ENGL 4384: Senior Seminar Student Anthology

ENGL 4384: Senior Seminar Student Anthology Spring 2012 Dr. Patrick Erben, Professor Department of English & Philosophy Printed on campus by UWG Publications and Printing. SACRED SEX: RELIGION AND EROTICISM IN LITERATURE Introduction 5 Patrick Erben I. SEX AND RELIGION IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR CULTURE “They Do Know We’re Brothers, Right?”: Finding 11 Sexual Traditionalism in Homoerotic, Incestuous Supernatural Fanfiction Jenna Harvie Get a Demon Off: Sexuality and the Succubus in 25 Richelle Mead’s Succubus Series and Jim Butcher’s Dresden Files Series Kim Gonter You need to Control that Snake: Undressing the 39 Veil of Sexuality in Black Snake Moan through readings of The Crucible and the Bible Greg Lewis The Vulcans of Star Trek: Binding the Spiritual 51 and Sexual Sides of Humanity Crystal Laminack The Oppressive Nature of Religion-Based Inferiority 65 Complexes in Boardwalk Empire and The Handmaid’s Tale Rachel Bartlett II. CONTEMPORARY TEXTS—HISTORICAL CONTEXTS Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale vs. “Song of 79 “Solomon”: Who’s Having Blessed Sex? Anastasia Latson Naughty Natives: How European Exploration Influenced 91 Modern Representations of Aboriginal Sexuality Amanda Shoemake Wolves, Men, and Werewolves. Oh, my! The Trappings 105 of Masculine Desire within Religion and Fairytales Tara Prouty Breaking the Sex Code: Hierogamy as a Past Christian 117 Rite in The Da Vinci Code Raven Eggleston Christopher Rice’s Naïve Manipulation of Hieronymus 129 Bosch’s The Garden of Earthly Delights and the Brethren of the Free Spirit Ashley Westmoreland The American Jezebels 141 Catherine Evans III. SEX AND RELIGION IN LITERATURE Goblin Market 155 Amie Hendrix A Poetic Engagement with God: Whitman and 171 Dickinson’s Construction of the Self Kimberly Smith INTRODUCTION DR. PATRICK M. ERBEN s our seminar discussed the intersections of spirituality and A eroticism in literature, art, and film throughout the semes- ter, heated public debates once again revealed the current political and cultural sensitivities attached to religion and sex: ultra- conservative talk-show host Rush Limbaugh infamously calling women’s rights activist and Georgetown law student Sandra Fluke a “s—t,” the Catholic bishops of America protesting the Obama administration’s decision to require health care plans offered by religious institutions to include birth control, the popularity of TV shows (from Big Love to Sister Wives) about polygamy, and the debate over same-sex marriage leading to two widely discrepant responses—a constitutional ban on same-sex marriage in North Carolina on the one hand and President Obama’s announcement that he personally supports such unions. Although these issues and phenomena were not primarily the center of our investigations, they productively informed the texts we examined, ranging from The Handmaid’s Tale to metaphysical poetry to The Crucible to the The Last Temptation of Christ. The transgressive nature of the material forced the participants of the seminar to test their own personally, socially, or culturally constructed boundaries and en- gage taboo topics such as incest and anal sex. What became the most shocking for everyone was the realization that religious language—expressions of the relationship between humanity and the divine—frequently relied on the language of sexual excess or transgression to fathom the unknowable or ineffable realms of human comprehension or image making. Extreme piety, we found, adopted the language and phenomenology of sexual desire and passion, whereas attempts to exert social and political authority— especially over women—configured dually repressive regimes of sexual and religious control. 5 Dr. Patrick Erben In working independently on their anthology essays, students realized the many ways in which contemporary popular culture operates on the axis between religion/spirituality and sexuality, often producing both shocking and intellectually challenging con- stellations. Our excursus through English and American literary history debunked the idea that the occupation with sex and sexuality was only a recent phenomenon and an effect of the loosening or loss of religious controls. Rather, they found that the vernaculars of their own time—from TV shows to film to internet fanfiction— probe similar terrain as ancient texts concerned with sin, sex, and salvation. This was the most exciting point of the seminar: when students took up the questions and paradigms of the course and applied them independently and intelligently to current (or past) cultural productions, harnessing their dual literacies in popular culture and literary history, conventions, and theory. Several students thus explore in their essays how current tropes and media discuss and reevaluate long-standing paradigms and questions: Jenna Harvie examines how the fandom surround- ing the TV show Supernatural harnesses the internet platform to expand the series’ subtle innuendoes about the central characters—the Winchester brothers—and their possibly homoerotic, incestuous relationship, all the while precluding the political advancement of progressive sexual choices, such as gay marriage. Similarly, Kim Gonter analyzes the apparent transgressiveness of contemporary succubus fiction to reveal rather traditionally valued concepts about relationships, love, and sexuality. Greg Lewis’s reading of the 2006 film Black Snake Moan intriguingly suggests that its shocking depictions of excess and abjection make visible the ways in which religious fanaticism and the sexual exploitation of women are intertwined. Crystal Laminack finds thatStar Trek’s Spok character and his struggle between reason and sexual passion reflect the continuing human endeavor to reconcile both.Rachel Bartlett’s comparison of the HBO series Boardwalk Empire and the novel The Handmaid’s Tale similarly demonstrates that the central male characters’ (Nelson van Alden and “The Commander”) 6 Introduction religious zealotry masks and leads to the very sexual deviance or “sin” they seek to eradicate. A number of students engaged texts that link historical, ancient, and Biblical tropes of sexuality and religion to current cultural phenomena, politics, and media. Anastasia Latson compares the ways in which various concepts of “sacred sex”—from the Moravian Church to the fictional Republic of Gilead in The Handmaid’s Tale—are informed by widely differing interpretations of Scriptures, from the book of Genesis to the Song of Songs. Amanda Shoemake compares colonial representations of Native Americans’ nakedness and sexuality as justifications for imperial othering with current Native American erotica written primarily by and for white women. Tara Prouty follows representations of the werewolf from ancient lore to Angela Carter’s stories, reading the mythical figure as an articulation of the fear and demoniza- tion of male sexual appetite. Raven Eggleston uses Dan Brown’s widely popular novel The Da Vinci Code and the film based on the book as a lens to examine the suppression of the ancient concept of divine sex—hierogamy—by the Catholic Church. Similarly, Ashley Westmoreland adopts the lens of Christopher Rice’s novel The Snow Garden to demonstrate how ahistorical or anachronistic deployments of historical texts or images—such as Hieronymous Bosch’s painting The Garden of Earthly Delights— can distort their political, cultural, and religious context and thus sanction manipulations of uncritical consumers of knowledge and art today. Catherine Evans traces the oppression of female voices and sexuality by religious authority from the Puritans’ trial against and banishment of Anne Hutchinson to the virtual discarding of so-called un-women and Jezebels in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale. Two students focus on more narrowly defined literary topics, but each revises more commonly applied critical approaches by inspecting the connective operations of religion and sexuality. Amie Hendrix argues that previous readings of Christina Rossetti’s Goblin Market have established analogies between the characters and Biblical figures—specifically Eve and Christ—without taking 7 Dr. Patrick Erben this parallel to its logical conclusion: that the sisters’ homoerotic longings and encounters ultimately feature as redemptive agents, whereas the goblins’ corrupted heterosexual acts figure as rape. Kimberly Smith shows Walt Whitman’s and Emily Dickinson’s poetics as analogous conduits for probing—inwardly and self- reflexively—the link between divinity and human sexuality; their poetry is most provocative when the language of the divine and the sexual become intertwined or indistinguishable. In carefully employing cultural and literary criticism, the essays in this collection bespeak the crucial contribution that rigorous train- ing in the humanities can make to our society and culture. Our students prove their intellectual, emotional, critical, and rhetorical maturity by defying the hype, the clichés, and the dogmas surround- ing sex and religion present in public discourse. The results declare that “yes, we can actually talk about this.” The essays neither preach nor do they dismiss religious sensibilities; they do not gratuitously revel in sexual imagery and language but discern the complicated social, historical, and literary interactions of sex and religion. In sum, they confirm that sex is “sacred”—mysterious, mystical, taboo, spiritual, ecstatic, disruptive, and, sometimes, unifying. 8 I. SEX AND RELIGION IN CONTEMPORARY POPULAR CULTURE “THEY DO KNOW WE’RE BROTHERS, RIGHT?”:

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