‘s frailty and the child who was still part of the then fifteen- year-old. If anything, Cyrus looks in this shot younger than she actually was, less someone you imagine is about to start driving and more a girl you might catch surreptitiously playing with dolls. At the same time, the pose and the sheet, the subject's direct gaze, the soft light and the red lips—all these elements combine to give the illusion that we are looking at someone who has just arisen from a languorous postcoital nap with her lover. The semiotics of the picture veer between

Dickensian waif and vampiric seductress.

Neither of those images went over well with the national media, which claimed to be shocked, shocked, at the photograph. Disney, under whose umbrella Cyrus has risen to fame, accused the magazine of creating "the situation…to deliberately manipulate a 15-year-old in order to sell magazines" (qtd. in Keegan). Susan Dominus, writing for the New York Times, noted the disparity (and potential hypocrisy) of teen fans who, themselves clad in a variety of short skirts, tight baby doll tees, and cleavage-revealing tops, reacted to Cyrus's media faux pas Salvi 101 by calling her "a slut." Internet message boards abounded with commentators alternately condemning Cyrus, condemning her minders for letting her get placed in such an awkward position, condemning the media for creating a market for sexualized images of young women, or condemning all the people who were freaking out about the photo in the first place.

In many ways, the Miley Cyrus "scandal" is not particularly interesting. What it does do is effectively and quickly encapsulate our contrasting and divisive attitudes surrounding the sexuality of teen girls, and Cyrus's position as celebrity and thus "role model" exacerbates the discourse around the incident. It also highlights a curious discrepancy—why are there no similar scandals surrounding young male stars? Can we hypothesize that Hollywood's young men are mysteriously well-behaved? Of course not—but we can see that the gaping gossip hole we might expect Justin Bieber to fill is empty precisely because those young men capture the attention of young women while eluding the harshest portions of the media's gaze. To put it bluntly, the very lack of attention paid to the sexualized antics of teen boys tells us both that we don't sexually objectify fifteen-year-old boys the same way we do girls and that, fundamentally, we care less about the sexual activity of young men because we take it for granted that they are, simply and naturally, already sexual.

Of course, there are some notable exceptions to the rule—one of which can be illustrated by Daniel Radcliffe's (of Harry Potter movie fame) recent star turn in the London and Broadway revivals of Peter Shaffer's play Equus. Equus is perhaps most famous among theatergoers for the fact that the actor playing protagonist Alan Strang must spend a long scene (over 10 minutes) at the end of the play completely nude. When publicity stills for the London production showing the then seventeen-year-old Radcliffe in full frontal poses came across the Atlantic, the gossip wave was nearly as big as that surrounding the much less revealing Cyrus photos, though the Salvi 102 tenor of the conversation was radically different. Indeed, discussion of Radcliffe's publicity stills had a tone of fascination rather than disgust. No one was ever accused of manipulating Radcliffe into participating in a compromising photo shoot—rather, Radcliffe himself was spoken of as making a cynical and calculated move, precisely because of the play‘s "shock value," into the realm of adult roles. Indeed, the very degree to which Radcliffe was assumed to have agency in the production of the photos while Cyrus was assumed to have been manipulated in her Vanity

Fair shoot points not just to the two-year age gap between the actors at the time the photos in question were taken, but also to the degree to which we still assume men to have agency and women to be vulnerable. Jokes immediately circulated about audiences getting a chance to see

"Harry Potter's magic wand," and in an interview on Inside the Actors Studio Radcliffe made genial cracks about the shriveling effect of the audience's gaze on male genitalia.46 Because

Equus is an artistic vehicle which invites the audience to stare at an overtly sexualized character and because, like Cyrus, Radcliffe is already surrounded by the intense scrutiny which accompanies celebrity, investigation of the discourse around Equus‘ revival offers us a space to usefully compare the differences between these two apparently very similar sets of circumstances.47

The paradox, in the case of Equus, is that while on a visual level the play offers us the opportunity to engage in a fairly rare type of objectification, on a textual level the play efficiently sets up and complicates the circumstances under which we do engage in an anxious social

46 See Inside the Actors Studio, original air date December 1, 2008.

47 It can, of course, be argued that the cultural valence surrounding these two sets of photographs was quite different. Radcliffe's photos were publicity stills for the first major revival of a play that, when it premiered, was the first play in history to win every New York award for a single year. Thus, the Radcliffe photos carried with them amount of cultural capital that Cyrus photos did not, perhaps lending Radcliffe a greater degree of leniency in the public eye. However, the Cyrus photos did appear in Vanity Fair -- a major glossy, certainly, but one that continues to maintain a reputation for some amount of serious journalism. The fact that Cyrus was photographed by Annie Leibowitz, with all of Leibowitz's attendant reputation for combining high aesthetic with fashion photography, also gives the Cyrus photos more weight than they might have had otherwise. Salvi 103 discourse around adolescent male sexuality—those times when that sexuality is coded as "gay" or ―queer.‖ Discourse bowing here, as so often elsewhere, to the sexual double standard, overt sexuality is expected to be par for the course in teen boys—an equation which often conveniently overlooks the fact that if young straight men are having sex their most likely partners are straight women of approximately the same age. But let the discussion turn to the sexual activities of the queer boy, and the virulent homophobia so familiar in any number of other public debates suddenly re-creates the paranoid discourse that surrounds the sexual activity of teen women.

While this shift in the discourse around teen sexuality aligns neatly with the already extensively theorized "threat of gayness" and the queer figure‘s disruptive effect on the procreative norm of the nuclear family, Equus does more than merely reconfirm what we already know to look for.

Equus suggests that the way to solve the "problem" of the teenager is to figure out the teen‘s sexuality and to correct it, send it back down the "normal" path. At the same time, the play‘s deep ambivalence about that very normativity suggests that the problem is not so easy to solve, that it runs deeper and wider. The text, in a move often overlooked, links Alan's queerness to a far-reaching critique of modern culture: its consumerism, its claims of civility and civilization, its emotional sterility and alienating effects. The play uses sexuality as the sine qua non of this critique: the audience is led to see an unfettered sexuality as a successful rejection of culture‘s stability, and a safely boring heteronormative sexuality as a sign of capitulation to the norm.

Because the text explicitly links sexuality to issues of religion and worship, labor, consumerism, and psychology, it is easy to follow the text's lead and thus to accept the idea that to correct

Alan's sexuality would be to "fix" the problem of his disruption. My argument, however, is that what the issue of sex covers over, vis-à-vis the teen, are the possibilities for a radically disrupted future, one unimaginable from our present position. By focusing so intently on the teenager‘s Salvi 104 sexual behavior and identity we enable ourselves to avoid looking at the other issues raised by the figure of the adolescent. Equus vividly stages both the radical sexual and political potentialities that attach to the figure of the adolescent; it both opens up and closes down the possibility that we might look outside of, around, or underneath sexuality. While Alan Strang is presented to us as the primitive reemerged in the modern landscape, the character as a figure in fact participates in and reifies a variety of positions within a matrix of mythological ideas about teenagers. Though the play was first written and performed in 1973 and consequently must be read partly as an artifact of that era, the fact that the play just received its first major re-staging in

London and New York since its premiere suggests that the dynamic between Alan and Dysart is as important to audiences now as it was more than forty years ago.48 Although our cultural conception of what the teenager is or is supposed to be has evolved since the play's premiere, that understanding has changed more in degree than in kind. In many ways, Alan Strang remains the perfect symbol of our fears about how the stresses and anxieties of adolescence can morph into madness.

The text, in both content and structure, leads us to believe that the teenager is a solvable puzzle, even if there are underlying issues which remain dangerously enigmatic. The desire which is so dramatically played out here is that of wanting to make the teenager into an object of knowledge, a thing that can be studied, quantified, decoded. At the beginning of the play Dysart tells us that "in a way, it has nothing to do with this boy. The doubts have been there for years, piling up steadily in this dreary place. It's only the extremity of this case that made them active"

48 Shafer says as much in his program note on the play‘s Broadway revival: "For many years, I hesitated about permitting it to be revived on a large scale, partly because I was concerned that psychiatric techniques and practice had changed quite a bit since I wrote it. But finally I had to acknowledge that all plays 'date' in one way or another, and that it was really time that this one, which had made such a stir at its first appearance, might still be found relevant and indeed welcome thirty-five years later." (See Bibliography for full citation information for the theater program.) Salvi 105

(18). In the next scene, Dysart says that he expected "very little" of Alan. "One more dented little face. One more adolescent freak. The usual unusual. One great thing about being in the adjustment business: you're never short of customers" (21, emphasis mine). Dysart's weary practicality in the face of violent mental illness clearly illustrates the assumption that there is really nothing all that strange in the psychic ruptures that can lead to acts such as Alan's. In performance, the tone of voice in which the actor after utters the phrase "one more adolescent freak" suggests redundancy—aren't all adolescents, after all, fundamentally freaky?

Indeed, while the text stages a thorough investigation into Alan's family history and upbringing, it can find no event or pattern of interactions that would satisfactorily explain the boy's violent outburst. This lack of trauma in Alan's history is an important part of the text's critique of modernity insofar as it makes it easier to read Alan as the generalizable proto-citizen. (Unlike

Arcadia, Equus explicitly addresses questions of citizenship and, as I will explore, expresses deep uncertainty over whether the adolescent can or should be made to conform to current conceptions of citizenship.) A significant trauma would make Alan too unique, would lessen the force of the text‘s condemnation of the society which surrounds Alan. And thus an important insight into the function of the adolescent as a figure: the adolescent functions as the internal

Other to this white, middle-class culture. It emerges, chrysalis-like, from the inside, from the same cultural space as the controlling voices of the adult. This fact, this complete equivalency of origins, is precisely what frightens. Furthermore, the voice in the play which teaches us to fear what Alan means the social order comes from Dr. Dysart, who is thrown into a spiritual and professional crisis through his work with him. It is through Dysart that we see how potent a threat the teenager can be to the adult worldview. Dysart, like Septimus in Arcadia, is finally paralyzed by his confrontation with the radically altered worldview of the teenager. This fact Salvi 106 reveals to us that the problem is really not about the teenager per se; it is about the destabilizing effect of the teenager on the adult and, consequently, on the models of citizenship that legitimate the adult's own position in social structures.

My reading of Equus follows and evolves from the critical work of Una Chaudhuri, both her older work specifically on this text and her more recent explorations of the concepts of zooësis, which she defines as a theorization of "the discourse of animality in human life" in "both our actual and our imaginative interactions with nonhuman animals" (Geographies 647). First,

I'll explore the permeating effects of Freudian discourse in the play and follow Chaudhuri's lead in thinking about how that discourse is instrumental in eliciting a particular set of reactions from the audience. This Freudian reading, so easily available on the textual level, reassures the audience that although Alan is a problem citizen, his problem can be "fixed" or "cured" by correcting his deviant sexuality. Although his cure will anesthetize him, strip him of his individuality, it will also stop him from committing further acts of violence -- either against animals, like the horses whose blinding precipitates the play's action, or against safely normal professionals like Dysart, whose worldview he destroys with his passionate primitivism. This

Freudianism, Chaudhuri argues, "is what ensures that a certain ‗reading‘ of the fictional events will occur" (Spectator 50). Chaudhuri elucidates other ways in which the play's structure, following this Freudian model and assisted by staging and dramatic techniques which invite the audience to think of themselves as scientific investigators of a particular mystery, ensures that we follow along and make meaning out of the play through a limited set of frames. However, both Chaudhuri and I are interested in how the play, in performance, subverts and transforms this

Freudian paradigm even while it continues, in some ways, to rely on it. Salvi 107

Following the discussion of Freud, I will contrast my readings of Equus with a reading of an earlier play dealing with similar issues of adolescent male sexuality, particularly queer sexuality and the role of males in society, Robert Anderson‘s 1953 Tea & Sympathy. Examining

Equus and Tea and Sympathy together reveals persistent patterns of anxiety around male sexuality. After discussing Anderson's text I will return to the work of Una Chaudhuri, using the implications of her work on the concept of zooësis to explore how the figure of the horse works in the text not just as an allegorization of homosexuality (though that is one available reading) but, more crucially, as an opportunity to confront a deeper and more destabilizing radicality.

Chaudhuri writes:

[Animals] must join the group of discursively colonized Others--the insane, children,

"savages" -- upon whom rationalism imposes its hegemony, forcing them speak in its

terms. Not only do we exploit animals as beasts of burden and the subjects of scientific

experimentation, says Baudrillard, we have also made them creatures of somatization,

forcing them to carry our symbolic and psychological baggage. As pets, as performers,

and as literary symbols, animals are forced to perform us -- our fantasies and fears, our

questions and quarrels, our hopes and horrors. (Geographies 648)

Thus Chaudhuri's work on zooësis helps me think through the connections between Alan and the animality that he worships. Both the horse and the teenager, in this text, ride along the borderlands of culture and threaten to blur together, become one body. Chaudhuri‘s elucidation of the connections between savagery, animals, children, and the insane -- key terms all easily available in Equus -- supports my reading of Alan/the teenager as a truly radical destabilizing Salvi 108 force.49 Her invitation to critics to think about animals in their own terms, not simply as symbols, opens up a dimension in the play where the Otherness of the teenager and the even more radical

Otherness of the animal combine to shape audience‘s reactions in surprising ways.

Whose Freud Are We Talking about, Anyway?

In this section, I discuss the importance of Freudian psychoanalysis to the reception of

Equus and to the play‘s structure and content. I also, using the work of Herbert Marcuse, examine some of the critiques of Freud and psychotherapy which were circulating in Britain at the time of this play's writing.50 One must, in talking about this text, contend with Freud‘s legacy and the particular legacy of Freud at the time of the play's writing, but one must also think about what gets covered over by relying only on the easily available Freudian critique of the play. This section ends with a brief discussion of the idea of "sensuous knowledge", as articulated by theorist Avery Gordon, as a possible corrective to an over-reliance on Freudian language and models.

Equus has a curious and somewhat paradoxical reception history. As a piece of theater, particularly when it first came out, it was almost universally hailed. On the other hand, even from the beginning, there have always been persistent doubts about the efficacy or ethics of the play's depiction of psychiatry. Una Chaudhuri has characterized the split as ―exhibit[ing] a

49 A number of moments in this text --including the already-cited instance of Dysart referring to Alan as "one more adolescent freak" and the play‘s repeated evocation of the term "citizen"-- suggest that the text itself reads Alan as not simply an individual but also as a type, a way of thinking through the teenager-as-such. My own reading here works to both read him as a specific character within a specific text and as a figure who allows me to make some broader generalizations about the function of this figuration.

50 My reading of Marcuse is, perforce, only part of what could be a much broader investigation into the debates swirling around psychoanalysis and psychotherapy in the 1960s and 1970s and the effect of those debates on this text. A more thorough discussion of these issues would also include further investigation of the school of "ego psychology," which, according to McConachie, taught that "social conformity was the key to psychological success" (62). Salvi 109 curious schizophrenia‖ which ―takes the form of a theoretical dichotomy between ‗drama‘ and

‗theater,‘ the former being roughly synonymous with ‗intellectual depth‘ or ‗originality of ideas,‘ the latter referring mainly to matters like staging, acting and scene design‖ (Equus 48). As Clive

Barnes wrote in his 1975 review:

Mr. Shafer's play, which this season has won every award open to it, remains an

engrossing, and enthralling piece of theater. Forget those sad little psychiatrists -- both

amateur and professional -- who, when the play was new earlier in the season, tried to

criticize it on the likelihood or otherwise of its clinical psychology and psychiatric

practice. Such an approach has nothing at all to do with the theater -- and Equus is first

and last a magnificent piece of theater. (needs cit).

Reviews of the play‘s revival echo the split Barnes alluded to in 1975. Writing of the London production in 2007, David Benedict says that "although doubts surface as soon as the play is over, Shafer's theatricality keeps auds [sic] tied in... what this fitful staging cannot do is overturn the naysayers. Philosophically speaking, there's considerably less to Equus than meets the eye"

(Variety February 28 2007). Dan Kois, writing for New York Magazine, argues that the play was

"a middlebrow sensation in 1974 thanks to big ideas and a little class." Unimpressed by any of the performances, he writes that the actors shouldn't be held too accountable for this since they are "trapped in an old-fashioned play weighed down by its well-made characters, its Jungian dream theory, its Freudian overtones...not to mention the outmoded therapy techniques on display" (October 2, 2008).

This split between questions of theater and questions of psychiatry seen in the journalistic criticism of the play is equally present in the literary criticism. In fact, two articles about the play by Margaret Emelson and Daniel Wright were published in The Journal of Evolutionary Salvi 110

Psychology -- an odd place to find discussions of a play in the first place and testimony to the importance of the play's psychological content to its public reception. Both Wright and

Emelson‘s critiques revolve around whether or not Shaffer represents psychoanalysis fairly or correctly. Wright, in particular, is angry about the use to which Shaffer has put the field of psychoanalysis, accusing Shaffer of "cheat[ing]" (24) the audience because the dialectic of the play "is not the achievement of new types of consciousness but the effacement of consciousness altogether, the violent destruction of faith and hope, the negation of meaning itself" (22). Wright closes by endorsing the continued need for careful psychiatric reading of the play, for such a reading "promises to yield insights considerably more rich and less tortured and contrived than the rather dismal existentialism of Shaffer" (27). Gene Plunka, while less critical than Wright, sees the play as successful precisely because it successfully mirrors a social shift towards the interior of the self. He argues that "Equus speaks for an era; it is the raison d'être of a period in history [the 1970s] in which individuals are trying to find themselves by turning inward and by moving away from social and political problems" (95).

By contrast with those who focus solely on the play's psychoanalytic content, those critics we might loosely categorized as "liking" the play invest their critical energy in a variety of other places. Fundamentally, the split between the critics seems to be one of those who are comfortable with the play's existentialism and those who are not. Michael Quigley argues that the play "is much more than a good detective story," (22) and applauds the text for its investigation "of the modern, ironic grotesque -- of the ‗normal' as unnatural" (24). While those critics who attack the play for being existential display a deep discomfort with the text‘s ambiguity, Quigley argues that "ambivalence is precisely the kind of response Schaffer expects from us. We are not expected to approve of Alan Strang's actions... Indeed we should be Salvi 111 horrified. Shaffer expects us to understand as well, however, the potential horrors of a life devoid of extreme passion and worship" (29). Like Quigley, Michael Gillespie is interested in what comes out of the play's refusal to give an exact, easy, or precisely hopeful answer to the questions the play poses. Gillespie sees in Dysart a "representative of the twentieth-century citizen...whose highly developed rational faculties have caused him to lose touch with his more

‗primitive‘ emotional nature, and for whom an inherited faith in the linear, horizontal progression of scientific inquiry has removed all possibility of worship and access to a vertical spiritual dimension" (63). Gillespie also points (as do Christopher Innes and Una Chaudhuri) to the importance of attending to how the play "achieve[s] a synthesis of many of the discoveries and rediscoveries of the modern theater and its chief practitioners -- and particularly of those practices which promote a sense of the theatrical, which break the 'fourth wall' and bring the actor and audience into a more explicit communal relationship" (65). As Innes writes, ―Shafer incorporates his existential theme in color, costume and ceremony, spectacle, choreographed movement and oral composition. The external elements of production become the core of play scripts that ‗demand elaborate physical actions to complete them‘. Dialogue and characterization, the standard carriers of dramatic meaning, become secondary to the staging‖ (483).

Una Chaudhuri, more than any other critic, has worked to develop an understanding of the importance of the grand theatrical gestures Shaffer employs in Equus. Negotiating the dialectic of "good theater" versus "bad drama" as she terms it (spectator 49), she investigates the possibilities for reading the theatricality of the play as the main point. The methodological impetus for Chaudhuri's investigation evolves out of Aristotle and Brecht‘s theorization of spectator response. Both theorists, she writes, Salvi 112

hold the position that the causes (stimuli, clues, direction, etc.) of the spectator's response

can be and are inscribed within the play and can, consequently, be discovered there, read

out of the play. Spectator-response criticism, this suggests, can take as its object of study

the text itself, as other (author- and text-oriented) criticisms have done. It is a matter only

of changing the angle of vision to focus more exclusively on those elements of the play

which do something to the spectator, call forth or create some sort of response, be it ease,

acceptance, comfort, security (characteristic responses to what Brecht called the "culinary

theater"), or unease, embarrassment, confusion, bewilderment, terror, etc. (Spectator 47-

48)

In this vein, Chaudhuri asks what effect that Freudian content has on the reader, above and beyond providing a discourse that Shaffer can use dramatic ends. Her answer to what the

Freudian content does comes in two parts. The first level of reading is prompted by Shaffer's direction that audience members should be seated in "tiers of seats in the fashion of a dissecting theater" around and above the stage.51 This practice "manages to shift the audience's experience away from that usual play watching and toward one of assisting at a lecture-demonstration" which in turn makes the audience member feel part of the investigative process unfolding on stage, rather than simply spectators to it (Chaudhuri Spectator 50). She argues that "a critical study of spectator response quickly reveals this response to be other than intellectual. (It is clear, for instance, that it is not just the Freudian explanation that is satisfying, but rather the process, enjoined by the play structure, of arriving at this explanation.)" (Spectator 52). We must understand, then, that the Freudian content of the play is important precisely because of its status as a familiar hermeneutic. Further, this hermeneutic allows audiences to feel that they are, like

51 The New York revival maintained this practice for a few spectators (no doubt those who were able to afford these more expensive and exclusive seats on the stage) but left most audience members in their regular place on the other side of the proscenium. Salvi 113

Dysart, detectives tracking down the mystery of Alan's neurosis. "The process of [arriving at] the answer is a process of passive reading, the valorizing and mobilizing of clichés (in this case, fragments of the central modern myth: Freudian psychology)" (Chaudhuri Spectator 51).

This sense of the play‘s Freudian content as mythology is crucial to Chaudhuri's reading, and this mythology, in turn, allows Shaffer to lead the audience into a ritualized experience.

This emphasis on myth and ritual, Chaudhuri argues, is evidence of the fact that

the Brechtian style of the presentation is actually set within an experience much closer to

the kind envisioned by Artaud. In other words, the distance, critical judgment and

rationalization implied by the lecture-hall type of seating arrangement are merely

convenient ways of implicating the audience, of using its rationalistic predilections to get

it to participate in what is -- experientially -- a secular ritual. (Spectator 57).

Chaudhuri admits that "the intellectual level of Equus lacks the awe and mystery Artaud envisioned" but also argues that "Equus demonstrates that it is not defunct myths but living ones

-- like psychoanalysis -- that will weld the group into collectivity and allow ritual participation"

(58).52

Chaudhuri points the way towards seeing the play's relationship to psychoanalysis as one which does not simply investigate psychoanalysis but rather uses it as a convenient shorthand for what the audience already knows, or thinks it knows, about the situation at hand, and thus by extension about the teenager. Since the play encourages the audience to see Dysart as a representative of themselves, it follows that his struggle to make meaning out of his

52 Of course, the split between Brechtian and Artaudian models is, in some ways, a false one. Both Brecht and Artaud expressed disgust with ―psychological‖ drama. Both theorists wanted to destroy traditional theater, but to different ends: Brecht to political ends, Artaud to spiritual ones. Equus is precisely the kind of psychological escape that both Brecht and Artaud would have hated, but its staging makes important use of dramatic elements taken from the work of both.

Salvi 114 confrontation with Alan is also the audience‘s struggle with the vision of radical Otherness Alan embodies. The audience and Dysart, like the detective, struggle to make sense of trifles in order to tell a story that makes sense of improbable events. A Freudian worldview does make sense of the ―psychopathology of everyday life.‖ It gives symbolic meaning to the same kind of details that the detective novel invests itself in. A Freudian worldview also invites us to examine the family, and, in its alignment with the detective, brings the force of surveillance into the domestic sphere. What Chaudhuri doesn't address in elucidation of the text‘s deployment of the Freudian mythos is that mythos‘ specific relationship to the figure of the teenager. My critique takes up this issue where hers leaves off, considering the specific legacy of Freud in relationship to the adolescent. In what follows I elucidate what that Freudian reading can usefully tell us about the figure of the teenager, while I also looking at what the Freudian reading distracts us from.

Aside from the specifics of Freudian theory as explicated by Freud himself, Freudian theory has thoroughly pervaded the popular consciousness and thus the context in which Equus was written and must be examined. Freud‘s ideas about sexuality are so widespread, particularly in literary studies, that crucial aspects of his writings go largely unchallenged: ―everybody knows‖ that children have and express sexuality, ―everybody knows‖ what kind of relationship pertains between drives and the unconscious, ―everybody knows‖ what the Oedipal complex is.

This "common knowledge" version of Freud is imprecise, and is crystallized through the figure of Freud more than through his actual writings. But even as we must acknowledge the limits of

Freudian theory in our understanding of sexuality (in its inability to predict future behavior based on past experience; in its situation as a theory rooted in the mental landscape of people of a specific time, place, and class; in its ignorance of the biological processes that contribute to the development of sexuality), it nonetheless remains a giant among the explanatory theories Salvi 115 available to elucidate the ways in which sexual behavior develops. As Steven Marcus points out in an explanatory footnote in his introduction to Freud‘s Three Essays, ―[The strength of Freud‘s theory] is in part suggested to us by the fact that nothing has come along in seventy years that remotely resembles it in explanatory power, coherence, and integrity. No intellectually serious challenges to it have taken or lasted. The superseders of it that have been regularly announced have just as regularly fallen away‖ (liii).

While I admit the dubiousness of taking Marcus‘ impassioned defense of Freud's work as the final word, it is useful to quickly review some of the specifics of what Freud said about adolescence so that we can understand how his vision remains, in important ways, our own cultural vision of this complex liminal stage. After unveiling the radical idea of infantile sexuality, Freud argues that children enter a latency period in which they internalize ―civilized‖ reactions to the expression of sexuality.53 Furthermore, a person‘s entire later experience of sexuality is determined by what they experience and learn of the subject in childhood. Through the therapeutic process the subject might learn new and (potentially) healthier ways of reacting to sexual stimuli, but the pattern of their sexuality is learned early and sticks tenaciously.54

Freud attributed the upheavals of adolescence to the need, biologically driven, for the subject to learn to direct their sexuality towards a (hopefully ―correct‖) external object.

Crucially, Freud argues that the ―sexual development…of males is the more straight-forward and

53 As Chodorow articulates it, Freud ―shows how the latency period is crucial in instituting the ‗civilized‘ reaction to sexuality (which any reader can recognize) of disgust, shame, and moral condemnation, all of which figure centrally in the genesis of neuroses as well as in the reaction formations and sublimations of culture and high culture‖ (x).

54 ―We have, however, a further reflection to make. This postulated constitution, containing the germs of all the perversions, will only be demonstrable in children, even though in them it is only with modest degrees of intensity that any of the instinct can emerge. A formula begins to take shape which lays it down that the sexuality of neurotics has remained in, or been brought back to, an infantile stage. Thus our interest turns to the sexual life of children, and we will now proceed to trace the play of influences which govern the evolution of infantile sexuality till its outcome in perversion, neurosis or normal sexual life‖ (Freud 38).

Salvi 116 understandable, while that of females actually enters upon a kind of involution‖ (73). Males have a clearly defined ―correct‖ target for their sexuality; expression of that ―correct‖ sexuality meets with societal approbation, much as Radcliffe‘s publicity photos were met with approval. Alan as a character challenges this paradigm: his sexuality is explicitly queer and his deviation from the normal ―more straight-forward‖ development is more harshly punished. If male sexual development is expected to be straightforward, deviation from it is accordingly more unsettling—hence we see male homosexual behavior met with more shock and disgust than female sexual behavior.

Perhaps more importantly for our purposes, however, Freud reiterates the idea that sexual maturity and rebellion go hand in hand. As he writes in the third essay, the one which deals with

"Transformations of Puberty":

At the same time as these plainly incestuous fantasies [of having sexual relations

with parents] are over, and repudiated, one of the most significant but also one of

the most painful, psychical achievements of the pubertal period is completed:

detachment from parental authority, a process that alone makes possible the

opposition, which is so important for the progress of civilization, between the new

generation and the old. (93)

This brief passage illustrates (or perhaps reifies) many of our assumptions about what it means to be an adolescent. First, Freud assumes that adolescence will contain no small amount of psychic pain. Second, Freud is here attempting to explain the pervasiveness of teenage rebellion, but further, he's arguing for the value of that rebellion not just for the individual but also for society.

However, if not correctly dealt with the psychic ruptures and conflicts will deform and stunt, the effects of which are thus (again, and by extension) seen not only on the individual but also the Salvi 117 societal level. Finally, he asserts that rebellion and sexual maturity are in fact one and the same, completely inextricable from each other. This entire process naturalizes adolescent behaviors, behaviors which had only just recently, at the time of for its writing, been explicitly identified as particular to adolescence and which are not in fact constant among historical epochs or geographic locations. While it is difficult to trace out precisely what parts of this assumption that sexuality and rebellion developed simultaneously come from Freud and which were part of the cultural discourse around adolescence at the beginning of the twentieth century we can say with authority that Freud's statement of these ideas lends them more weight than they might have had without him.

Many moments in Equus display the text‘s indebtedness to Freud, but one of the most important of these moments is Alan‘s primal scene with horse and rider on the beach. Even with our attention directed away from homosexuality specifically and towards a broader sense of queerness, this scene makes it extremely clear that his sexual fascination with horses is intimately tied to his memory of the handsome young male rider. The theatrical practice of using the same actor to play both Alan's favorite horse, Nugget, and the Young Horseman underscores

Alan's conflation of the two. This staging practice—hard to miss if you so much as glance at the program book or the play script—also works to clue in the reader to Shaffer's encoding. And indeed, on stage the mute (and therefore all the more insistent) physicality of the horses, odd representational hybrid that they are (clearly "pretend" horses, clearly "real" men), makes it easy for the audience to move with Alan in his conflation of the two. Alan makes his feelings about the encounter clear in the monologue/tape-recording he gives to Dysart.

It was sexy. That's what you want to know, isn't it? All right: it was... I was

pushed forward on the horse. There was sweat on my legs from his neck. The Salvi 118

fellow held me tight, and let me turn the horse which way I wanted. All that

power going any way you wanted... His sides were all warm, and the smell...

Then suddenly I was on the ground, where Dad pulled me. I could have bashed

him.... Mum wouldn't understand. She likes "equitation." Bowler hats and

jodhpurs! "My grandfather dressed for the horse," she says. What does that mean?

A horse isn't dressed. It's the most naked thing you ever saw! More than a dog or

cat or anything. Even the most broken down old nag has got its life! To put a

bowler on it is filthy!... Putting them through their paces! Bloody gymkhanas!...

No one understands!... Except cowboys. They do. I wish I was a cowboy. They're

free. They just swing up and then it's miles of grass... I bet all cowboys are

orphans! (47-49)

Alan's description of the horse is extremely visceral and relies not on visual cues but on the sensory details of smell and touch. In this moment, as he describes it, Alan is embraced by both rider and horse. Alan's description emphasizes his position on the horse, and we don't need to be a psychiatrist to understand his stimulation. Coupled with the sensory overload, and equally important to his development, is the emphasis on self-directed power. Just as the stimulation and

Alan's sense of newfound control are coming together ("all that power going anyway you wanted... His sides were all warm, and the smell..."), the parents intrude, providing an overt sublimating force: Alan‘s purely physical, sensual, and sexual experience must be properly channeled into ―civilized‖ manhood, clothed and codified.

The Oedipal content of the scene is reinforced by Alan's stated desire to do violence to his father for having interrupted his sexual pleasure. It also rejects Dora's extremely Victorian visions of propriety. It is impossible, Alan implies, for Dora's emphasis on proper dress and Salvi 119 proper manners to exist in the same plane as the powerful physical and emotional sensations he experienced while on horseback. The association of horses with cowboys, cowboys with freedom, and freedom with parentlessness points directly to Alan's sense of imprisonment within the expectations of the nuclear family. That this event has never been "properly" resolved is understood to be at the core of Alan's rejection of the social norms taught to him by his parents.

This moment in the text both clearly elucidates the play's barely encoded homoeroticism and provides an important narrative clue about Alan's particular pathology.

Of course, at the time Shaffer was writing Equus the legacy of Freud had evolved and changed. Although critics point to the influence of R.D. Laing on Shaffer's text, the work of

Herbert Marcuse offered another important critique of Freud which was circulating through public discourse around the time of the play's writing. Combining respect for Freud‘s work with a Marxist-informed view of capitalism and history, Marcuse‘s book Eros and Civilization: A

Philosophical Inquiry into Freud (1955) directly challenged the assertion that to be happy and to be civilized are two incompatible goals. In the Freudian worldview, Marcuse wrote, "happiness must be subordinated to the discipline of work as full-time occupation, to the discipline of monogamic reproduction, to the established system of law and order. The methodical sacrifice of libido, its rigidly enforced deflection to socially useful activities and expressions, is culture"

(182).55 While Freud saw the process of sublimation as the defining principle of civilization,

Marcuse argues that such processes of psychic progression are only inevitable so long as certain principles of advanced capitalism are left intact. While never questioning the validity of Freud's theories concerning the instincts and drives, Marcuse argues that the expression of those drives and instincts must be historically contingent. Capitalism as we know it requires of its subjects

55 All citations from Eros and Civilization refer to the digital location numbers for the Kindle Digital Edition which is an electronic reproduction of the Beacon Press edition of September 1974. Salvi 120 what Marcuse called "surplus repression" -- repression in excess of what is needed to achieve the necessities of a comfortable material existence. Doing away with surplus repression through the restructuring of labor relations would in turn, Marcuse argues, allow individuals to tap into the creative drives of Eros and achieve individual happiness and fulfillment.

Three aspects of Marcuse's critique are of particular importance to Equus. On the most basic level, but not therefore to be overlooked, is the fundamental methodology behind

Marcuse‘s work, which seeks to combine the insights of Marx and the insights of Freud. This desire to not lose sight of the social realm while examining the individual informs Shaffer's text as much as it does Marcuse‘s and is consistently overlooked by critics. Second, like Freud's assumption that adolescence and rebellion go hand in hand, Marcuse argues that much of the impetus for this shift in labor/consciousness he imagines must and will come from "the instinctual refusal among the youth in protest. It is their lives which are at stake, and if not their lives, their mental health and their capacity to function as unmutilated humans. Their protest will continue because it is a biological necessity" (162). With this view in mind, Alan's own disrupted mental health can be read as a symptom of both his mutilation at the hands of the capitalist society in which he lives and his own rebellion against that system, however inarticulate that rebellion may be.

Most central to the play, however, is Marcuse‘s condemnation of the then-current state of psychotherapy, a critique equally relevant now. In his epilogue, Marcuse argues that there is an irreconcilable gap between the theory of psychoanalysis and practice of it: "while psychoanalytic theory recognizes that the sickness of the individual is ultimately caused and sustained by the sickness of his civilization, psychoanalytic therapy aims at curing the individual so that he can continue to function as part of a sick civilization without surrendering to it altogether" (2230). Salvi 121

This summation of the split between theory and practice can be seen in Dysart's deep discomfort with the implications of curing Alan, as I will go on to show. As Marcuse articulates the issue:

In the long run, the question is only how much resignation the individual can bear

without breaking up. In this sense, therapy is a course in resignation: a great deal will be

gained if we succeed in "transforming your hysterical misery into everyday unhappiness,"

which is the usual lot of mankind. The same certainly does not (or should not) imply that

the patient becomes capable of adjusting completely to an environment oppressive of his

mature aspirations and abilities. Still, the analyst, as a physician, must accept the social

framework of facts in which the patient has to live and which he cannot alter. (2244)

As we will see in Dysart, it is not just the patient but also the analyst who must always already have resigned himself to the repressive operations of society. In Equus, in Alan, we see the destructive force of a personality that has unchained itself from most of the normal modes of repression, only to create for himself an equally punishing personal mythology, one that might be preferred to the mythologies of those around them because it allows him access to the ecstatic but which also triggers a violent act which, in turn, destroys the object of worship. The play suggests, however, that we should be less worried about how Alan's "hysterical misery" is transformed into "everyday unhappiness" then we should be with the consequences of letting a normal, "appropriately" repressed individual understand the paucity of their own life because of the effective internalization of the reality principle. In other words, the teenager is the catalyst for the breakdown of the operation of the performance principle in the adult, and thus by extension the potential catalyst for radical social change.56

56 Marcuse defines the performance principle as "that of an acquisitive and antagonistic society in the process of constant expansion, [which] presupposes a long development during which domination has been increasingly rationalized: control over social labor not reproduce society on an enlarged scale and under improving conditions" (517). Salvi 122

Even more radically, Marcuse argues that the attention paid by psychotherapy to the individual personality forces the individual to internalize ways of thinking that are ultimately counterproductive if the goal is true happiness/freedom, which would entail the dismantling of capitalist machinery In short, clinical practice is in fact dangerous to the happiness of mankind, insofar as it is dangerous to the whole to make individuals better able to cope with the destructive status quo. This too is articulated by Dysart, or might be, except that Dysart cannot really see beyond his own suffering.57

If discourse after Freud returns so insistently and repeatedly to sexuality it is not, of course, because there is a lack of things to talk about in that rich field where desire and action meet and intertwine. Adam Phillips‘ The Beast in the Nursery is a poetic evocation of the possibility for using what we know about the sublimation to a positive conscious end—that of re- creating for ourselves the passionate engagement with life that makes children both alluring and exhausting.58 However, language of sexuality has become intertwined with the language of sensuality, and it often seems that sexuality has the only sufficiently nuanced vocabulary with

57 In this, Dysart repeats the failures of the neo-Freudian revisionists, who failed to look beyond the individual and into the realm of the social in their search for a cure. Marcuse accused the revisionists of engaging in a "decline of theory", a "laboring of the obvious, of everyday wisdom... which is not derived from any theoretical principle but simply taken from the prevalent ideology" (2273). In Marcuse's critique of the neo-Freudians we might hear echoes of those critics who accused the play of not giving any "real" answers to the questions it raises. However, one cannot escape the suspicion that the type of answers those dissatisfied critics were looking for would be precisely the kind of pat, comforting, and obvious answers given by the neo-Freudian schools of thought. Marcuse's critique of the function of psychoanalysis is thus uncannily echoed in the latent content of the critiques of the text which are most concerned with the play's psychoanalytic content.

58 ―It is now a commonplace assumption that something essential is lost, or at least attenuated, in the process of growing up. Whether it is called vision or imagination or vitality or hope, lives are considered to erode over time (the idealization of childhood and adolescence is reactive to this belief). And it is of course integral to the story to conceive of death as an enemy—as something we fight, something that makes surprise attacks, and not of a piece with our lives. At its most insidiously compliant, psychoanalysis has merely enforced—through quasi-scientific redescription—these traditional stories, psychoanalysis as the high art of disillusionment; the modern mythology of enlightened frustration, the comforting ironization of desire‖ (Phillips 138). Salvi 123 which to talk about the sensuous at all. Sociologist Avery Gordon has started probing into the idea of what she calls "sensuous knowledge", which she defines as:

a different kind of materialism, neither idealistic nor alienated, but an active

practice or passion for the lived reality of ghostly magical invented matters.

Sensuous knowledge is receptive, close, perceptual, embodied, incarnate …. It

tells and it transports at the same time. Sensuous knowledge is commanding; it

can spiral you out of your bounds, it can hollow out, with an x-ray vision, the

seemingly innocuous artifacts of the master. To experience a profane illumination

is to experience the sensate quality of a knowledge meaningfully affecting you….

Sensuous knowledge always involves knowing and doing. Everything is in the

experience with sensuous knowledge. Everything rests on not being afraid of what

is happening to you. (205)

Gordon‘s work draws on Marxist and feminist insistence on the material to suggest new possibilities for methodologies. She calls on theorists to attend to active absences, blank spaces that are electrified by the presence of what is not in them. Following Gordon, I argue that a more rigorously developed conception of sensuous knowledge might help us learn to think about sexuality in less hysterical ways, but might also open up possibilities for overcoming the surplus repression of which Marcuse speaks.

I want to make clear that in calling for greater attention to the sensual, I am not negating the importance of the sexual or the importance of continued active exploration around questions of sexuality, identity, and politics. Nor am I suggesting that we have in some way moved past the sexual. I advocate a supplement, with all of the problematic and exciting possibilities of the supplement delineated by Derridean theory, not a replacement. Throughout this chapter I have Salvi 124 been insisting that a thorough understanding of Equus requires that we read not just the sexual content of the play, but also its investigations into problems of epistemology and consumer culture. In the same vein, to call for a greater inquiry into the possibilities for sensuous knowledge is to learn to read with multiple lenses at once.

Tea and Sympathy: A Contrasting Case Study

In order to more fully explore how Equus uncovers social anxieties around (male) teenagers it is helpful to look briefly at another, earlier play which does similar discursive work around questions of teen male sexuality and queerness—Robert Anderson's 1953 Tea and

Sympathy.59 The play, later transformed into a film of the same name, featured Deborah Kerr as

Laura Reynolds, the wife of a housemaster at an all-boys‘ boarding school. Laura has taken a friendly interest in one of her husband's charges, a sensitive and long-haired boy named Tom who likes to play guitar and sing folk songs and doesn't mind playing women in the school‘s theatrical productions. First Tom is caught sunbathing in the nude with the teacher who was already suspected of homosexuality. Then, in an attempt to quell the rumors stemming from the sunbathing incident, Tom goes on a ―date‖ with Ellie Martin, the local slut. After he finds himself unable to perform sexually with Ellie, Tom tries to kill himself. A scuffle ensues, the police are called in, and Tom is subsequently expelled from school. Meanwhile, the coolness of

Laura's marriage has been revealed and it is not at all surprising when she leaves her husband at

59 One important difference in the social context between Anderson's play and Schaeffer's is, of course, the 1969 Stonewall riots. Anderson's text was also written during the height of McCarthyism, with all of that historical moment‘s attendant homophobia. Salvi 125 the play‘s end, nor particularly shocking when she gives herself to Tom sexually in order to assure him of his heterosexuality.60

In almost no way can Tea and Sympathy be read as a pro-gay text, though it is sympathetic about the dangers and evils of stereotyping.61 What the play does, a bit heavy- handedly from our current "enlightened" perspective, is spell out how extreme anxiety about queerness presents a danger to straight men. The actual experience of gayness (if such a thing could ever be presumed to be static) is uninteresting to the play. Nor is the text particularly interested in fully exploring the alternative model of masculinity that Laura proposes to her husband—a "manliness [that] is not all swagger and swearing and mountain climbing. [A] manliness [that] is also tenderness, gentleness, consideration" (83). Although Tom would be the obvious candidate for fulfilling that model, the text makes it almost impossible to read Tom as manly precisely because of the degree to which it depicts his moodiness, his puppy-dog love for

Laura, and his adolescent rashness -- in short, as a teenager. Indeed, because the text offers no satisfactory model of Laura's preferred type of "manliness" it effectively stages the degree to which masculinity is a construction in the first place.

But if the play is not precisely pro-gay, it does register two things: first of all, the enormous weight and pressure of those traits which (still) signify a lack of properly gendered behavior and, secondly and more importantly, the notion that everything can be presumed to be fundamentally "all right" if only the proper heterosexual pairing can be made to occur. Tom

60 McConachie suggests that Elia Kazan might have been inspired by the character of Laura to create the "female facilitator of male epiphanies" so important to his films On the Waterfront and East of Eden, Laura being one of a host of women who "could save souls by denying her own desires and placing her sexuality at the service of a higher cause" (258-9).

61 Of the play, Bruce McConachie writes that it "raised the accusation of homosexuality but dodged its full Cold War implications. Because the boy in question is not homosexual after all, the play could treat the false accusation of those that were simply another McCarthyite witchhunt motivated by fear" (114). Salvi 126 bears all of the standard cultural markers of gayness and is stigmatized by the play‘s other characters for that, but since the audience is in the privileged position of knowing that Tom is

"really" heterosexual, we end the play secure in the knowledge that the situation has been fundamentally repaired.

Tea and Sympathy is a useful case study: it clearly illustrates what Bruhm and Hurley have identified as the tendency of narratives about childhood queerness to operate in the future anterior tense. That is, the child or teen's "queerness is assumed to be incompatible with [his/her] future, but it will be okay for it to be part of the past" (xviii). Oddly, Equus, though extremely avant-garde when compared with Anderson's sitting room drama, performs remarkably similar rhetorical moves when it comes to the question of adolescent male sexuality. Alan Strang is, like

Tom, a character whose main dramatic problem can be summed up as one of having the wrong sexual attachment. Likewise, his emotional crisis has intimately to do with his failure to have intercourse with a willing partner.

While both Tea and Sympathy and Equus deal with teenage boys who might be understood as "queer," that label may be said to apply more broadly to Alan in Shaffer's text than it does to Tom in Anderson's. One of the peculiar things about Alan is the way he has taken the trappings of a normal and middle-class life and made of them something very strange indeed.

Alan is, in short, much more perverse (as Kelleher uses the term62) than Tom is and is thus also more criminal and more oriented towards pleasure. Alan‘s worldview is quite coherent, and the text has a great investment in creating legibility out of his worldview for the audience, but it is quite unlike a worldview most of us create out of nearly identical material. This is seen particularly in the pieces of information that Dora Strang, Alan's mother and a former

62 See "How to Do Things with Perversion: Psychoanalysis and the ‗Child in Danger‘.‖ Salvi 127 schoolteacher, passes on to him. Dysart asserts that Alan is "proud" of his mother's learning, but when the boy tries to prove the superiority of his mother's knowledge to Dysart all he can come up with is a list of arid and largely anecdotal facts about the Kings of England (28). But, as demonstrated by the scene in the Strang home, Alan takes almost every piece of information he's given and weaves it into his personal mythology. Dysart remarks on this to Hesther, the judge in

Alan's case and Dysart's friend and confidant, in the second act.

He can hardly read. He knows no physics or engineering to make the world real

for him. No paintings to show him how others have enjoyed. No music except

television jingles. No history except tales from a desperate mother. No friends.

Not one kid to give him a joke, or make him know himself more moderately. He's

a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist. He lives one hour every three

weeks—howling in a mist. And after the service kneels to the slave who stands

over him obviously and unthrowably his master. (81)

Much of day-to-day culture is encompassed in the list of activities Dysart describes Alan as isolated from. All of art, all of science, all of pop-culture, and all of the past—these are the things which Dysart asserts barely exist for Alan. If Alan is "a modern citizen for whom society doesn't exist" then he is implicitly calling into question the possibility for citizenship in the first place, and the usefulness of the modern culture that surrounds the boy. This is not true of Tom, whose

"freakiness" adheres only in his less rigid adherence to gender norms. In the two characters we see different degrees of deviation, and Tom's deviations do not veer into the realm of pathology or violence. While Shaffer's text calls into question the fundamental values of the society in which Alan lives, Anderson's text calls, much more sedately, for greater tolerance and compassion. Salvi 128

Also implicit in Dysart‘s description of Alan is a condemnation of the nuclear family which has handed down to the boy an education which has been reduced to facts and stripped of meaning, contributing to the boy's alienation and isolation from the culture in which he is embedded. This is an important point, since removing from the confines of the domestic sphere makes all the more pressing the status of the boy‘s relationship to civic life. All Alan has is his religion, his "worship" of the horse-god Equus whose mythology he has carefully constructed such that it parallels the Christianity of his mother while not being that Christianity, which would enrage his father. Into his worship Alan has built room for a sexuality which encompasses ecstatic longing, ecstatic release, and a variety of self-mortifying rituals, such as riding bareback naked and whipping himself with a wire coat hanger. These masochistic practices once again line up with the traditions of his mother's Christianity, but also have in them their own ―queer‖ pleasure and a kind of autoeroticism which is also part of the boy's isolation. In making room for his sexuality Alan's worship addresses a concern we would expect the self-made religion of a teenager to address, all of the longings and lures and powers of human sexuality. Alan's worship also wounds him, exacerbates his position as outsider and freak. Yet, Dysart‘s point is that Alan has made all of this into something rich and strange, something that the text leaves us in no doubt as to the value of. As Dysart frankly tells Hesther, "I envy it" (82).

Here, in its investigation of passionate primitivism, Equus veers far from the territory of

Arcadia and adults into an entirely different set of mythologies about the teenager—a set of mythologies much more legible in a text with a male protagonist. While the history of discussions about children is littered with competing claims that children illustrate either man's essential goodness and gentleness or man's irrepressible savagery, Gail Bederman convincingly demonstrates that from the late nineteenth century onward, a concerted effort was made by men Salvi 129 like G. Stanley Hall and his followers to counteract what they saw as a dangerous effeminizing of young boys by teaching those boys to get in touch with their own "savage" natures.

Involvement in quasi-militaristic groups like the Boy Scouts (an internationally robust movement as popular in Britain as in America) was supposed to teach young men the skills of survival so valued by their forebears, even though those skills have little practical use in an industrial or postindustrial age, and through the teaching of those skills to give young men a kind of ruggedness and physical stamina associated with "primitive" peoples.63 Thus throughout the 20th century the discourse surrounding masculinity has regularly emphasized the importance of men's relationship to their own "primitive" or "bestial" natures. One thinks again here of Laura's definition of the two kinds of masculinity to Bill in Tea and Sympathy, one a set of male behaviors that glorify physical prowess and the refusal to bow to social niceties, one that can be characterized by a strict adherence to etiquette.64 Bederman elucidates how this twentieth- century myth of masculinity grew out of and in reaction to the norm of the Victorian gentleman and, at the same time, a deep and profound sense of cultural alienation growing out of the

Industrial Revolution. It makes sense, then, that a story like the one that Equus tells would be difficult for us to tell about a young girl, given our attachment to the notion that teen girls, when they misbehave, will do so through deliberate and callous manipulation but not through violence or acts of physical destruction. Alan's participation in the discourse of savagery lines up neatly, of course, with his fascination with cowboy stories, as the myth of the ―wild West‖ has long been a synecdoche for the same kind of lawlessness and backlash against upper-class Victorian norms

63 Though groups like the Girl Scouts eventually came into being as parallels to the Boy Scouts, the mission of such groups for girls unsurprisingly emphasized civic obligation and domestic duties over physical toughness.

64 Laura, in Tea and Sympathy, may in fact be arguing for something much more radical when she argues for model of masculinity that includes tenderness. However, a full discussion of that possibility is outside the scope of my argument here. Salvi 130 that Bederman describes.65 By carefully and repeatedly aligning Alan with notions of the

"primitive" and the "intuitive," as Dysart continually does, the play invests the character with a mythic stature and makes space for a more thorough critique of Western consumer culture than has heretofore been recognized.

Sexuality and Spirituality—One and the Same?

As we might expect, given how I open this chapter, sexuality and the question of whether the teenage character‘s sexuality can be controlled is a crucial part of the text's attempt to create legibility out of the problematic teenage body. Furthermore, questions of the homoerotic and the homosocial do not stop with Alan's deviant choice of sexual object. The play‘s depiction of the intense relationship between Dysart and Strang has been criticized by some as "pederastic"(c.f.

Plunka 87) and it is impossible to ignore how much of Dysart's diagnostic difficulties center on questions of sexuality. In the play‘s climax it is Alan's inability to have sex with Jill that leads to his violent crime—blinding six horses with a metal spike which, in its turn, sets up the text's dialectical exploration. Martin Dysart, Alan's therapist and the play‘s controlling voice, also assumes that Alan's eventual recovery and "cure" are irrevocably tied to an eventual completion of the heterosexual sex act. However, Shaffer (who may here, as I have already suggested, been following Marcuse) is not able to make the same easy assumptions that Anderson does about the efficacy of the heteronormative cure. Dysart, who has throughout the play been worrying over the long-term effects of the therapeutic process on Alan's soul, delivers this monologue in almost the play's final moments:

65 It has been suggested that Allen's investment in the cowboy is a very American context for what is, in fact, a British play. This suggests that there is more thinking to be done about how discourses of nationalism affect discourses of masculinity, but this discussion falls outside the scope of this project. Salvi 131

He'll be delivered from madness. What then? He'll feel himself acceptable! What

then? Do you think feelings like his can be simply reattached, like plasters? Stuck

on to other objects we select? Look at him! ... My desire might be to make this

boy an ardent husband—a caring citizen—a worshiper of abstract and unifying

God. My achievement, however, is more likely to make a ghost!... With any luck

his private parts will come to feel as plastic to him as the products of the factory

to which he will almost certainly be sent. Who knows? He may even come to find

sex funny. Smirky funny. Bit of grunt funny. Trampled and furtive and entirely in

control. Hopefully, he'll feel nothing at his fork but approved flesh. I doubt,

however, with much passion! Passion, you see, can be destroyed by a doctor. It

cannot be created. (107-8)

Certainly, the model of masculinity Dysart here imagines himself teaching Alan to inhabit is not a particularly appealing one. Once again, the language of citizenship emerges and the monologue suggests (as theorists such as Castronovo and Berlant, among others, have suggested) that to be a citizen as Dysart understands the term means giving up on sensuous experience. To give up on sensuous experience is also, then, to give up on the possibilities for sensuous knowledge, and is certainly also to engage in a discourse of bodily shame. The description here also directly links the performance of sexuality to a wide variety of other kinds of interpellation into the capitalism.

It is not very strange that Dysart should draw connections between heterosexualizing Alan and making him "an ardent husband," but if one doesn't follow the tenets of the religious right then it is rather a leap farther to equate Alan's cure with the ability to be "a caring citizen" or "a worshiper of an abstract and unifying God." And while Dysart qualifies his expostulation by saying that his work is only "more likely to make a ghost" (emphasis mine) it is clear that the Salvi 132 therapist believes this modern ghostliness, this empty and pre-scripted life path, to be virtually guaranteed. Dysart might be able to make Alan into a proper citizen, but he ends the play believing that the disembodied citizenship to which he has been taught to make his patients aspire is, in fact, more traumatic and violent than the violence which landed Alan in his care to begin with. Dysart believes that the effect of his healing will

set him [Alan] on a nice mini scooter and send him puttering off into the Normal

world, where animals are treated properly: made extinct, or put into servitude, or

tethered all their lives in dim light…I'll give him the good Normal world, where

we are tethered beside them—blinking our nights away in a non-stop drench of

cathode-ray over our shriveling heads! I'll take away his Field of Ha-Ha, and give

him Normal places for his ecstasy—multilane highways driven through the guts

of cities, extinguishing Place altogether, even the idea of Place! (108)

As the monologue continues, we see that the substance of Dysart's critique—of culture, of his own work—has shifted, and the audience is presented with dystopian image of the substance of our day-to-day lives. Our treatment of animals is read as also a treatment of the wild within ourselves, and the only possibilities within that model are annihilation (extinction) or unquestioning service. The equivalencies that Dysart had set up earlier between citizenship, marriage, and religion, begin to multiply rapidly, so that our treatment of animals is seen by him as being the same as drooling television watching, the same as the erasure of cultural diversity

("even the idea of Place"), and the same as an acceptable expression of heterosexuality. We could, on the one hand, read this monologue as proof of Dysart's rapid descent into his own crisis, but since the text consistently offers Dysart's point of view as a rational response to the problems of modern existence it is difficult to simply dismiss the radical diversity of these Salvi 133 equivalencies as proof of Dysart's own impending madness. Rather, the text asks us to take seriously the idea that all of these different parts of society interact with and inform one another.

In keeping with the text‘s interest in exploring these intricate interactions and equivalencies, is important to understand how, on all levels, the play works to equate spirituality and sexuality. A crisis in one engenders a crisis in the other. Dysart‘s marriage is—as Alan easily ferrets out—completely sexless, and in Dysart‘s case the lack of fulfilled sexual energy is linked to hopelessness about his own spiritual life.66 At stake here, for both the character of Dysart and for the play as a whole, are questions about the validity of Freud's theory of sublimation. Our libidinal energy must go somewhere, and it was Freud‘s ardent belief that the energy we put into science, culture, society, industry, politics, etc. is in fact all libidinal energy seeking a different outlet. Dysart assumes the opposite flow—his stunted sex life diminishes the energy he has for other pursuits. Moreover, his sense of spirituality is as dessicated as his marriage bed. By contrast, Alan‘s sex life and his spiritual energy are one and the same. Neither are ―normal‖— i.e., sanctioned by the rest of society—but they work for Alan. Critically, it is when Alan tries to alter the nature of his sexual life that he experiences the spiritual crisis, which, in turn, leads to his violent act. So sexuality—its expression, experience, satisfaction and consummation—can easily be read as the engine which drives the plot of the play. Yet at the same time sexuality is the play‘s red herring—it covers over and distracts us from other important (and perhaps even more interesting) elements of the play‘s critique, such as its discomfort with consumerism, its

66 I'm using the term "spiritual life" a bit loosely here. Certainly questions of divinity come up in the play, as Alan's obsession with horses hinges on a reframing of his mother's Christianity in which the horse is a material and earthly representation of Godhead. Daniel Radcliffe, in his interview on Inside the Actors Studio, notes that he believes Alan's struggles to be one of trying to reconcile his mother's Christianity with his father's dislike of religion. By creating an entirely new religion, Alan is able to, in some degree, satisfy the desires of both his parents. Radcliffe‘s interpretation of Alan‘s religious life is clearly supported by the text and obviously gave the actor some important grounding for his own interpretation. However, Radcliffe's understanding of Alan is not the only way to understand spirituality in this play. I also use "spiritual life" here as a sort of shorthand for a sense of joie de vivre, of fulfillment and purpose in one's life. Salvi 134 persistent questions about the nature of the patient/psychiatrist relationship, and how we read the meaning of adolescence.

An understanding of sexuality is a crucial component of how the text seeks to make legible the problematic teenage body. This is made clear when Alan and Jill go to see a skin flick in the neighboring town. Alan's experience of the porn theater leads him to identify normative male sexuality as tragically deflated. At first, Alan seems to want to see in the public sexuality displayed at the porn theater a reverence for and sacred relationship to sexuality similar to what he experiences with the horses. "All round me they were looking. All the men—staring up like they were in church. Like they were a sort of congregation" (92). But then Alan's father Frank enters the theater, sees his son, and forces the couple to leave in a publicly embarrassing moment. Frank, who had earlier confessed his inability to "speak of such things" (52), lies to

Alan and Jill and tells them that he was only there on a business matter. Alan sees through this lie, and on his defiant walk home with Jill he begins to think over the implications of finding his father in such a place. At first he is angry, characterizing his father as a "filthy old bugger!" (95), but then he begins to realize that what had seemed private and particular to him is in fact universal.

I kept looking at all the people in the street. They were mostly men coming out of

pubs. I suddenly thought—they all do it! All of them!...They're not just Dads—

they‘re people with pricks!...And Dad—he's not just a Dad either. He‘s a man

with a prick too. You know, I'd never thought about it....I just thought about Dad,

and how he was nothing special—just a poor old sod on his own…poor old sod,

that's what I felt—he's just like me! He hates ladies and gents just like me! Posh

things—and la-di-da. He goes off by himself at night, and does his own secret Salvi 135

thing which no one'll know about, just like me! There's no difference—he's just

the same as me—just the same! [He stops in distress, the bolts back a little

upstage.] (96)

Alan's distress has not just to do with the sudden confrontation he must make with his assumptions about his parents‘ sex life—or lack thereof. To go to the porn theater, to see sexuality as universal (at least to men) and as something available for the price of a movie ticket, is to secularize an experience that had heretofore been sacred. Perhaps it is the threat of banality that leads to Alan's inability to complete intercourse with Jill, or perhaps Alan's moment of sexual "failure" is simply an example of the intrusion of and irreplacability of the fetish object.

As Alan says:

I couldn't... see her.... Only Him. Every time I kissed her—He was in the way.... When I

touched her, I felt Him. Under me... His side, waiting for my hand... His flanks... I

refused him. I looked. I looked right at her... and I couldn't do it. I shut my eyes, I saw

Him at once. The streaks on his belly... [With more desperation.] I couldn't feel her flesh

at all! I wanted the foam off his neck. His sweaty hide. Not flesh. Hide! Horse-hide!...

Then I couldn't even kiss her. (102-3)

A Horse Is a Horse, Of Course Of Course?

Here I return to Una Chaudhuri in order to think about out the role of the horses in the play, and how the horses are part and parcel of both the intersection of spirituality and sexuality and the play's complex depiction of teenagers. The horses are important on two levels. First, their choreography and presence is the single most important element in transforming the theatrical space into a ritual space—something they certainly do for many audience members and whose Salvi 136 power can only really be experienced by attending a performance. Against the stark, minimalist set design, their sleek bodies in huge masks stand vividly apart from everything around them.

Carefully stylized choreography, the clomping of their hooves, and the humming "Equus noise" they produce make them unique and haunting. This highly aesthetic, ritualized, and surreal presentation is, of course, appropriate to their textual role as stand-in for representations of the horse-god Equus of Alan's private mythology. But more than that, their presence draws the audience into its own confrontation with something beautiful and mysterious. Without their presence on stage, Alan‘s delusions would be just that, delusions, not an image powerful enough to account for Dysart's own anguish or the audience's own fascination.67

Second, the horses also stand as objects of deviant desire. This desire can be allegorized as homoerotic, and that dimension of reading cannot be casually dismissed. However, it is also possible to read the horses not as allegory but, both more simply and more complexly, as horses.

Read as animals, as something impossibly and permanently Other, the horses take on new dimensions and force us to confront questions of what it means to have an erotic and spiritual connection to something fundamentally alien. In this light, Alan more forcefully challenges our assumptions that the Otherness of the teenager can be reincorporated into mainstream society.68

67 Shaffer writes of the horses: "Any literalism which could suggest the cozy familiarity of a domestic animal—or worse, a pantomime horse—should be avoided. The actors should never crouch on all fours, or even bend forward. They must always—except on the one occasion when Nugget is ridden—stand upright, as if the body of the horse extended invisibly behind them. Animal effect must be created entirely mimetically, through the use of legs, knees, neck, face, and turn of the head which can move the mask above it through all the gestures of equine wariness and pride. Great care must also be taken at the masks are put on before the audience with very precise timing—the actors watching each other, so that masking has an exact and ceremonial effect" (15). In practice, the actors who play horses are most often also trained as dancers.

68 Writing about Edward Albee's play The Goat, Chaudhuri notes that ―it is not Martin‘s [Albee‘s protagonist‘s] love for the animal that violates taboos and threatens to ‗bring [...] down‘ the family (89); it is the fact that this love is physical, sexual -- heterosexual! -- corporeal. The presence of this most transgressive of sexualities strains the tragic formula to the limit" (geographies 651). Schaffer's play, unlike Albee's, is not a tragedy. It is, if anything, more akin to a thriller, or a mystery. And within that mystery, Alan‘s transgressive love begs to be, in the play's own language, "accounted for." The strain that the figure of the horse puts on the mystery genre is, finally, equal to the strain the figure of the goat puts on the genre of tragedy. Salvi 137

Chaudhuri's work on zooësis suggests, more than once, that it is no accident when animals and adolescents come together in representation. Nowhere does she discuss this more explicitly than in her article with Shonni Enelow on the dramaturgical process of staging a new play, Fox Hollow. Suggesting that ―the emergent metaphor‖ of that play is that "adolescent characters are kept and co-opted by the adult social world like animals in a zoo, or pets in a household," they write:

for us, it seemed no mere accident of circumstance or plot that the becomings of our play

took root in the transitional bodies of our teenaged characters. Although explicit

discussion of this parallel was kept out of the script, we felt that the play depended on the

audience's familiarity with the becoming of adolescence, when the body is not singular,

but rather plural, at once the disappearing child and the appearing adult: both, and

somehow neither as well. The adolescent body is a becoming, always in process, never

fixed. This body, coupled with its relation to the surrounding world, furthers the theory of

the adolescent as a kind of human-animal. The pack-like behavior…the forced

subservience to the more bodily powerful adult world, the body-which-is-not-itself, all

render the adolescent exquisitely suited to perform the kind of animalized becomings in

which we were so interested. (Animalizing 13)

The kind of uncomfortable, boundary-crossing, neither/nor relationship Chaudhuri and Enelow describe in adolescents in general is physically embodied in Equus through the staging practices around the horses which are, as I suggested in my reading of Alan's primal scene on the beach, neither fully human nor fully equine. The affinity between these two strange, alien creatures -- protohuman and domesticated beast -- is perfectly captured in the play's opening moments when, during Dysart‗s first monologue, we see horse and boy resting together, leaning on each other Salvi 138 within the spotlight. In Chaudhuri's article on zooësis, she writes: ―As [Equus] glosses the role of animality in psychoanalysis, to put the horse before the boy is to violate the anthropocentric grammar of the normal. A similar assumption of animal irrelevance characterizes public culture‖

(Nonsenical 520). This insight can be applied to Equus as well: how the play insistently and performatively blends the bodies of the adolescent and animal invites audiences to consider how these types of bodies might be considered "irrelevant" and "unexamined" in similar ways.

If There Is a Red Herring, Is There a Real Herring Also?

When I suggested earlier that sex is the text‘s red herring, what I mean is that sex itself is largely (or maybe even entirely) not the real problem. Dysart talks about the coldness of his marriage, but it's not as if he's running out to have an affair. Sex alone is an insufficient explanation for what is lacking in modern life—the repressive hypothesis in this case being about the entirety of the façade of civilization. To put it more simply, the answer to the play is not and can never be "Go out and have more kinky sex." Nor is the answer about replacing queer sexuality with normative sexuality—if that were all that needed to happen, Dysart wouldn't mourn Alan's approaching cure. But the language of sexuality is the only sufficiently specific vocabulary we can use in order to describe passion, or the lack thereof.

If sexuality is the play‘s red herring, then capitalism would be the thing we are being distracted from. In this way, Equus bears a surprising resemblance to Death of a Salesman, which also stages both a psychological tragedy and a critique of capitalism, and in which the critique tends to get upstaged by the Loman family's personal and individualized tragedy.69 In

69 Miller's play offers a perfect example of what Brecht thought was wrong with naturalism and against which he proposed the development of epic theater. Because the members of the Loman family are more individuals than types, we mourn the Aristotelian fate that drives Willie to his suicide instead of condemning the social practices that Salvi 139 many ways Equus falls into the same trap, but there are a few key differences which create the possibility for a much more critical staging, even if few productions take on those possibilities.

Curiously, while a critique of capitalism—or more accurately, consumerism—runs throughout the play, the lines which support this reading are some of the most often cut from production.

(They are almost entirely absent from the 1977 film adaptation of the play, for example.)

Likewise, Dan Kois' review of the recent New York production for New York Magazine observes: "It's too bad that one of the few aspects of the script to retain cultural currency—its strikes against brand-name consumerism—was cut from this production. I guess casting Harry

Potter as your star renders that argument moot." So while the text occasionally offers up ways to think about the situation being presented to us as something other than a case of sexuality gone wrong, productions of the play often undercut this textual message.

Any reading of the play which wants to think about its critique of consumerism --which, we should remember, was an integral part of defining teenagers when the word was first coined-- must look closely at two moments in the play. First, when Alan tells Dysart about his work at

Bryson's electric shop a peculiar theatrical moment occurs. The chorus of the play, the actors who play the horses and the minor roles, call out to Alan from the side of the stage as customers.

The stage directions read: "Their voices are aggressive and demanding. There is a constant background mumbling, made up of trade names, out of which can clearly be distinguished the italicized words, which are shouted out" (53). What follows is a mishmash of demands as customers shout out their needs for Philco hot plates, Remington ladies‘ shavers, Robex tableware, Hoover vacuum cleaners, and Pifco automatic toothbrushes (54). It is a brief moment in the text but its effect is assaultive both for Alan and for the audience: the overwhelming

left him so desperate.

Salvi 140 cacophony of the customer‘s demands draws the audience into an understanding of the physical and emotional pain that his workplace generates in Alan. Before the shouting begins Alan sarcastically remarks to Dysart that work in the electric shop "might just drive you off your chump" but when the moment ends the audience inevitably feels that Alan's sarcastic remark was, in fact, entirely reasonable (54).

It is important to distinguish this moment in part because there are many other moments in the text which could be like it, but in fact never are. As Shaffer writes in his explanatory notes to the play: "References are made in the text to the Equus Noise. I have in mind a choric effect, made by all the actors sitting round upstage, and composed of humming, thumping, and stamping—though never of neighing or whinnying. This Noise heralds or illustrates the presence of Equus the God" (16). So in fact there are many moments in production where the chorus is engaged in creating important sound effects, adding to the Artaudian gestalt of the production and its non-naturalistic staging, which both emphasizes the cold institutionalism of the hospital setting and creates, particularly with the help of the horses, the stark and ritualized atmosphere so necessary to the performance‘s effectiveness. This short depiction of Alan in the electric shop is assaultive in a way that no other moment in the production is, with the single and crucial exception of the moment when we see Alan blind the horses.

This odd theatrical moment would not retain its power if it were not emphasized again, and it is at the end of Act One that Alan reveals the intensity of his hatred for his work in the shop. Under hypnosis, Alan describes to Dysart his secret nighttime rides upon the horses and the rituals he has built up that make this act not one of transgression against the stable owner, but of worship. Salvi 141

ALAN: Here we go. The King rides out on Equus, mightiest of horses. Only I can

ride him, he lets me turn him this way and that.... Now the king commands you.

Tonight, we ride against them all.

DYSART: Who's all?

ALAN: My foes and His.

DYSART: Who are your foes?

ALAN: The Hosts of Hoover. The Hosts of Philco. The Hosts of Pifco. The

House of Remington and all its tribe!

DYSART: Who are His foes?

ALAN: The Hosts of Jodhpur. The Hosts of Bowler and Gymkhana. All those

who show him off for their vanity. Tie rosettes on his head for their vanity!...

And Equus the Mighty rose against all!

His enemies scatter, his enemies fall! (73)

Once again the staging of this moment backs up its importance, as it is this part of the ritual,

Alan's figurative "slaying" of the trappings of consumerism and civilization, which directly precedes his orgasm. Without first slaying his enemies, Alan cannot find sexual release, and the enemy here is not, as we might expect given the highly Freudian nature of this text in general, his mother or father. The "enemy" is not in fact a person at all, it is a host of material goods to which

Alan has attached a variety of meanings. In Alan's mind, at least, it is not his worship of horses that makes him strange and unhappy and it is not the relatively benign strictures of his parents.

What entraps him and tortures him are the objects of conspicuous consumption to which he must give his time and energy. Salvi 142

As I have already shown, although this moment in the text offers another set of ways to understand the crisis both Alan and Dysart are undergoing, criticism of the play has returned to insistently to issues of sexuality. The threat that the teenager (Alan) poses to the adult (Dysart) is not simply or merely sexual. The teenager threatens the adult‘s knowledge, the adult‘s status as a controlling voice whose wisdom supersedes the heady experiences of youth. In this text, the teenager forces the adult to question the use value of the knowledge—and the status that goes along with it—that the adult has worked so hard to acquire. The operations of the text demonstrate that even if the threat the teenager poses is not, in fact, sexual, it remains discursively important to present the teen as intrinsically and constantly sexual in order to hide the real threat that they pose in terms of overturning current social practices. Sexuality often remains the language for describing this anxiety, such as when we might bring in the language of

"impotence" to describe how confronting the problems of futurity feels. Sexuality is also perhaps the easy anxiety to admit to because we know that our social mechanisms for controlling sexuality are largely effective. We know that part of our definition of what it is to be an adult is to have a certain kind of control over (implicitly heterosexual) sexuality. However much the sexual revolution has moved or changed our discourse around sexuality, it is still true that the nuclear family unit survives mostly intact and has even become in some measure the goal to which "nontraditional" romantic pairings in the queer world aspire.

The second of the plays more assaultive moments takes place when Alan commits his violent act. This occurs just after Jill has left Alan alone in the stable. As Alan describes it, the omniscient and omnipresent horse-god equus is the reason that Alan is unable to engage in the sexual act: Salvi 143

He was there. Through the door. The door was shut, but he was there! … He‘d seen everything. I could hear him. He was laughing. […]

Eyes! … White eyes—never closed! Eyes like flames—coming—coming! …

God seest! God seest! … NO! …

[Pause. He steadies himself. The stage begins to blacken.]

[Quieter.] No more. No more, Equus.

[He gets up. He goes to the bench. He takes up the invisible pick. He

moves slowly upstage towards NUGGET, concealing the weapon behind

his naked back, in the growing darkness. He stretches out his hand and

fondles NUGGET‟s mask.]

[Gently.] Equus … Noble Equus … Faithful and True … God-slave … Thou—

God—Seest—NOTHING!

[He stabs out NUGGET‟s eyes. The horse stamps in agony. A great

screaming begins to fill the theatre, growing ever louder. ALAN dashes at

the other two horses and blinds them too, stabbing over the rails.

Their metal hooves join in the stamping.

Relentlessly, as this happens, three more horses appear in cones of light:

not naturalistic animals like the first three, but dreadful creatures out of

nightmare. Their eyes flare—nostrils flare—their mouths flare. They are

archetype images—judging, punishing, pitiless. They do not halt at the

rail, but invade the square. As they trample at him, the boy leaps

desperately at them, jumping high and naked in the dark, slashing at their

heads with arms upraised. Salvi 144

The screams increase. The other horses follow into the square. The whole

place is filled with cannoning, blinded horses—and the boy dodging

among them, avoiding their slashing hooves as best he can. Finally they

plunge off into darkness and away out of sight. The noise dies abruptly,

and all we hear is ALAN yelling in hysteria as he collapses on the

ground—stabbing at his own eyes with the invisible pick.]

Find me! … Find me! … Find me! …

KILL ME! … KILL ME! … (104-6)

This scene finally gives the audience access to the "shocking"-ness of Alan's act, just as Hesther tells Dysart in the play's first scene. Whereas in the rest of the text we are led by Dysart‘s prompting to feel a certain sympathy for Alan, a personalized empathetic understanding of his confusion and isolation, actually seeing the horses blinded throws us at least temporarily into abrupt confrontation with the violence and its bloody aftershocks.

In production, this moment is like nothing else that precedes it. Strobe effects are used and the cacophony is overwhelming—Alan's inarticulate yelling, terrified whinnying, and a loud screeching audio effect overlay one another. The stage is blurred with motion—in the New York production Radcliffe ran frantically from side to side, stall to stall, vaulting frenziedly off the sides of the set like a parkour artist. When the moment is over we are drawn back to seeing

Alan's complete vulnerability. He is crouched on the stage floor, shivering and naked, until

Dysart covers him with a blanket and soothes him to sleep. He doesn't speak another word before the final curtain—all of the real control and authority in describing what has just been seen is handed over again to Hesther and to Dysart. But staging the moment of the blinding, moving to

(re)enactment of it and away from description, means that we leave the theater with a visceral Salvi 145 sense of Alan as a violent force, uncontrollable as the hurricane. The play ends by returning our attention to Dysart‘s crisis—a structurally important move insofar as the play is fundamentally more concerned with the threat posed to the adult by the teen than vice versa.

A Return to Sublimation—and Resistance to It

An interest in sexuality (or as Adam Phillips writes, in ―what goes into and what comes out of bodies‖ [20]) may be one way to describe the curiosity of infants and young children, but it is a reductive one—as reductive as the understanding of children that came before Freud and denied them sexuality altogether. Children are sensuous creatures as well as sexual creatures, and it is for their capacity (and the cultural space now made for them to do so) to switch between sensuous, sexual and rational exploratory modes that we envy children the most. I could offer many observations here about how learning can be a sensuous experience—how to see children learn with enthusiasm is to be struck by how they throw their whole bodies into the experience.

In doing so, I might be accused of repeating the error that Freud denounced, of erasing the sexual experiences of childhood, but such is not my goal. However, evolutionarily speaking, sex cannot be the only thing children are ―truly‖ interested in—the demands placed on us as social animals to accede to the pressures of socialization are too great and varied.

And what has this to do with Equus? On the broad scale, we can say simply that Equus makes this discourse visible. It blames a ―flaw‖ in Alan‘s sexuality for his violent offense and assumes that a correction of one will lead to a correction of the other. Inevitably, however, the text cannot sustain displaying only this one anxiety, this single narrative about what the ―root‖ of the problem is. And it is worth noting how very important origins are to this play, how insistently the text maintains the belief that if the origin can be understood and explained then the solution Salvi 146 will follow. Dysart in particular mourns the impossibility of truly understanding origins, and thus being forever shut out from the possibility of resolution. At the beginning of Act Two, considering the image of the horse-god Equus, he delivers this monologue:

I can hear the creature‘s voice. It‘s calling me out of the black cave of the Psyche.

I shove in my dim little torch, and there he stands—waiting for me. He raises his

matted head. He opens his great square teeth, and says—[Mocking] ‗Why?...Why

Me?...Why—ultimately—Me?...Do you really imagine you can account for Me?

Totally, infallibly, inevitably account for Me?... Of course I‘ve stared at such

images before….this one is the most alarming yet. [Pause.] A child is born into a

world of phenomena all equal in their power to enslave. It sniffs—it sucks—it

strokes its eyes over the whole uncomfortable range. Suddenly one strikes. Why?

Moments snap together like magnets, forging a chain of shackles. Why? I can

trace them. I can even, with time, pull them apart again. But why at the start they

were ever magnetized at all—just those particular moments of experience and no

others—I don‘t know. And nor does anyone else. Yet if I don‘t know—if I can

never know that—then what am I doing here? I don‘t mean clinically doing or

socially doing—I mean fundamentally! These questions, these Whys, are

fundamental—yet they have no place in a consulting room. So then, do I?...

(Shaffer 76)

And the crisis which is elucidated at the beginning of the act is also the play‘s final note, its last haunting cry.

DYSART: And now for me it never stops: that voice of Equus out of the cave—

‗Why Me?...Why Me?...Account for Me!‘…All right—I surrender! I say it!...In Salvi 147

an ultimate sense I cannot know what I do in this place—yet I do ultimate things.

Irreversible, terminal things. I stand in the dark with a pick in my hand, striking at

heads! I need—more desperately than my children need me—a way of seeing in

the dark. What way is this?...What dark is this?...I cannot call it ordained of God:

I can‘t get that far. I will however pay it so much homage. There is now, in my

mouth, this sharp chain. And it never comes out. (Shaffer 108)

Read together, these scenes demonstrate an obsession with the essential, and a panic about actions which effect that ―essential‖ without first knowing what it is. Again, we see here the degree to which the teen is a cipher onto which adult anxieties about the status and use of knowledge are projected. As Hesther points out, Alan himself never questions the morality of

Dysart's treatment or the value of its efficacy. Dysart himself leads us to see Alan's desire for the

"truth drugs" as evidence of the boy‘s deep desire to unburden himself, to engage in the purgation of the confessional.

Alan‘s mother Dora is also concerned with discovering the origin of what has happened to Alan, and her explanation of the situation both parallels and diverges from Dysart‘s.

DORA: Whatever‘s happened has happened because of Alan. Alan is himself.

Every soul is itself. If you added up everything we ever did to him, from his first

day on earth to this, you wouldn‘t find why he did this terrible thing—because

that‘s him; not just all of our things added up….You‘ve got your words and I‘ve

got mine. You call it a complex, I suppose. But if you knew God, Doctor, you

would know about the Devil. You‘d know the Devil isn‘t made by what mummy

says and daddy says. The Devil‘s there. It‘s an old-fashioned word, but a true

thing….I only know he was my little Alan, and then the Devil came. (78) Salvi 148

Even in the eyes of his mother, Alan is an impossibility, something that can only be explained through a turn to supernatural forces. And when I say something here, I do so deliberately, because it is Alan's category as thing, not a person, which is precisely at stake here. Under the watchful and dissecting eye of therapist Alan becomes the exotic Other within the society, even within the heart of the nuclear family.

Dora‘s and Dysart‘s stories parallel each other insofar as they both come down to a certain kind of metaphysical explanation of origins: for Dysart the image of Equus-the-God as told to him by Alan takes on a tremendous significance, even to the point of awe. For Dora, the explanation for Alan‘s transformation has to be the Devil. Once again, the ―answer‖ has to do with the essential. Dora, and her assertion that Alan (or the devil) is responsible for the situation at hand, implicitly rejects the notion of the tabula rasa. If Alan's actions could be fully explained through an investigation into his individual past, then he would have come out normal—certainly there is no central, dramatic event that we learn about in the play that would do more to explain why Alan twisted in his own peculiar way. Dora suggests that there was always (or nearly always; he was once her "little Alan") something awry in the boy, and its strangeness or alienness is the ultimate explanation for his violent act.

To return to the beginning of the chapter and the photographs of Cyrus and Radcliffe, the conversations surrounding these stills might be said to offer as perfect a glimpse as is possible into the fear that teenagers might be able to co-opt the anxiety surrounding their sexuality and use it to their own ends. In the case of Cyrus‘ Vanity Fair shoot, we deny her power by screaming that she has been manipulated by her handlers—her innocence must be maintained at all costs. For Radcliffe, it is assumed that he knows what he is doing, and his move into adult roles is treated with cynicism. But once again, sexuality is that which covers over the real fear: Salvi 149 the real fear is that these children who labor, who command our gaze so fearlessly, understand that the photographs we view and condemn are part of the way we make the teenager into a thing-to-be-consumed. We make the teen into a body for our consumption in order to stave off the threat, as both Septimus and Dysart illustrate, that we will be consumed by the teen. And if these adolescents understand the process by which they are consumed, they remain free to make choices about their own consumption—in every sense of the word.

Salvi 150

Chapter Three

Child-Brides: The Seductiveness of Innocence in The Crucible

and How I Learned to Drive

Early on in Paula Vogel's play How I Learned to Drive, the character of Li‘l Bit is shown at the dinner table, fighting with her family over why she wants to go to college, which she has received a scholarship for. Her misogynistic grandfather, making crude remarks about the size of the teenager‘s breasts, asks "What does she need a college degree for? She's got all the credentials she'll need on her chest‖(17). Incensed, Li'l Bit replies, "maybe I want to learn things.

Read. Rise above my cracker background… There's a whole semester course, for example, on

Shakespeare‖(17). Still skeptical, grandfather asks: "how is Shakespeare going to help her lie on her back in the dark?" (17). In the viewpoint of this randy patriarch, his granddaughter‘s obviously well-developed secondary sex characteristics obviate the need for further education.

Like other voices this dissertation has been exploring, the grandfather‘s remarks demonstrate the persistent rhetorical equivalency of sexual and intellectual maturity where the two are assumed to develop in tandem. That he is completely missing the point, both about his granddaughter‘s desire for further intellectual development and her already complex relationship to sexuality because of her abuse at the hands of her Uncle Peck, is the play's point at this moment. Already

Vogel is working to disrupt this common equivalency.

The girl leaves the dinner table weeping with rage. But a few pages later, Li‘l Bit says:

There were a lot of rumors about why I got kicked out of that fancy school in

1970. Some say I got caught with a man in my room. Some say as a kid on scholarship I

fooled around with a rich man's daughter. Salvi 151

(Li'l bit smiles innocently at the audience) I'm not talking.

But the real truth was I had a constant companion in my dorm room – which was

less than discrete. Canadian V.O. A fifth a day.

1970. A Nixon recession. I slept on the floors of friends who were out of work

themselves. Took factory work when I could find it. A string of dead-end day jobs that

didn't last very long.

What I did, most nights, was cruise the Beltway and the backroads of Maryland,

where there was still country, past the battlefield and farm houses. Racing in a 1965

Mustang – and as long as I had gasoline for my car and whiskey for me, the nights would

pass. Fully tanked, I would speed past the churches and the trees on the bend, thinking

just one notch of the steering wheel would be all it would take, and yet some…reflex

took over. My hands on the wheel in the nine and three o'clock position – I never so

much as got a ticket. He taught me well. (21)

At this moment it seems that Li‘l Bit has not, in fact, managed to ―rise above her cracker background.‖ The escape of the collegiate career vanishes into an alcoholic stupor and suicidal ideation, both of which, we infer, are born of her desire to escape the truth of what happened to her as a girl in her family. But even here, as Li‘l Bit is confessing her darkest hour, she acknowledges the importance of Peck's teaching. The moment is ironic and dark—in effect she is praising him for teaching her how to get away with being a drunk driver. But as the play continues we see that Li‘l Bit‘s praise of her uncle‘s pedagogy is not wholly ironic.

In fact, the most uncomfortable thing about this very uncomfortable play is that it makes us confront the intersection between sexuality and teaching. The car, the instrument of what Li‘l

Bit is ―supposed‖ to be learning—according to the play‘s title—is also the liminal and weirdly Salvi 152 protected space of sexual exploration. The very first lines of the play, spoken by Li‘l Bit, are

―Sometimes to tell a secret, you first have to teach a lesson‖ (7). It is a conspiratorial first line, promising us the voyeuristic pleasure of knowing the secret even as it warns us that we must be schooled in order to get the reward of the secret. Li‘l Bit tells us right away that she is ―a very old, very cynical of the world, and I know it all. In short, I am seventeen years old, parking off a dark lane with a married man on an early summer night‖ (7-8). And the conspiracy continues, because we do not know that the ―married man‖ she refers to is her uncle until several minutes into the production (12). There is of course a mocking edge to the assertion that Li‘l Bit already

―knows it all‖; this moment also depends on the fear that Li‘l Bit might know something she is not supposed to, that something being precisely the sexuality she ought not possess, and also ought not share with her uncle. Much is revealed here, but these are not all of the secrets or lessons Li‘l Bit has to tell or to teach.

In this chapter I read Vogel‘s How I Learned to Drive in conjunction with Arthur Miller's

The Crucible through the lens of Lauren Berlant‘s theorization of infantile and diva citizenship.

In brief, infantile citizenship should be understood as acting from a position of claimed innocence or naïveté in order to shore up the machinations of the state, while diva citizenship, though starting from a similar position of claimed naïveté, takes a rhetorical turn and performs an act of heroic pedagogy which forces it audience(s) to acknowledge (and hopefully change) the operations of social power. My reading will demonstrate that while The Crucible explicitly claims that when teaching and sex come together the result is an amoral, devouring force, How I

Learned to Drive shows that the conjunction of sexuality and pedagogy can lead to acts of diva citizenship wherein audiences are forced to confront the complexity and power of all of the parties involved, of what it means to take seriously the idea that knowledge is power, and that Salvi 153 how power is differently exercised over different kinds of bodies changes the possibilities for citizenship. While the previous two chapters demonstrated the workings of the phantasmatic scene of learning predicated, (though not always controlled by) a hierarchical student/teacher relationship, in this chapter I investigate what can happen when the student becomes the teacher.

I open with Li‘l Bit‘s own description of her college reputation because reputation is at the heart of this chapter. Having a reputation describes the moment at which an individual‘s secrets enter the public sphere, thereby defining the possibilities for the individual‘s interactions with public/political life. Reputation as a concept is important for questions of epistemology in public life, since as an idea people have about themselves or others it is one of the major ways in which secrets, which we could also think of it as epistemes of a particular kind of knowledge, gain or maintain value as currency.70 Reputation can also function as something that constricts a person's social existence—if a person‘s reputation precedes them, it limits the kinds of meaning other people make about them, often falsely. And finally, reputation is still something women have to worry about more than men, particularly in the realm of sexuality.

In this chapter I will be examining ways in which the figure of the female adolescent has been co-opted into pressing debates about the status, formation, and character of national life.

Theses texts do not come to the same conclusion about what the adolescent female ―means‖ as a figure. The ambiguities surrounding this figure are precisely what interest me about it—its availability and potential for overdetermination are what make it useful. I do not argue that any of the characters I examine in this chapter fully embody or exemplify Berlant‘s notion of

70 My use of the word ―episteme‖ follows from the definition of this term used by Foucault in The Order of Things, but ought also to be distinguished from Foucault's use of it insofar as I am here conceiving of the episteme as a piece of knowledge which does, as in Foucault‘s conception of it, serve as a predicate or condition of possibility for what follows from it, but also as a discrete piece of knowledge, the kind of thing that can be told and circulated as a secret.

Salvi 154 infantile citizenship. Rather, I use Berlant‘s work as a springboard, and in diving into these texts

I wish to trace out the implications of how these texts display the qualities of infantile and diva citizenship in different registers and to different ends. This mode of reading is, I believe, in line with Berlant‘s own work, which sees these categories of citizenship as operating in a variety of complex and nuanced ways.

The texts I examine use the female adolescent body as a metonym for the body of the nation which reveals the fragility of the construction of citizenship. The female adolescent bodies

I examine in this chapter are struggling to lay claim to the operations of power, and the struggle is important because their gender and, more particularly, their youth, undo any assumptions we might have that power will be handed to them easily and inevitably. Furthermore, the complex sexual fetishization of the young female body both grants these figures power through sexual manipulation and, equally, positions them as imperiled.71 These young women have the power to manipulate, but they can also themselves be easily manipulated. The uneasy positioning of these women within the matrices of power reveals a deep-seated anxiety around how power might be passed down, kept in check, denied, or abused as it is transferred intergenerationaly. While the fact that these characters are female in the first place reveals a fundamental shift in who can be imagined as capable of wielding public power, the degree to which issues of sexuality and sexual behavior shape our understanding of these young women attests to how little we can separate out our very old ideas about what female sexuality means from our ideas of what it means to be a public woman.

Abigail and Li‘l Bit are difficult characters to think about and talk about at least partly because of the way they insert themselves forcefully into the public sphere: Abigail through the

71 When I say ―sexual manipulation‖ here, I mean both that the characters of Abigail Williams and Li‘l Bit are sexually manipulated and, in turn, claim for themselves the agency to manipulate others through sexuality. Salvi 155 mechanism of the witchcraft trials, Li‘l Bit through her public recounting and reliving of her personal trauma, which requires of the audience an act of witnessing.72 That is to say that although both of these plays can be read as deeply personal stories, they require their audiences to move the intimate narratives back into the public sphere.73 Within the characters of Abigail and Li‘l Bit, sexuality is the lens through which we understand their political gestures. This is weird and not inevitable, although the persistence of this pattern across different kinds of narratives and genres serves to make it seem inevitable. As always, I am seeking to untangle that seeming inevitability and to challenge the terms on which innocence remains highly prized and coveted category.

The plays I examine here have certain thematic similarities to each other and the similarities point the way towards the logic of reading these texts in conversation with each other. Both plays stage a sexual relationship between an older man and a significantly younger woman, though the inflection given to those relationships is quite different. Within those relationships the dynamic of student and teacher is played out at length, and with implications that reach beyond the dyad of the partners. Unlike what we see between Thomasina and

Septimus in Arcadia, manipulation and coercion are integral parts of the dynamic of these plays, facts which radically alters the tenor of the texts. While in my previous chapter I assumed that

72 Anne Cvetkovich, in her book An Archive of Feelings, succinctly notes that it is essential to keep in mind that incest stories or narratives are performances whose contexts may vary tremendously. An incest story could be offered up as testimony in court, an object of scrutiny on a television talk show, material for processing in a therapy session, a plea for public and political attention to the problem of sexual abuse, or a disruption of other political projects. The audience for this story is crucial to its effects and some stories serve the interests of their listeners at the expense of the teller. [Incest scholars] emphasize the distinction between confession and witnessing, where witnessing requires a kind of participation on the part of the listener that is not merely voyeuristic. (93)

73 A more traditional reading of The Crucible would argue that what we see in the play is John Proctor‘s personal and individualized story, not Abigail‘s. Given my interest in the adolescent, however, such a reading doesn‘t serve my needs.

Salvi 156 the collision of the space of instruction and the space of seduction was accidental, here I investigate what happens when the text acknowledges the two spaces to be one and the same.

Situating Theory, Situating Seduction

To understand the centrality of Berlant‘s theorizations to my own arguments we must first explore what those theorizations are. Arguing that the ―fetal/infantile person is a stand-in for a complicated and contradictory set of anxieties and desires about national identity,‖ Berlant sees this figure as the primary one through which we decide ―whose subjectivity, whose forms of intimacy and interest, whose bodies and identifications, whose heroic narratives ... will direct

America‘s future‖ (6). In short, we can define the infantile citizen as one who uses a position of perceived, not actual, marginalization in order to consciously or unconsciously reinforce systems of power. The infantile citizen is imagined as an infant or child, but it is important to remember that this is a position that can be performed by any adult who is sufficiently un-self-reflexive about what s/he is doing.

The importance of the infantile citizen for Berlant is that citizenship ―is continually being produced out of the political, rhetorical, and economic struggle over who will count as ‗the people‘ and how social membership will be measured and valued‖ (20). While it is tempting to read the infantile citizen as diametrically opposed to the diva citizen, because both positions rely on a fundamental claim of innocence/naïveté it is more accurate to see them as originating from the same place but operating in different rhetorical and political registers. While Berlant focuses her reading of diva citizenship on virtuosic performances enacted by African-American women

(Anita Hill, Harriet Jacobs), both the infantile and diva citizen are roles that can be inhabited by almost any kind of body. We must also note, however, that the fetal/infantile citizen discussed by Salvi 157

Berlant is almost exclusively imagined as middle-class and white. This return to the normative in terms of race and class is important for precisely the ways in which it reveals how the national imagination continues to frame itself through reification of old models about what kinds of bodies deserve representation, power, and protection under the law.

While Berlant critiques the infantile citizen‘s ability to overwhelm discourse, she also sees it as a position with certain powers unique to its configuration. The infantile citizen is the citizen who refuses to wake into critical consciousness; it is the citizen who, like Peter Pan, refuses to grow up. However, a peculiar power resides in the infantile citizen‘s stubborn naïveté.

The infantile citizen‘s ingenuousness frequently seems a bad thing, a political subjectivity

based on the suppression of critical knowledge and the resulting contraction of

citizenship to something smaller than agency: patriotic inclination, default social

membership, or the simple possession of a normal national character. But the infantile

citizen‘s faith in the nation, which is based on a belief in the state's commitment to

representing the best interests of ordinary people, is also said to be what vitalizes a

person's patriotic and practical attachment to the nation and to other citizens. (Berlant 27-

8)

As Berlant traces throughout the book, practices of infantile citizenship which do not recognize themselves as such perpetuate a false model of civic engagement through which knowledge alone is presumed to be sufficient. In other words, ―to infantilized citizens … having at least a weak understanding of an overwhelming amount of material seems better than nothing, and also the only thing possible‖ (52). To be a concerned citizen is not sufficient; to have knowledge is not the same thing as to intentionally disavow the position of innocence which enables one to speak patriotically, to engage with the symbols and allegories of the nation. In the terms of this Salvi 158 project‘s larger concerns, then, the infantile citizen is fundamentally unlike either Thomasina or

Alan Strang because their knowledge does nothing to disrupt the paradigms of the world they live in. Infantile citizens, such as we will see in Abigail, access and manipulate the power machinery of the state without looking to transform those operations at a basic level.

However, individual subjects can on occasion deliberately tap into the infantile citizen‘s position of ingenuousness in order to call attention to personal experiences which are evidence of systemic injustices. To take on but to not fully inhabit the position of the infantile citizen is, in

Berlant‘s terms, to perform an act of ―diva citizenship‖ which ―occurs when a person stages a dramatic coup in a public sphere in which she does not have the privilege‖ (223). Acts of diva citizenship are moments when

[a] member of a stigmatized population testifies reluctantly to a hostile public the muted

and anxious history of her imperiled citizenship. Her witnessing turns into a scene of

teaching and an act of heroic pedagogy, in which the subordinated person feels compelled

to recognize the privileged ones, to believe in their capacity to learn and to change; to

trust their desire to not be inhuman; and trust their innocence of the degree to which their

obliviousness has supported a system of political subjugation. (222)

Diva citizenship requires the diva to call attention to her own body and her own bodily experiences in order to illustrate the subjugation she wants to educate the powerful about.74 To perform an act of diva citizenship might be to willfully believe the dominant culture to be better intentioned than it actually is. Diva citizenship might rely upon an intentional forgetting. Or, in another mode, the diva might act from a privately held but publicly unexpressed position of cynicism, a position unsure about the efficacy of its call to action, but from which the diva

74 Berlant is particularly concerned with how acts of diva citizenship come about or are precipitated by issues of sex and sexuality. This concern with sex and sexuality is also very much a part of this chapter, but there is no reason to a priori assume that sexuality is the only possible realm of action for diva citizenship. Salvi 159 positions herself as willing to at least temporarily inhabit the position of naïveté which allows her to perform her grand gesture at all. In contrast to acts of infantile citizenship, which we will recall are acts which use a perceived marginalization to reinforce present systems of power, the diva citizen strategically performs her real marginalization in order to radically alter those same systems.

There are dangers inherent in taking up the position of the diva. By forcing the public to recognize the profoundly systemic and structural implications of private sexual acts and experiences, the diva risks being able to continue to lay claim to positive bodily and sensational experience. As Berlant points out, ―desire to become national seems to call for a release from sensuality—this is the cost, indeed promise, of citizenship‖ (239). To perform as a diva citizen is to simultaneously call attention to the markedness of one‘s own body, to call attention to the violations enacted upon that body, and to wish for a return to a degree of invisibility that the diva citizen may, in fact, never have experienced. However terrible this risk, the possibility remains that the diva‘s act of heroic pedagogy might lead to change. ―The bodily distortions and sensual intimacy of national media degrade and swell representations of political agency so extremely that diva manipulations of publicity might always bleed into a space of surprise where anything can happen, including political experiments in reimagining agency and critical practice that burn through citizenship‘s anesthesia‖ (Berlant 242). The diva citizen, by calling attention to her own body and her own circumstances, as Li‘l Bit repeatedly does throughout Vogel‘s play, impels us to recognize how other bodies and other claims to citizenship might be imperiled in the same way as the diva‘s.

Berlant remains uncertain about the potential efficacy of acts of diva citizenship. While she admires the impulse and the courage of the particular divas she chronicles and is excited by Salvi 160 the energy created by their acts of defiant testimony, she also writes that these women, ―in manifesting their previous failures to secure sexual jurisdiction of their bodies ... challenged

Americans to take up politically what the strongest divas were unable, individually, to achieve‖

(246). I want to read Berlant‘s work optimistically (perhaps even, I will admit, a little bit too optimistically) as pointing the way towards a sustained and critically aware form of engaged citizenship. The texts I examine in this chapter point the way towards understanding citizenship as a performance rather than as a category bestowed on one through an accident of birth, race, or gender.75 Russ Castronovo and Dana D. Nelson suggest ―that the best energies of democracy are non-formal‖ and that an acceptance of this premise can lead to ―concepts of democracy that refuse to take a preprogrammed shape as teleology‖ (6). Abigail and Li‘l Bit, in their different performative modes, both point the way towards a resistance of teleology that is also part and parcel of my larger examination of the figuration of the adolescent as a figure that still has the potential to resist teleological impulses toward certain kinds of adult citizenship.

A crucial component of Berlant's concept of the diva citizen is the classification of it as an act of ―heroic pedagogy.‖ What does it mean for an act of pedagogy to be heroic, epic, and brave? In both The Crucible and How I Learned to Drive, older men teach younger women, and the question in play is whether or not the young women are learning the ―correct‖ lessons.

Crucially, both Abigail and Li‘l Bit then become teachers in their own right and it is through the behavior of these characters that the plays endeavor to teach something to their audiences. This teaching occurs in part through the way that both texts gesture towards allegoresis. Allegoresis, as distinct from allegory, is ―the formal name for [an] act of perception and interpretation…. A common mode of reading deployed to interpret a wide variety of text and performances, both

75 Russ Castronovo suggests that our current conception of what it means to be ―democratic subjects are narrowed to a thin, historyless performance by dematerializing imperatives that assign a generic personhood to facilitate incorporation into national politics‖ (― Souls That Matter" 118). Salvi 161 allegorical and otherwise‖ (McConachie 39). In other words, allegoresis is the work done by the reader who is ―always discover[ing] type characters and representative situations in their fictions‖ (McConachie 39). Just as allegory can move in and out of focus, so too can texts, in different moments, prompt their readers towards or away meaning making through allegoresis.76

The Crucible has historically (and occasionally controversially77) been read as an allegory, while the workings of allegoresis in How I Learned to Drive are present but more muted. Berlant‘s work helps illuminate how The Crucible reproduces already available narratives, which the criticism of the work often perpetuates. How I Learned to Drive, by contrast, exposes the myths which underlie processes of allegoresis as myths. In short, The Crucible exposes the operations of infantile citizenship (particularly when that position of infantilization is deliberately performed), while How I Learned to Drive stages a performance of diva citizenship with all of its concomitant dangers to the diva.

Many aspects of The Crucible invite the reader to move towards allegoresis. The paranoia around sexuality and conformity that were so much a part of the HUAC investigations is clearly present in the Salem of Miller's imagination.78 The implication of Miller's text is that

America is learning the wrong lessons, punishing the wrong people, listening to the wrong

76 I am throughout this work, however, keenly aware of Paul De Man‘s work on allegory, which suggests how very slippery and unstable a category allegory is, verging always and inevitably towards irony. See particularly De Man‘s essays ―The Concept of Irony‖ and ―The Rhetoric of Temporality.‖

77 Phillip Walker, for example, argued in 1956 that the play fails to ―achieve full identity as either a personal tragedy or a political allegory but, rather, contains within itself the unfulfilled characteristics of both‖ (223). Michelle I. Pearson doesn't explicitly name the play as allegory but bases her entire reading of the play on Jungian character archetypes, a methodology which is in itself a move in the direction of allegoresis. Bruce McConachie's excellent book American Theater in the Culture of the Cold War persuasively argues that The Crucible, along with a number of other theatrical productions and films produced between 1947 and 1962, consistently enjoined its audiences to participate in practices of allegoresis.

78 The sexual (particularly homophobic) subtexts of the HUAC hearings have been well-documented by a variety of authors. See, for example, Rebecca Walkowitz's introduction to Secret Agents, p. 7, McConachie 74-5, and Joseph Litvak‘s The Un-Americans: Jews, the Black List, and Stool Pigeon Culture. Salvi 162 voices. Abigail is, if we follow my argument to its logical end, the body that embodies all of this wrongness. Although this play has the largest cast of any of Miller's texts, and even as we see that it takes the entire village to create the hysteria, Abigail stands as the most visible and the most reviled of antagonists – as McConachie describes her, Abigail ―personifies insurgent, amoral, and devouring sexual energy‖ and ―preys on the inchoate adolescent sexuality and marginal social status of the other young girls to achieve her villainous ends‖ (274). And yet, as we shall see, it is still possible to read against the grain of this characterization and see in Abigail a fight not unlike that of the diva, a desire to be heard despite a variety of silencing forces. While a more conventional reading of the play would see John Proctor as the text‘s diva citizen, I argue that his heroism falls apart when we take a closer look at his particular kind of pedagogy.

While How I Learned to Drive does not invite allegorical reading to the same degree The

Crucible does, Paula Vogel‘s use of character types (about which more later) can also prompt the audience towards allegoresis. Furthermore, the character of Li‘l Bit demonstrates how rhetorical twists can transform the infantile citizen into the diva citizen. Berlant suggests that the figure of

―the little girl stands ... as a condensation of many (infantile) citizenship fantasies‖ (58). The little girl who might be corrupted by seeing or hearing or having any knowledge of the kinds of

―adult‖ materials found, for example, in an adult bookstore is the symbol around which issues of mainstream morality and normalcy are rallied. The issues of censorship which surround this idea of the little girl have a contradictory effect, since ―even the most liberal obscenity law concedes the children must neither see nor hear immoral sex/text acts ... at least until they reach that ever more unlikely moment of majority when they can freely consent to reading with a kind of full competence they must first be protected from having‖ (Berlant 67). This totemic figure of the little girl serves to protect and perpetuate models of infantile citizenship, which Berlant also calls Salvi 163 a form of dead citizenship. Berlant persuasively argues that a ―radical social theory of sexual citizenship in the United States must not aspire to reoccupy the dead identities of privacy, or name the innocence of youth as the index of adult practice and knowledge‖ (81). More particularly here, I examine how the story of child molestation—which is, as Paula Vogel argues, one of those ―sensationalized‖ subjects that leads to sort of intentional forgetting—combines with Berlant‘s investigation of what the infantile citizen can and cannot know. Li‘l Bit‘s trauma is important to this investigation because it is trauma, because trauma is one of the ways in which the private gets turned into the wrong kind of political. As Berlant writes, ―the public rhetoric of citizen trauma has become so pervasive and competitive in the United States that it obscures basic differences among modes of identity, hierarchy, and violence. Mass national pain threatens to turn into banality, a crumbling archive of dead signs and tired plots‖ (2).79 How I

Learned to Drive is not ―a crumbling archive of dead signs and tired plots,‖ and this chapter explores why, and what the consequences of its live performance are.

The Witch Hunt

During the investigations of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) certain important rhetorical patterns began to emerge. Many of the writers, directors, and actors called before the committee caved before the pressure exerted by the blacklist and became

―cooperative witnesses,‖ taking part in a bizarre ritual in which they told HUAC the names of those who had been involved with the Communist party, names which the committee was already in possession of, and in return they were allowed to keep their jobs and their livelihood.

It was a process by which no new information was received, no cause but that of state repression

79 It should be noted here that neither Berlant nor I am arguing that molestation is banal. Rather, Berlant is commenting on the tendency of conversations about trauma to mobilize the same language repetitively, to the point of cliché, with the result that the horror of what is narrated ceases to have a persuasive effect upon its audiences. Salvi 164 furthered. In the eyes of the committee, it was the act of confession which mattered, not what one confessed to or who one hurt by doing so.

The politics of The Crucible—as text, as performance, as an iconic document for the era of McCarthyism—are complex. Because the play has often been read as an allegory, the characters can be approached as both individuals and as a stand-in for national figures. Miller‘s choice to set the play within the context of the events of seventeenth-century Salem further emphasizes the potential to read the play as national allegory, as its anachronism explicitly calls audiences to see patterns repeating themselves throughout our national history. (Whether or not the allegory finally holds for the audience is less important to my methodology than the ways in which the text prompts readers towards allegoresis in the first place.) As Christopher Bigsby writes in his introduction to the text, ―what lay behind the procedures of both witch trial and political hearing was a familiar American need to assert a recoverable innocence even if the only guarantee of such innocence lay in the displacement of guilt onto others‖ (xi). Furthermore, the long arm of the HUAC investigations can be seen reaching into even the present moment. As

Joseph Litvak argues in The Un-Americans:

the conventions of testimony are nothing less than the conventions of citizenship:

HUAC‘s rules of testimonial etiquette rule over the performance of Americanness itself.

Leftist and liberal theorists of citizenship value it as the potential basis of a democratic

polity, a realm apart from and salutarily larger than the exclusionary circles of the tribe

and the community. But even this inclusive democratic space cannot constitute itself

without both collective assent to the sovereignty of the national, or transnational, order

(citizenship as collaboration) and collective vigilance against ―abuses‖ of the freedom of

expression (citizenship as informing). Even in its most benign forms, that is, citizenship Salvi 165

entails perpetual readiness to bear witness in the name of the law, to give evidence about

oneself and others. Dispensing with the blandishments of a more civil or a more civilized

inflection of citizenship, HUAC has the rude merit of laying bare the irreducible

complexity of citizenship tout court, whereby every citizen necessarily has within him- or

herself at least a little bit of the collaborator and at least a little bit of the informer. (8)

Bigsby describes precisely what Berlant has charted as the operations of infantile citizenship. To recover innocence can take many shapes, but as Litvak helps us see, all of those shapes involve violence, either to the self or to another and often to both. In those brave and heroic acts of diva citizenship the diva injures herself, first by exposing herself to public scrutiny and public disapproval, but more fundamentally by having to deny her own attachments to sensuous experience. But acts of diva citizenship are rare, and, as The Crucible illustrates, much more often the violence done in the name of recovering innocence takes the form of repression: repression of knowledge, repression of bodies, reified repression of those already marginalized.

In this play we see that the dramatic tensions inherent in the state‘s demand that witnesses ―name names‖ are incompatible with the heroic pedagogy of diva citizenship. While Abigail is an apt pupil, what she learns – and what she in turn teaches us – is that the rhetoric of protecting innocence which creates the infantile citizen can be one of the state‘s most destructive weapons, and can be wielded irrespective of any kind of guilt or innocence which might be empirically based. While in his testimony before HUAC, Miller had done all he could to shift blame from others onto himself, in this play the fantasy in which the humiliation faced by those called before

HUAC is utterly displaced onto a much ―guiltier‖ figure, that of the sexual adolescent female.

While the sexism of Miller's text has been well recognized the importance of Abigail‘s status as Salvi 166 an adolescent has not been.80 Her youth is important because, as we‘ve seen in other chapters, she is the very sign of an endangered and dangerous futurity. If people like Proctor are hanged then we are left with only the dangerous intelligence of Abigail.

To understand how Abigail turns the state‘s machinery to her own ends it is instructive to look first at a few of the real-life models which inspired The Crucible‟s writing, and the rhetorical twists which mark both the play and the historical events. Those witnesses called before the committee who did not cave to the ritualistic demand to ―name names‖ tried by various means to extricate themselves from their precarious legal situation. Some of the prominent figures called before HUAC attempted radical and pronounced rebellions. For example, actor/singer Paul Robeson, one of the most outspoken opponents of HUAC, made his reversal of the committee‘s tactics as overt as possible. In the course of his testimony, Robeson told the committee that ―you gentlemen are the non-patriots,‖ and ―you are the un-Americans‖

(qtd. in Bentley 157). Robeson did not go so far as to defend before the committee his very active involvement with the Communist party, but he did defend Russia for the acceptance he had felt as a black man on his visit there. Asked by a committee member why he did not stay in

Russia, Robeson responded, "[b]ecause my father was a slave, and my people died to build this country and I am going to stay here and have a part of it just like you. And no Fascist-minded people will drive me from it. Is that clear?" (qtd. in Bentley 154). The accusation is impossible to ignore—in their claims to the preservation of American democracy, the members of HUAC were recreating the Fascism they had fought against a scant decade before.

Other participants in this national drama took a different tack. Playwright Lillian Hellman

80 For a few of the other explorations of the rhetorical centrality of the play‘s condemnation of Abigail on sexual grounds, see McConachie 274, and Stuart Marlow, ―Interrogating The Crucible: Revisiting the Biographical, Historical, and Political Sources of Arthur Miller's Play." See also David Savran, Communists, Cowboys, and Queers: The Politics of Masculinity in the Work of Arthur Miller and Tennessee Williams.

Salvi 167 offered to testify about her own activities but refused to answer questions regarding anyone else.

In her letter to the committee, Hellman wrote: ―I cannot and I will not cut my conscience to fit this year‘s fashions, even though I long ago came to the conclusion that I was not a political person and could have no comfortable place in any political group‖ (Hellman 93). Hellman, through her use of a fashion metaphor, explicitly repositions herself as a woman before the masculine members of the committee, figuring herself as an old-fashioned lady at that, hardly a radical who keeps up with current political debates. Arthur Miller, called before HUAC in 1956, tried to bend Hellman‘s tactics to suit his own situation. Miller told the committee: ―I am trying to—and I will—protect my sense of myself. I could not use the name of another person and bring trouble on him‖ (qtd. in Bentley 135). For his testimony, Arthur Miller was cited in contempt of

Congress. Though his conviction was overturned on appeal, and though he was primarily a playwright and thus not quite as vulnerable to the force of the blacklist as his Hollywood colleagues, his brush with the forces of McCarthyism clearly shook him deeply.

Robeson provides us with a model of active resistance, Hellman and Miller with a more passive one. Taken together, these examples illustrate the kinds of attempts made by the Left to subvert the roles provided for them by the ritual of HUAC. One could, like Robeson, blame the forces of the committee or one could, like Hellman and Miller, turn attention elsewhere.

Within this larger pattern of attempted reversals and re-directions, it is the responses of the playwrights which most intrigue me. Hellman's contention that she ―was not a political person‖ can be read as an attempt to excuse herself from the game entirely, to hide behind the skirt, as it were, of aestheticism. Her claim is one, fundamentally, of the separability of art and politics—a claim that the committee‘s very processes found ludicrous at best and seditious at Salvi 168 worst.81 Miller does not cut himself out from politics, but his testimony mirrors Hellman‘s in its reliance on personal integrity. Both writers attempt to find themselves a space in which personal and private responsibility can stand in for the public confession and humiliation demanded by

HUAC. For Miller, the figure of the lone and tragic individual who struggles to maintain his/her integrity in the face of political opposition was a character not only within HUAC, but within his plays as well. While The Crucible (1953) was written as (and has always been read as) an allegory of McCarthyism, Miller‘s preoccupation with the trials extended into his later work, most notably A View from the Bridge (1955) and After the Fall (1964).

While there are certain rhetorical patterns which persist throughout all of Miller‘s HUAC plays, I am concerned here with how The Crucible explicitly equates sexual and political frenzy, and with how this frenzy is focused through the figure of the sexual adolescent. Rather than directly attacking the forces of the state and all its vast defenses, the text neatly reroutes responsibility onto the figure of the sexual adolescent female. While the play explicitly condemns scapegoating, I argue that in fact the text unwittingly reenacts precisely what it was seeking to avoid and turns Abigail into the ultimate scapegoat through repeatedly condemning her sexuality. John Proctor is understood in the text and by the audience as a flawed man, proud and too often swayed by his emotions, but his flaws are excused precisely because the text is able

81 Rebecca Walkowitz notes that "in the McCarthy era, the public spectacle of intellectuals and politics in close proximity mobilized to related questions: to what extent can political statements be intellectual statements? Can the true intellectual, even a ‗public intellectual,‘ be political? These questions are no less pertinent today‖ (Secret Agents 3). Walkowitz is here pointing towards the very real quandary that both Hellman and Miller faced, in which both playwrights desired to continue to be taken seriously as public intellectuals and artists but realized that to do so was to endanger their livelihoods and their freedom in very real ways. So in fact, the problem here is not just one of separating art and politics, but one of separating art, intellectualism, and politics. In effect, HUAC forced witnesses like Hellman and Miller to perform personal integrity while simultaneously performing being less intelligent or politically motivated than they actually were. Hellman, for example, had in fact been deeply involved with Henry Wallace's third-party presidential bid in 1948 and was fully aware of the active involvement of many Communists in that process (Hellman 119-123). Hellman was also deeply aware of the committee's reliance on theatrical methods, writing in her book Scoundrel Times that when she went before the committee ―I haven't seen the committee come in, don't think I realized that they were to sit on a raised platform, the government having learned from the stage, or maybe the other way around‖ (104). Salvi 169 to so effectively shift blame onto the figure of Abigail Williams. Written during the height of

McCarthyism, the play condemns the apparatus of state repression, but it does not stop there. In seeking a way to get out from under the thumb of the state, The Crucible turns its attention to an already politically marginalized figure, although one with great symbolic power. In so doing,

Miller unwittingly recreates the very politics he condemns. It is repetition with a difference, but the difference is not nearly so pronounced as we might hope for.

Abigail is able to wreak such havoc because she has been taught how to do so, and her lessons have been learned in many different spaces and from many different teachers. There is also much at stake for Abigail—when the play opens, her cousin Betty is lying in a fit after the girls were discovered dancing naked in the woods by Abigail‘s uncle and Betty‘s father, the Rev.

Parris. In the claustrophobic atmosphere of a small and repressed village, this fact alone would be enough to endanger Abigail‘s position, but her reputation is already being questioned. Paris comes straight out and asks Abigail: ―Your name in the town–it is entirely white, is it not?‖

Abigail replies, ―with an edge of resentment: Why, I am sure it is, sir. There be no blush about my name‖ (11). The innuendo of ―whiteness‖ and ―blush‖ is unmistakable. Warned by her uncle that ―just now when some good respect is rising for me in the parish, you compromise my very character‖ (11), Abigail‘s physical safety is in question. Thus we see that Abigail had learned about the importance of reputation not least of all from her uncle, whose concern with his own standing in the village sets in motion the play‘s action almost as much as to the girl‘s secret rites in the woods. Carrying as she does many secrets, many epistemes of knowledge concerning both her own character and the characters of those around her, the girl positions herself as a weapon.

Crucially, in terms of the play‘s ability to carry out its rhetorical twist, Abigail herself gives voice to the idea that it is her sexual awakening which has given her the knowledge Salvi 170 necessary to her ability to act with insight and power.

ABIGAIL, in tears: I look for John Proctor that took me from my sleep and put

knowledge in my heart! I never knew what pretense Salem was, I never knew the lying

lessons I was taught by all these Christian women and their covenanted men! And now

you bid me tear the light out of my eyes? I will not, I cannot! You loved me, John

Proctor, and whatever sin it is, you love me yet! (22)

Abigail attributes her ―knowledge‖ to her sexual partner, John Proctor, who is thus in her eyes the most important of her teachers. More importantly, she is grateful for the knowledge she has obtained. While unable, naturally, to free herself from the discourse of sex-as-sin, Abigail also recognizes in Salem the sin of hypocrisy. The personal power and knowledge that Abigail gains through sex is also, much to the detriment of the community, a knowledge that goes beyond carnal experience. In her ―fall‖ Abigail gains not the knowledge of good and evil but a knowledge of layers and surfaces. She gains, precisely as she suggests, a ―light‖ in her eyes which allows her to see the machinery of power and thereby manipulate it. In other words, sexual activity is for Abigail the mechanism by which she is vaulted into critical consciousness. She is no longer learning by rote; she is beginning to make the kind of intellectual leaps that, in other circumstances, we might applaud in our students. Henceforth, Abigail will continue to enact the role of the infantile citizen because that position is the only one that allows her to access the apparatus of state power. Her potential, however, is much more like that of the diva citizen—she understands what it means to enact the role of infantile citizenship and understands what she does as a performance. Let me make clear here that I am not arguing that we ought to read Abigail as enacting diva citizenship. Rather, I want to Salvi 171 emphasize the relationship between infantile and diva citizen in that both positions must manipulate claims of innocence and naïveté in order to achieve their ends. The difference between the two lies in a rhetorical shift which is very like the kinds of shifts suggested by and occasionally deployed by non-cooperative HUAC witnesses.

Though the erotic tensions underlying the events of Salem in the seventeenth century are undeniably present in the sources Miller is known to have relied upon, the particular affair that the play preoccupies itself with is a fiction entirely created by Miller.82 As widely noted, the historical Abigail was eleven at the time of the trials, and John Proctor sixty. In the play the characters become seventeen and thirty-five, respectively. Their liaison takes place during the period when Abigail was working as a servant in the Proctor household. Though the affair has ended by the time the play opens, its consequences are far from over.

In his account of the hysteria of Puritan New England, Miller does not scruple to bring forward the preoccupation with sexuality that underlay the HUAC hearings from the very beginning. In this play, the sexuality of the adolescent girl is very much at the forefront of our attention; indeed, it (or the desire to control that sexuality) is the driving force behind the machinery of state repression which the play enacts. Thomas Porter writes: ―The hysteria the girls display in court and in the palpably erotic imagery they use shouts ‗sexual experience‘ to deaf ears‖ (92). But it is not that the Puritan community is deaf to desire, it is that for them desire points not simply to sex but also to the Devil. As Satan and witchcraft became the acknowledged

82 Stuart Marlow notes, for example, that In the course of his research, Miller accepted the relatively well-known descriptive narrative of the Salem witch hunts; Charles W. Upham's sexually loaded nineteenth-century account, Salem Witchcraft as historical fact, rather than scrutinize the work to identify fictional or speculative narrative and strategies within it. The playwright claimed to have found in Upham‘s account: ―the hard evidence of what had become the play‘s center; the breakdown of the Proctor marriage and Abigail‘s determination to get Elizabeth so she could have John‖ (Timebends 337). " (Marlowe 82). Another of Miller‘s sources, Marion Starkey‘s The Devil in Massachusetts, likely provided Miller with the specific model of villainy to use for Abigail. Starkey wrote, for example that Abigail ―was not innocent; from the eyes of this child an authentic hellion looked out on a world it would make over if it got a chance‖ (23). As Salvi 172 root cause of evil in Salem, so for HUAC all forms of deviance had—or could be painted as having—their root cause in Communism. For both the Puritans of Salem and the homophobic members of HUAC, sexuality that they felt they could not control was both sign and symptom of much more dangerous forms of knowledge.83

But sexuality is not the only form of knowledge that Abigail has which differentiates her from the other girls in Salem. As an orphan who has seen her parents killed by Indians, Abigail has prior knowledge of the workings of violence. Warning the other girls not to reveal what they have done in the woods, she tells them:

Let either of you breathe a word, or the edge of a word about the other things, and I will

come to you in the black of some terrible night and I will bring a pointy reckoning that

will shudder you. And you know I can do it; I saw Indians smash my dear parents‘ head

on the pillow next to mine, and I have seen some reddish work done at night, and I can

make you wish you had never seen the sun go down! (19)

Abigail does not hesitate to use the threat of violence as a means of coercion, an attribute which makes it all the easier for her to manipulate the community and the judges later. One could say that the ―problem‖ of Abigail is that she has been insufficiently ―protected‖ from experience.

Telling the other girls she will ―shudder‖ them, Abigail‘s language evokes orgasm and links violence and sexuality together, the two most powerful tools in the State‘s grasp. And this is particularly problematic since Abigail has so much to gain by using these tools.

The Crucible also illustrates how this violence can erupt precisely from those marginalized figures so often stuffed back into obscurity once the crisis has passed. In this play

those usually deprived of power—the black slave Tituba and the young children— …

83 For a thorough accounting of the coincidence in codependency of both anti-Semitism and homophobia in the HUAC hearings, see Joseph Litvak, The Un-Americans. Salvi 173

suddenly gain access to an authority as absolute as that which has previously

subordinated them. Those ignored by history become its motor force. ... Those whose

opinions and perceptions carried neither personal nor political weight suddenly acquire

an authority so absolute that they come to feel they can challenge even the representatives

of the state. (Bigsby intro. xvii-xviii)

In essence then, this play stages the possibility of revolution, and the certainty that such a revolution is destined to end in violence and failure. The potential revolution is all the more frightening because those formerly disenfranchised members of the community who are now taking center stage have so much to gain and so little to lose. The youth of the girls heightens the potential for radical change since as unmarried women they are not yet completely interpellated into the social order. Abigail is, then, not simply a teenage girl seeking revenge for her broken heart; she is the figure for the heart of the violent revolution. As such she participates in culture‘s growing distrust of teenagers, coupled with its old-fashioned misogynistic distrust of sexual women.84 The manipulative vindictiveness of Abigail points not in any simple or straightforward way simply to the machinations of the McCarthy era. The flaws in her character (by which I mean her integrity, not her effectiveness as a dramatic personification) are further evidence of how even a purportedly liberal text can find itself uncannily echoing and thus reifying critiques

84 And herein I hedge: it is difficult to pinpoint exact periods or moments after which cultural attitudes shift. As far back as the late nineteenth century, a look at judicial records shows an increased concern with juvenile delinquency, which has had a range of definitions (cf. Savage). Arthur Miller, writing only ten or fifteen years after the coining of the word ―teenager,‖ is in The Crucible already anxious about the power of the adolescent to sway public opinion— in some ways The Crucible seems prescient in its pre-figuring of waves of public hysteria triggered by the dubious testimony of the adolescent, such as seen in a variety of the sexual molestation scandals of the 1980s and 1990s. Other scholars suggest that teenagers‘ bad rap is of more recent vintage, or at least has taken a particularly dire turn in the last twenty or so years. Nancy Lesko asserts that ―the Romance of adolescence is now over. The almost century long belief in ‗child-saving‘ ended in the United States with the well for Reform Bill of 1996, which plunged 60,000 children into poverty ... the love and desire that in part animated the original ideas about adolescent development seem to be turned toward younger children or simply dissipated‖ (171). Judith Levine reports that ―in 1997, the public research group Public Agenda asked adults what came to mind when they thought of children and teens. A majority of respondents snatched at the words undisciplined, rude, spoiled, and wild. The older the kids, the more frequently cited were these characterizations‖ (219).

Salvi 174 of conservative discourse. I‘m not suggesting here that Abby is not an awful character—of course she is. What I am trying to get at is how the play, even in speaking against the mechanisms of state repression as enacted through both the Salem witch trials and the HUAC hearings, also cannot bring itself to imagine a way for the marginalized and disenfranchised to speak and be heard.

It is not until Tituba‘s coerced confession (44) that Abby truly sees how performing hysterical sexualized innocence offers the potential for power, but once she receives this second enlightenment (the first having been at the hands of John), she learns it all too well.85 Copying

Tituba‘s emotional confession (yet another example of Abigail as apt student), she cries out,

―staring as though inspired ... enraptured, as though in a pearly light‖: ―I want the light of God,

I want the sweet love of Jesus! I danced for the Devil; I saw him; I wrote in his book; I go back to Jesus; I kiss His hand‖ (45). Here we see that Abby is performing returned innocence. She claims to have written (an act of an educated girl) in the Devil‘s book, but she kisses Jesus‘ hand in an act of obeisance. This turn makes it appear that Abby has returned to her proper place in

Salem‘s hierarchy, but in fact it is in this moment that she seizes power for herself. A public act of repentance is – as it was for those called before HUAC – key to not only to safety but also to participation in and thus control of the state machinery. This rhetorical turn is the key moment of

Abigail‘s turn away from the potential to diva citizenship. How does one escape charges of

85 Tituba's confession also reveals the resentments of the disenfranchised. Called on by the Rev. Hale to confess her allegiance to the devil, she cries: In a fury: He [the devil] say Mr. Parris must be kill! Mr. Parris no goodly man, Mr. Parris mean man and no gentle man, and he bid me rise out of my bed and cut your throat!... But I tell him ―No! I don't hate that man. I don't want kill that man.‖ But he say, ―You work for me Tituba, and I make you free! I give you pretty dress to wear, and put you way high up in the air, and you gone fly back to Barbados!‖ And I say, ―You lie, Devil, you lie!‖ And then he come one stormy nights to me, and he say, ―Look! I have white people belong to me.‖ (44) Of course, what we see here is that Tituba does hate Mr. Parris, that she misses her homeland, and that she resents the implication that only a black woman could possibly be the one allied with the devil. It is through her denial that we see clearly her real and accurate critique of the society she has been forcibly and brutally brought into. Salvi 175 immorality? First, by engaging in the act of confession and publicly admitting to one‘s own guilt.

Public confession proves repentance. And then, one simply turns those same accusations against those more powerless than oneself—women of proven ill-repute, poverty, and drunkenness.

Abigail‘s deliberate and considered use of the language of religious ecstasy ―proves‖ that it is not

Abigail or Betty who are agents of the Devil, that ―honor‖ belongs to the disenfranchised of

Salem.

The problem is not simply that Abigail is using her sexual knowledge to gain power, though that is the play‘s most straightforward narrative. The problem lies in the way that Proctor uses Abigail‘s sexuality, in his moment of heroic triumph, to shift the blame not only from himself but also from the state. In his attempt to save his wife from the gallows, Proctor must engage in a very HUAC-like act of self-humiliation, naming himself a lecher and an adulterer before the judges. However, the language he uses to speak of his affair with Abigail is of the most rhetorically charged kind. Repeatedly calling her ―whore‖ (101) and ―harlot‖ (103), the burden of guilt for the affair shifts from John-as-seducer onto Abigail-as-slut. Most important,

Proctor‘s condemnation of Abigail is one that fails to change the terms of the debate. By re- inscribing Abigail into the already constructed category of prostitute, Proctor and Miller fail to adequately take on the problems of a theology and a theocracy that enables the persecution of the witch hunt. The problem becomes one not of witches but of sluts, and having neatly exchanged one female stereotype for another, the machinery chugs merrily along.86 It is the Reverend Hale, and only he, who is able to see past the problem of Abigail and into the problems of faith.

Begging Elizabeth to persuade Proctor to confess, Hale says:

86 Hypocrisy is at play here too—Proctor admits to being a lecher but Abigail never admits to her sexual experience. Miller allows himself and Proctor the last laugh, noting on the last page of the text that ―legend has it that Abigail turned up later as a prostitute in Boston‖ (135). There is in fact no historical proof that this is what happens to Abigail. Salvi 176

Let you not mistake your duty as I mistook my own. I came into this village like a

bridegroom to his beloved, bearing gifts of high religion; the very crowns of holy law I

brought, and what I touched with my bright confidence, it died; and where I turned the

eye of my great faith, blood flowed up. Beware, Goody Proctor—cleave to no faith when

faith brings blood (122).

It is Hale, then, who articulates most clearly the danger of the infantile citizen‘s claims to innocence, patriotism, and obedience to authority. Hale had access to all the power he could have hoped for—education, a safe position within the church, authority to wield as he saw fit. Perhaps ironically, it is not the latent sexuality of the girl‘s testimony that Hale condemns, but his own bookish knowledge, ―the very crowns of holy law‖ and how that knowledge was twisted into an instrument of violence. Through the metaphor of bridegroom and beloved, Hale continues the equivalency between sexual awakening and intellectual knowledge, but here he shows how dangerous that equivalency is.

With Abigail as the villain, Proctor becomes the hero, the upright man who attempts— and fails, at least before Danforth87—to expose the hallucinations of the girls as mere manipulation. But Proctor too is flawed. Proud and angry, we, like Reverend Parris ―cannot blink‖ (10) what we see: Proctor has had sex with Abigail, therein committing adultery and taking advantage of a woman in his employ. Walter J. Meserve says that it is ―a tribute to the dramatist's skill‖ (130) that we can forgive Proctor for ―seducing‖ Abby, but I (and the French adaptor88) see the problem as more vexed than that. Abigail‘s crimes and Proctor‘s are not

87 Of course, Proctor does succeed in convincing Hale, and us as audience. If he didn‘t, the play would simply be an exercise in dramatic futility rather than an effective protest against the actions of McCarthy.

88 Bigsby notes that the French adaptor Marcel Aymé was less than pleased with Miller‘s protagonist and took a number of liberties with his script. Aymée wrote that ―the sympathy of the American spectator belongs with the seducer‖ (qtd. in Bigsby xx). Aymée goes on to ask why Proctor ―shows no regrets regarding his gravest Salvi 177 equivalent, but neither is Proctor a guiltless innocent.

Karen Bovard writes that ―Abigail's natural leadership ability and boldness are attractive traits to the reader even as her absolute lack of moral scruples is repellent‖ (82). While Abigail is certainly one of the villains of the play, a scene removed from the production suggests a different reading of her character and one that in some ways illuminates the parallels to McCarthyism.89 In a clandestine meeting between Abigail and John in the woods, it becomes clear that though

Abigail rejects the hypocrisy of Salem insofar as it controls her, she has come to believe wholeheartedly in her own power and mission. Claiming ―[m]y spirit‘s changed entirely‖ (140), she has rededicated herself to the Puritan ideal. Railing against the ―hypocrites who pray in jail‖ and ―torture me in my bed while sacred words are comin‘ from their mouths‖ (148), Abigail appears fully convinced of her own righteousness. Looking forward with shining vision to the day when Elizabeth is dead and she is finally free to marry Proctor, she foretells that John ―will be amazed to see me every day, a light of heaven in your house‖ (140). Once she is able to access the power of the state‘s repressive machinery Abigail has no trouble, at least in words, subscribing to the state‘s ideology. Looking back on the writing of The Crucible, Arthur Miller summed up the experience in these words:

The net of it all, I suppose, is that I have come, rather reluctantly, to respect delusion, not

least of all my own. There are no passions quite as hot and pleasurable as those of the

deluded. Compared with the bliss of delusion—its vivid colors, blazing lights,

shortcoming, that of having led astray a little soul who had been entrusted to him,‖ and excoriates the Puritan family for being ―one of those good biblical families in which the master of the house exercises prudent thrift in conjugal patience by screwing the servant girls with God‘s permission‖ (Bigsby 156). While Aymée‘s criticisms fall clearly into the trap of seeing the child-servant as entirely innocent—which Abigail is clearly not—and entirely without agency, also a fallacy in this case, his remarks do shed light on some of the largely unexamined power dynamics at stake in the text. 89 Though the scene was removed from production by Miller, it remains an important part of the text, on occasion inserted by directors back into the script. Its centrality can also be seen through the fact that the scene was included in the 1996 film directed by Nicholas Hynter, which used Miller's own screenplay adaptation. Salvi 178

explosions, whistles, and sheer liberating joys—the dull search for evidence is a deadly

bore. (―The Crucible in History‖ 294)

Abigail, like McCarthy, is invested in the delusion—but also in the power that bringing others to believe in the delusion gives her. The passion of sex and the passion of the delusion are, in this text, inescapable.

Ironically, Miller himself subsequently pinpointed the failure of the Left in the 1950s to change the terms of the debate. In his essay ―The Crucible in History‖ he writes:

In a word, the disciplined avoidances of the Left bespoke a guilt that the Right found a

way to exploit. ...What the Left was not saying was that they were in truth dedicated to

replacing capitalism with a society based on Marxist principles, and this could well mean

the suppression of non-Marxists for the good of mankind. Instead they were simply

espousing constitutional protections against self-incrimination. Thus the fresh wind of a

debate of any real content was not blowing through the hearing or these terrible years.

(285)

While he was perfectly capable of political analysis which recognized the shortcomings of the

Left‘s strategy, Miller was unable in his own work to come up with a sufficiently radical new set of terms.90 Calling attention to the hypocrisy and danger of McCarthyism in his dramas, Miller apparently unconsciously perpetuates politics and categories very similar to those he was

90 To return to Hellman a final time, she wrote that her experience of being called before HUAC, and the poverty she and her partner Dashiell Hammett subsequently faced because of their blacklisting, changed her view of politics forever: My belief in liberalism was mostly gone. I think I have substituted for it something private called, for want of something that should be more accurate, decency. And yet certain connecting strings have outworn many knives, perhaps because liberal connections had been there for thirty years and that‘s a long time. There was nothing strange about my problem, it is native to our time; but it is painful for nature that can no longer accept liberalism not be able to accept radicalism. One sits uncomfortably on a too comfortable cushion. Many of us now endlessly jump from one side to another and endlessly fall in space. The American creative world is not only equal to but superior in talents to their colleagues in other countries, but they have given no leadership, no words of new theory in a country that cries out for belief and, because it has none, finds too many people acting in strange and aimless violence. (Scoundrel Times 113) Salvi 179 fighting against. That it was on the bodies of women that he did this most clearly seems almost accidental. It is a chilling testament to the insidious rhetoric of McCarthyism that even a playwright like Miller, politically active and aware, could find himself echoing in his writing the very things he most vehemently opposed. My reading of The Crucible reveals that an overvaluation of innocence—a metaphysical category of being that is fundamentally impossible to sustain—can lead those who most need to preserve a façade of innocence into acts of social violence which ultimately perpetuate their own subjugation. If a rhetoric of innocence is the most important category on which a reputation is based then there can be no claims made to new kind of wisdom and no possibilities for new social forms: hysterical reiteration of the threatened innocence overwhelms all other possibilities and maintains the status quo.

Who’s in the Driver’s Seat?

In a 1998 interview with Arthur Holmberg, Vogel, responding to Holmberg's assertion that the play ―dramatizes ... how we receive great harm from the people who love us,‖ said:

I would say that we can receive great love from the people who harm us. ... We are now

living in a culture of victimization, and great harm can be inflicted by well-intentioned

therapists, social workers, and talk show hosts who encourage people to dwell in their

identity as victim. Without denying or forgetting the original pain, I wanted to write

about the great gifts that can also be inside that box of abuse. My play dramatizes the

gifts we receive from the people who hurt us. (qtd. in Herren 104)

Without denying that this is a story about trauma and about harm to a fragile individual (a child, a young woman), Vogel strongly asserts her investment in questions of agency. She challenges

Holmberg, and by extension her audiences, to question the inevitability of social scripts Salvi 180 surrounding the issues her plays address. In essence, How I Learned to Drive undoes assumptions that when sex is explicitly taught to a young person the inevitable result is irreconcilable trauma. This in turn challenges the notion that innocence about sex or sexuality is always the best—or even safest—thing for teenagers to have and lends weight and of value to knowledge about sex even if that knowledge comes through trauma. Knowledge and teaching are fundamentally, then, the ―gifts‖ Vogel is talking about, even if those gifts are imperfect.

In a 1997 interview with David Savran, Vogel said, ―As cultural animals, we do not forget because something is hidden, we forget because something is in our face and we don't want to see it anymore, that's what forgetting is. Forgetting is a way of not looking‖ (qtd. in

Savran, Voice 271). Later in the same interview, she says:

So the interesting thing is to remember to expose that which is in the public view. What is

in the public view? AIDS, pedophilia, child molestation, domestic violence,

homosexuality. All of these subjects people may say are sensationalized—

―sensationalism‖ is another way of avoidance and denial. … It‘s right in plain view, it‘s

topical, it‘s what's hurting us right now and therefore we‘re not looking at it. (qtd. in

Savran, Voice 274)

Reasserting her own commitment to the way that the personal is political, Vogel‘s plays demand that we not take a narrow view of those connections between the intimate and the public. Her attention to formalism is a large part of how her plays work—they insist of the audience that we look beyond the characters on stage. She is very deliberate about this. She says: ―there is a displacement in the theatrical process. It‘s not you, there‘s no such thing as a ‗you‘ or ‗he‘ or a

‗she.‘ They‘re character recipes, not real people‖ (qtd. in Savran, Voice 279). This displacement that Vogel is interested in, the way that she uses the theatrical process to illuminate issues of Salvi 181 performativity not just around gender but also around our responses to a variety of events, points again toward the process of allegoresis. For one thing, displacement is a central move of allegory, as part of how we understand that one thing is standing in for another. Vogel‘s plays use this displacement, but they also move beyond it, tapping into Brechtian notions of alienation to make impossible any kind of ―simple‖ allegorical reading with one-to-one correlations. Her use of character types forces the audience to move beyond a purely sympathetic reaction and towards a greater critical consciousness.

Almost all of the critics who have written on How I Learned to Drive have struggled to come to terms with the complexity of the relationship between Li‘l Bit and Uncle Peck. Vogel‘s refusal to paint Peck as a complete villain is itself enough to baffle our usual responses. Some critics cannot quite bring themselves to fully admit to Li‘l Bit‘s active role in the relationship.

Amy Cummins, for example, writes that Peck is ―undeniabl[y]‖ a ―sexual predator taking advantage of his young, fatherless niece ... but flirtatious remarks on Li‘l Bit‘s part—a personality into which his abuse has twisted her—often make her appear complicit in the relationship‖ (13). Cummins‘ use of the qualifier ―appear‖ displays her deep discomfort with the play‘s subject matter—a discomfort which is appropriate and yet which also hinders her reading.

Other critics are able to take a slightly less qualified stance, or perhaps I should say a stance which is less quick to point out Peck‘s relative villainy and Li‘l Bit‘s relative innocence.

N. J. Stanley remarks that the play is ―at its essence ... a love story, and thus Vogel‘s treatment of the subject of pedophilia clouds our preconceived, black-and-white notions of victim and victimizer, right and wrong‖ (358). Graley Herren, who reads the play as an extended investigation into how to successfully cope with trauma, stands staunchly by Li‘l Bit‘s agency, insisting that ―to see the scenes as the random flashbacks of someone who has not yet uncovered Salvi 182 the buried truth seems to me to reduce her incest and her means of coping with it to the psychosexual equivalent of a bad acid trip‖ (106). Similarly, Anne Pellegrini writes that ―none of the terms usually used to characterize their relationship—―incest,‖ ―child abuse,‖ ―pedophilia,‖

―trauma‖—is adequate to either the complexity or weight of Li‘l Bit‘s connection to her uncle.

His legacy to her ... fails to resolve into pious and self-contained certainties‖ (482). And

Christopher Bigsby comments that How I Learned to Drive is only ―seemingly‖ concerned with pedophilia, ―nor is it simply a play about the psychopathology of abuse‖ (Modern American

416). While all of these critics acknowledge the complexity and nuance of the text, most of them don't know where to take that complexity, or how to read it. It is a barricade in the road of their understanding: they can describe its shape and weight and height, but they cannot climb over it.

My reading solves this dilemma by focusing on the value of what Li‘l Bit has learned, particularly in the realm of her understanding of herself as a citizen.

And it is, of course, a huge roadblock to climb over. The most common strategy used in an attempt to deal with the roadblock is to look at Vogel‘s use of nonlinear chronology. Jill

Dolan, in her review of the 1997 New York production, notes that the strategy is crucial in allowing Vogel ―to build sympathy for a man who might otherwise be despised and dismissed as a child molester‖ (127) and that the play ―is only ‗about‘ incest after the scene of Li‘l Bit‘s first molestation‖ (128), which takes place when Li'l Bit is eleven years old. (The scene in question also takes place almost at the very end of the play. This means that the audience has already had almost two hours of getting to know Peck before we see the initial trauma.) The general assessment seems to be that the play‘s nonlinear structure, in which virtually no scene follows chronologically from the one that preceded it, has the effect of ―mak[ing] the observer aware of his or her shifting moral perspective‖ (Bigsby Modern 417). The persistent focus on this one Salvi 183 formal element of the play—the way it plays with time—suggests to me that there is something still missing in the criticism, an aporia the criticism points to, a thing right in front of us which we are still forgetting. What is this thing that we cannot see? And what is keeping us from seeing it?

In the first scene of the play, which I discussed briefly in my opening pages, Uncle Peck tries playfully to disavow his role as teacher to Li‘l Bit. Commenting on how lovely Li‘l Bit‘s hair smells, he says he is going to buy a bottle of the shampoo she uses and then ―when I‘m all alone in the house, I‘m going to get into the bathtub and uncap the bottle and—‖ (8). Li‘l Bit cuts him off, not wanting to hear about his masturbation plans, which Peck denies is what he was leading up to it all.

PECK: What did you think I was going to do?

LI‘L BIT: Nothing ... I don't know. Something ... nasty.

PECK: With shampoo? Lord, gal—your mind!

LI‘L BIT: And whose fault is it?

PECK: Not mine. I've got the mind of a Boy Scout.

LI‘L BIT: Right. A horny Boy Scout.

PECK: Boy scouts are always horny. What do you think the first merit badge is for? (9)

Peck acknowledges his sexuality, his ―horniness,‖ but denies his culpability for bringing out Li‘l

Bit‘s own sexuality, or for having taught her to anticipate the implications of his fantasy about her shampoo. In effect, Peck seems to want Li'l Bit's sexuality to remain infantilized, under his control. He is trying to create an elision of both the pedagogy and sexuality of his comments. In this moment, Li‘l Bit also refrains from explicitly naming the content of her knowledge, she Salvi 184 participates her own infantilization, something we see change in her character over the course of the play.

It is worth remembering that this moment occurs in the brief space of time before we know that this married man that Li‘l Bit is out with is in fact her uncle, a point I raise again because this moment has a very different resonance if one reads this as a moment between a young girl and her older lover than if one reads it as an example of the incest that the play deals with for the rest of its duration.91 It is one thing to learn about sexual behaviors from someone older and more experienced, it is another thing entirely to have them intimately taught to one by a member of one‘s close family. It is important that the play draws our attention early to these issues of learning and teaching, and to the often unstable dynamic between teacher and student.

As Graley Herren points out in his reading of the play, which emphasizes Li‘l Bit‘s control over the narrative structure, ―Li‘l Bit often selects scenes for reenactment in which Peck originally assumed the role of teacher‖ (107). Peck may have been the original teacher, but Li‘l Bit‘s ability to creatively navigate the audience through the twists and turns of the story demonstrates how fully she has now taken on the role of instructor.

As the play amply demonstrates, Peck is the only adult in the family who truly listens to and understands Li‘l Bit.92 He is in an absolute position of trust within the family, a man who

91 Incest is strongly correlated with poverty: ―the child whose parents bring in less than $15,000 a year is eighteen times more likely to be section abused at home than one from a family with an income above $30,000‖ (Levine xxxiii-xxxiv). Also according to researcher Stephanie Levine, very few pedophiles are violent or use force; most pedophilia encounters consist of acts like petting, kissing, mutual masturbation, voyeurism, or exhibitionism (25). Finally, I want to note that there is a technical difference, recognized by both psychologists and law enforcement officials, between a pedophile and someone who is attracted to teenagers, who is known as a hebophile. It is important to recognize the hebophilia might be said to be the norm, in so far as very young women are our cultural standard of beauty.

92 N. J. Stanley writes that: ―abusive though jocular language characterizes Big Papa and his cohorts, who are perhaps too easily perceived as caricatures. Their bigness tends to obscure their responsibility for Li‘l Bit‘s insecurity and alienation, while, in effect, they catapult her into the arms of her kind, welcoming uncle. Li‘l Bit‘s badgering, oblivious family creates very real scars with which she must also reckon‖ (360-61). Salvi 185

―held you [Li‘l Bit], one day old, right in this hand‖ (14). And as the eleven-year-old Li'l Bit heartbreakingly argues to her mother at the end of the play, just before we see her first molested by her uncle, ―just because you lost your husband—I still deserve a chance at having a father!

Someone! A man who will look out for me! Don't I get a chance?‖ (87). And after begging Peck not to do this, after holding back tears and saying ―This [the molestation] isn't happening,‖ the adult Li‘l Bit tells us, the audience: ―That day was the last day I lived in my body. I retreated above the neck, and have lived inside the ‗fire‘ in my head ever since‖ (90). What she‘s describing here is the classic experience of bodily dissociation described by countless victims of sexual abuse. The pain of these incestuous moments lives with Li‘l Bit forever, though she refuses to have them define her.

Critic David Savran demonstrates one way of accounting for the play‘s central trauma without reading the text as exclusively about that trauma.93 Savran reads the play in the tradition of what he calls ―queer theater,‖ in which the term queer ―functions as a useful hermeneutic for analyzing an American theater in which the boundaries between the traditional and the experimental have become increasingly porous and in which ostensibly stable meanings and identities (sexual or otherwise) are routinely displaced by notions of mutability, instability, and polyvalence‖ (58). Savran‘s definition relates not simply to the sexual behaviors of either the playwrights or their characters, but more broadly to the way this hermeneutic of queerness allows for both textual ambivalences and formal experimentation. He continues:

93 Anne Cvetkovich suggest that is important, in therapy culture, ―to expand the category of the therapeutic beyond the confines of the narrowly medicalized or privatized encounter between clinical professional and client.…Trauma cultures are actually doing the work of therapy; rather than a model in which privatized effective responses displaced collective or political ones, my book proposes a collapsing of these distinctions so that affective life can be seen to pervade public life‖ (Archive 10). It is possible to see this play as one kind of engagement in on alternative therapy for, culture, since it too goes beyond the boundaries of the clinical setting. Salvi 186

In its contemporary use, it suggests a mode of excessive and self-conscious theatricality

that has long been linked to sexual deviance. At the same time, the flowering of an

explicitly queer dramaturgy is a reminder that ―queer‖ is a performative designation, one

that privileges doing over being, action over intention. Queerness, in other words, is

constituted in and through its practice. It is less a fixed attribute of a given text or a

performance than a transient disturbance produced between and among text, actor,

director, and spectator. It might be said to be an effect of knowledge, or lack of it, in

relation to dissident sexual desires and identities. (Savran, Queer 58-59, emphasis mine)

This idea that queer dramaturgy could be understood as ―an effect of knowledge, or lack of it‖ is crucial to my own reading of the play and connections it draws between sexuality and pedagogy, as Savran also links sexuality and knowledge without seeing that connection as automatically problematic. Through this queer hermeneutic we can imagine a link between sexuality and knowledge which is not bemoaned as a lack of innocence.94

Savran is implicitly making an argument about how deviant sexualities have historically been connected to utopic visions for social change, and how theater might be one space through which we can think experimentally about what it is that sexuality does teach, and what it might teach instead. Rather than trying to de-tangle these constructions, separating sexuality from questions of citizenship altogether, Savran‘s idea of a queer dramaturgy leads us back towards

94 It is important to recognize that this idea does not change the terms of the debate; it reinforces the notion that sexuality and knowledge will perforce go together, which might in turn reinscribe the idea that, weirdly, sexuality can be a teacher of anything besides itself, by which I mean, simply, that sexuality teaches us to be sexual beings. Sexual activity can teach us to be better lovers, or to understand our own desires, and it can teach us something of what it means to act upon those desires. But if one performs the almost impossible mental experiment of stripping sexuality of its various complicated ties to our ideas of romance, then we can begin to see the way in which sexuality can be an almost pure category, about nothing but itself, which cannot teach about anything but itself.

Salvi 187 questions of collective action—after all, he is interested in queerness as a performative designation.

With this idea of a queer hermeneutic, Savran reads How I Learned to Drive as part of a pattern which extends throughout the Vogel‘s oeuvre, a pattern of ―drag‖ which ―denotes woman making and taking up a masculine identification‖ and through which Vogel‘s female characters

―sustain a powerful psychic identification with men—and with the social and sexual power that men are able to wield‖ (195). Savran argues that ―Li‘l Bit‘s masculine identification‖ is taught to her by Peck, who through teaching her how to drive also teaches her ―how to master that unmistakably feminized machine with which, she [Li‘l Bit] notes, a ‗boy‘ typically ‗falls in love,‘ that ‗thing that bears his weight with speed‘ (46). Indeed, the play hinges on a clever contradiction—that by learning to drive Li‘l Bit both (mis)recognizes her self-as-object and discovers another ‗she‘ over which she has complete control‖ (198). Savran's investigation of the play not only acknowledges Li‘l Bit‘s agency but describes in compelling terms the mechanism through which she exercises that agency, and sheds light on our discomfort with that agency, since her exercise of it breaks the mold of gender roles.

If Savran reads How I Learned to Drive as a play that describes how one particular character type, as embodied by Li‘l Bit, manages to seize agency through a series of masculine impersonations, I argue that this is also a play about how citizenship can coexist with trauma. It is about the choice between what Berlant calls ―live‖ citizenship and ―dead‖ citizenship. This is a play about the pressures exerted both gently and violently on subjects with the end goal of keeping them from truly claiming the citizenship which is their right. Even Li‘l Bit‘s (nick)name is a sign of how insignificant and insubstantial her family tries to make her, a form of Salvi 188 inescapable infantalization.95 Savran is precisely right in identifying that much of Li‘l Bit‘s reclamation of agency involves acts of male impersonation—as I suggested earlier, both this play and The Crucible force us to confront our uncertainty about what it might mean to be a public woman. Being a public woman might, in some cases, have to rely on this kind of male performance. Another option, of course, is that of diva citizenship. I'll return in a moment to how

I see the play working through ideas of live and dead citizenship, but first I must explain what dead citizenship is and how it relates to the other forms of citizenship that I have been talking about throughout this chapter.

Dead citizenship has a relationship to infantile citizenship that works like this: the infantile citizen has the ability to eschew forms of knowledge/critical consciousness that would trouble his/her ability to identify with the nation in the abstract, that is, the nation understood through symbols. Privacy, as ―a category of law and a condition of property that constitutes the boundary between proper and improper bodies, and [the] horizon of aspiration vital to the imagination of what counts as legitimate US citizenship,‖ is a crucial and constitutive element of maintaining infantile citizenship (Berlant 58). Because identities which fall outside the zone of normalcy (nonwhite/straight/middle-class/reproductive identities) would trouble the ability of the infantile citizen to make their national identification, we can say that practices which support infantile citizenship are the technologies which produce dead citizenship. And dead citizenship is all about fixed identities, identities not at play, safe in their zone of disembodied privacy and not in danger from the forces of history, labor or other forms of bodily exploitation, poverty. Diva

95 Savran suggests that Li‘l Bit ―has a ‗bit‘ between her legs that entitles her to a different relationship to the Phallus. ... (Since the Phallus most emphatically is not ‗the organ ... that it symbolizes,‘ the scale of Li‘l Bit‘s ‗bit‘ is immaterial. What matters is that she lacks lack.) And while this relationship does not exactly make her a man, it does fashion her like a man‖ (Queer 198). Salvi 189 citizenship, then, is an act which attempts to break through that sacred zone of privacy, even if in so doing it must rehearse the desire to return to the zone of the private/silent/domestic.

Arguments for the value of dead citizenship affect women particularly. One lucid example of this argument gets rehearsed in debates around pornography. Those who object to porn argue that pornography, which women get into for very real material reasons supported by the structure of patriarchy, reduces all women to the vulnerability of the young girl, so that ―the young girl‘s minority is the true scene of arrested development of all American women's second- class citizenship‖ (Berlant 70). This leads once again to the logic by which citizenship finds its deepest expression in a

promise of corporeal safety and the privacy of deep shadow. ... Here America‘s promise

to release its citizens from having a body to humiliate trumps the feminist or materialist

visionary politics Dworkin might have espoused, politics that would continue to imagine

the female body as a citizen's body that remains vulnerable because public and alive,

engaged in the ongoing struggles of making history. (Berlant 71)

This ―promise of corporeal safety‖ is especially powerful in a culture that both enacts violence against women's bodies and argues that that violence is inevitable. Furthermore, this ―promise of corporeal safety‖ hinges on an assumption of innocence or respectability—only those who live by the rules, no matter how restrictive those rules are, can be even theoretically promised the protection of the rules. The enormous value given to privacy can be measured by the degree to which media cycles which constantly display images of national trauma invade and disrupt family homes. How I Learned to Drive stages a way of being part of the public conversation without engaging in the mediatized and mediated confessional of the television news cycle. Li‘l

Bit‘s persistent rejection of the claim of innocence forces audiences into recognition of cycles Salvi 190 which create possibilities for the kind of abuse she has suffered, making it impossible to read

Peck as ―simply‖ a demon.

The scene in which Peck first begins to teach Li‘l Bit to drive further illustrates these questions of live citizenship. After he instructs her on the correct positioning of the seat, the rearview mirrors, and the door locks, Peck begins to tell Li‘l Bit about steering.

PECK: Now. Put your hands on the wheel. I never want to see you driving with one hand.

Always two hands. (Li‟l Bit hesitates) What? What is it now?

LI‘L BIT: If I put my hands on the wheel—how do I defend myself?

PECK: (Softly) Now listen. Listen up close. We're not going to fool around with this.

This is serious business. I will never touch you when you are driving a car. Understand?

(49)

All at once, the car becomes something else for Li‘l Bit. Previously a space in which she and

Peck could be assured of relative privacy for him to touch her as he liked, now it has become safe territory, where she will need to defend herself neither from Peck nor from her own desires because here, her desire to be in control is legitimated. Driving in America is, after all, a crucial and well-recognized step along the road of personal enfranchisement. Access to a car and driver‘s license offers the subject an almost unparalleled degree of mobility. For Li‘l Bit, that mobility is symbolic as well as literal. But the importance of the scene doesn't end there. Peck continues:

I want you to lift your hands for a second and look at them. ... Those are your two hands.

When you are driving, your life is in your own two hands. Understand? I don‘t have any

sons. You are the nearest to a son I‘ll ever have—and I want to give you something.

Something that really matters to me.... A power. I feel more myself in my car than Salvi 191

anywhere else. And that's what I want to give you.... I want to teach you to drive like a

man.... Men are taught to drive with confidence—with aggression. The road belongs to

them. They drive defensively—always looking out for the other guy. Women tend to be

polite—to hesitate. And that can be fatal. (50)

What Peck is offering Li‘l Bit here is, quite literally, the chance to take her life into her own hands. The lesson he offers is not just about road safety, it is about activity, observation, and the dangers posed by what can seem like common courtesy. As Li‘l Bit takes on the opportunity for mobility, the opportunity to move out of the position of infantilized citizenship, she takes also the opportunity to take power, to make meaning, including meaning that steps her outside of what her uncle wants of her.

Berlant argues that in order to create a picture of what live citizenship is, she is

―require[d]‖ to ―tell you a secret history of acts that are not experienced as acts, because they take place in the idealized time and space of citizenship‖ (59). She wants to tear away the veil of privacy which protects reproductive heterosexuality but not other sex acts. As we have seen, Li‘l

Bit is also telling secrets and tearing away a veil of privacy, a veil which surrounds acts that are heterosexual but which carry a number of fraught and contradictory meanings. Li‘l Bit‘s identity remains ―in play‖ at least in part because she does not accept the label of victim, because she does have complicity in the relationship with Peck, and she is exposing a whole series of patterns and discourses which are, as displayed through the shifting bodies of her family members, played on stage by the Greek Chorus, also complicit in the events that occur between her and Peck.

The casting for this play is an important element in its disruption of the boundaries of privacy. How I Learned to Drive requires a cast of five. In this cast, two actors play the roles of

Li‘l Bit and Peck and only those roles. The other three cast members are called ―the Greek Salvi 192

Chorus‖ and consist of a Male Greek Chorus, a Female Greek Chorus, and a Teenage (female)

Greek Chorus. The Greek Chorus sometimes comments on the action and frequently slips into the roles of other characters—family members and secondary social observers alike. The Male

Greek Chorus slips into the roles of the Grandfather, the Waiter, and High School Boys. The

Female Greek Chorus plays the roles of Mother, Aunt Mary, and High School Girls. The

Teenage Greek Chorus becomes the Grandmother, High School Girls, and the voice of the eleven-year-old Li‘l Bit. The effects of the Greek Chorus are multiple and crucial. Because almost all the cast members are on stage almost all the time, the Greek Chorus serves as a public- within-the-play, further disrupting the norms of privacy. They also work to remind the audience of how some kinds of discourse are generic, voiced by a multitude of bodies in almost identical ways.

One of the things most critically disrupted by the unconventional casting decisions of

Drive is, in fact, notions of age. The actress who plays Li‘l Bit must move seamlessly through almost twenty years of ―life‖ experience, none of which is presented in chronological order. But even more radical than the artistic virtuosity required of the actress in the lead role is the span of maturity explored by the Teenage Greek Chorus, who provides both the voice of the eleven-year- old Li‘l Bit (that is, the voice of Li‘l Bit in the scene where she's first molested by Peck) and Li‘l

Bit‘s grandmother.96 The play‘s rejection of realism in the bodies that it uses on stage raises questions around how we assign ideas about experience and knowledge to bodies based only on their age. Read in another way, this casting practice works elegantly with the nonlinear

96 Of the casting for this character, Vogel writes in the script: ―I would strongly recommend casting a young woman who is ‗of legal age,‘ that is, twenty-one to twenty-five years old who can look as close to eleven as possible. The contrast with the other cast members will help. If the actor is too young, the audience may feel uncomfortable" (vii).

Salvi 193 chronology of the play, illustrating how the force of memory can move us through different moments in our personal histories in the blink of an eye.97

Indeed, the play insists again and again that we look at how Li‘l Bit‘s family is participating in discourses about sexuality that leave Li‘l Bit vulnerable. Her grandfather, known in the family by the moniker ―Big Papa,‖ announces to the whole family that ―five minutes before Li‘l Bit turns the corner, her tits turn first‖ (16). We learn that Li‘l Bit‘s grandmother was a child bride, married at fourteen, ―and in those days, fourteen was a grown-up woman‖ (37).

When Li'l Bit, as an eleven-year-old, is pestering her mother to let her spend an extra week at the beach, which would involve her spending seven hours alone in a car with her uncle, Li‘l Bit‘s mother remarks that ―I don't like the way your uncle looks at you‖ (87) and ―I will feel terrible if something happens‖ (88). But when she finally gives in to Li‘l Bit‘s urging, she says, ―I'm warning you—if anything happens, I hold you responsible‖ (80)—a patently ridiculous remark.

But perhaps most revealing of all when it comes to the family‘s tacit participation is Aunt Mary‘s monologue, given midway through the play:

My husband was such a good man—is. Is such a good man. Every night, he does the

dishes. The second he comes home, he's taking out the garbage, or doing yard work,

lifting heavy things I can‘t. Everyone in the neighborhood borrows Peck—it‘s true—

women with husbands of their own, men who just don't have Peck‘s abilities. ...

I know he has troubles. And we don't talk about them. I wonder, sometimes, what

happened to him during the war. Men who fought World War II didn‘t have ―rap

sessions‖ to talk about their feelings. Many in his generation were expected to be quiet

about it and get on with their lives. And sometimes I can feel him just fighting the

97 I will explore further these ideas of age as a performative category in my conclusion. Salvi 194

trouble—whatever has burrowed deeper than the scar —and we don‘t talk about it. I

know he‘s having a bad spell because he comes looking for me in the house, and just

hangs around me until it passes. And I keep my banter light … because I think

domesticity can be a balm for men when they are lost. …

(Sharply) I'm not a fool. I know what‘s going on. I wish you could feel how hard

Peck fights against it—he‘s swimming against the tide, and what he needs is to see me on

the shore, believing in him, knowing he won‘t go under, he won‘t give up—

And I want to say this about my niece. She is a sly one, that one is. She knows

exactly what she‘s doing; she‘s twisted Peck around her little finger and thinks it‘s all a

big secret. Yet another one who‘s borrowing my husband until it doesn‘t suit her

anymore.

Well. I‘m counting the days until she goes away to school. And she manipulates

someone else. And then he‘ll come back again, and sit in the kitchen while I bake, or

beside me on the sofa when I sew in the evenings. I‘m a very patient woman. But I'd like

my husband back.

I am counting the days. (66-67)

This monologue is the play‘s most overt acknowledgment of the family‘s complicity in the affair between Li‘l Bit and Peck. It also amply illustrates the ―blame the victim‖ mentality which so many victims of abuse have described and decried. But most important here is how the monologue displays the tension between the publicness and the privateness of the marriage between Mary and Peck. Mary makes explicit her pleasure in the public‘s knowledge of the

―goodness‖ of her husband—his helpfulness, his material success. But the public success of the marriage is undercut by its private banality. What aunt Mary paints as the ―balm‖ of domesticity Salvi 195 is an emptiness, a gaping void into which she projects an intimacy which is not there. Just after

Mary‘s monologue we are given the scene of Li‘l Bit and Peck in the kitchen after Li‘l Bit‘s thirteenth Christmas (that is to say, after the molestation has already started), in which Li‘l Bit offers to meet Peck somewhere in public once a week so that he can talk to her, in the hopes that talking will ease his drinking (70-72). Thus the play offers us an image of the intimacy that Peck really craves, an intimacy which in fact has nothing to do with the domesticity of the marriage and which is clandestine, which cannot be shared with the family or the public, which cannot be held up as a model of success. This is one of the secrets that the play tells, one of the lessons it offers us: that relying on the forms and structures of the nuclear family is both dangerous and alienating. Furthermore, Mary‘s distinction between the private secret of Peck‘s affair with his niece and the public success of her marriage hinges on questions of shame and reputation which

Li‘l Bit, as a public voice and body for the problem of incest, is implicitly rejecting.

Mary‘s argument here is also, subtly, about citizenship. She is arguing that Peck‘s service in the war has made him a real citizen, and that domesticity ought to be his reward for that sacrifice. She is admitting that Peck is, like Li‘l Bit is becoming, a traumatized citizen, but she is unwilling or unable to cope with this trauma or to allow it to have a voice in the life of their marriage. The fact that Peck‘s trauma is a secret that cannot be spoken, that she will not allow to be spoken, this is what eventually turns Peck‘s live citizenship into something literally dead— when Li‘l Bit breaks off her relationship with her uncle, ―it took [him] seven years to drink himself to death. First he lost his job, and his wife, and finally his driver‘s license‖ (85).

As for Li‘l Bit, she just barely escapes. In her last encounter with her uncle, just after her eighteenth birthday, he asks her to marry him. Thus at the very moment when Li‘l Bit reaches her legal majority, her uncle asks her to retreat into the same position of deadness within Salvi 196 domesticity that Mary occupies. After all, to be a housewife is the very model of dead citizenship. We might say of Peck that his desires concerning his niece are deeply ambivalent— he wants both to give her power and to take it away from her. But having given her power in the first place, he cannot finally take it away. Li‘l Bit makes her choice, chooses to tell her secrets, and to live more or less peacefully with her trauma, even if that means that she ―must always live with the unexpectedly comforting reflection of Uncle Peck in her rearview mirror‖ (Savran

Queer 91).

Berlant imagines the possibility for an aware and literate rejection of the citizen zone of privacy. In fact, she insists that a ―feminist and materialist of visionary politics ... would continue to imagine the female body as a citizen's body that remains vulnerable because public and alive, engaged in the ongoing struggles of making history‖ (71). In Berlant‘s view, to be a dead citizen is not to be a citizen at all. But this directly contradicts the model of citizenship most commonly advocated, expressed, and named. To be a dead citizen is to live in the fiction of citizenship, a safe false consciousness in which nothing is risked, least of all the self or the exposure of the self in one's corporeality.

What does Li‘l Bit risk? In an interview with David Savran, in which he asked her about the use of a narrative voice in her plays, Paula Vogel insists that the theater is always public.

There‘s nothing private about the theatre, even with the fourth-wall convention. It is

really political speech. Women therefore have invented, or at least gone toward the

lyrical expressions of the novel, the short story, essays and poems. ... You write it at your

parlor desk, and you can hide your writing when your father or your husband comes in....

It‘s a room of one's own, not a stage of one‘s own, so for me the narrative voice is a way Salvi 197

for women playwrights to imbue the whole notion of dramatic persona with the lyrical

immediacy of saying ―I‖ on stage. (qtd. in Voice 272)

If we accept the premise that the play sets up, that Li‘l Bit is the narrator of this story who is exercising creative control over the narrative and how we learn about it, then we must also accept the risk she takes in showing us how this play can be about any of the characters, all of the characters, even Uncle Peck, who we can see through the sympathy of aunt Mary‘s view. Li‘l

Bit risks being exposed; in fact, she makes her exposure as explicit as possible and once again advocates for the possibility of a coincidence of sexuality and pedagogy where the combination is a gift, not a curse. Li‘l Bit describes the experience of taking the bus trip and meeting a young man who asks her what she's reading. When she explains that she is preparing for a class that she is about to teach, the boy tells her, ―I'm a senior. Walt Whitman High‖ (40).

LI‘L BIT: The light was fading outside, so perhaps he was—with a very high voice.

I felt his ―interest‖ quicken. Five steps ahead of the hopes in his head, I slowed

down, waited, pretended surprise, acted at listening, all the while knowing we would get

off the bus, he would just then seem to think to ask me to dinner, he would chivalrously

insist on walking me home, he would continue to converse in the street until I would

casually invite him up to my room—and—I was only into the second moment of

conversation and I could see the whole evening before me.

And dramaturgically speaking, after the faltering and slightly comical ―first act,‖

there was the very briefest of intermissions, and an extremely capable and forceful and

sustained second act. And after the second act climax and a gentle dénouement—before

the post-play discussion—I lay on my back in the dark and I thought about you, Uncle Salvi 198

Peck. Oh. Oh—this is the allure. Being older. Being the first. Being the translator, the

teacher, the epicure, the already jaded. This is how the giver gets taken. (41)

Once again here we see a staging in which the space of the automobile (in this case a bus) is the space in which instruction and seduction intertwine. The automobile, itself a kind of liminal space between one location and another, can invite intimacy and dialogue. While a Greyhound bus does not provide the same privacy as a personal vehicle, any number of anecdotes about the strange conversations that one can seek out (or carefully avoid) while on long bus trips signal the possibilities of this space in which, freed from the distractions of one's usual environment, new behavioral possibilities emerge.

Connections between the pedagogic, the literary, and the theatrical are also made explicit here. The name of the boy's school is ―Walt Whitman High,‖ signaling his position within a matrix of literary conversations about sex and sexuality. His interest in Li‘l Bit ―quickens‖ when he hears that she is a teacher, linking once again the desire for knowledge about something intellectual with desire for knowledge about the sexual. In the second paragraph Li‘l Bit invokes metaphors of the stage, explaining the narrative arc of the incident not through the terms of the novel but the terms of dramaturgy, casting both herself and the boy as actors playing roles. She highlights here the performativity of the heterosexual courtship dance, as much about scripts as it is about the desires of individuals. Perhaps most importantly, she makes explicit the erotic frisson of being in the role of the teacher, a role that Jane Gallop points out can be most erotic even or especially when it is most genuine and selfless (Anecdotal Theory).

The bus incident takes place in 1979. Since we find out later that Li‘l Bit‘s last encounter with Peck takes place in 1969, when Li‘l Bit is eighteen, we can assume that she is twenty-seven or twenty-eight when she seduces this eager young high school student. Since the play is Salvi 199 throughout very exact and careful in letting us know where we are in Li‘l Bit‘s personal chronology, the fact that Vogel is careful to include the date for this incident indicates that she is interested in highlighting both the similarities and the differences between these two seductions.

Li‘l Bit is not already in an intimate relationship with this young man; she has no power over him that she can wield coercively. The age difference between them is much smaller than the difference between Li‘l Bit and Peck, even if the boy is not in fact a high school senior.98 And of course, our culture is full of erotic fantasies for young boys in which they are seduced and

―taught‖ by sexy female teachers.99

Is a Li‘l Bit, then, a diva citizen? In a word, yes. She calls our attention to her individual experience of what we recognize as a broader social pattern. But she also moves beyond diva citizenship because what she gives voice to is not the desire to retreat back into privacy. What she wants is to be re-corporealized, to engage in public displays of the body like running or dancing. As she says at the end of the play, ―I still have never known what it feels like to jog or

98 In a Fall 1997 interview in the magazine Bomb between Mary-Louise Parker, who originated the role of Li‘l Bit in the New York production, and Paula Vogel, this interesting moment occurs: MLP: [T]here's something about Uncle Peck, as damaged as he is, that is tender and erotic. This is something I have wondered about, the fishing monologue, is that meant to be a direct metaphor for incest? Because it's learned behavior, incest, it's something that is passed down. PV: Well, there are two functions. One is it‘s the metaphor for incest and child molestation. But it's also political. It may not come through, but it was important to me that we think of pedophiles—as they are statistically—as married men who are pillars of society, not gay men who are preying on young boys. This myth is the whole reason why homosexuals are not supposed to teach in schools or be priests, or be this, or that ... it drives me insane. In every play, there are a couple of places where I send a message to my late brother Carl. Just a little something in the atmosphere of every play to try and change the homophobia in our world. And I wanted to say about pedophilia: It's not gay men who are out there molesting kids. (Bomb 49)

99 A recent episode of the popular television show (July 28, 2010) So You Think You Can Dance provides an elegant example of the banality and commonness of this particular fantasy. One of the young male contestants, Kent Boyd, was paired with experienced ―All-Star‖ older dancer, Anya Garnis, to dance a cha-cha routine called ―My First Kiss‖ in which Anya as the ―teacher,‖ with her hair in a loose bun, a white buttoned blouse, and glasses, was forcefully and ―manfully‖ seduced by her ―student.‖ Performed on prime time network television, on a show touted as family entertainment, the routine demonstrates the utter normality of the construction in which it is perfectly okay for young men to fantasize sexually about their female teachers. Even in a film like the recent Notes on a Scandal, the young man's desire for his teacher is seen as normal, although the teacher‘s reciprocation of that desire is painted as aberrant. On the other hand, a film like the sensationalistic Wild Things assumes that if a high school student has sex with her teacher, murder and mayhem is bound to ensue. Salvi 200 dance. Anything that ... ‗jiggles.‘ I do like to watch people on the dance floor, or out on the running path, just jiggling away. And I say—good for them. ... The nearest sensation I feel—of flight in the body—I guess I feel when I'm driving‖ (91). Berlant asks: ―if sex and sensuality radicals were really circulating a kind of pleasure acid that could corrode the American Way of

Life, what about it exactly would they be attacking?‖ (56). Li‘l Bit's radicality, and the radicality of this play in general, lies in its refusal to give up on the idea of pleasure entirely, its insistence that even a trauma history does not erase pleasure or the potential for it. Trauma does alter what kinds of pleasure a person may decide to pursue, but perhaps that is not such a bad thing after all.

Perhaps we need to learn how to value different kinds of pleasure, sexual and otherwise. If these different kinds of pleasure do attack the American way of life, they do so through disrupting nuclear family structures that perpetuate abuse, whose banality destroys possibilities for intimacy, whose modes of protectionism value ignorance over the potential for power and the ability to make social change. Deviant pleasures cannot be the only means by which these isolating structures which disenfranchise citizens are attacked; to argue only for pleasure is to fall prey to the Right‘s message of the overall and all defining importance of sexuality, which cannot be the only mode in which we understand citizenship. But if these intimate acts, unveiled for all to see, are not to be the measure of standard, then we must attend to the pedagogy also implicit in this play, where the space of the car is the space of both instruction and seduction. Pedagogy, then, is the sign of our call back into the social realm.

What, finally, does this play tell us about what adolescents are, what we want them to be?

It suggests that adolescence is inherently traumatic, a common enough trope. But it also points towards a set of choices that we, as potential pedagogues, can choose to make. We can either invest in helping teens overcome their trauma, however banal or large that trauma might be, or Salvi 201 we can invest in having them continue to live inside that trauma. As the different fates of Peck and Li‘l Bit suggest, coping with trauma is the path to live, diva citizenship, and perhaps Peck‘s final lesson is about how to avoid the metaphorical death before the literal one. We might find that, as a culture, we are more invested than we want to admit in trying to keep teenagers living within their trauma, within dead citizenship. But we might also be unpleasantly surprised by their ability to become adults despite our ―best intentions.‖ Salvi 202

Chapter Four

A Krank’s Dream: Aesthetics and Ideology in

The City of Lost Children

Because the child precedes the teenager chronologically it is only with a new conception of what childhood is, does, or could be that we can embrace a new set of ideas about the teenager. For these reasons, a reading of Marc Caro and Jean-Pierre Jeunet‘s 1995 film The City of Lost Children (La Cité des Enfants Perdus) through Barthes‘s theorization of childhood allows me to offer some final thoughts on both childhood and adolescence. Exploring the possibilities suggested by The City of Lost Children allows for a final comment on the failure of the dream of innocence and gestures towards a vital restructuring of the relationship between child and adult. In this conclusion I investigate what I call an epistemology of childhood, a way of thinking about childhood which is tied not to age or stature or innocence but rather to a way of being in the world. This epistemology of childhood, which emerges in the film through a very particular aesthetic, can only exist in opposition to what I understand as the ideology of childhood, a way of thinking about childhood and children which relies on a limited and nostalgic view and which uses concepts of innocence as its cornerstone. In order to effect my investigation I turn first to a discussion of the city, looking at how the city and the ideology of childhood have, historically, been in conflict with each other. Exploring the idea of the flâneur and the work of Michel de Certeau allows a new theorization of how the city can open up possibilities for the expression of the epistemology of childhood. These possibilities are threatened by the character of Krank, who valorizes innocence, and in his downfall the film Salvi 203 deflates the importance of that innocence and fights against the ideology of childhood. Finally, the central relationship between One and Miette allows an exploration of how this unconventional pseudo-romance forces the viewers past their normal reading practices and into a new understanding of what childhood could be. After my discussion of the film I return to the figure of the adolescent, investigating how an extension of the aesthetic of childhood might be logically developed into a new and more fruitful epistemology of adolescence.

This shift in medium—from the Anglo-American stage to French film—both follows from the logic of my earlier chapters and takes a methodological turn. I argue that the French view of children is closely related to the American and British views of children—we might see the French understanding as a sibling of sorts, or perhaps a first cousin, to the ideas this project has been exploring. It follows, then, that the ideas I extrapolate from this film can be usefully integrated into Anglo-American thinking on the subject.

The City of Lost Children can, because of its existence as a mechanically reproduced and widely distributed cultural object, be accessed by a much larger audience than most stage plays.

The fact that it is a film also gives it a certain temporal durability that the play does not enjoy.

However, I argue that the film can—like the plays I have been investigating—be read as part of the middlebrow, particularly in the US where foreign films receive less widespread distribution than those made in Hollywood. Like all cultural objects which can be described using the term

"middlebrow", this film struggles to be both artistically complex and commercially viable, aiming itself at an audience willing to spend money on something more complex than the latest action flick but still attempting to remain broadly accessible. (Sony pictures Classics, which distributed the film, did all it could to make a successful commodity of it, including distributing a videogame based on the film in America, Japan, and Europe. The game, as it happens, received Salvi 204 terrible reviews while the film was something of a critical darling. 100 101) David Savran writes that early definers and critics of the middlebrow saw it as "a vexing, obscene, and contradictory phenomenon. On the one hand, it represent[ed] the product of a perverse, heterosexual -- and arguably, miscegenated -- coupling that produce[d] a ‗bastard‘ child‖ (Materialism 8). This might indeed accurately describe City of Lost Children, especially in light of the film‘s interest in the grotesque and in unnatural reproduction. Furthermore, this film is like the plays I have been examining in that while it uses a large number of child actors, it is not a story for children.

Rather, like the plays, the intended audience for this film is adults, who are speaking to themselves and to each other about childhood. Most critically for my investigation, like the place, the film must rely on a series of familiar assumptions about what the child "is" but its middlebrow status pushes the film to do more than simply reify what we might be said to already

"know" about children. On many levels, it troubles our most basic assumptions about these figural children, presenting new possibilities for thinking about children that can lead to new possibilities for how we think about adolescents.

New Possibilities

Let us set the scene by looking first not at the children, but at the amnesiac Professor as he sleeps in his lair. All around him, filling his underwater room to the brim, is the detritus of the unnamed city above him. The camera zooms in on a mysterious brass canister, then pans left, showing us

100 GameSpot called it "an adventure game with no adventure and no game." http://www.gamespot.com/pc/adventure/cityoflostchildren/index.html Field Code Changed

101 I have to share the reaction, however, of one reviewer, ―Mr. Cranky,‖ who did not like the film and who wrote: "This is one of them art films. Now it's not an art film because of the long, drawn out sequences where the camera Formatted: Font: 10 pt pans over backdrops were obviously painted by some guy who spends his weekend selling paintings of the market. It isn't an art film because it was made in France by the same guys who made ‗Delicatessen.‘ And it isn't an art film because it has subtitles. No it's an art film because of the midget." http://www.mrcranky.com/movies/lostchildren.html Field Code Changed Salvi 205 huge conch shells and dried puffer fish before moving down to the Professor himself, asleep in his bunk. Cut to the professor‘s diving suit, hanging upside down from the ceiling, dripping slowly. From inside the suit falls a tiny white crab, which lands on the lever for an air hose. As air flows through the hose, it whips wildly about, rattling objects hanging from the ceiling until one of the mysterious objects falls down onto an alarm clock. The alarm clock rings, startling the professor, who sits up abruptly, knocking his head on the shelving unit where the mysterious brass canister is kept. As he falls back into his bed, unconscious from the knock to the head, the canister falls to the floor and releases an eerie green mist. The camera follows the green mist as it slips about the room until it finds the professor and triggers in him a nightmare. With the nightmare, the professor‘s memories of who he was before he lost his memories come flooding back.

In this flood of memories the film‘s revision of childhood surfaces in full force, illuminating the many tensions traced throughout my dissertation. What the professor remembers is, more specifically, the rupturing of his own familial narrative. His attempt to scientifically create for himself a wife (the diminutive Miss Bismuth), an intellectual ―brother‖ (Krank), and a series of children grown in his own image (the many clone brothers, shown in the memory as grotesque fetuses in tanks) fails. None of the film‘s eponymous children appear in this scene, but the unborn clones and the rebellious Krank mirror the anxiety around children we see consistently throughout many different types of discourse around both children and teenagers— the danger of the ―creation‖ that takes its fate into its own hands. These laboratory-grown specimens of unnatural reproduction raise the specter of all that might go wrong in a more normal family, though such a normal family is never shown in the film either. Thus the professor‘s experience of the nightmare displays a certain kind of terror about futurity. But the Salvi 206 green mist, not done yet, trickles above ground until it finds the orphan Miette, showing her the same nightmare the professor has already seen. For Miette, the scenes from the nightmare crystallize a series of accidents and serendipitous events, combining the girl‘s thorough knowledge of the city with her acute observational skills to give her the key to solving the film‘s central mystery—where have all the lost children gone? The nightmarish mist, then, plays a second role, illuminating the power of the child to arrive at unique insights unavailable to the film's other characters.

In his seminal work Mythologies, Roland Barthes writes:

French toys: one could not find a better illustration of the fact that the adult Frenchman

sees the child as another self. All the toys one commonly sees are essentially a

microcosm of the adult world; they are all reduced copies of human objects, as if in the

eyes of the public the child was, all told, nothing but a smaller man, a homunculus who

must be supplied objects of his own size.... However, faced with this world of faithful and

complicated objects, the child can only identify himself as owner, as user, never as

creator; he does not invent the world, he uses it: there are, prepared for him, actions

without adventure, without wonder, without joy. (53-54)

Barthes‘s critique identifies childhood as a phase of training, during which smaller people are taught, using the tools disguised as ―toys‖ given them by larger people, how to conduct themselves in the world. This teaching encompasses the whole of social relations—―war, bureaucracy, ugliness,‖ gender relations through giving girls dolls which ―wet their nappies,‖ and, most importantly for Barthes, the norms of consumption, which include an acceptance of things as they already are, not as they might be (53). (Miette has no reason to accept things as they are, and no toys to train her in following the path society would set her on.) This acceptance Salvi 207 of the world as it is disgusts and disappoints Barthes, and his evocation of the failure of these toys to provide ―adventure,‖ ―wonder,‖ and ―joy‖ displays a negative image of what he assumes childhood ought properly to consist of. Sneakily, through his discussion of the possibilities inherent in a set of blocks, Barthes suggests a version of childhood filled with radical potentialities.

The merest set of blocks... implies a very different learning of the world: then, the child

does not in any way create meaningful objects, it matters little to him whether they have

an adult name; the actions he performs are not those of the user but of a demiurge. He

creates forms which walk, which roll, he creates life, not property: objects now act by

themselves, they are no longer an inert and complicated material in the palm of his hand.

(54)

Here Barthes couples (or decouples) ―meaningful objects‖ and ―property‖—neither of these, he imagines, are within the proper realm of childish play. Barthes never uses the word

―imagination‖ here, perhaps because of that term‘s complicated relationship to the romantic conception of the child, a conception which Barthes is here trying to move us away from.

However, imagination seems to be precisely the quality he implies is the most wonderful possibility of a childhood freed from training in established norms and values.

Barthes‘s meditation on toys partakes in but reverses the usual logic surrounding children. Like most conversations around children, Barthes‘s imagines the child to be magically imbued with qualities lost or foreshortened in adults.102 Barthes is also, in another familiar move, implying that children are endangered and imperiled. As we've seen, many conversations about children and teenagers assume them to be at peril from a variety of shadowy threats, and their

102 In the words of Adam Philips. ―if desires for satisfaction—an urgent love of life, a commitment to appetite—are assumed to be, one way or another, driving the child into the future, growing up is nevertheless construed as the attenuation of pleasures‖ (39). Salvi 208 endangerment to proceed from their lack of ability to know precisely what it is that puts them in peril.103 That these terms and concerns have already come up for us in earlier chapters demonstrates the extent to which it is difficult to uncouple our figuration of children from our figuration of adolescence. Barthes, however, suggests that peril stems rather from the way that we train children to partake of civilized norms—it is this that attenuates their abilities of imagination and wonder. In this, Barthes is rejecting both social norms which dictate strict oversight of children and, simultaneously, Freud‘s theories of sublimation, in which biological processes are responsible for turning children‘s libidinal impulses into socially accepted forms of work and behavior. (One could imagine Barthes and Dysart finding themselves in agreement with each other here.) Barthes partakes of a romanticized view of children which identifies childhood as a time accompanied by its own insights and knowledges. This view of childhood implicitly raises the child to the same level as the adult, seeing in her/him not a lesser type of human, only a different one. While most romanticized visions of children rely upon an extreme valuation of innocence as the specialized category which separates child from adult, Barthes‘s meditation privileges whimsy and the radical possibilities of imagination in the subject who has not been fully socialized into acceptance of the world as it is. Innocence seems not to be an important category for him at all.

Situating the Film

103 Paul Kelleher argues that in our culture ―in order to reflect on our relationship with children, in order to conceive of childhood as such, we must put the child in danger.‖ He goes on to ask: ―[W]hy, as a way to think about children, have we become accustomed to beginning with an image of the ‗child‘ in ‗danger,‘ and only then (assuming then ever comes) working our way back to the boy or girl in the room? The ‗child‘ I speak of here refers not to a group or Formatted: Font: 10 pt, Not class of children, or anyone identifiable child, but rather the figure of no child in particular, a figure whose lack of Highlight particularity enables a great deal of thinking and speaking—not to mention legislating and policymaking—about matters of so-called general, national, or universal concern‖ (151).

Salvi 209

As we have seen, the ideology of childhood revolves around privileging innocence. By contrast,

Barthes suggests the way towards an epistemology of childhood evoked by a particular aesthetic which is centered on whimsy or imagination.104 Caro and Jeunet‘s The City of Lost Children follows the same logic around children as Barthes‘s meditation, reversing norms while simultaneously using ideas already easily accessed by the audience. That is to say, the film appreciates and celebrates children, but not at all in the ways we might expect it to. On a narrative level, City of Lost Children works to unpack many of our assumptions about what childhood is, either as an essential state or in relationship to adulthood. On a formal level, however, the film uses many of the devices that we associate most strongly with childhood. Most importantly, the Rube Goldberg-esque mechanics of many of the film‘s key sequences reveal an aesthetic investment in the tropes of childhood while questioning the ideology of childhood.

Thus, City of Lost Children persistently dismantles many of our most cherished ideas about what childhood is—innocence, safety, freedom from worry and responsibility. At the same time, the logic of the film‘s narrative structure grabs onto, elaborates, and valorizes a different set of ideas about children—most notably whimsy, an alternative viewpoint, and a sense of play. Taken together, these aspects of the film offer a vision of childhood that is fundamentally new.105

Through disconnecting ideals of innocence from ideals of imagination, the film‘s new mythology embraces invention and alterity, freeing childhood from the matrix of nostalgia in which, the film argues, it is currently embedded.

104 iImagination and whimsy are, of course, different words with different valences, the first implying a quality of invention or creativity and the second an attitude of quirkiness or extravagance. Both of these ideas are, I think, Formatted: Font: 10 pt important to this epistemology of the child I am proposing.

105 In their article ―Disenchantment and the City of Lost Children‖ (Canadian Journal of Film Studies [2004], 13.1: 55-68), Jen Webb and Tony Schirato argue that this is ―a film about childhood, or rather, it is about the ways the adult world constructs, and then appropriates, childhood‖ (55). I read the film more ironically, as one that does not validate the adult appropriation of childhood but works to dismantle it. Formatted: Font: Italic Salvi 210

In an interview with Alain Schlockoff and Cathy Karani, Caro describes the film‘s dystopian setting as a ―retro future, a former future.‖ Another, more currently vernacular way of describing the film‘s aesthetic might by ―steampunk‖—a combination of odd, improbable mechanics, such as the entirety of Krank‘s laboratory—set in nostalgic scenery, in this case the fashions of approximately 1940s France. In this bleak urban landscape, a religious cult called the

Cyclopses are capturing children off the streets and selling them to the sinister inventor, Krank.

Krank, it transpires, cannot dream on his own and wants to harness the power of the children‘s happy dreams, believing that if he can do so those dreams will keep him young. The problem, from Krank‘s point of view, is that all of the children are terrified of him and only have nightmares when hooked up to his dream machine. We are immediately, then, confronted with two competing and potentially conflicting stories about children and childhood. First, we are presented with a scenario in which children are endangered and threatened, and this scenario is what drives the machinery of the narrative forward. In a world where children can be taken off the streets or from the family dinner table, innocence is implicitly at risk, in danger of being stolen just as the children‘s bodies are. At the same time, it is the innocence of these children which makes them an appealing target and a potentially valuable commodity. Krank‘s plan participates in the fetishization of the child which constructs childhood as the site of unfettered happiness and unlimited potential. The particularly sinister thing about these kidnappings is the degree to which it reveals a fetishization of children to be part and parcel of what endangers them, turning what we are said to ―love‖ about them into what can, in this imagined world, be bought and sold—the children‘s dreams themselves.

But not everything goes according to Krank‘s plan. When an endlessly hungry little boy little boy named Denrée (whose appetite for food overwhelms any potential for fear) is stolen his Salvi 211 older ―brother,‖ the carnival strongman One, vows to find him. In his quest to find Denrée, One hooks up with a tough and unsentimental orphan girl named Miette (―crumb‖ or ―scrap‖ in

French), who becomes the brain behind One‘s brawn. The two journey through the city together in classic quest fashion, facing many dangers before finally confronting Krank, his dwarf companion Miss Bismuth, his pet brain-in-a-box, Irvin, and six clone brothers. In the end,

Miette‘s willingness to sacrifice herself in order to save Denrée exposes the false romanticism inherent in Krank‘s vision. Miette hooks herself up to the dream machine, entering the shared vision of Denrée and Krank, and offers to take Denrée‘s place. Her sacrifice triggers a surprising revelation. While in the dream world Miette ages, Krank becomes younger and younger, until he can be scooped up and placed into the dream machine by his own clone brother. Rather than being restored to youth, Krank is subjected to a young child‘s complete powerlessness, a revelation which kills him.

The City and the Child

In order to fully appreciate the critical importance of the film‘ s mise en scène to its project, we must spend some time more carefully examining the role of the city in the film, and more particularly the relationship of the child to the city. The pressures of the urban environment have since at least the eighteenth century been thought to be one of the primary dangers to the innocence adults profess a desire to protect. In Emile Rousseau argued vehemently for the importance of raising children in the country, stating that ―men are not made to be crowded together in ant-hills, but scattered over the earth to till it. The more they are massed together, the more corrupt they become. Disease and vice are the sure results of overcrowded cities‖ (488).

Rousseau‘s pedagogical model rested upon a number of complex assumptions about returning Salvi 212 man‘s development to the models provided by natural living. Thus, he desired his student to grow up in the purity of the countryside for both his moral and physical health. These early

Romantic assumptions about the importance of nature to man‘s spiritual well-being, and the purity of the countryside as compared to the corruption of the city, have remained active even up to the present day, though the ideal of the countryside seems to have been replaced with the ideal of the suburb.

The assumption that urban spaces will erode childish innocence has always rested most heavily on children of the lower classes. Historian Jon Savage notes that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, ―street arabs …were a living reminder that, for all America‘s wish to forge a new society independent of European traditions, and despite its rhetoric of freedom for all, inequity was embedded, if not actually promoted, in its economic and social systems‖ (36).

While this rhetoric of freedom was especially important in America‘s conception of itself versions of this idea were seen throughout the Western world, as children of the lower classes became a lens through which the evils of poverty were most closely examined. Thus, impoverished children became the metric by which the innocence and safety of middle and upper-class children was measured.106 In City of Lost Children, the idea of the city (as opposed to the particularity of any named city) functions not just a setting but as the skeleton on which the film‘s new logic of what childhood means rests. Here, however, the impoverished urban children are the only children we see, making comparisons to more privileged children impossible, and the film uses their capacity to intelligently and creatively navigate the world to

106 James Kincaid suggests that, in fact, the Victorians understood impoverished children not to be children at all, at Formatted: Font: 10 pt least not by the definition of childhood that was becoming increasingly prevalent. "Almost all writers assumed that what was said about modesty, delicacy, and innocence, even the innocence of small children, did not apply to the poor: Acton prints a powerful letter from Henry Mayhew arguing that the indecent living conditions which must be Font: 10 pt, Italic endured by the impoverished children cause the minds of females to be ‗wholly divested of that sense of delicacy Formatted: and shame which, so long as they are preserved, are the chief safeguards of her chastity‘ ― (Cchild-Lloving 38-9). Formatted: Font: 10 pt, Italic Salvi 213 undermine the importance of the concept of innocence to demarcate what childhood is. To understand how this works, we must examine historical assumptions about urban spaces, specificities of how this film sets the child into the cityscape, and how the film‘s sequences use the logic of the city‘s material density to flesh out the body of its theoretical articulation.

Another example of how urbanity and innocence have been historically assumed to be incompatible can be seen in Peter Baldwin‘s work on juvenile curfew laws in America between

1880 and 1930. Baldwin notes that ―modern urban night was not an extension of day; it was a liminal world in which conflicting moral values mingled uneasily‖, and that ―child experts and reformers viewed the city as an unnatural environment that threatened to upset the schedule of development‖ (596-597). Furthermore, Baldwin notes that ―the seclusion of children, like the domesticity of women, was a luxury that many working-class Americans neither desired nor could afford.... As reformers complained incessantly, working-class parents were far less concerned about strict scheduling either of daily activities or of child development. They granted children freedom‖ (597).107 City of Lost Children, as if channeling the concerns of the reformers

Baldwin discusses, takes place in a mysteriously murky world where it is often clearly night but never clearly day. The children of the film run wild, disconnected from the family units from which they must have originated. They are, furthermore, free to make whatever choices might ensure their survival, even if those choices fall outside the law or conventions of morality.

A similar set of concerns was found across the Atlantic. Shurlee Swain, tracing the history of child welfare practices, notes that in the late nineteenth century the British child rescue movement was ―found in the evangelical outreach to the inner cities, feared lost to Christianity in

107 Kincaid also give several examples of Victorian arguments in favor of the freedom and independence of children. See cChild lLoving: tThe eErotic cChild and Victorian cCulture, p. 65. Formatted: Font: 10 pt Salvi 214 the wake of the rapid urbanization which accompanied the Industrial Revolution‖ (199). Swain quotes from a poem found in one of the pamphlets of Thomas Barnardo:

Dear little bent forms, in your narrow alleys,

Hidden from the searching sun that longs to make you well:

Forms that never ran and leaped, in grassy groves and valleys,

Stand before a startled world that knows not where you dwell. (200)

This pamphlet poetry makes a clear connection to nature as a restorative measure against the decay of urbanity, creating a dichotomy between urban and rural spaces even though poverty was equally likely to exist in the country as in the city. In the city, however, at least according to the reformers, poor children were exposed to a ―foetid and infectious river of crime‖ where they would grow up ―ignorant of everything but evil‖ (Swain 197). All of these historical associations are clearly present in City of Lost Children, with its vertically oriented cityscape, dim lighting, grimy bricks, and complete lack of ―natural‖ or ―pastoral‖ scenic elements. The only trees we see are Christmas trees—literally trees that have been brought indoors and decorated—in a word, domesticated. Nor is the water any more appealing—no sandy beaches for these children. All the viewer sees or the characters experience are narrow and dirty canals; the open water through which One and Miette travel to broach Krank‘s water-tower laboratory is littered with mines.

This cityscape, in addition to its hygienic threats, sharp edges, and explosive devices, is also already implicitly eroding audience is assumptions about the innocence of the film's children.

Although the rhetoric of child rescue made ―repeated references to the equality of all children in the eyes of God,‖ Swain notes that

there are few instances in which the rescued child is depicted as being entitled to the

accoutrements of the middle-class childhood while still on Earth. Notions of innocence Salvi 215

and joy are all too often replaced with references to training and discipline as the child is

transformed from victim to threat. Even the most angelic of children, readers were

warned, could harbor evil within. (203)

In this literature and through this logic, these endangered children transform into the danger from which society needs to be protected. The endangered child becomes the dangerous child even as you look at it.

City of Lost Children taps into these fears as well—all the children of the film are orphans, and most of them, including Miette, are pickpockets and thieves, trained and strategically deployed by the conjoined twin sisters known as ―the Octopus.‖ Nor are these children strangers to violence—when One follows the children to the Octopus‘s lair, one of the boys threatens him with a knife. But although these are no ―little angels,‖ the film neither demonizes nor trivializes their actions as simply mischievous. It resists the polarizing urge, granting to the children a complexity as full as that exhibited by any of the adult characters.

In fact, this particular film is unimaginable outside the city. It requires the city both spatially and narratively. Indeed, we begin to see that the title of the film—The City of Lost

Children—is almost redundant, for if children are to be imagined in the urban landscape they are already implicitly lost. The particular vision we have of endangered and orphaned children is predicated on all of these assumptions surrounding urbanity. However, the children are also expert navigators and manipulators of the urban space. It is the children, after all, and particularly Miette, who can lead One to find his little brother. The children solve the ―problem‖ of the city by not seeing it as a problem at all—what seems a bewildering array of spaces and materials is, for them, a landscape whose possibilities are not predetermined but remain amenable to reinvention. While survival is clearly the children‘s first concern, this hard Salvi 216 experience of the world has not diminished their capacity to make inventive use of their surroundings. In other words, experience has not attenuated their ability to be childlike in the aesthetic sense. Unconcerned with their own innocence, they are free to take in everything urbanity has to offer them and to use it all in the serious game of survival-through-play.108

The film‘s more outrageous cause-and-effect sequences, one of key ways in which the film builds up through aesthetics an epistemology (rather than an ideology) of childhood, rely on the assumption of cramped, crowded, and precarious urban spaces, filled with an overabundance of materials that can be put to use. For example, when the children are sent by the Octopus to break into a loanshark‘s safe filled with jewels, their method for getting into his apartment makes ingenious use of tools to which they have easy access. To begin, Miette pushes a pin through the lock so that the skeleton key left on the inside of the door falls to the ground. She grates some cheese by the crack at the bottom of the door and uses a small rubber bulb to blow the cheese gratings through to the other side. The orphans remove a piece of grating and send a mouse with a large magnet tied to its tail through the grating and into the loanshark‘s apartment. The mouse goes to nibble at the cheese gratings, sending it directly by the key, which the magnet then picks up. At ceiling level, the orphans have opened another air vent and through it pushed a large black cat. The mouse retreats from the cat, going back the way it came, delivering magnet and key together to the orphans still standing in the hallway. The sequence of events is improbable, but not impossible—it demonstrates not only resourcefulness but also a spirit of experimentation.

Later a despondent One has drunk himself into a stupor and has been loaded by the Octopus‘s henchmen into the back of a pickup truck. Though the children cannot bodily lift One out of the truck they make enterprising use of tools available to them. A boy gets behind the controls of a

108 It has been suggested to me that I am here rejuvenating a sense of the Romantic view of the aesthetic as the realm of play. Future versions of this project will explore this idea in more depth. Salvi 217 crane left outside the bar and manipulates the hook into the back of One‘s shirt, lifting him silently off the truck bed as the henchmen drive away. He tries to set One down gently but accidentally lowers him onto a large piece of piping. One, waking with a start, runs along the top of the pipe, trying to keep his balance. As in a circus trick, as One runs the pipe rolls along the street, until it collides with a large metal boat mooring at the edge of the street, by the canal. One tumbles into the water, but another of the orphans tosses in an inner-tube he has found at the edge of the dock, so that the moment the strongman surfaces he is safely contained within the flotation device and is able to kick his way back to dry land.

Both these episodes show the children making adroit use of their surrounding environments, whether they have planned in advance or are acting on the spur of the moment. So we can also read the title of the film as signaling the children‘s ownership of the labyrinthine city. The second reading of the title continues to embed the children in this cityscape, but undoes or ignores the logic that dictates that the city is, in itself, inherently dangerous to the children. In order for the city to cease to be dangerous to the child, the child must be able to enact her/his mastery over the spaces and situations urban life forces them to confront. It makes sense, then, that urban spaces would disrupt the logic of protected innocence. To disrupt this logic is also to appreciate the child‘s plasticity, adaptability, and powers of invention—all qualities that can be particularly prized in the modern citizen. To follow this train of logic is, in some ways, to partake again of the logic which privileges childhood as a zone of unique creativity. However, the conception of childhood which is invested in this privileging of creativity works within a matrix of assumptions about middle-class life to which the children of the film clearly do not have access. The ideology of childhood assumes that children are creative because they have the luxury to be so, and this luxury is created out of physical safety, material excess, and a life free Salvi 218 of responsibilities. But these children are poor, and they play not for the sake of play but for the sake of survival. The concept of play remains at the heart of this developing epistemology of childhood but it is founded on a different set of assumptions, assumptions which are not class- based and thus resist the historical forces which have gone into creating the ideology of childhood I am here critiquing.

Eric Tribunella has suggested that within the realm of children‘s literature set in the city it can be productive to read the child as a flâneur. Tribunella‘s understanding of this figure closely follows the articulation of the flâneur set forth by Baudelaire and Benjamin, who see the flâneur as a figure uniquely equipped to make sense of the complexities of modern urban life.

This is a particularly useful concept in this film, concerned as it is with displaying the agency of children within the threatening cityscape. As Tribunella points out, both Baudelaire and

Benjamin made connections between the practice of flânerie and the figure of the child, arguing that the two share the ability to combine keen observation with a sense of wonder. ―The child,‖ says Baudelaire ―sees everything in the state of newness; he is always drunk. Nothing more resembles what we call inspiration than the delight with which the child absorbs form and color‖

(152).109 Delight is not the only important quality of the flâneur, though—in his description of the painter M.G., Baudelaire writes that ―curiosity may be considered the starting point of his genius‖ (142). In other words, a sponge-like capacity to interest one‘s self in all aspects of one‘s surroundings is key to the flâneur‘s ability to make sense of modern life. This capacity for curiosity can also be seen in the aesthetic articulation of the child to whom no form of knowledge is denied. Baudelaire argues that ―genius is no more than childhood recaptured at will

... equipped now with man‘s physical means to express itself, and with the analytical mind that

109 All citations to Baudelaire‘s The Painter of Modern Life refer to the digital location numbers for the Kindle Digital Edition, taken from the Penguin Classics Selected Writings on Art and Literature, translation by P.E. Charvet, 1972. Salvi 219 enables it to bring order into the sum of experience‖ (158). This suggests that this quality of genius, which is so closely linked here with the figure of the child, can transcend the temporal limits of childhood. A learned quality, it can be cultivated and practiced.

Tribunella‘s development of the theory of flânerie to encompass the possibility of the child flâneur emphasizes the relationship between Baudelaire‘s romantic notion of the child‘s wonder and the understanding of the child as a marginal citizen as emphasized by the historians discussed earlier. Tribunella writes:

Partly because of their status as second-class citizens, children are sometimes able to

roam without being noticed. Moreover, while the authority of the gaze might denote or

require the privileged status of the one who looks, associations between the child and

innocence or nature and the sacralization of the child have conspired to construct the

child‘s gaze as somehow special or even magical, hence the notion of seeing ―through the

eyes of the child.‖ (68)

This model of flânerie is upheld and celebrated by the film, which joins Tribunella in being able to imagine that mastery of urban space, practices of flânerie, and activities of children can go together in the first place.110 Moreover, the one part of our common conception of childhood that the film does not dismantle is this idea of a magical gaze.111 Indeed, the aesthetic logic of the film uses the camera as the stand-in for the child‘s gaze, the means by which the audience is re- situated in the world as a wondering, curious, engaged subject. Although the setting of the film is

110 The ability of children to move about disregarded by the adults around them is also displayed by the film on multiple occasions. For example, when the children and One first stumble upon each other, the children are in the midst of a robbery. When the Cyclopses arrive, chasing One, the children disguise One as a guard asleep on watch. Assuming that the children are incapable of deceit, the Cyclopses take a cut of the robbery but never stop to consider that the children might be hiding the fugitive. As they leave, they drop a few francs, telling the children dismissively to go buy themselves some sweets.

111 Describing a visit to the studio of M.G., Baudelaire writes: ―All the materials, stored higgledy-piggledy by memory, are classified, ordered, harmonized, and undergo that deliberate idealization, which is the product of a childlike perceptiveness, in other words a perceptiveness that is acute and magical by its very ingenuousness‖ (216). Salvi 220 literally dark and its narrative revolves around kidnapped children, a sense of playfulness and keen interest clearly imbues nearly every frame. Grotesqueries abound, but they do not frighten, because wonder, not innocence, is the film‘s operative term. Wonder does not preclude the possibility of ugliness: the flâneur cannot choose to walk only the city‘s broadest boulevards and stateliest parks but must also see and incorporate in her/his philosophy the marks of poverty, detritus, and alienated labor.

The final dimension of understanding the relationship between the child and the city in this film has been born out of Certeau‘s The Practice of Everyday Life. Certeau describes his work as desiring to ―bring to light the clandestine forms taken by the dispersed, tactical, and makeshift creativity of groups or individuals already caught in the nets of ‗discipline.‘ Pushed to their ideal limits, these procedures and ruses of consumers compose the network of anti- discipline‖ (xiv-v). Certeau‘s work is most productively read alongside Foucault‘s, an optimistic but discerning study of what practices escape society‘s surveying gaze precisely because of their mundanity and ordinariness. The children of the city, who are still in the process of being formed by the surveying tactics Foucault describes, are particularly inventive and able to take advantage of possibilities for anti-discipline. Certeau‘s study of practices includes practices of marginal events carried out by marginal characters, arguing that ―[m]arginality is today no longer limited to minority groups, but is rather massive and pervasive‖ (xvii). To illustrate the relationship between marginality as a social position and makeshift tactics, Certeau uses the example of the immigrant who, he says, ―confronted by images on television ... does not have the same critical or creative elbow room as the average citizen. On the same terrain, his inferior access to information, financial means, and compensations of all kinds elicits an increased deviousness, fantasy, or laughter‖ (xvii). The example used here is that of the immigrant, but the orphans of Salvi 221 the film could equally well fit into this category of engaged agents, who use tactics of

―deviousness, fantasy, [and] laughter‖ to both serious and whimsical ends.

Certeau‘s book is also concerned with the operations of the individual within the city. In his chapter ―Walking in the City‖ he makes clear the connections between storytelling and the peripatetic motions that carry the pedestrian through the urban landscape.

Certainly walking about and traveling substitute for exits, for going away and coming

back, which were formally made available by a body of legends the places nowadays

lack. Physical moving about has the itinerant function of yesterday‘s or today‘s

―superstitions.‖ Travel (like walking) is a substitute for the legends that used to open up

space to something different. What does travel ultimately produce if it is not, by a sort of

reversal, ―an exploration of the deserted places of my memory,‖ the return to nearby

exoticism by way of a detour through distant places, and the ―discovery‖ of relics and

legends.... What this walking exile produces is precisely the body of legends that is

currently lacking in one‘s own vicinity; it is a fiction, which moreover has the double

characteristic, like dreams or pedestrian rhetoric, of being the effect of displacements and

condensations. (106-7)

To take individual charge of one‘s wanderings through the city is in Certeau‘s vision to make a story out of one‘s own wandering, the daily circuits of one‘s life. This formulation combines the always-new vision of the flâneur, which can see in the taking of a new route an adventure, with a sense of how ritual embeds places and practices with meaning greater than the sum of the ritual‘s parts. Pedestrian motions, because they are self-propelled, do not have to follow the routes of the city laid out by urban planners, the streets open to the traffic of cars, the logic set by boundaries like fences, or territories enforced by property rights. And this, too, describes the logic of the Salvi 222 film, which never gives us a totalizing, aerial view of the unnamed city but keeps us moving through the space on an intimate level. In fact, the view of the city given to us by the film can be most accurately or concisely described as the child‘s view, which has access to odd angles and unexpected vantages. The camera‘ s various disruptions of our normal ways of seeing not only embraces the child‘s explorations of physical space but also leads us, the participating viewers, into a new set of legends and superstitions about the child‘s place in the adult world.

The children, because of their marginal status and their presumed uselessness, are uniquely able to escape the operations of discipline. ―The ordinary practitioners of the city live

‗down below,‘ below the thresholds at which visibility begins.... These practitioners make use of spaces that cannot be seen; their knowledge of them is as blind as that of lovers in each other‘s arms‖ (Certeau 93). Certeau is describing that which escapes not the actual threshold of visibility, that is, not that which is impossible to see, but rather the threshold of visibility that makes subjects subject to the operations of surveillance that Foucault has described. Their knowledges may not be fully articulated, i.e., ―blind,‖ but they are, at the same time, intimate.

This precisely describes the situation of the orphans and of course, most particularly, of Miette, who efficiently navigates her way through the obstacle course of Krank‘s and the Octopus‘s plans in order to achieve meaning for herself. Moreover, the intimacy of the children‘s knowledge of the city directly contradicts any logic of a ―forbidden‖ knowledge. They know of the bars and brothels, the rats and the sewers, but they know more sublime things as well.

Wandering through the city, the children create their own networks of resources, of meaning, and of kinship. They take control over the story through their mastery of the other city, the hidden city, the forgotten spaces and materials which can still be put to use by the enterprising or imaginative subject. Salvi 223

Like the immigrant of whom Certeau writes, the children of the film exhibit remarkable capabilities because practices of anti-discipline increase both satisfaction and survival. And if these practices of anti-discipline can be utilized by both immigrants and children, this means that these practices are not essential to any one generation or social position. Practices of anti- discipline are performative and tactical. They are, like the practices of diva citizenship Li‘l Bit employs, available to anyone who has a stake in utilizing them. While diva citizenship is overtly pedagogical, however, the practices of anti-discipline used by marginal citizens must perforce slip under the radar, they can continue to work only so long as they do not call attention to themselves. This desire to escape the surveying gaze might, then, be particularly central to an epistemology of adolescence insofar as we understand adolescence to be inherently rebellious and invested in ―bucking the system.‖ The question, then, becomes one of what the widespread utility of such tactics might be. If these practices of anti-discipline are meant only to aid in the survival of individuals who continue to live in marginal positions than their effect can be, at best, slow and cumulative. (And after all, base survival can be a pretty mean thing to strive for.) But

Certeau also links these tactics, we must remember, to ―deviousness, fantasy, [and] laughter‖

(xvii). Necessity may breed the use of these tactics, but it does not then follow that necessity alone will guide their further usage. Whatever our moral conundrums, deviousness, fantasy and laughter sound inviting and enriching. They might also be deemed frivolous but that charge of frivolity is also what allows these tactics to remain hidden while working their transformative potential.

The Failure of the Dream of Innocence Salvi 224

A key moment between Krank and Irvin reveals that outside the dream world, claims of innocence can be dangerously manipulated by those wishing to avoid responsibility. In a rare moment when the two are alone, Krank begs the brain for help. ―Irvin, you know all about feelings. Won‘t you try to help me? Won‘t you explain why all those children only have nightmares?‖ Irvin‘s explanation is reductionist and essentialist, preying on the inventor‘s worst fears. ―Because you are a nightmare,‖ the brain responds. ―You can persecute all the children in the world, but there‘s one thing you‘ll never have—a soul.‖ The inventor is enraged, and immediately turns on Irvin even though he has just asked him for help. ―Because you believe you have one?‖ Krank sneers. ―You don‘t even have a body. He who created us made us all monsters.‖ But Irvin calmly responds: ―No Krank, you are wrong. You‘re the only monster here.‖ His face turning red, his hands in fists, Krank yells, ―Be quiet! He‘s the only one responsible here. I‘m innocent. I‘m innocent!‖ The fact that only the villain of the film ever claims innocence as a defense entirely deflates the concept of innocence as valuable or desirable.

Krank‘s claim of innocence is based on a denial of culpability, but his quick transformation from pathetic questioner to enraged tantrum-thrower further identifies innocence with a dangerous lack of control, an inability to successfully navigate the challenges of the individual‘s circumstances. In other words, though Krank is here trying to distinguish between innocence and guilt, his childish actions lead to a reading of his assertion of innocence is more linked to the putative innocence of the child. In asserting the impossible coexistence of his own responsibility with his own dubious claim of innocence, Krank appears more like a spoiled toddler than an evil genius, suggesting that avoiding responsibility is the most childish act of all. More provocatively, this moment suggests that we take seriously Irvin‘s suggestion that what we see here is not childishness but monstrousness. Salvi 225

The film does not shy away from depicting dark moments or violent events—it knows that sadness and violence are part of the child‘s lexicon and that any attempt to assert otherwise stems only from blind sentimentality. An example of this can be seen through examination of the film‘s opening dream sequence. In it, Krank tries to engage a little boy in what he thinks will be the happy dream of Christmas and a visit from Santa, only to discover that in his presence these

―happy dreams‖ morph into nightmares, filled with an appalling repetition of events and demonically multiplying Santa figures. The lived reality of the child‘s life intrudes on the dream—the reindeer shits on the floor, one Santa tipples drunkenly from a hip flask, the child is overwhelmed by the press of large figures. Though the plot contends that it is Krank‘s monstrosity that induces the children‘s nightmares, I argue what we see here is that Krank‘s vision of what makes children (or people generally) happy is too limited. Indeed, it is in the dream sequence that we see childhood most thoroughly constructed through the processes (and, I would argue, the aesthetic) of nostalgia, which has much more to do with what the adult wants and believes than with what the child actually experiences.

Nostalgia, as I‘ve already noted, is clearly operative in the film, set in its ―retro future.‖

In fact, to return to the question of toys, one important way the film constructs childhood nostalgically is through the old-fashioned toys used as props and set dressings—a windup elephant on a bicycle, a clockwork soldier playing the cymbals, a jointed teddy bear.

Interestingly, the children of the film are not interested in these toys, perhaps because in their orphaned freedom they see the whole world as a set of tools over which they can have mastery.

When, at the end of the film, the professor runs into Miette and is reminded by her of the children he both means-to-and-has-forgotten-to rescue from Krank, he fills her arms with toys to give to the children. She stares at him blankly as he hands her item after item, picked from the Salvi 226 bottom of the sea. Practical girl that she is, Miette has discarded the toys by the next time we see her on screen—she has more important things to think about. The unimportance of these toys to the children underscores the film‘s rejection of seeing children as little homunculi who will only make use of what is given to them.112

Perhaps this form of nostalgia is inevitable in discourse about childhood. After all, when we think about childhood we inevitably think about our own childhoods, our own memories, so we are also thinking about historical context some twenty or more years in the past. But if

Baudelaire or Barthes are right about what is unique about childhood, then the answer is newness—perpetual newness and the inventive possibilities that abide in not having a pre- formed knowledge of how things ―ought‖ to be. We, the adults who can talk about childhood because we are now outside of it, no longer have access to the experiences that continue to shape the lives of the children who still live within that tantalizing set of possibilities. To recognize this disconnect between discourse and experience is not necessarily the same as idealizing or romanticizing the child. Rather, it is to take seriously the differences in experience between child and adult and to lend credence to non-paradigmatic thinking.

Midway through the film, Krank and his clones return again to the image of Christmas to try and induce the kidnapped children to feel affection for their guards. This time they are working in the realm of reality instead of dreams. Krank, dressed in a Santa suit, lip-synchs to the song ―Papa Noelle‖ while surrounded by Christmas trees and wrapped presents, the clones holding lit sparklers behind him. At first the toddlers in their cribs are transfixed, but when the gramophone playing the record is bumped by one of the clones and the song begins to skip, repetition rears its head again as Krank is forced to sing the same line over and over. The

112 In the film‘s opening dream sequence, the little boy climbs out of his crib and runs to get his teddy bear before trying to escape the dizzying array of Santa‘s that have invaded his bedroom. This is the film‘s only example of a child caring about a toy, which otherwise seem to immediately disappear from the children‘s attention. Salvi 227 children burst into horrified wails, crying harder and harder. They stop when the record skips again, this time to a lively cabana tune about love and romance, to which the clones begin dancing and lip-synching. The novelty of this new performance soothes the children. The calm lasts until Krank again tries to make the script go according to his plan, at which point the children resume crying. Krank‘s failure of imagination, his attempt to return again and again to one tired scene, epitomizes the failure of the nostalgic mode both for himself and for the children he has kidnapped.

As I‘ve mentioned, the film‘s final dream sequence is also the space of innocence‘s final undoing. After Miette has agreed to take Denrée‘s place, she begins to grow and to age, while

Krank gets younger and shrinks. Miette swoops the inventor into her arms and begins dancing with him, twirling madly. Krank pulls away for her and reaches for the bell pull to summon his clone minions, but he can no longer reach it. He is reduced to a toddler as Miette becomes an old woman. Krank begins to cry in the real world and the dream world simultaneously. Miette, now able to do what Krank could not, tugs the bell pull to summon one of the clones and then slips behind a red curtain. One of the clone brothers comes and picks up the sobbing toddler and tucks him under his arm. The clone then unceremoniously forces one of the dream helmets onto the child Krank‘s head. As in the previous dream, repetition signals the final descent into nightmare, and the scene of the child being unceremoniously scooped up and then hooked into the torturous dream machine is shown over and over again, speeding up with each repetition. The horrifying shock forces Krank into one last moment of wakefulness, as he suddenly realizes that to tap into the ―innocence‖ of children is not, in fact, to access unfettered happiness. Rather, this moment in the film seems to argue that true innocence consists of powerlessness, of being unable to stop Salvi 228 others from enforcing their will upon you.113 The inventor falls over dead, his brain scan a flat line.

This dream sequence is also key to understanding the relationship between One and

Miette, to which I will now turn. When Irvin, the brain-in-a box, tells Miette that she must join

Krank and Denrée ―in the clutches of evil, inside the dream,‖ the girl willingly straps herself into the dream machine. As she does so, she says, ―it‘s funny, I don‘t even know the little brother.‖

Irvin responds, ―but I know you. And he could have been yours.‖ Strapping herself into the machine, Miette also straps herself into the provisional but powerful chosen family structure One has been maintaining all along. Although at this point in the film Miette thinks that One is dead, she still makes the choice to try and help him. She takes on the responsibility of maintaining the chosen family herself, and Denrée becomes ―hers‖ as much as he is One‘s. There is nothing compulsory about Miette‘s decision, nothing bound up in the language of blood or biology. Once inside the dream, Miette confronts Krank, and when she offers to take Denrée‘s place Krank asks her, warily, ―What would you get in exchange?‖ The girl, looking down, responds, ―a brother. If

I take his place, maybe I‘ll see his big brother again.‖ Krank remains wary. ―You are trying to trap me, aren‘t you?‖ Miette does not deny this, but responds, practically, ―I don‘t risk very much.‖ The last few shots of the film prove that her risk has paid off. First we see Miette and

One rowing away from the water tower together, content looks upon their faces. Her body and bright red dress are framed by One‘s large presence and his black coat; seen together, they form a fused unit. With them in the boat are Denrée and the other rescued children. The final shot is

113 Although it might seem strange to utilize the term "innocence" here after the critiquing it so thoroughly, this is the term made most easily available by the film. The film never answers the question of why, precisely, Krank cannot dream, but the fact that he is seeking the remedy to his malady through the use of very young children Formatted: Font: 10 pt suggests that he is looking for as blank slate as possible. (At one point, when Miss Bismuth is picking up a new batch of children from the Cyclops she is told" ―this batch is as fresh as they come, not a one of them is over five years old.‖") Innocence, as we have seen through Kincaid, is most easily understood through blankness or nullity. Therefore, innocenceit is the most accurate term to use here. Salvi 229 the camera narrowing into a circle around Denrée‘s face, all wide eyes and blond hair, and the film ends as the insatiable boy lets out a final burp. The relationship between One and Miette does more than simply serve as the film‘s emotional anchor, although that is of course an important element of its work, just as their teamwork is an important structural element for the plot‘s resolution. More fundamental to my argument, however, are the ways in which their interactions force us to reconsider what elements must necessarily pertain in relationships between children and adults. The personal relationship between One and Miette insistently calls into question the structural relationship between childhood and adulthood – Miette clearly has the agency and capacity to navigate the world successfully, while One is frequently lost and stymied. This dynamic privileges the child‘s abilities, and when this is coupled with the child‘s ability to successfully navigate the city it becomes a formidable force indeed.

Two important elements follow from the fact that the film positions One and Miette as peers. First, as I have already started to address, the chosen family dynamic between One,

Miette, and Denrée undoes our assumptions about what the nuclear family is or should be.

Second, One and Miette circle around moments that tempt the audience into reading their relationship as a romantic one. However, the film ultimately avoids turning this romantic dynamic into a viable reading, undermining the audience‘s own efforts to insert the conventional marriage-plot happy ending into the film‘s framework. (In other words, there are moments in the film when the audience seems to want a marriage-plot almost despite themselves.) This undoing of conventional narrative structures is particularly important in the context of this film because conventional narrative structures are one of the important ways in which nostalgic modes of thinking and acting become reified and presented to audiences as continually ―new‖ when they are anything but. Since the operations of nostalgia are here so clearly the tactics of Krank, Salvi 230 avoiding the nostalgic heteronormative mode allows the audience to avoid aligning itself with

Krank, ultimately sustaining the possibility of taking the film‘s vision of an epistemology of childhood outside the theater. To see past the temptation of the romance plot is to see the film‘s overall project as viable and, perhaps, even liberatory.

It is not surprising that the way Miette goes about achieving a meaningful existence is through building a family structure to fill the blank spaces left by her orphan status. Even if the desire for family seems a clichéd thing for an orphan to want, Miette goes about it not by trying to find herself a set of parents, but by inserting herself into a pre-existing, chosen-family sibling relationship. As One describes it to her, he found Denrée as an infant in a rubbish bin. At first, the girl urges the strongman to abandon his brother, telling him that ―the wolves will have eaten‖ him and saying, dismissively, ―he‘s too little to bother.‖ When Miette tells One that she knows where the Cyclopses‘ truck is going, the strongman tentatively asks her, ―Miette, and One, together?‖ Her response is a dubious ―And then what?‖114 Though it is One who first proclaims

―Denrée little brother, Miette little sister,‖ she quickly comes to adopt this fraternal language herself. As One proves her loyalty to her, Miette responds by proving her loyalty to him and even, eventually, to Denrée.

The peer relationship that obtains between Miette and One as siblings is also part of what plays into the temptation to read them as a couple, or potential couple. This relationship is strongly established by the film—on two prominent occasions, Miette verbally rejects the notion that the strongman‘s status as adult and her status as child should negatively affect their interactions. The first instance comes when the two, captured by the Cyclopses, have been taken

114 This is may not be an entirely accurate translation into English. Webb and Schirato , whose French is undoubtedly better than my own, note Miette‘s response to One‘s question as a cynical and perceptive ―In your dreams!‖ (Webb and Schirato 66). This translation is also very much in keeping with my own contention that Miette is much more aware of the potential double entendres in their relationship than One is. Salvi 231 to the pier and are about to be drowned. They are wrapped with ropes, standing at the end of planks over the water, counterbalanced by full baskets of rotting fish. When the baskets are uncovered, seagulls flock to carry away the fish, slowly reducing the weight in the basket until the two are about to be plunged into the water. As they stand there, One mourns, ―Miette too little.‖ Miette, defiantly and angrily, responds, ―Not as little as all that.‖ She both understands and rejects the conceptual basis on which One predicates his own mourning: his idea of what her youth means does not align with her own self conception. The relative value of her life has nothing to do with her age.

Later, after the other orphans have helped Miette retrieve One from the back of the pickup truck, they ask her about the relationship. ―What has he done to you?‖ they ask. ―You‘re inseparable. You must be in love... he‘s a grown-up, and you know it.‖ Miette is again angry, not this time because she feels the need to defend her knowledge but because she needs her former cohort to understand the parity of their relationship. ―He may be big,‖ she responds, ―but he‘s not grown-up. And maybe you‘re not so little either.‖ As other marginalized, disposable children, the other orphans can make no claim of childish innocence, but One—who is, as he admits himself,

―a moron‖—retains a simplicity of purpose despite his formidable size.

As the other orphans‘ taunts suggest, the relationship between little girl and strongman has raised eyebrows in a few places, seeming at times to cross uncomfortably into the realm of romance. However, the language of the film never endorses this reading. In an interview with

Alain Schlockoff and Cathy Karani, Jeunet asserted that while this film ―could also be a love story‖ and that the character of Miette is ―in search of that,‖ he claims that any sexual content is

―unconscious on the part of the little girl ... and with us, too: it was while editing that we realized it!‖ Salvi 232

The moment in the film which most encourages the audience to read a romance between the two characters comes midway through the film, as Miette and One are trying to track down the tattooed man with a map of the minefield on his body, and just before One receives the tattoo

―Miette Pour La Vie‖ (Miette for Life) which signals his total commitment to her. Miette, exhausted, calls for the strongman to slow down. She sits down at the top of some steps and he comes to her, removes her boots, wiggles a finger through the hole in the sole of one of them

(eliciting a small smile from the girl), and begins to massage her feet. Miette looks at him considerately and asks, ―After you find little brother, what will you do?‖ One, still massaging, replies slowly: ―Don‘t know. Find work. House. One day…take wife, maybe?‖ The two look at each other and nod, considering, making noises of assent. Then Miette asks, curiously, ―Well, what kind of wife?‖ One makes a dismissive noise. ―Oh, no hurry to choose. Need time to find shoes One‘s size.‖ He gives her boots back to her and urges her to climb on his back. As they walk they find themselves tromping along behind a man carrying a mirror on his back. Miette takes one of the stolen jewels from her pocket and hangs it in her ear, playing dress-up, playing grown-up.

This moment is one of the pinnacles of physical intimacy between the two, a moment when their teamwork stems not from necessity but from affection. To touch another‘s feet is imagined as either intimate or devotional, as when a disciple washes the feet of their spiritual superior. Miette is probing, trying to find what her place in One‘s life will be once this adventure is over. We might find ourselves wanting to believe that Miette will grow to be the wife one speaks of. Miette, preening before the mirror, might herself be imagining that. Either way, the next scene shows the tattoo artist dabbing away blood from the traditional red heart with the banner of words across it—the proverbial ―mom‖ tattoo proclaiming One‘s devotion to his new Salvi 233

―little sister.‖ Though the possibility for sexuality is there, it is allowed to exist, as it exists for all of us throughout our lives, and nothing in the narrative requires that sexuality to be brought forth, acted on, or exploited. Most importantly for my argument, nothing about that sexuality is dangerous to the child. As Webb and Schirato note, ―One‘s innocence, his lack of self-interest, and his apparent lack of awareness of the sexual nuances in various interchanges with Miette, authorize their affection for one another‖ (67). Sexuality, that great bogeyman which is the ultimate threat to the ―innocence‖ of the child, here floats, freeform, as a potentiality that threatens nothing.

The relationship between One and Miette is the final piece to the film‘s puzzle, the final piece in creating a new picture of what childhood might mean. First, the film had to imagine a situation in which the dangers that threaten the child are better solved by the children themselves than by the adults who surround them. This was the role of the city, which the children know from different angles and play with intentionally, manipulating common objects to put them to new uses, manipulating common spaces to new ends. Then the film dismantled the nostalgic construction of childhood, reminding us of the potential falsity of our memories, the frustrations of powerlessness, the impossibility of predicting what will create happiness. And finally, through

One and Miette, the film elevates the child while humbling the adult, bringing the two into a position of equality which opens up new possibilities of interaction. All of this may be a fantasy, a dream more elusive and mysterious and impossible to grasp than any of the film‘s more peculiar sequences. But to imagine these possibilities in the first place is a step in the direction of seeing children as more fully human, a step towards taking their play seriously, a step towards imagining a world where radical possibilities can be acted on, not just dreamed of.

Salvi 234

And Then They Grew up...

What might all of this mean for the adolescent, or for our ideas about the adolescent? How could the ideas explored by The City of Lost Children evolve into new consequences for those liminal bodies that vacillate wildly between vulnerability and maturity? Much of this project has been spent working to understand how the figuration of the child is incorporated into and transformed—even as the physical body is transformed—by the figuration of the teen. I have come to see the teenager as an embodiment of the both/and, a site where meanings coalesce but often refuse to cohere. This is of course a difficult distinction to uphold, and here at the end I want to consider the difficulties of that boundary more fully. To begin, I want to make two important points regarding how the film re-imagines children and the effects these re-imaginings might have on our understanding of adolescence. Both of these points have the potential to be more thoroughly developed in future versions of this project, but for now I will simply acknowledge them before moving on to articulate how we might develop a new epistemology (or set of epistemologies) around adolescence, as I have suggested that the film points the way towards a new epistemology of childhood.

First, one of the things the film does is to remove the child from the realm of commerce.

Just as the film rejects the homunculi-logic of the common toy, it also rejects the notion that children need to be catered to as anything other than humans. The film trusts that the qualities it admires in children--the serious play, plasticity, inventiveness, and openness--will manifest themselves in every aspect of children‘s engagement with the world, no props required. A similar logic applied to the adolescent might remove or distance her/him from the idea of the teenager.

In other words, if the word ―teenager‖ describes a marketing demographic assumed to have a lot of discretionary spending power, to re-envision the teenager adolescent might bring us back to Salvi 235 appreciating the qualities unique to puberty, freeing us from a mechanical and sterile set of ideas about what the teenager can do for the economy. To deconstruct the idea of the teenager may, in fact, be one of the more powerful things we can do in terms of taking adolescence seriously.115

Second, just as the film reimagines the child‘s relationship to the city, so too could reimagining the adolescent within an urban context have a diverse set of ramifications. If the city and all the different kinds of knowledge it contains are not a threat to the child, it follows that they cannot be a threat the teenager either. More importantly, to remove this shadowy idea of

―threat‖ from the equation altogether might make space for ceasing to think of the urban adolescent as a threat. Throughout this project I have sought to identify the types of threats adolescence are variously imagined to pose: pathetic and unexpected visions; stability to the social, sexual, or epistemological order; rejection of entrenched values. Though the plays I have focused on have all depicted white suburban teens, the paranoia attached to these various threats is inevitably magnified when the topic is ―urban‖ (read: black or brown) youth. The net result of this fear is that the poor youth most negatively affected by current US policies are the ones most demonized. Undoing the notion that city life is inherently bad for young people might point the way towards less racist public policies. A future version of this project will look more closely at theatrical figurations of urban youth, particularly figurations written by authors of color, in order to both broaden my critique and examine more particularly how urban communities understand and represent futurity both to themselves and to the white audience members who might attend such performances.

Most important, however, are the effects that rejecting the dream of innocence that children and teenagers would have. One observed effect of this rejection in the context of The Formatted: Font: 10 pt 115 Ffor a well- researched argument on the problematic links between consumerism and the teenager, in which the Formatted: Footnote Reference, teenager becomes the arbiter of pop culture, see Marcel Danesi, Forever Young: the "Teen-aging" of Modern Font: Not Bold Anne, can you finish this citation for me? Culture. Formatted: Footnote Reference Salvi 236

City of Lost Children was that it required an acknowledgment of the distance between our adult memories of our childhoods and the currently lived reality of those who are children now.

Abandoning the nostalgic mode frees us from the repetition compulsion and its dictates that we try to force the experiences of others to resemble our own. This doesn‘t, of course, erase what commonalities may exist, but it allows us to see difference with less negative judgment. I‘m reminded here of Eve Sedgwick‘s first axiomatic assumption in The Epistemology of the Closet,

―people are different from each other.‖.

As Sedgwick writes:

It is astonishing how few respectable conceptual tools we have for dealing with this self-

evident fact. A tiny number of inconceivably coarse axes of categorization have been

painstakingly inscribed in current critical and political thought: gender, race, class,

nationality, sexual orientation are pretty much the available distinctions. They, with the

associated demonstrations of the mechanisms by which they are constructed and

reproduced, are indispensable, and they may indeed override all or some other forms of

difference and similarity. But the sister or brother, the best friend, the classmate, the

parent, the child, the lover, the ex-: our families, loves, and enmities alike, not to mention

the strange relations of our work, play, and activism, prove that even people who share all

or most of our own positions along these crude axes may still be different enough from

us, and from each other, to seem like all but different species.

Everybody has learned this, I assume, and probably everybody who survives at all has

reasonably rich, unsystematic resources of nonce taxonomy for mapping out the

possibilities, dangers, and stimulations of their human social landscape. It is probably

people with the experience of oppression or subordination who have most need to know Salvi 237

it; and I take the precious, devalued arts of gossip, immemorially associated in European

thought with servants, with effeminate and gay men, with all women, to have to do not

even so much with the transmission of necessary news as with the refinement of

necessary skills for making, testing, and using unrationalized and provisional hypotheses

about what kinds of people there are to be found in one‘s world. (22-23)

It follows that to appreciate the difference in experience is not to deny the difference. I don‘t think we can or should go back to preindustrial model where the differences in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood were effectively erased by the demands of labor and further exacerbated by differences in class. A more nuanced understanding of the implications of difference rests not in denial but in active embrace, recognition of what difference differentiates.

In this spirit, an epistemology of adolescence would not be identical to an epistemology of childhood, although it might possess some of the same features. (Just a little further down I speak in more detail about what the differences in these epistemologies might include.) Furthermore, if we recall Baudelaire‘s characterization of genius, we remember that it is in the cultivated attribute which combines attitude with knowledge. This opens up the possibility that the epistemology of childhood, called up here through the aesthetics of the film, need not be bound strictly to those who are chronologically children, but can instead be made widely available for strategic deployments as the occasion calls for it.

As explored throughout this project, ―age‖ might be productively added to Sedgwick‘s list of crude axes, but it is indeed a crude axis that intersects complexly with the categories she describes. The intersection of urbanity, youth, and race, to make use of the previous example, looks incredibly different than the similar-but-different intersection of suburbanity, youth, and race. Both of these examples look different if the race difference is understood not as a Salvi 238 distinction between white and African-American experiences but as a distinction between white and Asian-American experiences. The intersection transforms yet again if we speak of immigrant versus native-born experiences, or ethnic differences, or ... the list goes on and on. Sedgwick is also, however, pointing us in the direction of a productive methodology when she speaks of using gossip as her guide to thinking through these complex taxonomies. City of Lost Children points the way towards a new epistemology through use of a particular set of aesthetic moves which disconnect whimsy, imagination, and invention from innocence. This type of aesthetic methodology could be used again to find a new epistemology of adolescence.

To make space for, to legitimize the kinds of knowledge associated with the epistemologies descriptive of any chronological age—this is a hard task, but not an impossible one. It requires, first, that we begin to undo the assumption that certain kinds of knowledge belong only to any particular age since that assumption implicitly runs roughshod over the very kinds of differences that, following Sedgwick, I am most interested in articulating and learning to better appreciate. Second, it requires figuring out how to describe those epistemologies, as I have suggested City of Lost Children successfully describes an epistemology of childhood. In keeping with the both/and logic of adolescence I spoke of earlier, I imagine an epistemology of adolescence which is not unitary but as contains (at least) two threads: one civic and one that we might call anti-social.

In the afterword to the 1994 printing of his play A Bright Room Called Day, Tony

Kushner writes:

The Left characterizes the Right‘s nostalgia as senescent; the Right characterizes the

Left‘s demands for change as adolescent…. If this is ageist I apologize for it; it‘s

certainly too schematic.... Right and Left, young and old are categories too simple and Salvi 239

undialectical to be properly descriptive; and yet it is a truth, I think, that any partisan

position on the political spectrum is stigmatized generally as being either pre- or post-

maturity.

Maturity, according to the American politics of relativism, arrives when one

believes in nothing too deeply, when one is not particularly or passionately partisan,

when one hews to the gray middle, a place towards which many people are expected to

drift as they approach middle age. (171-72)116

This idea is where one of my notions of the epistemology of adolescence comes to rest, in the idea that this epistemology (and perhaps an aesthetic that might accompany it) has particularly to do with civic engagement. City of Lost Children is not offering up a vision of the kind of activism of which Kushner speaks here, but it does imagine the child as an active agent rather than a passive receptacle, a prerequisite move in understanding civic engagement of all kinds. It aligns neatly (perhaps even too neatly) with my focus on citizenship and my argument that the persistent anxiety surrounding adolescents boils down to fear of the potential of living in a future society structured by a radically different set of norms and values. Furthermore, this active engagement with life is part of the model of what citizenship is or should be, a model which we saw both negatively and positively explored in chapter three. This thread is—like Berlant‘s theorizations of the infant or diva citizen or the practices of flannerie—a performative practice which can be intentionally occupied and tactically deployed. What I‘m suggesting here, inspired by Sedgwick‘s appeal for us to map out new axes of difference, is that embracing these methodologies and aesthetics would be to embrace critical practices which could break down

116 Kushner is hardly the first person to have expressed this idea. For brief overview of the history of this sentiment, see OED contributor Barry Popik‘s, ―If you‘re not a liberal at 20, you have no heart, if you‘re not a conservative at 40 you have no brain,‖ on the website The Big Apple. http://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/if_youre_not_a_liberal_at_20_you_have_no_heart_if_not_a_conservative_at_40/ Field Code Changed Salvi 240 these unproductive anxieties surrounding futurity. The genius of which Baudelaire speaks, the genius of the flâneur or the painter of modern life who embraces the wonder of childhood and channels it into his work, has particularly to do in his vision with the artist. But the vision of the adolescent is about expansion outside the family circle, about the ability to connect one‘s passions to those of other people. As a strategic position, this powerful and possibly libidinal sense of engagement that I am characterizing here as constituting the foundation of the epistemology of adolescence might be productively harnessed to legitimize the emotional forces behind social change. In some ways this legitimization might entail de-coupling this passionate engagement from adolescence itself, which is partly how I imagine aesthetics contributing to these epistemologies insofar as decoupling aesthetic categories from different life-stages to be a relatively easy imaginative leap. (I can personally, for example, name a number of people in my acquaintance under twenty who are passionately excited by Beethoven, and a similar number over forty who adore Lady Gaga.) Those who chose to might then feel free to attach themselves to ideas or movements without fearing that this passion alone would be enough to allow others to label them immature. Hewing passionately to things or people can be a radical act of love undertaken with full knowledge and intention.

My thinking about the non-civically engaged or antisocial dimension of an epistemology of adolescence evolves from further consideration of Una Chaudhuri's work on zooësis, which was so central to my chapter on Equus. Zooësis informs my thinking in a number of dimensions.

First, it is another articulation of how to think through difference and, more crucially, how

―reducing the animal [or the adolescent] its radical otherness by ceaselessly troping it ... erases the animal even as it makes it discursively ubiquitous‖ (―Geographies‖ 648). Zooësis clarifies some of what is at stake when we erase difference. Following John Berger, Chaudhuri suggests Salvi 241 that this erasure means that ―animals can no longer perform the vital function for which human beings have long prized them: their ability to foster in us a kind of self-consciousness that is impossible to attain within the human species itself‖ (―Geographies‖ 650). This loss of self- consciousness which arises out of refusal to recognize radical difference blunts the critical gaze, erases particularity, and homogenizes into bland mush the field of social inquiry.

Second, Chaudhuri and Enelow suggest (as I have already explored in Chapter Two) that their dramaturgical explorations of the idea of becoming-animal led them to see some provocative linkages between animals and adolescence.117 These links are articulated most clearly through the becoming-animal‘s emphasis on process and refusal of stasis.

For our purposes, the most challenging of Deleuzian definitions (or definitions by

negation) was the idea that becoming is antithetical to imitation... Becoming resists

metaphor and mimesis. It courts fleeting synecdoches, momentary metonymies, shifting

interstices... Becoming-animal is dynamic and active, continuous and never-ending: a

process that never coalesces into a product. Second, the process is an unraveling, a

breaking down, a ―molecularization,‖ tending towards what the Deleuzian chapter title

calls a ―becoming-imperceptible.‖ The molecular is opposed…to the ―molar,‖ which is

the fixed, characteristic, constituted, programmed body... For the purposes of

performance, the idea of molecularization and ―becoming-imperceptible‖ function as a

117 To give the relevaent quote again: Formatted: Indent: First line: ―Indeed, for us, it seems no mere accident of circumstance or plot that the becomings of our play took root 0", Line spacing: single in the transitional bodies of our teenage characters. Although explicit discussion of this parallel was kept Formatted: Indent: Left: 0.5", out of the script, we felt the play depended on the audience's familiarity with becomings of adolescence, First line: 0", Line spacing: single when the body is not singular but rather plural, at once the disappearing child and the appearing adult: both, Formatted: Font: 10 pt and somehow neither as well. The adolescent body is a becoming always in process, never fixed. This body, coupled with its relation to the surrounding world, furthers the theory of the adolescent as a kind of human-animal. The pack-like behavior (to which anyone who has observed a group of high school students can attest), the forced subservience to the more bodily powerful adult world, the body-which-is-not-itself, all render the adolescent exquisitely suited to perform the kind of animalized becomings in which we were so interested. (―Animalizing‖ 13) Formatted: Font: 10 pt Formatted: Font: 10 pt Salvi 242

constant corrective to the pull of mimesis, of inhabiting fixed and recognizable forms and

behaviors. The third idea with which we imbued our understanding of becoming-animal

was that it is a ―deterritorializing,‖ a radical dislocation and destabilizing of familiar

spatial condors and boundaries. (―Animalizing‖ 5-6)

If this process of becoming is ―a process that never coalesces into a product‖ that implies it is partaking in the kind of deconstruction of the teenager (in favor of the adolescent) I alluded to at the beginning of this section. More provocative, though, is how the performance of this becoming resists the kind of stable identities on which claims of citizenship so often attempt to rest. This suggests that there is further research to be done here, following critiques of critics like Giorgio Agamben who contest use-value of ―the citizen‖ as a conceptual category.

When I say that this thread of my proposed epistemology is antisocial I do not necessarily mean that its aim is social destruction, though I do think it would necessarily entail social reconstruction. This thread is antisocial in its rejection of current foundational models of sociality, such as the nuclear family. It might rely, as Chaudhuri and Enelow suggest, on a series of new allegiances to the tribe or pack, accepting that shifting or provisional alliances do not perforce constitute betrayal. The emphasis on process imagined through the performative practices described in ―animalizing performance‖ would, like the epistemology imagined through City of Lost Children, value plasticity as an end in itself, rather than assuming transformation to be acceptable only when contain within a teleological model. But it might, in the case of the adolescent, be distinct from the epistemology of childhood in that it could recognize greater capacity for becoming and acting. This suggests a difference of degree, rather than kind, and understanding of the spectrum rather than a reliance on the binary. Salvi 243

I want to end with a few final thoughts about the notions of aesthetics that I have been playing with throughout this final chapter. The long-term effects of the Romantic image of the child is part of what allows a film like The City of Lost Children to present what I‘ve been identifying (for lack of a better term) as a coherent aesthetic that can oppose itself to the romanticized ideology of childhood. Because both ―adolescent‖ and ―teenager‖ are newer ideas with shorter cultural histories it is harder to pin down what an oppositional aesthetic evolving from these conceptions might look like. The persistent equation of teenagers with pop culture also complicates this process, since changing technologies have, in every decade since the word teenager was coined, resulted in a series of different aesthetic/age correlations. And finally, such an aesthetic, if it were to ever emerge, might only be recognized retrospectively, after it had already emerged for identification in a film or play or novel.

Sianne Ngai‘s article ―Our Aesthetic Categories‖ opens with cogent series of remarks and questions about the problems attendant upon a methodological focus on aesthetics. She suggests that aesthetics might be a way to circumvent the problem of critical critique, ―a practice increasingly attacked from multiple directions ... for doing artworks the disservice of reducing them to encryptions of history radiology‖ (948). But she also points out that ―our aesthetic experience is always mediated by a finite if constantly rotating repertoire of aesthetic categories‖

(948). We may not be able, then, to fully articulate at this moment what the correct aesthetic category through which we might articulate a new epistemology of adolescence actually is.

However, Ngai suggests a link between the aesthetic of the zany and the performative which I find particularly provocative. Arguing that the categories of the cute, the zany, and the interesting are particularly relevant in modern aesthetic discourse because of their relationships to consumption, production, and circulation, she writes: Salvi 244

The zany, for its part, is hot: hot under the collar, hot and bothered, hot to trot. Pointing to

the intensely embodied affects and desires of an agent compelled to move, hustle, and

perform in the presence of others, these idioms underscore that the zany is the only

aesthetic category in our repertoire with a special relation to affective or physical effort

and is thus an aesthetic whose dynamics are most sharply brought out in performance:

dance, theater, happenings, television, film. (950)

At this point I can only provisionally suggest that the zany might ultimately be a key term in developing the performative epistemology of adolescence in which I am interested. Zaniness might work to mediate between the civic and the antisocial strains of this epistemology as either, in the first case, a tactical call-to-action or, in the second, an alienating gesture that loudly proclaims its disinterest in adhering to the tenets of the highly privileged normal. Zaniness might take into account and make less anxious space for the insistent embodiedness and active sexuality inherent in our current understanding of the adolescent. If zaniness can make us comfortable with the bodies of these problematically embodied citizens who refuse to fade back into the background of disembodied social death then it could be a powerful tool for transformation.

To appreciate the zany one must also appreciate its infectious energy, the insistent invitation that we get up and join the dance. I am and always have been an unabashed optimist. If

I sound here as if that optimism is taking over, that is because I want to let it do so. My attitude towards my own optimism has always been one of ―little to lose, much to gain‖ and I feel that here profoundly. For the teenager I was and the friends I had then, for the teens I know now, and for the younger children in my life who enthusiastically and wisely jettison their un-knowledge Salvi 245 and embrace all their experiences through active bodies, what I can imagine growing out of this optimism is as difficult but fruitful a reimagining of difference as any other I can think of.

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