Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos
Vol. 31, núm. 1 Junio 2009
31.1 (June 2009) 31.1 (Junio 2009)
EDITORS Editores
General Editor: Angela Downing Universidad Complutense de Madrid Assistant Editor: Ludmila Urbanová Managing Editor: Carmen Méndez University of Brno Universidad Complutense de Madrid Book Reviews Editor: Clara Calvo Editor’s Assistant: Juan Rafael Zamorano Universidad de Murcia Universidad Complutense de Madrid Universität Bremen Copy Editor: Jorge Arús Hita Universidad Complutense de Madrid
EDITORIAL BOARD Consejo de Redacción
BOARD OF ADVISORS Consejo Asesor
Andrew Blake Heinz Ickstadt University of Winchester Freie Universität Berlin Martin Bygate J. Hillis Miller Lancaster University University of California at Irvine Teresa Fanego Susheila M. Nasta Universidad de Santiago de Compostela Open University Fernando Galván Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Universidad de Alcalá de Henares Universidad de La Rioja
BOARD OF REFEREES Consejo Científico y Evaluador
Joan C. Beal Rachel Bowlby Graham D. Caie University of Sheffield University College London University of Glasgow Jesús Benito Sánchez Kris Van den Branden Gordon Campbell Universidad de Valladolid Katholieke Universiteit Leuven University of Leicester Marcella Bertuccelli Papi Mario Brdar Isabel Carrera Università di Pisa Josip Juraj Strossmayer University Universidad de Oviedo Nilufer E. Bharucha Laurel J. Brinton Shirley Chew University of Mumbai University of British Columbia University of Leeds Clare Birchall Manuel Broncano Robert Clark Middlesex University Universidad de León University of East Anglia Anita Biressi Jorge Luis Bueno Alonso Thomas Claviez Roehampton University University of Vigo University of Stavanger Maggie Ann Bowers Christopher S. Butler Tom Cohen University of Portsmouth Swansea University University of Albany Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre David Johnson Victor J. Ramraj Universidad de Murcia The Open University University of Calgary Francisco J. Cortés Rodríguez Stephan Kohl David Richards Universidad de La Laguna Julius-Maximilians-Universität University of Stirling Isabel de la Cruz Cabanillas Würzburg Caroline Rooney Universidad de Alcalá de Henares Zoltán Kövecses University of Kent Pilar Cuder Eötvös Loránd University Francisco J. Ruiz de Mendoza Universidad de Huelva Manfred Krug Universidad de La Rioja Daniela Daniele Otto-Friedrich-Universität Bamberg Dianne F. Sadoff Università di Udine Merja Kytö Rutgers University Rocío G. Davis Uppsala University Jürgen Schlaeger University of Navarra Alberto Lázaro Humboldt-Universität Berlin Denise deCaires Narain Universidad de Alcalá de Henares Elena Seoane University of Sussex Ursula Lenker Universidad de Santiago de Celestino Deleyto Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität Compostela Universidad de Zaragoza München María Josep Solé Sabater Balz Engler María José López Couso Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona University of Basel Universidad de Santiago de Alasdair Spark Compostela Charles Forceville University of Winchester University of Amsterdam Dámaso López García M. S. Suárez Lafuente Universidad Complutense de Madrid Javier Franco Aixelá Universidad de Oviedo Universidad de Alicante María Losada Friend Juan Antonio Suárez Universidad de Huelva María del Pilar García Mayo Universidad de Murcia Universidad del País Vasco Ricardo Mairal Usón Henry Sussman UNED Cristina Garrigós University of Buffalo / Yale University Universidad de León Ana María Manzanas Calvo Justine Tally Universidad de Salamanca Dirk Geeraerts Universidad de La Laguna University of Leuven Javier Martín Arista Paloma Tejada Caller Universidad de La Rioja Lincoln Geraghty Universidad Complutense de Madrid University of Portsmouth John McLeod Geoff Thompson University of Leeds Vincent Gillespie University of Liverpool University of Oxford Lavinia Merlini I. M. Tieken-Boon van Ostade Università di Pisa Cristina Giorcelli University of Leiden Università di Roma Tre Rafael Monroy Harish Trivedi Universidad de Murcia Manuel José Gómez Lara University of Delhi Universidad de Sevilla Carmen Muñoz Carmen Valero Garcés Universitat de Barcelona José Luis González Escribano Universidad de Alcalá de Henares Universidad de Oviedo Jo Anne Neff Van Aertselaer Boris Vejdovsky Universidad Complutense de Madrid Francisco Gonzálvez García University of Lausanne Universidad de Almería Heather Nunn Ruth Wodak Roehampton University Agnieszka Graff Lancaster University Warsaw University James Ogude Pilar Zozaya University of the Witwatersrand Leighton Grist University of Barcelona University of Winchester Ana Ojea Universidad de Oviedo Adolphe Haberer Université Lumière-Lyon 2 Mohamed-Salah Omri University of Exeter Felicity Hand Cranham Universitat de Barcelona Klaus-Uwe Panther Universität Hamburg Pilar Hidalgo Universidad de Málaga Pedro Javier Pardo Universidad de Salamanca Juan Carlos Hidalgo Universidad de Sevilla Ruth Parkin-Gounelas Aristotle University of Thessaloniki Ton Hoenselaars Utrecht University Javier Pérez Guerra Universidad de Vigo Jacqueline Hurtley Universitat de Barcelona James Procter University of Newcastle upon Tyne
Revista de la Asociación Española de Estudios Anglo-Norteamericanos
31.1 (June 2009) 31.1 (Junio 2009)
Table of Contents • Índice
Articles • Artículos
The Character of Phantasm: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ Christopher Rollason Metz (France) ...... 9
Temporality and Narrative Structure in Flannery O’Connor’s Tales Marita Nadal University of Zaragoza ...... 23
The Buddy as Anima? Revisiting Friendships between Men in Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter Josep M. Armengol-Carrera SUNY (State University of New York) at Stony Brook ...... 41
Planting Civilization in the Wilderness: The Intersections of Manifest Destiny and the Cult of Domesticity in Elizabeth Madox Roberts’ The Great Meadow Constante González Groba Universidad de Oviedo ...... 57
Salas y Quiroga’s Anglo-Saxon England: a Psychological and Sociological Portrait of Power Paloma Tejada Caller Universidad Complutense Madrid ...... 73
On There-Passive Participle Constructions Concha Castillo Universidad de Málaga ...... 91
Voice-overs in Standardized English and Spanish Television Commercials Barry Pennock-Speck and Mª Milagros del Saz Rubio Universitat de València / Universidad Politécnica de Valencia ...... 111
Examining the Relationship between Receptive Vocabulary Size and Written Skills of Primary School Learners Mª Pilar Agustín Llach and Melania Terrazas Gallego Universidad de La Rioja ...... 129
Reviews • Reseñas
Alexandra Gillespie 2006: Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books 1473–1557 reviewed by Jordi Sánchez-Martí ...... 151
Ursula Lenker and Anneli Meurman-Solin 2007: Connectives in the History of English reviewed by Cristina Suárez Gómez ...... 157
Judie Newman 2007: Fictions of America. Narratives of Global Empire reviewed by Paula Martín Salván ...... 165
Jonathan P. A. Sell 2006: Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560-1613 reviewed by Eduardo Valls ...... 171
Francisco J. Borge 2007: A New World for a New Nation: The Promotion of America in Early Modern England reviewed by Jonathan Sell ...... 177
Elizabeth Russell, ed. 2006: Loving against the Odds: Women’s Writing in English in a European Context reviewed by Carolina Sánchez-Palencia ...... 183
Jean I. Marsden 2006: Fatal Desire. Women, Sexuality, and the English Stage, 1660-1720 reviewed by Paula de Pando Mena ...... 191
María José Mora, Manuel Gómez-Lara, Rafael Portillo and Juan A. Prieto-Pablos, eds. 2007: The Woman Turned Bully reviewed by Jorge Figueroa Dorrego ...... 197
Acknowledgements ...... 203
Editorial policy and Instructions to contributors ...... 205
ARTICLES
ARTÍCULOS
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 9–22 ISSN 0210-6124
The Character of Phantasm: Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and Jorge Luis Borges’ ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’
Christopher Rollason Metz (France) [email protected]
The traces of Edgar Allan Poe in the work of Jorge Luis Borges have long been recognised, but both in the Argentinian writer’s own hands and others’, comment has tended to concentrate on three areas of the American author’s work, namely: the detective fiction; the novel Arthur Gordon Pym; and Poe’s literary theory. This paper will explore another facet, i.e. the possible intertextual relations and parallels between Poe’s tales of terror and Borges’ admired metaphysical fictions. The side-by-side examination of ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, Poe’s most celebrated Gothic tale, and ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, Borges’ fable of the intellectual attraction of an imaginary planet, reveals significant links, both overt and covert, between Borges’ tale and Poe’s, highlighting the seductively similar yet also strikingly divergent forms in which both writers privilege the textual and intertextual in exploring and developing the concept of a parallel reality.
Keywords: Borges; Gothic; influence; intertextuality; parallel; Poe
El “Character of Phantasm”: ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ de Edgar Allan Poe y ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ de Jorge Luis Borges
La presencia de huellas de Edgar Allan Poe en la obra de Jorge Luis Borges es un fenómeno ya reconocido. Sin embargo, los comentarios al respecto, de parte tanto del mismo Borges como de la crítica, se han limitado en general a tres áreas de la obra del norteamericano, a saber: los relatos policiales; la novela Arthur Gordon Pym; y las teorías literarias de Poe. En este artículo se explorará otra faceta: las relaciones y los paralelismos identificables a nivel intertextual entre los relatos de terror de Poe y las célebres ficciones metafísicas de Borges, tomando como textos de referencia ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, el más famoso de los cuentos góticos de Poe, y ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, la fábula borgiana de la atracción intelectual de un planeta imaginario. Su examen simultáneo revelará unos vínculos significativos, tanto abiertos como encubiertos, entre los dos textos, trayéndose así a colación los modos, seductoramente semejantes y a la vez llamativamente divergentes, por los que los dos escritores destacan lo textual y lo intertextual en su exploración del concepto de una realidad paralela.
Palabras clave: Borges; gótico; influencia; intertextualidad; paralelismo; Poe 10 Christopher Rollason
I
That there exists a close relationship of influence and intertextuality between Edgar Allan Poe and Jorge Luis Borges is both a critical commonplace and an undoubted fact of literary history, as avowed on numerous occasions by Borges himself and subsequently confirmed by criticism (Bonells 1988; Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan 1998). Indeed, the editors of a new commemorative Spanish-language edition of Poe’s complete tales, issued in advance of the bicentennial of the American author’s birth in 1809, go so far as to declare that without Poe, we would not have had Borges, his follower Julio Cortázar, or, ultimately, the modern short story as such: “Todos somos descendientes literarios de Poe, pues gracias a Poe existieron Borges ... y ... Cortázar” (‘We are all literary descendents of Poe, for it is thanks to Poe that Borges ... and Cortázar existed’ – Iwasaki and Volpi 2008: 13). The kinship between Poe and Borges is more than evident: both exhibit a marked preference for brief forms (short story, essay and short poem), Poe having only completed one novel and Borges never having attempted one; both make display in their writings of a massive (real or apparent) encyclopaedic erudition; both regularly question and subvert the dividing-line between fiction and non-fiction, story and essay; both blur the high culture / mass culture antithesis by writing intellectual fiction in popular genres, Poe even inventing such a genre in the shape of the detective story; and both share a conception and practice of the text – notably the short story – as literary artefact or consciously made object.1 Borges was brought up on Poe, reading him as a child in his father’s library in the English original (Bonells 1988: 155). Poe is a constant point of reference for Borges the critic, right across his career, both in a series of dedicated articles and in multiple fugitive references scattered over the Borgesian oeuvre. Of his texts specifically on Poe, one may cite the essay ‘Edgar Allan Poe’, published in the Buenos Aires newspaper La Nación on 2 October 1949 (Borges 1949), the chapter of the same name in Diálogos, Borges’ 1992 collection of interviews with Osvaldo Ferrari (Borges 1992a), and the text ‘Edgar Allan Poe: Cuentos’, originally published as an introduction to a selection of Poe’s tales, which appears in Borges’ volume of 1988 Biblioteca personal (which collection also includes numerous Poe allusions passim) (Borges 1997a). Furthermore, two of Borges’ best-known stories openly acknowledge Poe’s intertextual presence. ‘Pierre Menard, autor del Quijote’ (‘Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote’), first published in 1939, calls its protagonist a “devoto ... de Poe” (“a devotee of Poe”) (Borges 1971c: 54; English tr., 67), and, indeed, Menard is said to declare that he cannot imagine the universe without a certain line of verse by the American, namely “Ah, bear in mind this garden was enchanted!” from Poe’s poem ‘To Helen [Whitman]’, published in 1848 (Poe 1969: 446, line 30). Equally, the text of Borges’ story of 1942, ‘La muerte y la brújula’ (‘Death and the Compass’) states that its detective Lönrott: “se creía
1 A shorter version of this article was given as a paper at the conference “Edgar A. Poe: Two Hundred Years Later” (University of Castilla-La Mancha, Albacete, Spain), in February 2009.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 9–22 ISSN 0210-6124 The Character of Phantasm 11 un puro razonador, un Auguste Dupin” (“believed himself a pure reasoner, an Auguste Dupin”) (Borges 1971b: 148; English tr.: 106), thus placing him in a direct line from Poe’s analytic genius and first detective in literary history, the protagonist of ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ of 1841 and ‘The Purloined Letter’ of 1845. Nonetheless, in both the Argentinian writer’s own hands and those of others, discussion of Poe’s presence has tended to be confined to three areas of the American author’s work, namely: the detective fiction; the novel of 1837, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (Poe 1975); and Poe’s texts of literary theory, such as the ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ of 1846 (Poe 1972a) and ‘The Poetic Principle’ of 1848 (Poe 1972b). In the case of the detective stories, Borges saw Poe, quite unequivocally, as both inventor and canonical exemplar of the entire genre. This position is affirmed in, for instance, the interview ‘El poeta del regreso’ (‘A poet returns’), published in the Madrid weekly Cambio 16 in 1980 (Borges 1980: 131), and also in the text ‘El cuento policial’ (‘The detective story’) included in the 1992 Borges/Ferrari volume of interviews referred to above (Borges 1992b), and has been amply confirmed by critics (e.g. Freeland 1996; Figueroa Rebolledo 2008) who, following in his wake, have mapped out a detective genealogy leading from Poe through Conan Doyle to Borges himself. Arthur Gordon Pym is recurrently mentioned favourably by Borges, who praised its symbolism as early as 1932 in his essay, ‘El arte narrativa y la magia’ (‘Narrative art and magic’), included in the volume Discusión (Borges 1964), and even went so far as to single it out as his personal favourite, telling Osvaldo Ferrari that if he had to choose one work by Poe it would be Pym (Borges 1997a: 351). Poe’s theoretical postulates, finally, are invoked by Borges to shore up his own espousal of the short poem and short tale, as in his 1968 Harvard interview with Rita Guibert where he states (directly in English within a Spanish-language text), paraphrasing the Poe of ‘The Poetic Principle’, that “there’s no such thing as a long poem” (Borges and Guibert 1976: 320). Less attention has been paid to the possible intertextual relations and parallels between the nineteenth-century writer’s tales of terror – on which, indeed, Borges as critic has relatively little to say – and his twentieth-century admirer’s celebrated metaphysical fictions. Poe is, unsurprisingly, a recurrent presence in the Introducción a la literatura norteamericana which Borges co-authored in 1967 with Esther Zemborain de Torres (translated as An Introduction to American Literature [Borges and Zemborain de Torres 1971]). However, the main areas of Poe’s oeuvre considered in that manual, whether in the section on Poe himself or passim, are the aesthetic theories (there is a detailed summary of ‘The Philosophy of Composition’) and the detective stories, with an approbatory nod to Pym and some of Poe’s science-fictional texts. Borges and his co-author dedicate but a few lines to the tales of terror, and do not even refer to any of them by name. Criticism too has paid scant attention to the possible links between Poe’s work in this genre and Borges the composer of short stories, though Jorge Bonells (1988) has (very briefly) suggested a number of parallels between these two groups of Poe’s and Borges’ works. In the specific case of the two stories to be considered in this paper, Poe’s ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and Borges’ ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’, Bonells does not mention either, while Ib Johansen (1989) has linked ‘Usher’ to another Borges story, ‘La Biblioteca de Babel’ (1971a) (‘The Library of Babel’), his celebrated fable of 1941, but not to ‘Tlön’. Nonetheless, it will be argued here that the side-by-side
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 9–22 ISSN 0210-6124 12 Christopher Rollason examination of ‘Usher’, Poe’s Gothic tale par excellence, and ‘Tlön’, Borges’ fable of the attraction exerted by the study of an imaginary planet, proves highly suggestive in elucidating the seductively similar yet also strikingly divergent forms in which both address the concept – now indeed reverberative in the epoch of cyberspace - of a parallel reality.
II
A century separates the two tales. ‘Usher’ first appeared in 1839 in Philadelphia, in Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, and received its definitive shape in Poe’s volume Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840. ‘Tlön’ was first published in 1940 in the Buenos Aires magazine Sur and was republished in revised form in 1944 in Borges’ collection Ficciones (the ‘postface’ indicated as being from ‘1947’ is date-wise a hoax). Both texts are highly self-conscious manifestations of the genre of the fantastic, a genre, indeed, openly meta-signified in Borges’ text, which states that the inhabitants of Tlön “juzgan que la metafísica es una rama de la literatura fantástica” (Borges 1971d: 24) (“judge that metaphysics is a branch of fantastic literature” – English tr. 1970: 34). The House of Usher is as visibly imaginary a location as are Borges’ fictitious toponyms, the non- existent Central Asian country Uqbar and the planet Tlön whose encroachment arises out of the study of Uqbar. The name ‘Uqbar’ could even be an echo of ‘Usher’, as indeed ‘Tlön’ could derive from Poe’s invented island of Tsalal in Pym. The disturbing strangeness of the two texts, as exemplars of the fantastic, is heightened by the location of both as contemporaneous with the time of writing. Borges positions ‘Tlön’ in the Buenos Aires of the mid-twentieth century, with a first-person narrator approximating to himself; ‘Usher’ is set by Poe not, despite appearances, in some Ivanhoe-type medieval past but in his own day, as is clear from the references to nineteenth-century medical lore, and to the painter Henry Fuseli (1741-1825) and the composer and musician Karl Maria von Weber (1786-1826) (Poe 1978c: 405). Further, philosophical readings of both texts have abounded: ‘Usher’ has been read in terms of the thought of Poe’s time as a critique of the Burkean and Kantian sublime (Voller 1988) or a negation of empiricism and transcendentalism (Vermilion and McCumber 2000), or, extrapolating into the twentieth century, as embodying Lévi-Strauss’s antithesis between nature and culture (Wasserman 1977). ‘Tlön’ has been pressed into the service of Foucault, Einstein, Wittgenstein and, again, Lévi-Strauss (Alazraki 1976; Romano Hurtado 2006). Equally, the encyclopaedic and the intertextual are key dimensions of both texts; Poe combines invented characters with largely real books and artworks, while Borges employs the reverse strategy, placing mostly real people in dialogue with imaginary books. Numerous characters in ‘Tlön’ are actual friends or connections of Borges’. In particular, his fellow Argentinian (Adolfo) Bioy Casares, who enters the story in the first paragraph, is well-known not only as Borges’ collaborator on various volumes of short stories and anthologies of short fiction but as a distinguished exponent of the fantastic genre in his own right, as novelist and short-story writer. Other members of Borges’ real literary and artistic circle appearing as themselves in the story are the Argentinian painter Xul Solar, the French Princess de Faucigny Lucinge,
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 9–22 ISSN 0210-6124 The Character of Phantasm 13 and the writers Carlos Mastronardi, Néstor Ibarra and Ezequiel Martínez Estrada (all Argentinian), Enrique Amorim (Uruguayan), Alfonso Reyes (Mexican; at one point ambassador to Argentina), and Drieu La Rochelle (French) (Wilson 2006: 81). Of the other personages presented by the narrator as living connections of his, two, Gunnar Erjford and the engineer Herbert Ashe, appear to be invented, but it is clear that the majority of the story’s active characters originate as historical individuals. The critic Berenice Romano Hurtado evokes the problem for commentators on this story of distinguishing between those named in the text as real people and those same names as characters within the tale (2006: 98n) - as, indeed, also between Borges the narrator (“Borges personaje”) and Borges the creator (“Borges creador”) (2006: 102). Indeed, the narrator of ‘Tlön’ is best described as a simulacrum of Borges himself, not quite author, yet not quite character either. ‘Tlön’ was conceived in a public library, Borges’ workplace at the time. In 1940 he was First Assistant at the Miguel Cané public library, in the district of Almagro Sur in Buenos Aires (Wilson 2006: 103) – later he would become Director of Argentina’s National Library; Poe’s text details volumes from Roderick Usher’s private library. Borges’ story does not explicitly name Poe or his creations, but clues leading back to ‘Usher’ can be found in its opening sentence: “Debo a la conjunción de un espejo y de una enciclopedia el descubrimiento de Uqbar” (Borges 1971d: 13) (“I owe the discovery of Uqbar to the conjunction of a mirror and an encyclopaedia” – English tr. 1970: 27) – the encyclopaedia suggesting Usher’s polymath library; the mirror, Poe’s narrator’s terror at the House’s “remodelled and inverted” image in the tarn (Poe 1978c: 398). Soon after, we learn that a heresiarch of Uqbar “había declarado que los espejos y la cópula son abominables” (Borges 1971d: 14) (“had declared that mirrors and copulation are abominable” – English tr. 1970: 27) – Borges, it is said, traced his own aversion to mirrors to Poe (Bonells 1988: 155). Besides, as we shall see, Borges’ concluding sentence contains a semi-concealed link that, under the sign of intertexuality, points the astute reader back towards the American writer; and, indeed, Bonells has said of the world of ‘Tlön’ that “Edgar Allan Poe aurait toute sa place dans un tel univers” (‘Edgar Allan Poe would be more than at home in such a universe’) (1988: 161). Both ‘Usher’ and ‘Tlön’ are narratives dominated by the notion of a parallel reality and its gradual, ineluctable encroachment on everyday reality to the point where the alternative universe takes over. Poe’s narrator finds himself gradually drawn into Roderick’s belief regarding his house and domain that there has accumulated a “gradual yet certain condensation of an atmosphere of their own about the waters and the walls” (Poe 1978c: 408): even before he enters the House, it seems to him that “about the whole mansion and domain there hung an atmosphere peculiar to themselves” (1978c: 399), and, once inside, he feels “creeping upon me, by slow degrees, the wild influences of [Usher’s] own fantastic yet impressive superstitions” (1978c: 411), until he finally becomes a participant in Usher’s hallucination of the resurrection of his sister Madeline. In ‘Tlön’, too, an alternative reality gradually takes over both the narrator’s consciousness and the circumambient world. The appearance of a compass with inscriptions in “uno de los alfabetos de Tlön” (Borges 1971d: 33) (“one of the alphabets of Tlön” – English tr. 1970: 40) marks “la primera intrusión del mundo fantástico en el mundo real” (1971d: 33) (“the first intrusion of this fantastic world into the world of
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 9–22 ISSN 0210-6124 14 Christopher Rollason reality” – 1970: 41); this is followed by the discovery of a mysterious metal cone, emblem of a divinity of Tlön, at which moment “la realidad cedió en más de un punto” (1971d: 35) (“reality yielded on more than one account” – 1970: 42), and, at last, as the study of the imaginary planet starts to replace the traditional areas of knowledge, the narrator asks rhetorically: “¿Cómo no someterse a Tlön, a la minuciosa y vasta evidencia de un planeta ordenado?” (1971d: 35) (“How could one do other than submit to Tlön, to the minute and vast evidence of an ordered planet?” – 1970: 42). Tlön is in process of substituting itself for the existing world, and whether this is a gain or a loss is for the reader to decide: as Romano Hurtado puts it, “la dificultad está en determinar el dentro y el fuera en estos mundos que se envuelven unos a otros: en saber en qué lado queda el asombro” (‘the difficulty lies in determining the inside and outside of these worlds which envelop each other: in knowing on which side fear lies’) (2006: 110). In both stories, the alternative reality is strongly mediated through textuality – through the world of encyclopaedias and libraries. The narrator of ‘Usher’ lists a shelf’s worth of “the books which, for years, had formed no small part of the mental existence of the invalid”, and adds, significantly, that Roderick’s reading is “in strict keeping” with the “character of phantasm” (Poe 1978c: 408), or “fantastic character” (1978c: 406), which he has already observed in his friend’s musical performances. Borges’ narrator, likewise, states of the antechamber to Tlön that “la literatura de Uqbar es de carácter fantástico” (Borges 1971d: 16) (“the literature of Uqbar was one of fantasy” – English tr.1970: 29). The intertextual link made here is arresting (and clearer, be it noted, in the original than in the English version): the “character of phantasm” presides over textuality in both texts. Indeed, in the case of ‘Usher’, one recent commentator, Álvaro Bisama, has even directly linked the protagonist’s downfall to his obsession with books and textuality, seeing Roderick as “un Quijote defectuoso y un lector deforme y contaminado por sus libros” (‘a defective Don Quixote and a misshapen reader contaminated by his books’) (2008: 317). The roll-call of the books that Roderick and the narrator read together merits quoting in full: We pored together over such works as the Ververt et Chartreuse of Gresset; the Belphegor of Machiavelli; the Heaven and Hell of Swedenborg; the Subterranean Voyage of Nicholas Klimm by Holberg; the Chiromancy of Robert Flud, of Jean D’Indaginé, and of De la Chambre; the Journey into the Blue Distance of Tieck; and the City of the Sun of Campanella. One favourite volume was a small octavo edition of the Directorium Inquisitorum, by the Dominican Eymeric de Gironne; and there were passages in Pomponius Mela, about the old African Satyrs and Oegipans, over which Usher would sit dreaming for hours. His chief delight, however, was found in the perusal of an exceedingly rare and curious book in quarto Gothic - the manual of a forgotten church - the Vigiliae Mortuorum secundum Chorum Ecclesiae Maguntinae. (Poe 1978c: 408-409) This list of the books from Usher’s library which he shares with the narrator (and therefore with the reader) ranges over European literature from classical times up to Poe’s own day. The books number twelve within the text (thirteen in the real world, since Gresset’s Ververt [in fact Vert-Vert] and Chartreuse are actually two separate works, not one). They take in writers from ancient Rome (the geographer Pomponius Mela, born near Algeciras in Spain); Renaissance and baroque Italy (Niccolò
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 9–22 ISSN 0210-6124 The Character of Phantasm 15
Machiavelli - the prose satire Belphegor, or Belfagor arcidiavolo, being one the more obscure works of the author of The Prince - and Tommaso Campanella, whose utopian narrative La città del sole was first published in Italian and later republished in Latin as Civitas solis); seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France (Marinus Cureau de la Chambre, author of Discours sur les Principes de la Chiromancie; the satirical poet Jean- Baptiste Louis Gresset); seventeenth-century England (the mystic Robert Flud [more correctly Fludd], author of various Latin manuals of chiromancy); eighteenth-century Denmark (Ludvig Holberg, whose fantastic-satirical novel was originally published in Latin as Nicolai Klimii Iter Subterraneum) and Sweden (Emanuel Swedenborg’s mystico-philosophical fiction Heaven and Hell first appeared in 1758, again in Latin, its full title being De Coelo et Ejus Mirabilibus, et de Inferno, ex Auditis et Visis - Of Heaven and its Marvels, and of Hell, from things Heard and Seen); sixteenth-century Germany (Johannes Indagine [not D’Indaginé], compiler of Die Kunst der Chiromantzey); and, again from Germany, Poe’s contemporary, the author of Gothic fictions Ludwig Tieck (1773-1853). The ‘Dominican Eymeric de Gironne’, author of the Directorium Inquisitorum or Inquisitors’ Handbook, was a fourteenth-century Spanish monk writing in Latin (‘Gironne’ is actually Gerona or Girona in Catalonia), while the anonymous “manual of a forgotten church” (Vigils for the Dead according to the Choir of the Church of Mainz), again in Latin, hails from Germany. Between them, the twelve works encompass a wide sweep of genres (Gothic or fantastic novel, utopian novel, philosophical narrative, prose satire, verse satire, geographical treatise, ecclesiastical or theocratic vademecum, and esoteric manual). They represent seven different geographical provenances and, at least in their originals, four different European languages: Latin (six), French (two), Italian (two) and German (two). We are not told what Roderick (and the narrator) read in – presumably English – translation and what in the various original languages, but both must, at least, have known Latin (one more book, meanwhile, enters the narrative before the end – the only book of Usher’s not, in fact, real: the invented medieval romance The Mad Trist, ascribed to the equally imaginary Sir Launcelot Canning). Richard Wilbur, in, curiously, a Library of Congress lecture delivered in 1966, described Usher’s books as “belonging to all times and tongues” (1970: 272); this comment is somewhat exaggerated and indeed Eurocentric, but it does point to an encyclopaedic project in Poe that leads straight to Borges. The books and authors read by Usher (Machiavelli and, arguably, Swedenborg apart) may appear a shade peripheral to the Western literary canon, but they are still certainly part of it, and in its eclectic sweep across nations, centuries, languages and genres, Usher’s library may be viewed as the direct harbinger of its celebrated Borgesian successors. Indeed, intertextuality fans out from Roderick’s shelves, towards elsewhere in Poe and to Borges. In ‘The Purloined Letter’, it is Auguste Dupin who includes on his list of authorities charged with “spurious profundity” the names of Usher’s two Italians, Machiavelli and Campanella (Poe 1978e: 985). Two other authors from Usher’s bookcase, Flud (correctly re-spelt as Fludd) and Swedenborg, make their appearance in Borges’ pages: ‘La muerte y la brújula’ / ‘Death and the Compass’ mentions as being in one of its characters’ possession an imaginary study of the real Fludd, Examen de la filosofía de Robert Fludd (An Examination of the Philosophy of Robert Fludd) (Borges 1971b), while in 1975 Borges
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 9–22 ISSN 0210-6124 16 Christopher Rollason published a preface to a selection from Swedenborg, including an extended discussion of Heaven and Hell (Borges 1998a). The interplay of real and imaginary places Usher’s books firmly on the side of the real: that all of them, The Mad Trist apart, actually exist is beyond doubt – this even though the narrator is remembering them as components of a vanished library, since at the end house, inhabitants and library all disappear into the tarn. Poe’s editor Thomas Mabbott states: “The books ... are all ... actual books ... Some, I believe, Poe actually had read” (Mabbott 1978, vol. II, 419n). Here, curiously, the critic Clive Bloom, in his comparative study Reading Poe Reading Freud (1988), citing the same passage from ‘Usher’ as we have just quoted to exemplify Poe’s encyclopaedic vision of mind and universe, or how he “continually enwraps his tales within [a] totality of cultural and aesthetic availability”, rather seriously vitiates his own argument by claiming that “the majority of the titles are works invented by Poe” (110, 113; Bloom’s italics). Since Bloom cites James A. Harrison’s 1902 edition as his main Poe text of reference, we may conclude that when composing his book he was, ironically, unaware of Mabbott’s encyclopaedically annotated edition of Poe’s tales, which, published ten years before, had, for the texts included in it, definitively superseded Harrison. The esoteric nature of Usher’s reading thus plays strange games with Poe’s critics, blurring the borders between reality and text in a fashion that should have delighted Borges. The encyclopaedic dimension already present in ‘Usher’ becomes, in ‘Tlön’, explicit and essential to the narrative. Borges, we may note, was a proud owner of the 29- volume (1910-1911) Eleventh Edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Wilson 2006: 82). The story begins with the (fictional) Anglo-American Cyclopaedia of 1917, described as a reprint of the (real) Tenth Edition (1902) of the Britannica; it moves into the fantastic with the (real) Bioy Casares’ (imagined) location of a preternatural copy of the Cyclopaedia’s volume XLVI, containing an apocryphal entry on the (invented) country Uqbar. By the end, the First Encyclopaedia of Tlön – at first known only through a copy of its Eleventh Volume, mysteriously dispatched from Brazil – has become a full terrene reality, manifesting in all forty volumes in Memphis, Tennessee and offered as an embodiment of an enormous project involving 300 collaborators called Orbis Tertius – described as “la obra más vasta que han acometido los hombres” (Borges 1971d: 32) (“the vastest undertaking ever carried out by man” – English tr. 1970: 40). In the project’s second stage, the narrator adverts in anticipation of Tlön’s final conquest of planet earth, there awaits the Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön, which will stretch to an overwhelming one hundred volumes. It is, then, above all through the creation of an alternative textuality, an enormous and expanding fund of knowledge, that Borges’ parallel universe imposes itself, as if one jump further from Usher’s pan-canonical library.
III
A surprising twist occurs at the end of Borges’ story, when the textual mutates into the intertextual, and also loops back numinously to Poe. In the closing sentence of ‘Tlön’, the narrator – at this point as much the historical Borges as a fictional character –
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 9–22 ISSN 0210-6124 The Character of Phantasm 17 declares that, even as Tlön impinges on the world, “yo sigo revisando ... una indecisa traducción quevediana (que no pienso dar a la imprenta) del Urn Burial de Browne” (Borges 1971d: 36) (“I ... go on revising ... an uncertain Quevedian translation [which I do not intend to publish] of Browne’s Urn Burial” – English tr. 1970: 43). Here, quotation, translation and intertextuality intersect, and behind the explicit references to the seventeenth-century writers Sir Thomas Browne and Francisco de Quevedo there lies a hidden, embedded link to Poe. Browne (1605-1682) and Quevedo (1580-1645) are both authors admired and commented on by Borges: his attraction to these two baroque writers may be linked to the elaborate and lapidary Latinity which he discerns in both, almost as if the English writer were the double of his Spanish contemporary. Here, the book mentioned, Urn Burial (1658 – to give it its full title, Hydriotaphia. Urn- Burial; or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk), is - untypically for this story - a real one. The essay ‘Sir Thomas Browne’ appeared in Borges’ 1925 volume Inquisiciones (Borges 1994b). Meanwhile, Francisco de Quevedo, poet, picaresque novelist, prose satirist and devotional writer, is, we may note, a constant point of reference – almost as much as Cervantes or, indeed, Poe – across the Borgesian oeuvre, present in a series of essays and a host of fugitive allusions. The essays include: ‘Menoscabo y grandeza de Quevedo’ (‘Quevedo: Decay and Grandeur’), published in, again, Inquisiciones in 1925 (Borges 1994a); ‘Un soneto de Don Francisco de Quevedo’ (‘A Sonnet of Francisco de Quevedo’), in El Idioma de los Argentinos from 1928 (Borges 1998c); ‘Francisco Quevedo: Prosa y verso’, which first appeared as a prologue to a selection of the master’s prose and verse edited by Borges and Bioy Casares and published in 1948 (Borges 1998b); and ‘Francisco Quevedo: la Fortuna con seso y la hora de todos. Marco Bruto’ (referring to two of the master’s works, whose titles may be rendered as Fortune’s Wit and the Hour that Calls for All and Marcus Brutus), which rubbed shoulders with an essay on Poe in Borges’ 1988 collection Biblioteca personal (Borges 1997b). Notably, in the first-mentioned of those essays Borges cites one of the baroque writer’s most important works, namely the satirical sequence of prose pieces which appeared between 1603 and 1613 under the title Los sueños (The Visions) - a reference which, as we shall see, connects both Borges and Quevedo to Edgar Allan Poe (here too a broader intertextuality raises its head, for in this same essay Borges, pointing back to the classics, reads Quevedo’s text as a “reflejo de Luciano” (“reflection of Lucian”) (Borges 1994a: 44). In addition, Borges’ very own Pierre Menard is said to have translated Quevedo into French, certainly once and possibly twice, and altogether the story bearing his name mentions Quevedo three times (Borges 1971c). Besides, Alfonso Reyes (himself, as we have seen, a character in ‘Tlön’), writing in 1943, used the adjective quevediano to describe Borges’ early work (indeed, he also likened Borges to Poe) (Reyes: 1976, 61-62). In his mention of the translation of Quevedo, and in relation to the interface between text and reality, Borges’ narrator is being a shade disingenuous. The fact is that the real Borges did, in January 1944, in No 14 of the Buenos Aires journal Sur, publish a translation, made jointly (in yet another link to ‘Tlön’) with the historical Bioy Casares, not of Browne’s entire text but of its fifth and final chapter (Browne 1944; Johnson 2002: 174). To boot, in one of their footnotes the translators cite none other than Francisco de Quevedo, comparing a passage in Browne’s text (on the vanity of elaborate
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 9–22 ISSN 0210-6124 18 Christopher Rollason tombs) to one in the Spanish writer’s Epístolas a imitación de las de Séneca (Epistles in Imitation of Seneca) (Browne 1944: 23n). Meanwhile, and albeit Borges may not have known it, Poe himself is reliably believed to have owned a copy of Quevedo’s prose satire (as mentioned above) Los sueños, translated as The Visions of Quevedo, and Mabbott (1978, vol. II: 83) believes this work to be a source for Poe’s grotesque tale ‘Bon-Bon’ (Poe 1978a). If a brief digression be allowed here regarding Poe’s knowledge of Spanish language and culture, we may note that his biographer Kenneth Silverman states that his modern languages studies at the University of Virginia in Charlottesville comprised inter alia “probably some Spanish” (1992: 30), and records that among the books mentioned by Poe’s foster- father John Allan as belonging to Edgar’s library in Allan’s Richmond home in 1827 was a copy, presumably in English, of Don Quijote (1992: 36). In ‘How to Write a Blackwood Article’, his skit of 1838, Poe quotes some lines of verse from Cervantes, taken from the second part of Don Quijote (Poe 1978b: 344; Mabbott 1978, vol. II: 360n); and a source for his 1839 tale ‘William Wilson’ (Poe 1978f) has been located in Pedro Calderón de la Barca’s drama El Purgatorio de San Patricio (The Purgatory of St Patrick) (Mabbott 1978, vol. II: 424n). Further, in the account of Longfellow’s play The Spanish Student included in his 1845 article ‘The American Drama’, Poe notes his fellow author’s admitted use of Cervantes’ story ‘La Gitanilla’ (‘The Gipsy Girl’) and unadmitted borrowings from Don Quijote (Poe 1986: 465, 470), adding that “there is not an incident” in Longfellow’s drama that could not be traced to “some one of the thousand and one comedies of intrigue attributed to Calderon [sic] and Lope de Vega” (1986: 474). All this suggests that Poe laid claim to a quite substantial knowledge of Spanish Golden Age literature. What is most arresting, however, about all the intertext that froths around the conclusion of ‘Tlön’ is that the fifth chapter of Browne’s Urn-Burial – as chosen by Borges and Bioy for their sample translation – includes the lines which Poe prefaced to ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’ as that tale’s epigraph. Those lines read: “What song the Syrens sang, or what name Achilles assumed when he hid himself among women, although puzzling questions, are not beyond all conjecture” (Poe 1978d: 527, emphasis in the original). Poe’s epigraph openly sources the quotation to “Sir Thomas Browne”. Mabbott notes that Poe used the same quotation on three other occasions (all reviews, thus placing it under the sign of intertextuality), and adds that in Browne it “refers to the difficult questions which Suetonius, in his life of Tiberius (chapter LXX) says that the Emperor enjoyed putting to literary scholars” (Mabbott 1978, vol. II: 569n). Borges and Bioy Casares translate Browne’s words as: “Qué Canción cantaban las Sirenas, o qué nombre Aquiles tomó cuando se ocultó entre las mujeres, son interrogaciones arduas, pero que no superan la conjetura”, and, interestingly, in a footnote quote the same anecdote about Tiberius as does Mabbott (Browne 1944: 16, 16n, Borges’ and Bioy Casares’ emphasis). The current Oxford World’s Classics translation of Suetonius’ Lives of the Caesars renders the relevant passage: ‘“What was Achilles’ name when he was among the virgins? What songs used the Sirens to sing?”‘ (Suetonius 2000: 132) – the first question referring to the hero of the Iliad (though the episode itself is not in Homer but in Ovid’s Metamorphoses) and the second to the Odyssey (Achilles hidden on the island of Skyros, disguised as a girl in a vain stratagem to keep him from the
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Trojan war: Odysseus and his men returning from that war, under the spell of the fatal Sirens). The text of ‘Tlön’, then, covertly connects not only to Poe but to a passage, affirming the knowability of all things, quoted by him at the opening of the tale which introduces Dupin and is a monument to an all-conquering analytic rationalism. At the same time, Borges places his own text within a spiral of intertextuality that winds back through Poe, Browne, Suetonius and Ovid and in the end leads all the way to Homer, at the very dawn of the Western canon.
IV
The last sentence of ‘Tlön’, then, signifies Borges’ text as eminently intertextual, with a covert nod to Poe. It needs, however, to be asked how far Poe’s systematised irrationality is or is not replicated in the organised hyperreality of Borges’ tale. Roderick’s parallel universe is certainly logically organised: “The conditions of the sentience had been ..., he imagined, fulfilled in the method of collocation of the stones – in the order of their arrangement” (Poe 1978c: 408), but it also points to the pathological organisation of the delusional universe of mental disorder. That universe may itself be interrogated from within the medical discourse of Poe’s own time, in terms of the “hysteria” (1978c: 412, emphasis in the original) or “hypochondriac” state (1978c: 405, 409) of the narrator’s diagnosis (convergent too with Michel Foucault’s analysis of those concepts in his famous work of 1961, Histoire de la Folie / Madness and Civilisation) (Foucault 1971); or, in the language of psychoanalysis, in terms of the fully- fledged, systematised delusions of paranoia as classically elucidated by Freud in his 1911 case-study of the deranged appeal court judge Schreber (Freud 1979). The apocalyptic finale, with house and denizens disappearing into the undifferentiated void of the tarn, is, surely, the limit-case of what D.H. Lawrence, in 1924, called the “disintegrative vibration” in Poe (1971: 70). If the fissure in the House of Usher is also a tragic fissure in reality, in Borges, by contrast, the vibration by which Tlön impinges on the familiar world is less disintegrative than, ultimately, reintegrative; if in Poe’s tale the parallel world destroys the familiar world, in Borges’ it replaces it. The parallel universe of Tlön has been called “dystopian” (O’Dwyer 2002); and yet the Eleventh Volume of the Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön is, surely, a less oppressive project than the Eleventh Newspeak Dictionary nightmarishly bodied forth in 1949 by George Orwell in his Nineteen Eighty-Four (Orwell 1989: 312). Borges’ work in general and ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’ in particular are now being increasingly hailed, by a whole emerging school of criticism, as prefigurations of the new universe of interrelations that is the Internet. For John Barth, in his 1967 essay ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’, Tlön was “a coherent alternative to this world” (1990: 78); today, one cybercritic has declared: “What is Tlön ... if not the cyberspace for which the physical world is rapidly becoming a quaintly antiquated sketch?” (Wolk 1999), while another sees the multi-authored Second Encyclopaedia of Tlön as an uncanny harbinger of Wikipedia (Cohen 2008; conversely, both English- and Spanish-language versions of the actual Wikipedia harbour long entries on ‘Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius’). Behind Borges there lies Poe, unavoidable precursor and fabular master; and yet, in our epoch
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 9–22 ISSN 0210-6124 20 Christopher Rollason of the rapid expansion, transformation and diffusion of knowledge, the most significant contribution of Edgar Allan Poe may yet prove to be less the disintegrative vibration than the dynamic of intertextuality that he, polyvalently and triumphantly, shares with Jorge Luis Borges.
Works Cited
Alazraki, Jaime 1976: ‘Tlön y Asterión: metáforas epistemológicas’. Jaime Alazraki, ed. Jorge Luis Borges. Madrid: Taurus. 183-200. Barth, John 1990 (1967): ‘The Literature of Exhaustion’. Malcolm Bradbury, ed. The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction. London: Fontana. 71-85. Bisama, Álvaro. 2008: ‘Comentario’ to ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ (Trans. as ‘La caída de la casa Usher’). Edgar Allan Poe. Cuentos completos: Edición comentada. Trans. Julio Cortázar. Ed. Fernando Iwasaki and Jorge Volpi. Madrid: Páginas de Espuma. 317-18. Bloom, Clive 1988: Reading Poe Reading Freud: The Romantic Imagination in Crisis. London: Macmillan. Bonells, Jorge 1988: ‘Le retournement du réel: La présence de Poe chez Borges y Cortázar’. Actes du Troisième Colloque International de Science-Fiction de Nice: ‘Edgar Poe et la raison visionnaire’ (2-4 Apr. 1987). Nice: Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines. 155-165. Borges, Jorge Luis 1949: ‘Edgar Allan Poe’. La Nación 2 Oct, 2nd section 1.
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Borges, Jorge Luis and Esther Zemborain de Torres 1971 (1967): An Introduction to American Literature. Trans. L. Clark Keating and Robert O. Evans. Lexington: Kentucky UP. Borges, Jorge Luis and Rita Guibert 1976 (1968): ‘Entrevista con Borges’. Jaime Alazraki, ed. Jorge Luis Borges. Madrid: Taurus. 318-55. Browne, Sir Thomas 1658: Hydriotaphia. Urn-Burial; or, a Discourse of the Sepulchral Urns Lately Found in Norfolk.
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––––– 1978e (1845): ‘The Purloined Letter’. Collected Works vol III - Tales and Sketches 1843-1849. Ed. Thomas Olive Mabbott. Cambridge: Harvard UP. 972-97. ––––– 1978f (1839): ‘William Wilson’. Collected Works vol II: Tales and Sketches 1831-1842. Ed. Thomas Olive Mabbott. Cambridge: Harvard UP. 422-51. ––––– 1986 (1845): ‘The American Drama’. The Fall of the House of Usher and other Writings. Ed. David Galloway. Harmondsworth: Penguin. 448-77. Quevedo, Francisco de 1969 (1603-1613): Los sueños. Madrid: Espasa-Calpe (Austral). Reyes, Alfonso 1976 (1943): ‘El argentino Jorge Luis Borges’. Jaime Alazraki, ed. Jorge Luis Borges. Madrid: Taurus. 61-63. Rodríguez Guerrero-Strachan, Santiago 1998: ‘Idea de Edgar A. Poe en la obra crítica de Jorge Luis Borges’. ES 21: 163-74. On-line: Borges Studies Online (J. L. Borges Center for Studies & Documentation).
Received 29 February 2009 Accepted 3 March 2009
Christopher Rollason (BA and MA Cambridge, PhD York) is an independent British scholar living in France. He has lectured at the University of Coimbra and collaborated as a guest lecturer with several Indian universities, including Jahawarlal Nehru University (Delhi). He has been Language Editor for the Atlantic Literary Review (Delhi). He has co-edited the anthology Modern Criticism (2002) and has many articles published, e.g. on Indian Writing in English, Hispanic literatures and cultural and translation theory, in journals such as JSL (Delhi), Hispanic Horizon (Delhi) and Boletín de la Academia Peruana de la Lengua (Lima).
Address: 16 rue de Belchamps, F-57000 Metz, France. Telephone: 00352-4300-23090. Fax: 00352-4300-23905
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Temporality and Narrative Structure in Flannery O’Connor’s Tales
Marita Nadal University of Zaragoza [email protected]
This paper explores the relationship of time to narrative structure and to an ethical dimension of the literary experience in Flannery O’Connor’s tales, drawing on G. S. Morson’s notions of foreshadowing, backshadowing and sideshadowing and on Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope. It is my contention that O’Connor’s tales, despite their realism ‘of distances’ and hyperbolic features, do not abolish the essential openness of time: in fact, the tales incorporate a surprising variety of temporal devices through which a peculiar spectrum ranging from inevitability to contingency, from closure to aperture, and from fate to providence may be observed. The following analysis discusses this progression, focusing on a selection of tales that can be taken as models for the rest.
Keywords: foreshadowing; backshadowing; sideshadowing; chronotope; temporality; eventness; closure; contingency; fate; providence; ethics
Temporalidad y estructura narrativa en los cuentos de Flannery O'Connor
Partiendo de las nociones de foreshadowing, backshadowing, sideshadowing (Morson) y del concepto de cronotopo (Bakhtin), este artículo analiza la relación entre el tiempo, la estructura narrativa y la dimensión ética de la experiencia en los cuentos de Flannery O’Connor. El análisis refleja que los relatos de O’Connor, pese a su realismo ‘de distancias’ y rasgos hiperbólicos, no anulan el carácter abierto del tiempo, sino que incorporan una sorprendente diversidad de recursos temporales que permiten descubrir una temporalidad de amplio espectro, que se extiende desde la inevitabilidad hasta la contingencia, desde el final cerrado hasta el abierto, desde el destino hasta la providencia. El artículo estudia esa progresión, centrándose en una selección de cuentos que pueden tomarse como modelos para el resto.
Palabras clave: foreshadowing; backshadowing; sideshadowing; cronotopo; temporalidad; contingencia; destino; providencia; ética 24 Marita Nadal
Freedom cannot be conceived simply. It is a mystery. Flannery O’Connor In Narrative and Freedom: The Shadows of Time (1994) Gary Saul Morson analyses the relationship of time to narrative structure and to an ethical dimension of the literary experience. Morson argues that the way we understand narrative events is often at odds with the eventful and open nature of daily life. Thus, most narratives are developed through ‘foreshadowing’ and ‘backshadowing’, which, even if not explicitly used, are implicitly present by virtue of the plot’s reliance on structure and closure: in a well- constructed story everything points to the ending, to the pattern that will eventually be revealed, which tends to reduce the multiplicity of possibilities at each moment. However, Morson argues, narrative works can also convey narrative openness through the device of ‘sideshadowing’, which offers an alternative to prevailing deterministic, closed views of time. Whereas foreshadowing projects onto the present a shadow from the future, and backshadowing is foreshadowing after the fact, sideshadowing projects – from the ‘side’ – the shadow of an alternative present. It allows us to see what might have been and therefore changes our view of what is. 1 To a great extent, Morson’s analysis draws on Bakhtin’s work, especially his concept of the chronotope, “a unit of narrative analysis” (Holquist 1990: 110, emphasis in original) which assumes that there are always a multiplicity of temporalities to consider, and that narrative forms constitute artistic models of time. Bakhtin defines the chronotope “(literally, ‘time space’)” as “the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature” (1981: 84) and “the place where the knots of narrative are tied and untied” (1981: 250). Each narrative genre has its own way of understanding time, a specific ‘density and concreteness’. In each genre, time “thickens, takes on flesh, becomes artistically visible; likewise, space becomes charged and responsive to the movement of time, plot and history” (Bakhtin 1981: 84). Significantly, the chronotope combines spatial and temporal factors with an evaluation of their meaning, as Holquist has observed: “time and space are never merely temporal or spatial, but axiological as well (i.e. they also have values attached to them)” (1990: 152, emphasis in original). Thus, the chronotope transcends the boundaries of fiction, involving also the perspective of the reader, both in time and space. Taking Morson’s essay and Bakhtin’s concept of the chronotope as the main points of reference, this paper explores the relationship between temporality and narrative structure in O’Connor’s tales, as well as the diverse implications of this interaction. While Bakhtin tended to associate each narrative genre with a kind of chronotope, my use of it is much more specific, since the aim of this study is to distinguish different models of time within a single narrative mode by just one author. It is worth noting that although Morson employs the term chronotope frequently, he is mainly concerned with time and temporality, rather than with space; in contrast, this analysis will include some references to the topos aspect of the notion. On the other hand, although Morson focuses on unambiguously realistic novels, which are the most appropriate texts for this kind of analysis, I attempt to demonstrate that his method proves useful to analyse
1 The research carried out for the writing of this paper is part of a research project financed by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (MICINN) and the European Regional Fund (ERDF) (code HUM2007-61035).
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O’Connor’s stories, because despite their brevity and equivocal realism, they are rich enough to convey the variety of devices discussed in Narrative and Freedom, including their different approaches to sideshadowing.2 As is well-known, O’Connor’s fiction deviates from conventional realism: critics describe this characteristic as “‘anti-realistic’ impulse” (Hawkes 1986: 15), “forced realism” (Skei 2006: 139), or even relate her work to magical realism (O’Gorman 2004: 213-14), whereas she defines it as a realism “of distances” (O’Connor 1970: 179): it “lean[s] away from typical social patterns, toward mystery and the unexpected” (40). Significantly, O’Connor used to express her allegiance to Hawthorne, who wrote romances, rather than novels, and tales rather than short stories.3 O’Connor is considered a visionary writer and also ‘a comedian of genius’ who recurrently resorts to distortion and excess – what is also called the grotesque – to convey her Catholic faith. It is a fact, though, that the terrors of the New Age have turned our lives more grotesque and her fiction more relevant, as Bloom (2002: 575) has noted. Her tales, “wild”, “violent and comic” in her own words (O’Connor 1970: 43), portray a variety of characters who frequently get involved in unexpected, extreme situations and become the victims of an implacable fate, which on many occasions implies violence and death. As she explains, violence in her fiction “is never an end in itself” but a means that prepares the characters “to accept their moment of grace” (1970: 112-13) and an instrument to awaken the reader “to known but ignored truths” (O’Connor 1987: 89). O’Connor is well aware of the centrality of death in her work, the recurrence of which contributes to increasing the sense of closure and inevitability of her tales: “death has always been brother to my imagination. I can’t imagine a story that doesn’t properly end in it or in its foreshadowings” (1987: 107, my emphasis). In any case, O’Connor’s narrative technique is more complex than it might seem at first sight: her vision is conveyed “by showing, not by saying” (O’Connor 1970: 98), which problematizes the interpretation of her fiction and contributes to questioning the orthodoxy of her apparent Roman Catholic message. Her tales possess a highly elaborate structure which closely follows Poe’s notion of ‘unity of effect’ as well as reflecting the New Critics’ aesthetic tenets that O’Connor absorbed at the University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop.4 No doubt, the skilful design of her stories evokes Cleanth Brooks’s conception of the literary text as a well-wrought urn, a self-enclosed space of
2 Since Morson is mainly concerned with the exploration of sideshadowing, he focuses his study on Russian realist novels, especially those of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. Recurrently, he draws from Bakhtin, who, as he quotes, “discovered the genre he regarded as having the richest and most convincing sense of time: the novel (by which he meant not all prose fiction but works resembling such realist masterpieces as Anna Karenina, Middlemarch and Eugénie Grandet)” (1994: 88). 3 In Conversations with Flannery O’Connor, she remarks: “I write ‘tales’ in the sense Hawthorne wrote tales – though I hope with less reliance on allegory. I’m interested in the old Adam” (1987: 98). Cf. also Mystery and Manners, where she discusses Hawthorne in connection with “the modern romance tradition” in which she places her fiction (1970: 38-39). 4 Cf. Poe’s words in ‘Reviews of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales’: “In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre- established design” (1985: 1427). O’Connor herself has pointed out the special influence of Poe on her work above other writers: “But always the largest thing that looms up is The Humerous [sic] Tales of Edgar Allan Poe” (1988: 98-99).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 23–39 ISSN 0210-6124 26 Marita Nadal exquisite finish. Therefore, one might deduce that this self-conscious pattern that in many cases incorporates death as a dénouement could only result in the portrayal of life not as an open process but as a finished product. However, it is my contention that O’Connor’s stories, despite their meticulous ‘pre-established design’, the use and abuse of foreshadowing and backshadowing, do not abolish the essential openness of time, but, in their exploration of mystery, offer a variety of conceptions of temporality, compatible with freedom.5 In fact, O’Connor’s tales incorporate a surprising variety of temporal devices through which a peculiar spectrum ranging from closure to aperture, and from fate to providence, can be observed. My analysis will follow this progression, focusing on a selection of representative tales that can be taken as models for the rest. Perhaps it is inevitable (pun intended) to start this analysis with the story that opened and gave title to O’Connor’s first volume of tales, and is also one of her best : ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ (1953). In it, a family of six members, grandmother included, leaves Atlanta for a short trip in Florida, but never reach their destination. On their way, they have a car accident and as a result encounter the Misfit, a dangerous criminal escaped from the Federal Pen, who kills them one by one. Only the cat, taken by the grandmother without her son’s knowledge, and partly responsible for the accident, survives the killing. This tale, both violent and comic, is a brilliant example of inevitability and ‘pre-established design’; however, it also conveys responsibility and the possibility of choice. As a carefully designed work, the first paragraph of the story encapsulates the subject of the text: it stresses the grandmother’s will against that of the rest of the family about the following day’s trip, and includes her warning to her son Bailey about the Misfit. If the reader keeps the title of the story in mind, by the end of this first paragraph s/he will know in advance that the meeting with the criminal is going to take place, and that something terrible is going to happen: “Here this fellow that calls himself The Misfit is aloose from the Federal Pen and headed toward Florida and you read here what it says he did to these people. Just you read it. I wouldn’t take my children in any direction with a criminal like that aloose in it. I couldn’t answer to my conscience if I did” (1990: 117). No doubt, these first lines constitute a clear example of what Morson calls ‘foreshadowing’, that is, a projection onto the present of a shadow from the future. According to him, we speak of foreshadowing when only the reader is aware of it; if it is recognized as a sign by the character, “he will have discovered an omen” (1994: 63). In this case, the category of omen remains questionable, since, as the narrator notes, the grandmother quotes the newspaper’s information because she “didn’t want to go to Florida. She wanted to visit some of her connections in east Tennessee and she was seizing at every chance to change Bailey’s mind” (1990: 117). While foreshadowing projects onto the present a shadow from the future, backshadowing approaches the past “as having contained signs pointing to what happened later”; it incorporates “the added knowledge that only a future perspective could provide” and “turns the past into a well- plotted story”. Morson adds: “Everything conspires to produce the outcome we know;
5 In ‘An Interview with Flannery O’Connor and Robert Penn Warren’ on literary writing, O’Connor proves to be particularly aware of these devices. In her laconic and ironic style, she sums up her narrative technique: “When you write the thing through once, you find out what the end is. Then you can go back to the first chapter and put in a lot of those foreshadowings” (O’Connor 1987: 23).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 23–39 ISSN 0210-6124 Temporality and Narrative Structure in Flannery O’Connor’s Tales 27 loose ends, which intimate other possibilities, are drastically reduced or entirely eliminated in backshadowing narrative. ... He should have known: this is the essential trope of backshadowing” (1994: 234-36, emphasis in originalj). In this tale, both foreshadowings and backshadowings interact, increasing the atmosphere of tension and imminent catastrophe; for instance, the narrator’s words about the grandmother’s clothes (“In case of an accident, anyone seeing her dead on the highway would know at once that she was a lady”, 1990: 118), about Bailey (such as “trips made him nervous”, 121) or Bailey’s warning to the family when he agrees to leave the main road to visit the plantation house (“All right”, Bailey said, “but get this: this is the only time we’re going to stop for anything like this. This is the one and only time”, 124) are examples of backshadowing or even of foreshadowing, because their anticipatory nature does operate before the reader reaches the end of the text. Minor examples of foreshadowing/backshadowing are the allusion to the “five or six graves” (119) the family can see from the car at the beginning of their journey, and, at the end, the description of the Misfit’s car as a “hearse-like automobile” (126). No doubt, the grandmother’s dialogue with Red Sam, the bartender, during a break in the journey, constitutes the clearest foreshadowing in the text, since, in its concern with criminality and the Misfit, it foregrounds the central topic of the story. When Red Sam observes “A good man is hard to find” (122), he not only echoes the tale’s title, but also anticipates the family’s encounter with the Misfit. In turn, the grandmother’s words to Red Sam, “you’re a good man” (122) constitute a backshadowing of similar phrases addressed by her to the Misfit three times at the end of the story (127-28). To a great extent, the text’s building of tension is linked to the successive anxieties or vague omens of the grandmother (afraid of meeting the Misfit, of leaving the cat at home, of the patrolmen by the road, of having an accident with the car); however, her anticipation of danger cannot do anything to prevent it: it only foreshadows its realization. Despite the comic style, this sensation of inevitability brings to mind the oppressive world of Greek tragedies, as O’Connor noted: “this story [...] should elicit from you a degree of pity and terror, even though its way of being serious is a comic one. [...] like the Greeks you should know what is going to happen in this story so that any element of suspense in it will be transferred from its surface to its interior” (1970: 108-09). No doubt, O’Connor means by its interior the ethical dimension of the story, which reaches its climax in the dialogue between the grandmother and the Misfit and results in her final revelation, at the imminence of her death. As the author explains: “while predictable, predetermined actions have a comic interest for me, it is the free act, the acceptance of grace particularly, that I always have my eye on as the thing which will make the story work”. In this tale, “it is the Grandmother’s recognition that the Misfit is one of her children” (O’Connor 1970:115-16, my emphasis). For Morson, the ethical dimension of narrative has to do with the possibility of choice, which he relates to Bakhtin’s concept of eventness: “For there to be eventness, there must be alternatives. Eventful events are performed in a world in which there are multiple possibilities, in which some things that could happen do not” (Morson 1994: 22). In this tale, fatalism is omnipresent, and, needless to say, the plot does not convey multiple possibilities; in fact, it is designed to cancel them. Nevertheless, as Bakhtin argues, “all of our choices, however prosaic”, have “a measure of eventness” (Morson 1994: 22), and, as we can see, some measure of eventness is preserved in ‘A Good
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Man...’ through apparently prosaic, insignificant choices which, interestingly, result in disaster: thus, at the beginning, the grandchildren suggest to the grandmother the possibility of her staying at home, but she refuses. The day of the journey, it is her choice to secretively take the cat, which provokes the accident, and her idea to deviate from the main road to visit an old plantation, which results in the encounter with the Misfit. Finally, she becomes responsible for the massacre, when, childishly and proudly she reveals the Misfit’s identity with a triumphant air: “You are the Misfit! ... I recognized you at once!”. As the Misfit notes, “it would have been better for all of you, lady, if you hadn’t of reckernized me” (1990: 127), a humorous reply that ironically insists on the inevitability that pervades the tale.6 In any case, what makes the tale particularly fascinating is the variety of values associated with its chronotope, which go beyond the formal network of omens, foreshadowings and backshadowings that pervade the text. Thus, it is worth pointing out that although the reader realizes the grandmother’s possibility of choice and thence her responsibility, her religious epiphany and the action of grace may pass unnoticed or misunderstood in a dénouement dominated by the fundamentalism and nihilism of the Misfit and their frantic dialogue. As I have noted elsewhere, ‘A Good Man...’ is a powerful example of “ethical unreadability” (Nadal 2007): it is only O’Connor’s discussion of the tale’s ending that makes explicit the text’s intended but unclear message. On the other hand, the passing of time has modified and added significance to the interpretation of the text, as the notion of the chronotope implies (Bakhtin 1981: 254). Thus, in our “new Age of Terror” (Bloom 2002: 575) characterized by global terrorism and a variety of fundamentalisms, the plot of this tale has become more realistic and less grotesque than it was when the story was first published. Last but not least, we should pay attention to a minor chronotope embedded in the main one that plays a central role in the tragic ending: the old plantation and its house, provided with a secret panel which does not exist and which the grandmother fabricates to fantasize about the past and attract the children’s attention. It is precisely the grandmother’s desire to return to the past – in part an unreal past – that provokes the car accident, and in consequence, the encounter with the Misfit. Interestingly, she is the only character in the story that represents the traditional South and the nostalgia for it, which O’Connor recurrently undermines. Following the progression from fatality to sideshadowing, we can observe that O’Connor sometimes combines temporality tending toward closure with temporality tending toward openness, that is, she plays with ‘coincidence’, which links different causal lines, the interaction of which has fateful results, what Morson calls fateful coincidence or vortex time: “Vortex time and sideshadowing work in opposite ways. If in sideshadowing apparently simple events ramify into multiple futures, in vortex time an apparent diversity of causes all converge on a single catastrophe” (Morson 1994: 163). This is what happens in ‘The Comforts of Home’ (1960) and ‘Everything that Rises Must Converge’ (1961), a story that has usually attracted the critics’ attention because of
6 ‘A Circle in the Fire’ (1954) and ‘Greenleaf’ (1956) are stories that closely follow the pattern of ‘A Good Man...’. Both make repeated use of foreshadowing and backshadowing, including omens and hints. Similarly, the anticipation of impending catastrophe (the devastating fire in the former) or of the fatal encounter with the bull (‘Greenleaf’) do not exclude individual responsibility.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 23–39 ISSN 0210-6124 Temporality and Narrative Structure in Flannery O’Connor’s Tales 29 its racial concerns. The first paragraph of the tale encapsulates its most important issues: class, race, Southern ladyhood, the uneasy relationship between the two protagonists – Julian and his mother – and the excess of weight and blood pressure of the latter; surprisingly, this diversity of causes “all converge on a single catastrophe”, as Morson puts it and the tale’s title might suggest. No doubt, the mother’s high blood pressure is a foreshadowing of danger, but her death at the end of the story appears as the result of a fatal combination of factors rather than just a problem of physical health. The most important factor in this combination is Julian’s contemptuous attitude towards his mother, whom he despises because she lives attached to the ways and manners of a South that has ceased to exist. That is why he is determined from beginning to end “to teach her a lesson” (1990: 413), a recurrent statement that functions both as foreshadowing (a kind of threat for the mother) and also as backshadowing, because the dénouement discloses that he is the real recipient of the lesson. On the other hand, his disposition, full of aggressiveness against his mother, obliquely foreshadows the violent ending of the tale: “There was in him an evil urge to break her spirit” (409); “he could with pleasure have slapped her” (414). However, the element that triggers the catastrophe is the hat, identical to that of Julian’s mother, that a black woman is wearing on the integrated bus. This fateful coincidence, typical of ‘vortex time’ surprises both character and reader: “He could not believe that Fate had thrust upon his mother such a lesson” (416, my emphasis). For the mother, the hat provides a touch of class, whereas for Julian, despite his words of approval, it is “hideous” and “atrocious” (405-06). On the other hand, Julian’s interest in starting a conversation with a black man only to shock his mother is another factor – in this case not accidental, but deliberate – to take into account. Finally, the condescending attitude of Julian’s mother towards the black woman’s little boy arouses the violent reaction of the black woman and provokes the catastrophe: once off the bus, she strikes Julian’s mother a blow that leaves her sitting on the sidewalk. While Julian keeps reproaching his mother instead of offering help, she lies dying on the pavement, the victim of a fatal stroke. In the light of the tale’s dénouement, the story’s title acquires a fuller significance, because it evokes not only the convergence of hats and the condition of blacks in the South (cf. Julian’s mother’s words: “[Blacks] should rise, yes, but on their own side of the fence” 408) but also Julian’s contempt, the black woman’s rage (which foreshadows her violent reaction: “The woman was rumbling like a volcano about to become active”, 416), Julian’s mother’s blood pressure, and the coincidence of factors that defines Morson’s concept of vortex time.7 As in ‘A Good Man...’, the protagonist’s responsibility in the course of events is more than clear, but the values related to the plot are again divergent. While for O’Connor the convergence/coincidence of hats was supposed to suggest the rise of blacks in American society in the light of Jesuit Teilhard de Chardin’s concept of the
7 In fact, we can discover many other backshadowings, which range from the prophetic remark of the shop assistant: “with that hat, you won’t meet yourself coming and going” (407) – and which Julian’s mother repeats to convince herself of the good buy – to Julian’s visualization of a scene in which his mother would ask him to get off the bus and “he would look at her as at a stranger who had rashly addressed him” (413). This is what happens at the end of the story, but in reverse, when Julian’s mother no longer recognizes him, and instead keeps asking for her “Grandpa” or “Caroline”, her old black nurse (420).
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Omega Point – according to which humankind evolves towards a supreme consciousness that finds its convergence in Christ – the dénouement of the story foregrounds hostility and divergence. 8 In this regard, Kreyling, who has recently analysed the tale against the background of the cold-war period, remarks: “The clear theme is that, in the sphere of American race relations at least, nothing but animosity rises and the convergence of human interests is the last item on anyone’s agenda” (2006: 16). Interestingly, this text can also be approached as the clash of two chronotopes, that of the Old South, represented by Julian’s mother, and the New South, embodied by Julian and the black woman. Whereas the former is classist and somehow racist, and recalls with nostalgia her childhood years on the family’s decayed plantation, Julian’s bitterness reflects a society in transition between segregation and civil rights, in which his family has lost the privileged status it once enjoyed (his great-grandfather had been a former governor of the state). The next stage on the path towards sideshadowing is exemplified by ‘The Enduring Chill’ (1958), which contrasts the main character’s fatalism with the openness suggested by the plot. Thus, the sense of inevitability originates in the self-indulgent and self- destructive personality of the protagonist, Asbury. A failed writer living in New York, he returns to his mother and the South to await his death because he suffers from a mysterious fever, but mainly because, as a nihilist, he contemplates his death “as a gift from life” and “his greatest triumph” (1990: 370). Narcissistic and the victim of his obsessions and omens about his imminent end, he recalls the protagonist of Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina, a character that Morson discusses to exemplify the contrast between the author’s vision and his character: “Anna imagines fate and tragedy where Tolstoy gives us causes and conditions largely outside her notice” (Morson 1994: 77). In both works, the narrative develops an oppressive atmosphere of foreshadowing that reaches the reader as well. Thus, Asbury’s mind is only filled with forebodings of death: “He had felt the end coming on for nearly four months” (358); “Mother, ... I AM going to die” (372); “I’m dying” (376); “He was convinced that the end was approaching, that it would be today” (377). Asbury’s fixation with death is so great that it ends up reflected in his physical appearance, to the point that the country physician, summoned by Asbury’s mother against his will, remarks: “I don’t know when I’ve seen anybody your age look as sorry as you do. What you been doing to yourself?” (366). However, all these premonitions of death prove to be false foreshadowings, since in the end, the doctor discovers that the fever had been caused by Asbury’s drinking unpasteurized milk on the family farm. As Morson puts it, “Sideshadows lurk in the deepest foreshadows” (1994: 166). Thus, the enduring chill of the title, which Asbury had envisioned for his mother when reading his will, was intended for himself. Although O’Connor’s main concern in the story is the portrayal of Asbury’s spiritual awakening, the tale raises other issues that the passing of time has foregrounded. For instance, the conceited attitude of the protagonist towards his
8 Significantly, the title of the tale (which also provided the title to O’Connor’s second collection of stories) is a quotation from Teilhard de Chardin’s explanation of the Omega Point: “Remain true to yourselves, but move ever upward toward greater consciousness and greater love! At the summit you will find yourselves united with all those who, from every direction, have made the same ascent. For everything that rises must converge” (Whitt 1997: 111, emphasis in original).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 23–39 ISSN 0210-6124 Temporality and Narrative Structure in Flannery O’Connor’s Tales 31 mother’s black employees brings to mind controversial tales concerned with race like ‘Everything that Rises...’ or ‘The Artificial Nigger’ (see below) and recent approaches to O’Connor’s ideology, some of which not only emphasize her cultural conservatism but even suggest that she was a “closet racist” who had a “distaste for Negroes” and a “propensity for repeating racist jokes” (Wood 1994: 90, 94). 9 On the other hand, O’Connor’s dismissive treatment of the novel Gone with the Wind in ‘The Enduring Chill’ is now open to a different scrutiny: while in O’Connor’s time that novel was absent from the literary canon, its popularity has enormously increased with the passing of time, so that our contemporary evaluation of this tale is affected by these changes, as Bakhtin had anticipated. 10 As ‘The Enduring Chill’ suggests, ‘the structuring impulse’ of the plot may depend on one of the central characters, rather than on an externally imposed design. Just as Morson quotes Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina as an example of the protagonist’s ‘plotting’ of her own fate, whereas the world is “fundamentally innocent of both [closure and structure]” (1994: 79-80), some characters in O’Connor’s tales prove to be the real plotters of the story, becoming sometimes the victims of their own devious plans. Apart from being a skilful narrative device, this feature is also a way to convey narrative freedom, since it shows that events ultimately take place as a consequence of the character’s deliberate choice.11 While Asbury represents the figure of the passive and fatalistic plotter, the protagonists of ‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own’ (1953) and ‘Good Country People’ (1955) epitomize that of the active, self-confident and even devilish plotter: they are sure of their powers and determined to change the course of events. Needless to say, this variation constitutes a further step from inevitability to sideshadowing. ‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own’ is a good example of the plotting of two characters. As in ‘Good Country People’, an old woman and her daughter Lucynell Crater receive the visit of a tramp, Mr. Shiftlet. Although the daughter is a retarded girl and the visitor a complete stranger, the mother plots their marrying, for she is “ravenous for a son-in-law” (1990: 150) and wants a handyman for her run-down place. Shiftlet agrees to the marriage proposal but abandons Lucynell some hours after the wedding, taking with him the Craters’ car he had been so interested in repairing. After leaving his bride asleep in a bar, Shiftlet drives on towards Mobile, taking as a passenger a boy with a suitcase standing by the road. Like the Bible salesman in ‘Good Country People’, this visitor shows signs of unreliability, but the mother is not aware of them; for her, Shiftlet is “no one to be afraid of” (145), an estimation that ironically, foreshadows the opposite. This tale does not convey any sense of fatalism or even of closure. In contrast, it portrays the world as full of ‘eventness’ and alternatives, where life is seen as an open, unfinished process, and the protagonists – rather than fate or the
9 For further commentary on O’Connor and race, see Alice Walker (1984), Sarah Gordon (2000), Katherine Hemple Prown (2001) and Gretchen Dobrott Bernard (2004). 10 As Helen Taylor (2001: 28) argues, Margaret Mitchell’s novel Gone with the Wind (1936) – made into a successful film by David O. Selznick in 1939 – is probably the most popular work of art of the twentieth century and an international symbol of American Southernness. 11 Morson observes that this device may not always succeed, since the reader tends to displace “the locus of structuring to the wrong agent”, i.e. the author, who is, obviously, the ultimate agent (1994: 80-81).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 23–39 ISSN 0210-6124 32 Marita Nadal writer’s pre-established design – dominate the course of events. In fact, O’Connor confessed that she “did have some trouble with the end of that story” and that only “that little boy is what makes the story work”. Interestingly, O’Connor described her own role in the writing of this story as that of recipient, rather than agent of the plot: “Of course, I don’t know how you get those things. I just waited for it” (O’Connor 1987: 34).12 It is true that the boy completes the story in the sense that he stands for the agent of grace through whom Shiftlet can discover his own corrupt nature; however, Shiftlet’s final statement (“Oh Lord ... Break forth and wash the slime from this earth!”, 1990: 156) remains utterly ironic and ambiguous, since there is no way to ascertain whether these words are the expression of his illumination through the boy – the effect of grace – or simply constitute an angry exclamation at the boy’s insults. The impression of life as an unfinished process, of something in progress without a preordained destination is emphasized by the open structure of the plot and by the figure of Shiftlet himself: just as the pattern of the tale evokes the episodic nature of picaresque narratives, Shiflet’s name, his description of himself as a “drifting man” (152), and his life on the road (on foot, then by car, finally racing into Mobile – my emphasis) portrayed as a series of events that are not necessarily the expected outcome of previous ones – all this exemplifies Bakhtin’s concept of eventness. In Morson’s words: “Above all, the eventful event must produce something genuinely new, something beyond a predictable consequence of earlier events. If eventness is real, no knowledge of the past, no matter how comprehensive, would be sufficient for making a perfectly reliable prediction of the future”. Thus, we can conclude that eventness (‘surprisingness’) is the organizing impulse in both of these stories, since it involves not only the characters but also the reader and even the author herself, to some extent (Morson 1994: 22). In the chapter devoted to the study of indeterminism, Morson focuses on Bakhtin’s concept of poliphony, which the latter associates, more than with a mere plurality of voices, with the characters’ capacity of surprising the author: “Poliphony, then, is above all a theory of the creative process. .... When a work is created poliphonically, the eventness it conveys partakes of the real eventness happening during the creative process, when the characters surprise the author” (Morson’s italics, 1994: 98). Although Bakhtin’s analysis of poliphony mainly applies to the novel, and in particular to Dostoevsky as the inventor of the poliphonic novel, the characteristics of ‘The Life You Save...’ and its creative process recall Bakhtin’s definition. No doubt, Bakhtin’s paraphrase of Dostoevsky’s ‘central belief’ inherent in poliphony also applies to O’Connor’s tale: “Nothing conclusive has yet taken place in the world, the ultimate word of the world and about the world has not yet been spoken, the world is open and free, everything is still in the future and will always be in the future” (Morson 1994: 93). Significantly, these two tales are based on popular literary models: both follow the trickster plot common to American narrative; besides, the travelling salesman as freak is
12 In a letter to Sally Fitzgerald, O’Connor alludes to her problems with this tale: “I have been working on it two months & it’s cold as a fish to me. I don’t know the front from the back” (1988: 47). It is worth adding that O’Connor sold the rights of this tale to a TV channel, and wisely anticipated that the ending would be changed. In a letter to Betty Hester, she humorously remarks: “Mr. Shiftlet and the idiot daughter will no doubt go off in a Chrysler and live happily ever after. Anyway, on account of this, I am buying my mother a new refrigerator. While they make hash out of my story, she and me will make ice in the new refrigerator” (1988: 174).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 23–39 ISSN 0210-6124 Temporality and Narrative Structure in Flannery O’Connor’s Tales 33 a recurrent figure in the history of Southern literature, as Richard Gray (2000: 407-08) has noted.13 Their plots, which undermine Southern features such as honour, hospitality and respectability, evoke Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn (1884), in which the humorous style and picaresque episodes do not diminish the intensity of the writer’s critical vision or the sordidness, hypocrisy and materialism of the South portrayed. Although, as in the other tales discussed, O’Connor’s main intention was a religious one, the values conveyed by these texts go beyond this concern. In fact, her revisionist and iconoclastic impulse anticipates recent trends in Southern writing, so this is one of the reasons why her literary prestige is much greater now than when she first published her work.14 In his analysis of sideshadowing, Morson focuses on Tolstoy’s War and Peace and concludes that in this novel the author avoids closure, using a new device in its place, which Morson calls aperture: “Aperture encourages us to read with such expectations of open and unending futurity so that we become practiced in assessing events forever free of foreshadowing, closure, and final signification. ... Development itself – that is what aperture is designed to convey” (Morson 1994: 171). Although the length and scope of Tolstoy’s novel has very little in common with the brevity and compression of O’Connor’s tales, there is at least one tale in her collection that fully evokes the sense of progression, incompleteness and lack of closure that Tolstoy explored: ‘Parker’s Back’ (1965). In it, O’Connor brilliantly combines this technique of aperture with a highly elaborate design and her concern with the character’s encounter with grace; in that sense, there is some degree of ‘final signification’. To begin with, the author establishes a witty pun and link between the story’s title and its central character and subject, which in turn points to the defining structure of aperture: unending progression. Thus, Parker, the protagonist, keeps coming back to Sarah Ruth – before and after their marriage – and to new tattoos as a way to alleviate his “chronic and latent” dissatisfaction, which sometimes becomes “acute” and “rage[s] in him” (1990: 514). Therefore, it is both structurally and symbolically appropriate that this recurrent return should culminate and be embodied in an impressive tattoo on Parker’s back. However, despite this crucial tattoo of a “Byzantine Christ with all-demanding eyes” (522), O’Connor does not make use of a final ending; she just resorts to minor landmarks interspersed within the text. In keeping with Morson’s contention, a “work that employs aperture renounces the privilege of an ending. It invites us instead to form a relative closure at several points” (1994: 170). Thus, ‘Parker’s Back’ is structured around a series of phases or landmarks in the life of the protagonist: the first occurs when he is fourteen and sees a man in a fair, “tattoed from head to foot” and Parker is “filled with emotion” (1990: 512-13). The second turning point in his life takes place when his mother drags him off to a religious revival with her; when he sees “the big lighted church” he escapes and the next day “he lied about his age and joined the navy” (513). During his travels around the world, he keeps collecting new tattoos. The following phase starts with his unsatisfactory, stormy relationship with the ugly and fanatical Sarah Ruth, which continues into their
13 The travelling stranger in ‘Good Country People’ is a Bible salesman: he is not only a hypocrite, but an embodiment of atheism, fetishism and perversion. 14 In this regard, see Nadal (2008), where I discuss O’Connor’s stories in the light of present- day Southern writing.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 23–39 ISSN 0210-6124 34 Marita Nadal marriage and her pregnancy. Marriage makes him “gloomier than ever” and new tattoos are his only relief (518). The fourth climax in the story – which evokes a biblical epiphany – involves the crashing of Parker’s tractor into a tree and its bursting into flames: “GOD ABOVE”, he yells (520), and rushes to the city to get a religious tattoo, knowing “that there had been a great change in his life ... and that there was nothing he could do about it” (520-21). After having the tattoo of the Byzantine Christ drawn on his back and getting drunk, Parker experiences another revelation that seems to clarify both his past and his future: The eyes that were now forever on his back were eyes to be obeyed. He was as certain of it as he had ever been of anything. Throughout his life, grumbling and sometimes cursing, often afraid, once in rapture, Parker had obeyed whatever instinct of this kind had come to him – in rapture when his spirit had lifted at the sight of the tattooed man at the fair, afraid when he had joined the navy, grumbling when he had married Sarah Ruth. The thought of her brought him slowly to his feet. She would know what he had to do. She would clear up the rest of it, and she would at least be pleased. It seemed to him that, all along, that was what he wanted, to please her. ... His head was almost clear of liquor and he observed that his dissatisfaction was gone, but he felt not quite like himself. It was as if he were himself but a stranger to himself, driving into a new country though everything he saw was familiar to him, even at night. (527) No doubt, this epiphany could have put an end to the story, since it gives meaning to the protagonist’s past and illuminates his future, establishing through the religious tattoo a clear link between the fundamentalist Sarah Ruth, his restless, searching life, and the mystery of grace. However, the tale renounces the privilege of an ending, depicting life and its characters as part of a continuum, a process that never ends. Thus, the narrator continues the narrative, describing Parker’s return to Sarah Ruth – Parker’s back yet again – and his disappointment with her violent reaction, which in fact is just a replica of previous ones: rather than being pleased at the sight of the new tattoo, she accuses him of idolatry and begins to strike him furiously with the broom, her weapon of choice since their first encounter. “Idolatry! Enflaming yourself with idols under every green tree!”, she exclaims. After a cruel beating, Parker leaves the house and takes refuge precisely under a tree, where he is watched by his angry wife, “crying like a baby” (530). As Gerlach has pointed out in his structural analysis of the American short story, this tale “leaves as a residue an internal openness” and “seems to slip ... beyond the geometry of the telling to a mystery” (1985: 124).15 Apart from the growing dissatisfaction of the individual in the modern world and the evident proliferation of tattoos in daily life and popular culture, which the plot of the tale anticipates, its religious aspects have also acquired a deeper significance with the passing of time. Thus, while O’Connor’s impulse for the writing of this text was the belief that “the spirit moveth where it listeth” (1988: 593), in accordance with the Gospel of St. John (3: 7-9), and was pleased to hear from Caroline Gordon that she had succeeded in dramatizing “that heresy which denies Our Lord corporeal substance” (Giroux 1990: xv), the contemporary reader can draw a parallel between the violent, fundamentalist and
15 I agree with Sarah Gordon that the phrase crying like a baby “contains perhaps the most important words in the story”, because of its suggestion of “spiritual rebirth” and of “Parker’s need for spiritual guidance and teaching” (2000: 250). However, the phrase is too subtle and oblique to provide a sense of closure, which the tale’s structure circumvents.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 23–39 ISSN 0210-6124 Temporality and Narrative Structure in Flannery O’Connor’s Tales 35 ruthless Sarah Ruth and the Taliban rulers in Afghanistan, who in 2001 ordered the destruction of two giant Buddhas carved into a cliff, regarded as idols incompatible with Sharia law. Whereas ‘Parker’s Back’ exemplifies openness and unfinalizability because it portrays events as part of a continuum – like life and history – other tales point to openness and freedom in a more indirect way: through responsibility and regret. Morson discusses William James’s essay ‘The Dilemma of Determinism’, in which James invites us to accept the indeterministic view. If you believe in determinism, the sentiment of regret becomes “an absurdity, for regret makes no sense if things could not have been otherwise” (1994: 85).16 As we have seen before, ‘Everything that Rises Must Converge’ is a good example of this: at the end of the story, Julian realizes his cruelty and the reader leaves him about to enter “the world of guilt and sorrow” (1990: 420).17 In the same essay, William James suggests that open time (sideshadowing) may share the world with providence. He argues that, perhaps, God allows for people to choose and does not know their choices in advance: the world he has created offers more possibilities than actualities. However, “on contingent circumstances, he is also ready to offer slight, undetected pushes in the right direction by performing miracles so small that they do not come to light” (Morson 1994: 168): in that way, God would guide the world in beneficial ways. The work of providence is beautifully reflected in ‘Revelation’ (1964) and ‘The Artificial Nigger’ (1955), significantly O’Connor’s favourite story. In this tale, Mr.Head and his grandson, Nelson, quarrel and get lost in Atlanta, a city they are visiting on a one-day trip. To make matters worse, Mr. Head denies Nelson when the latter is in danger. Surprisingly, their reconciliation is by way of an ‘artificial nigger’, an ornamental statue they discover in a white neighbourhood: “They stood gazing at the artificial Negro as if they were faced with some great mystery, some monument to another’s victory that brought them together in their common defeat. They could both feel it dissolving their differences like an action of mercy” (1990: 269). As O’Connor states in Mystery and Manners, the black figure becomes the agent of revelation: it reunites both characters and represents “the working of grace” (1970: 115). Appropriately, O’Connor opens the story with a poetic and symbolic paragraph that, very subtly, contributes to foreshadowing the work of providence: “the miraculous moonlight” (1990: 249), reflected in the mirror of the room, evokes the supernatural, dream-like atmosphere inherent in Hawthorne’s concept of romance, in which “the moonbeams” and “the looking-glass” are the central symbols (1977: 66). In keeping
16 Similarly, Morson observes the importance of moral choice/responsibility for Bakhtin, who wanted to describe a world in which moral choice would be real, emphasizing “that responsibility requires an indeterministic world, a ‘pluralistic, restless universe, in which no single point of view can ever take in the whole scene’ “ (1994: 86-87). 17 Cf. also ‘The Lame Shall Enter First’ (1962) and ‘The Displaced Person’ (1954), which also explore responsibility, guilt and regret. In contrast, ‘A View of the Woods’ (1957) – “a sublimely ugly tale”, as Bloom observes (2001: 53) – lacks regret, but foregrounds choice, responsibility, guilt and evil with special intensity: the plot shows clearly that the death of the two protagonists at the end (the grandfather kills the granddaughter in a fight and then dies of a heart attack) is the logical consequence of their calculating, stubborn wills, rather than the effect of vortex time. In an indirect way, the ending emphasizes contingency as well, since the confrontation might have gone either way.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 23–39 ISSN 0210-6124 36 Marita Nadal with this elaborate and transcendental opening, the story comes to its end with a new allusion to the moon, which “restored to its full splendor” (269), enhances the effect of grace and beauty (backshadowing), contributing also to the text’s sense of narrative closure.18 Significantly, this tale has some points in common with ‘A Good Man...’: although the latter highlights fate, and the former, providence, both show a carefully built structure, and share the chronotope of the road and that of meeting, which are connected by a “close link”, as Bakhtin notes (1981: 98). The motif of meeting “fulfills architectonic functions”, since it can serve, for instance, as the dénouement of the plot (Bakhtin 1981: 98), as happens in these tales. However, as he remarks, encounters have “different nuances”, since they “may be desirable or undesirable, joyful or sad, sometimes terrifying […] the entire fate of a man may depend on them” (1981: 98-99). Thus, these two tales brilliantly exemplify the opposite effects of the combination of both chronotopes, and these chronotopes, in turn, constitute the basis of the tales’ narrative structure. As in ‘A Good Man...’, temporality has affected the values of ‘The Artificial Nigger’ in a way that O’Connor could not have anticipated: just as the issue of race has become increasingly foregrounded and opened to debate in recent criticism of O’Connor’s fiction, ‘The Artificial Nigger’ has become her most controversial text. Whereas Toni Morrison, among other critics, admires the strategies employed by O’Connor to portray the “connection between God’s grace and Africanist ‘othering’” (1993: 13-14) “in that brilliant story” (68), it is also evident that in years pervaded by a global wave of political correctness, the term nigger has become a taboo word which might sound even more offensive when coming from a white Southerner. No wonder, then, that the tale has been removed from the reading list of some American academic programmes as a racist text, as Oates (1999: 343) has noted. As this analysis has pointed out, temporality functions in a two-fold dimension, since it has to do not only with narrative structure and the artistic unity that the chronotopes create but also with the reader’s evaluation of their meaning, which results in an ongoing interaction between literature and life that alters and diversifies the significance of the text. As Bakhtin notes, “this process of exchange is itself chronotopic: it occurs first and foremost in the historically developing social world, but without ever losing contact with changing historical space” (1981: 254). Therefore, as he concludes, we could even speak of “a special creative chronotope inside which this exchange between work and life occurs, and which constitutes the distinctive life of the work” (1981: 254, emphasis in the original). In that sense we can conclude that the temporality of O’Connor’s tales will remain open and in progress, since it will always be perceived in the context of the reader’s chronotope. On the other hand, the analysis of O’Connor’s stories has pointed out that each of the tales has its own way of understanding time, and that all the chronotopes in them allow for some measure of temporal openness and, therefore, choice and personal responsibility. Despite the “already written quality” of literary works, which inevitably implies a “sense of destiny” (Morson 1994: 113, emphasis in original), the “more drastic procedures” (O’Connor 1970: 70) that the short story requires, and O’Connor’s hyperbolic realism ‘of
18 In her analysis of ‘The Artificial Nigger’, Oates emphasizes its engaging quality, “its dramatic momentum”, which goes beyond the interest of its Christian subtext. Among O’Connor’s work, Oates finds the story “memorable” “for its portrayal of comic yet sympathetic characters and for the unexpected ‘mercy’ of its conclusion” (1999: 343, my italics)
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 23–39 ISSN 0210-6124 Temporality and Narrative Structure in Flannery O’Connor’s Tales 37 distances’, these tales, in different degrees, manage to convey the sense of unactualized possibilities. Thus, we have observed a significant gradation in the treatment of temporality: whereas ‘A Good Man is Hard to Find’ epitomizes inevitability, fatalism and narrative closure, and its suggestion of alternatives is particularly weak, ‘The Life You Save May Be Your Own’ and ‘Parker’s Back’, placed at the opposite end of the spectrum, exemplify the sense of life in process, multiple possibilities and aperture, that is, sideshadowing. While in the first tales discussed, fate, ‘vortex time’ and the author’s control seem to dwarf the autonomy of the characters, other tales portray a progression in which the figure of the fatalistic protagonist gives way to that of the self-confident plotter, to the point that the author’s role appears reduced to that of observer, who can even be surprised by the characters’ initiatives. Finally, tales like ‘The Artificial Nigger’ and ‘Revelation’ show that the beneficent action of providence can also convey narrative closure, maintaining open the sense of freedom and eventness.19 Finally, it is worth adding that O’Connor’s handling of temporality evokes the diverse techniques used by Dostoevsky and Tolstoy in their portrayal of sideshadowing: according to Morson (1994: 12), both Russian writers offer the most sophisticated cases of this device. Interestingly, both Dostoevsky and O’Connor emphasize choice and responsibility by focusing on crises and extreme situations that reveal their reliance on closure and vortex time. In contrast to Dostoevsky, Tolstoy prefers to foreground the contingency of events, showing – through aperture or the mistaken fatalism of the protagonist – that every moment matters and that real time is an ongoing process, devices that some of O’Connor’s stories explore – perhaps surprisingly. Therefore, her tales prove to be chronotopically diverse, since they not only evoke Dostoevsky’s tormented world of responsibility and guilt – as critics have recurrently pointed out –20 but also rewrite Tolstoy’s more unobtrusive devices, especially the description of gradual, contingent small changes and the sense of unfinalizability and progression inherent in real time. No doubt, these characteristics could account for the peculiar diversity of O’Connor’s tales as pointed out by her critics: whereas the devices of inevitability and vortex time are linked to the portrayal of violence, death and extreme situations and suggest a “fierce, combative, revolutionary” imagination, an “apocalyptic religious experience” (Oates 1986: 46, 539) together with a sadistic impulse, O’Connor’s exploration of contingency, life in process and aperture is related to the description of gradual changes and to the idea that every moment matters, which reflects an emphasis on the concrete and particular and a realism of the “here and now” (O’Gorman 2004:
19 Since there are no deaths at the end of some tales analysed – something unusual in this writer – it might be argued that in O’Connor, the sense of alternatives, openness and freedom is related to this absence. However, some of her stories manage to convey contingency and indeterminacy despite their closed structure and inclusion of death in the plot. This is what happens in ‘A Late Encounter with the Enemy’ and ‘Judgement Day’: in spite of the ‘timely’ death of their central characters, the dénouement is seen as the natural and logical outcome of the characters’ inappropriate actions, not as the effect of fate or vortex time. 20 See, for example, Oates (1986) and Srigley (2004). On the other hand, O’Connor herself alludes recurrently in her letters to her reading of Dostoevsky (O’Connor 1988).
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6), also categorized as “neorealist fiction” (Bradbury 1988: 1139-40).21 In the end, it might well be that the equivocal character of the temporality of O’Connor’s tales, its seductive elusiveness, has to do with the strange combination of a great concern with time22 – which includes mastery of its three shadows – and the ultimate desire to transcend it. In her own words: “The writer operates at a peculiar crossroads where time and place and eternity somehow meet. His problem is to find that location” (O’Connor 1970: 59).
Works Cited
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1981: ‘Forms of Time and of the Chronotope in the Novel’. Michael Holquist, ed. The Dialogic Imagination. Four Essays. Austin: U of Texas P. 84-258. Bal, Mieke 1985: Narratology. Introduction to the Theory of Narrative.Trans. Christine van Boheemen. Toronto: U of Toronto P. Bloom, Harold, ed. 1986: Flannery O’Connor. Modern Critical Views. New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House. ––––– 2001 (2000): How to Read and Why. Boston: Fourth Estate. ––––– 2002: Genius. A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds. London: Fourth Estate. Bradbury, Malcolm 1988: ‘Neorealist Fiction’. Emory Elliot, general ed. Columbia Literary History of the United States. New York: Columbia UP. 1126-41. Dobrott Bernard, Gretchen 2004: ‘Flannery O’Connor’s Written Correspondence: An Inside Glimpse at the Forging of Art and Persona’. Atlantis XXVI: 25-33. Gerlach, John 1985: Toward the End: Closure and Structure in the American Short Story. Alabama: U of Alabama P. Giroux, Robert 1990 (1971): Introduction. Flannery O’Connor:The Complete Stories. London and Boston: Faber. vii-xvii. Gordon, Sarah 2000: Flannery O’Connor: The Obedient Imagination. Athens and London: U of Georgia P. Gray, Richard 2000: Southern Aberrations. Writers of the American South and the Problems of Regionalism. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP. Hawkes, John 1986 (1962): ‘Flannery O’Connor’s Devil’. Harold Bloom, ed. Flannery O’Connor. Modern Critical Views. New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House. 9-17. Hawthorne, Nathaniel 1977 (1850): ‘The Custom-House’. The Scarlet Letter and Selected Tales. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. 35-74. Holquist, Michael 1990: Dialogism. Bakhtin and his World. London and New York: Routledge. Kreyling, Michael 2006: ‘A Good Monk Is Hard to Find: Thomas Merton, Flannery O’Connor, the American Catholic Writer, and the Cold War’. Jan Nordby Gretlund and Karl-Heinz Westarp, eds. Flannery O’Connor’s Radical Reality. Columbia: U of South Carolina P. 1-17. Morrison, Toni 1993 (1992): Playing in the Dark. Whiteness and the Literary Imagination. London: Picador. Morson, Gary Saul 1994: Narrative and Freedom. The Shadows of Time. New Haven and London: Yale UP. Nadal, Marita 2007: ‘Sympathy for the Devil? Visionary Writing and Ethical Unreadability in Flannery O’Connor’s Tales’. Bárbara Arizti and Silvia Martínez-Falquina eds. On the Turn:
21 This sadistic impulse has been pointed out by a variety of O’Connor’s critics, among them John Hawkes (1986), Harold Bloom (1986, 2001, 2002), Joyce Carol Oates (1986, 2003) and Katherine Hemple Prown (2001). 22 This concern was also present in O’Connor’s daily life, as she reflects in her letters: “I myself am afflicted with time” (1988: 91); “time is very dangerous without a rigid routine” (465).
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The Ethics of Fiction in Contemporary Narrative in English. Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing. 309-26. ––––– 2008: ‘Aberrations, Instabilities and Mythoclasm in the Tales of Flannery O’Connor’. Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses 57: 181-93. Oates, Joyce Carol 1986 (1973): ‘The Visionary Art of Flannery O’Connor’. Harold Bloom, ed. Flannery O’Connor. Modern Critical Views. New York and Philadelphia: Chelsea House. 43- 53. ––––– 1999: ‘Workings of Grace: Flannery O’Connor’s “The Artificial Nigger” ‘. Where I’ve Been, and Where I’m Going. Essays, Reviews, and Prose. New York: Plume. 339-43. ––––– 2003: The Faith of a Writer. Life, Craft, Art. New York: HarperCollins. O’Connor, Flannery 1970: Mystery and Manners. Occasional Prose. Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, eds. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ––––– 1987: Conversations with Flannery O’Connor. Rosemary Magee, ed. Jackson and London: UP of Mississippi. ––––– 1988 (1979): Letters of Flannery O’Connor. The Habit of Being. Sally Fitzgerald, ed. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. ––––– 1990 (1971): The Complete Stories. London and Boston: Faber. O’Gorman, Farrell 2004: Peculiar Crossroads. Flannery O’Connor, Walker Percy, and Catholic Vision in Postwar Southern Fiction. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP. Poe, Edgar Allan 1985 (1842): ‘Reviews of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales’. Vol. 1 of The Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. New York and London: Norton. 1423-31. Prown, Katherine Hemple 2001: Revising Flannery O’Connor: Southern Literary Culture and the Problem of Female Authorship. Charlottesville and London: UP of Virginia. Skei Hans H. 2006: ‘O’Connor’s Everything That Rises Must Converge and Theories of the Short Story Sequence’. Jan Nordby Gretlund and Karl-Heinz Westarp, eds. Flannery O’Connor’s Radical Reality. Columbia: U of South Carolina P. 138-48. Srigley, Susan 2004: Flannery O’Connor’s Sacramental Art. Notre Dame, Indiana: U of Notre Dame P. Taylor, Helen 2001: Circling Dixie. Contemporary Southern Culture through a Transatlantic Lens. New Brunswick, New Jersey and London: Rutgers UP. Walker, Alice 1984 (1983): In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. London: Women’s P. Whitt, Margaret Early 1997 (1995): Understanding Flannery O’Connor. Columbia: U of South Carolina P. Wood, Ralph C. 1994: ‘Where Is the Voice Coming From? Flannery O’Connor on Race’. Flannery O’Connor Bulletin 22: 90-118.
Received 14 April 2008 Revised version accepted 10 December 2008
Marita Nadal is a senior lecturer at the Department of English and German Philology of the University of Zaragoza, where she currently teaches American Literature. A BA in Geography and History, she graduated with honours in English Philology and obtained her PhD in 1990 (University of Zaragoza). Currently, her main fields of research are Gothic fiction, and modern and contemporary US literature. Recent publications include articles on Edgar Allan Poe (Mississippi Quarterly) Joyce Carol Oates (Mississippi Quarterly) and Flannery O’Connor (Revista Canaria de Estudios Ingleses).
Address: Dpto. de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, C/ Pedro Cerbuna 12, 50009 Zaragoza. Tfno: 976 761538. Fax: 976 761519.
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The Buddy as Anima? Revisiting Friendships between Men in Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter
Josep M. Armengol-Carrera SUNY (State University of New York) at Stony Brook [email protected]
This article explores the construction and deconstruction of male friendship in Richard Ford’s novel The Sportswriter. The first part offers an overview of classic fictions of male bonding in U.S. literature, while the second contrasts such idyllic representations with the available empirical evidence on men’s friendships, which emphasizes their scarcity and precariousness. So as to reconcile the ‘reality’ and the ‘fiction’ of male friendship, part three analyzes Richard Ford’s 1986 novel The Sportswriter as a contemporary literary re-vision of the classic myth of male friendship in U.S. literature. More specifically, the novel will be used to illustrate the effects on male friendship of traditional masculinity, which tends to undermine intimacy between men by dissociating them from emotions and, especially, by promoting male homophobia.
Keywords: male friendship; homophobia; homosociality; masculinity; American literature; The Sportswriter; Richard Ford
El amigo como compañero del alma. Revisitando las amistades entre varones en El periodista deportivo de Richard Ford
Este artículo explora la construcción y la deconstrucción de la amistad masculina en la novela El periodista deportivo de Richard Ford. La primera parte ofrece una introducción a las novelas clásicas sobre amistades masculinas en la literatura estadounidense, mientras que la segunda contrasta estas ficciones con la evidencia empírica existente sobre amistades entre varones, la cual ha demostrado su escasez y precariedad. Con el fin de reconciliar la ‘realidad’ y la ‘ficción’ de las amistades entre hombres, la tercera parte analiza la novela El periodista deportivo (1986) de Richard Ford como una re-visión literaria contemporánea del mito clásico de la amistad masculina en la literatura de los Estados Unidos. En concreto, la novela es usada para ilustrar los efectos sobre la amistad masculina de la masculinidad tradicional, que tiende a socavar la intimidad entre hombres separándolos de las emociones y, sobre todo, fomentando la homofobia masculina.
Palabras clave: amistad masculina; homofobia; literatura de los Estados Unidos; El periodista deportivo; Richard Ford 42 Josep M. Armengol-Carrera
I would like to hug him now…But I can’t. He would get the wrong idea and everything between us would be ruined just when it’s started so well. —Richard Ford The Sportswriter (1986) 0. Introduction
In recent years, there has been a dramatic increase in the number of critical studies on friendship in literature.1 Many of them have set out to explore male romantic friendships, that is, “strong attachments between men in works ranging from ancient epics and medieval romances to Renaissance plays, Gothic novels, westerns, and war movies” (Watkins 2008: n. p.).2 In line with this recent critical trend, then, this article begins with an overview of literary celebrations of friendship, focusing on idyllic friendships between men in U.S. literature and culture. Such mythic images will then be compared to the existing empirical work on men’s friendships, which has revealed their scarce and precarious nature, tracing it back to the increased homophobia at the end of the nineteenth century. While the traditional literary depiction of male friendship and the empirical evidence on the subject seem totally opposed, the article attempts to move beyond the traditional binary between the ‘reality’ and the ‘fiction’ of male friendship, analyzing Richard Ford’s 1986 novel The Sportswriter as a literary deconstruction of the myth of indissoluble friendships between men in U.S. literature. In particular, the novel has been selected to prove and exemplify the influence on male friendship of conventional masculinity, which contributes to separating men from one another, as we shall see, by pitting masculinity against emotions and, especially, by promoting homophobia and the fear of homosexuality among men. Even though much of this article will thus aim to deconstruct the myth of indissoluble friendships between men in American fiction, it will conclude by underlining both the feasibility and the desirability of recuperating the emotional attachments between (heterosexual) men, which will entail, as will be argued, diminishing homophobia as well as other forms of social discrimination.
1. The myth of male friendship in American literature: an overview
Classic American literature spills with depictions of idyllic friendships between men. As Leslie Fiedler argued in his influential work Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), American literature, particularly novels and fiction, has consistently represented men’s struggle to avoid women and (hetero)sexuality. From Cooper, Melville and Twain to Hemingway, Saul Bellow and James Dickey, the theme of men’s escape from women and sexuality, which usually takes the form of bachelorhood and male
1 The research leading to the publication of this article has been made possible thanks to a Beatriu de Pinós postdoctoral grant from the government of Catalonia (Ref. 2006 BP-A 10181). 2 See, for example, Sedgwick (1985); Hammond and Jablow (1987); Dellamora (1990); Watkins (2008).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 41–55 ISSN 0210-6124 The Buddy as Anima? 43 comradeship, recurs in much of nineteenth- and twentieth-century American literature. In Fiedler’s own words, “where woman is felt to be a feared and forbidden other, the only legitimate beloved is the self. Pure narcissism cannot, however, provide the dream and tension proper to a novel; the mirror-image of the self is translated in the American novel...into the comrade of one’s own sex, the buddy as anima” (1998: 348). Through the figure of Natty Bumppo, James Fenimore Cooper did indeed seem to introduce a recurrent male prototype, the white male who rejects women and domesticity and embraces friendship with another man, who embodies the freedom of uncivilized nature. While James Fenimore Cooper’s Natty Bumppo forges an indissoluble friendship with the Indian Chingachgook, Herman Melville’s Ishmael bonds with Queequeg, a Polynesian harpooner, just as Mark Twain’s Huck Finn becomes inseparable from Jim, the black runaway slave. In Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), for example, Ishmael and Queequeg are so fond of each other that in the tenth chapter of the novel they even decide to get ‘married’. As Ishmael himself explains, “he [Queequeg] pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me around the waist, and said that henceforth we were married; meaning, in his country’s phrase, that we were bosom friends” (Melville 1996: 50). After marrying, Ishmael and his friend, like any other loving couple, embark on a honeymoon, over which they share confidences and even the same bed. As Ishmael himself elaborates: How it is I know not; but there is no place like a bed for confidential disclosures between friends. Man and wife, they say, there open the very bottom of their souls to each other; and some old couples often lie and chat over old times till nearly morning. Thus, then, in our hearts’s honeymoon, lay I and Queequeg –a cosy, loving pair. (Melville 1996: 51) Twentieth-century American fiction is centrally concerned with representations of friendships between men, too. For instance, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men (1937), set in the context of the Depression, remains one of the most poignant descriptions of male friendship in American letters. Indeed, the deep love between George and Lennie offers them the only respite from the pain of economic marginality. Rather than women, George and Lennie have each other. As Lennie tells his friend, “guys like us got no family”, although “we got each other, that’s what, that gives a hoot in hell about us” (Steinbeck 1974: 104). Like Steinbeck’s novel, much of Ernest Hemingway’s fiction makes another classic example for representations of strong attachments between (heterosexual) men in twentieth-century American literature. Hemingway’s novels do indeed appear to celebrate male same-sex friendships as more transcendental than any other affective relationships. Only men’s emotional attachments to other men, as Leslie Fiedler noted, seem to “move him to simplicity and truth” (1998: 316-17). From The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) to Green Hills of Africa (1936) and For Whom the Bell Tolls (1939), most of Hemingway’s literary texts focus on battle companions, friends on a fishing trip, fellow patients in a hospital, a bullfighter and his manager and so forth. In Hemingway’s works, then, male homosociality becomes much more central and stronger than (hetero)sexuality and women, who are either absent or secondary characters. It is true that women in Hemingway’s works, when present, appear to pose a threat to the ‘purer’ relationships between men. For example, in The Sun Also Rises, Brett Ashley’s assertive sexuality seems to stand in between Jake Barnes
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 41–55 ISSN 0210-6124 44 Josep M. Armengol-Carrera and Bill Gorton’s homoerotic relationship. Nevertheless, Brett’s sexuality is far less threatening than it seems. For one thing, Jake is sexually impotent. For another, Brett is much fonder of Romero, the bullfighter, than of either Jake or Bill, although her affair with Romero is short-lived as well. As Fiedler argued, Brett seems “incapable of love except as a moment in bed” (1998: 320).3 Since women in Hemingway’s fiction seem to be portrayed as sexual objects, they pose no real threat to the deeper, more idyllic love between men. Indeed, the affective relationship between Jake and Bill, rather than thwarted by Brett’s sexuality, appears to become increasingly strong as the novel advances. As Sibbie O’Sullivan (1988: 71) has noted, once Bill and Jake leave Paris for Spain, they become more intimate. The pastoral Spanish setting, with its idyllic mountains and trout streams, seems to facilitate a more private speech which allows them to discuss religion, literature and even personal problems such as Jake’s impotency.4 Jake’s relationship with Bill Gorton thus seems to exemplify an ideal friendship between two men, and perhaps even a source of sublimated homosexuality. During their fishing trip to the Irati River, Bill Gorton does indeed appear to disclose his homoerotic attraction to Jake. As Bill confesses to his friend, “You’re a hell of a good guy, and I’m fonder of you than anybody on earth” (Hemingway 1954: 116). Given the tradition of male friendship in American literature and culture, it is little wonder, then, that contemporary U.S. fiction remains centrally concerned with depicting male same-sex intimacy. If James Dickey’s novel Deliverance (1970), for example, focuses on four Southern, white, male friends who embark on a risky canoe trip as an escape from their emasculating suburban lives, more recent works such as Robert Bly’s Iron John: A Book About Men (1990) or Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996), to name but a few, continue to promote fictions of male bonding. Whereas Bly’s fable encourages American men to overcome their society’s feminizing influences by organizing all-male excursions to the forest, where they can recover their ‘true’ masculine essence by engaging together in hunting and other warlike games, Palahniuk’s novel, which was made into a very popular film of the same name by David Fincher in 1999, invites men to overcome the increasing feminization of the workplace by organizing all-male fight clubs, where they can bond by sharing their ‘real’ (i.e. aggressive) masculinity with each other, away from the feminizing influence of women. Clearly, these narratives of male bonding are simply modern versions of the canonical fiction in the United States, where males tend to cement their friendships by escaping together to the wilderness in search of violent tests and adventures, and by leaving women behind.
3 Though Brett has been subject to numerous misogynist attacks, including Fiedler’s characterization of her as an unemotional female character, she seems to be much more complex than has been generally acknowledged. In fact, Brett appears to represent the flapper, the ‘New Woman’ of the 1920s. One way in which she asserts her new identity is by exploring her sexuality and by moving away from the traditional female roles of mother and wife. However, Hemingway seems unable to avoid patriarchal representations of women as bitches and sexual objects. I am grateful to Àngels Carabí (personal communication) for these reflections. 4 “Though Jake’s problems are not discussed at length, and though his answers are frequently evasive or non-committal”, the subject, as O’Sullivan has concluded, is mentioned often enough in a number of conversations to deserve to be considered “a topic of conversation” (1988: 71).
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2. Male friendship: myth vs. reality
Even as (classic) American literature has long provided numerous representations of idyllic friendships between men, the myth of male friendship is not to be confused with its reality. Actually, contemporary men’s friendships, as masculinity scholar Peter M. Nardi reminds us, are usually characterized by emotionally neutral, instrumental, “side- by-side” (2004: 322) interactions. While women’s friendships often show emotionally close, expressive, ‘face-to-face’ styles of intimacy, (heterosexual) men’s friendships tend to be less intimate, self-disclosing and physically affectionate, focusing on topical rather than personal issues. Moreover, it has been proven that men tend to have fewer supportive relationships than women do, generally receiving (and giving) less support from (and to) their peers. No wonder, then, that men regard the meaningfulness of, and satisfaction with, their same-sex friendships lower than women do, while they see their cross-gender friendships as closer and more intimate than their same-gender ones, compared to women, who see their same-gender ones as closer (Nardi 2004: 322). Historically, the birth of the modern homosexual seems to have had enormous implications for the current gendered construction of male friendship. Within current social structure, there seems to be a clear-cut distinction between homosexuality and homosociality, that is, the social bonds between persons of the same sex. Indeed, the term homosocial is often used to describe such activities as ‘male bonding’, which may, in our society, be characterized by intense homophobia. However, friendships between men were once more intense and intimate. In seventeenth- and eighteenth-century British culture and literature, for example, there seems to have existed a continuum, as Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick elaborates, between male homosocial and homosexual relations,5 “a continuum whose visibility, for men, in our society, is radically disrupted” (1992: 2). Sedgwick contends that the separation between friendship and homosexuality is gender-specific and context-bound. On the one hand, the opposition between the homosocial and the homosexual seems to be less dichotomous for women than it is for men. As Sedgwick herself explains, “women in our society who love women, women who teach, study, nurture, suckle, write about, march for, vote for, give jobs to, or otherwise promote the interests of other women, are pursuing congruent and closely
5 Of course, Sedgwick’s argument (1992) of a continuum between homosexuality and homosociality, as Crowley (1987: 307) reminds us, derives, at least partly, from the work of Sigmund Freud. As is known, Freud insisted that homosexual tendencies are never fully repressed but are simply sublimated through culturally legitimated (homo)social practices such as male friendship and comradeship. In Freud’s own words: After the stage of heterosexual object-choice has been reached, the homosexual tendencies are not, as might be supposed, done away with or brought to a stop; they are merely deflected from their sexual aim and applied to fresh uses. They…help to constitute the social instincts, thus contributing an erotic factor to friendship and comradeship, to esprit de corps and to the love of mankind in general. (1959: 3446-47) It seems clear, then, that in Freud, as in Sedgwick (1992), the whole range of what may be called male ‘homosocial’ relations is seen to be more or less eroticized, even if the term homosexual has traditionally been applied to genital practices only.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 41–55 ISSN 0210-6124 46 Josep M. Armengol-Carrera related activities” (1992: 2-3). Moreover, the current disjunction between male friendship and homosociality seems to be historically specific. For the classical Greeks, for example, the continuum between men loving men and men promoting the interests of men seems to have been completely natural (Sedgwick 1992: 4). Nevertheless, the increasing homophobia at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries seemed to put an end to much of the closeness and intensity of male same-sex friendships (Foucault 1984: 173-92; Bem 1993: 81; Segal 1997: 139; Kimmel 2000: 214-15; Nardi 2004: 321-22). Before the turn of the century, the word homosexual described a type of sexual behavior, not identity. But, as soon as the word changed from an adjective to a noun, homophobia came to play an increasingly central role in men’s lives. The disappearance of friendship as a social institution thus seemed to result from the declaration of homosexuality as a social/religious/medical problem, which was itself the result of a number of specific historical factors. As feminist historian Sandra Lipsitz Bem (1993: 81) has argued, the increased stigmatization of homosexuality at the end of the nineteenth century was mainly a reaction to an epoch of social disruption in England and other parts of Europe, as well as in the United States. At the heart of this social disruption was a radical change in the models of sexual behavior, which was seen as a threat to the hegemonic sexual and political order. Bem explains that while sexuality had often been limited to marriage according to the rules of closely knit rural societies, nineteenth-century American and European urban areas were characterized by a dramatic increase in the prostitution business as well as by a growing, predominantly male homosexual culture (1993: 81). In conclusion, then, the increased homophobia at the turn of the century was fundamentally a reaction to these sexual changes, which were perceived as a threat to the dominant social and sexual order. The end of the nineteenth century was thus characterized by a ferocious religious, medical and legal persecution and repression of homosexuality. While religious sermons often celebrated the sanctity of the heterosexual family and warned against the abominable sin of homosexuality (Foucault 1984: 173-92), Freudian psychoanalysis described homosexuality as a deviation and a mental illness.6 Moreover, the three infamous trials and subsequent imprisonment of Oscar Wilde served to remind men that homosexual behavior was socially and legally punishable. As Lynne Segal has argued in this respect, “the possible imputation of homosexual interest to any bonds between men ensured that men had constantly to be aware of and assert their difference from both women and homosexuals” (1997: 139). While the concept of friendship between men had once included a wide range of erotic and sexual possibilities, men’s friendships thus became more limited in scope as issues related to (homo)sexuality became part of the public discourse in the post-Freudian era. As friendship scholar Peter M. Nardi elaborates: Romantic friendships, especially for men, were less visible and less of a topic to be discussed in poems and literature. True friendship, in the early twentieth century and continuing to this day, would be seen as something only women were more capable of
6 See, for example, Freud’s pathologization of homosexuality in books such as Totem and Taboo (1912-13) and in essays such as ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ (1914) and ‘Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction Between the Sexes’ (1925).
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experiencing. The ideal form of friendship is now typically described with more “female” language: intimacy, trust, caring, disclosing, and nurturing. (2004: 321-22)
3. Re/presentations of (failed) friendships between men in contemporary American literature: the example of Richard Ford
From what has been argued here, it would appear, then, that the literary and empirical approaches to male friendship are totally opposed. While idyllic friendships between men have pervaded U.S. literature and culture from the nineteenth century to our day, masculinity and friendship scholars have revealed the scarcity as well as the precariousness of (heterosexual) men’s emotional attachments to other men, which they have linked, historically, to the birth of homosexuality as an identity at the turn of the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries. Thus, work on male friendship seems divided between the sciences and the humanities, truth and myth, the world and the text. Moving beyond this traditional binary between ‘reality’ and ‘fiction’, however, the remainder of this article concentrates on revisiting the myth of male friendship from a specifically literary perspective. Focus will be given, as has been pointed out, to Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter (1986), the first novel of the Frank Bascombe trilogy, completed by Independence Day (1995) and The Lay of the Land (2006). Ford’s 1986 novel has been specifically selected for two different, albeit complementary, reasons. On the one hand, it rewrites traditional U.S. narratives of male bonding by underlining the male protagonist’s fear of (same-sex) friendship and intimacy. On the other, it illustrates the specific influence of masculinity ideals, particularly male homophobia, on the gendered construction of male friendship. Besides considering his former personal experiences of trauma, the novel connects its male protagonist’s fear of (same-sex) intimacy, as we shall see, to his traditional ideas about masculinity as the denial of emotions and, above all, to his blatant homophobia. In so doing, The Sportswriter will not only help us question the traditional depiction of idyllic friendships between men in classical U.S. fiction, but will also contribute to illustrating and exemplifying, as we shall see, the existing empirical work on masculinity, male friendship and homophobia from a specifically literary perspective. The author of six novels and three collections of short stories,7 and the recipient of the PEN/Faulkner Award for The Sportswriter (1986) and the Pulitzer Prize for Independence Day (1995), Richard Ford has been heralded both as a novelist and as a short story writer. Resisting the influence of postmodernism on contemporary American literature, most of Richard Ford’s works seem to share his stark realism and often minimalist style and, indeed, the author himself has often expressed his
7 After his first novel, A Piece of My Heart (1976), Ford published the well-known Frank Bascombe trilogy – formed by The Sportswriter (1986), Independence Day (1995), and The Lay of the Land (2006), his latest work –, besides two minor novels, The Ultimate Good Luck (1981) and Wildlife (1990). On the other hand, his short story collections include the highly acclaimed Rock Springs (1987), Women with Men (1997) – resulting from the compilation of three novellas titled ‘The Womanizer’, ‘Occidentals’ and ‘Jealousy’, respectively – and A Multitude of Sins (2001), which talks, mainly, about adultery and human frailty.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 41–55 ISSN 0210-6124 48 Josep M. Armengol-Carrera admiration for other contemporary American realist writers such as Tobias Wolff and Raymond Carver, among others. Recurrently, Richard Ford has been discussed as a Southern writer, although the author himself has always rejected this label and, indeed, only his first novel, A Piece of My Heart (1976), is set in the American South. Whether an example of Southern literature or not, his fiction has recurrently focused on the construction of masculinities. After all, most of Ford’s narrators and protagonists to date have been men. From Robard Hewes and Sam Newel, the two main voices in A Piece of My Heart (1976), Ford’s first novel, to Harry Quinn, the Vietnam veteran of The Ultimate Good Luck (1981), to sixteen-year-old Joe Brinson in Wildlife (1990), to Frank Bascombe, the narrator and protagonist of both The Sportswriter (1986) and Independence Day (1995) as well as The Lay of the Land (2006), Ford’s novels typically concern themselves with first-person male narrators and protagonists. And this also applies to most of his stories. For instance, the defining viewpoints in ‘The Womanizer’, ‘Occidentals’ and ‘Jealousy’, the three stories included in Women with Men (1997), are men: Martin Austin, Charley Matthews and Larry, respectively. On the other hand, first-person male narrators also tell eight of the ten stories in Rock Springs (1987). And, in fact, ‘Empire’ and ‘Fireworks’, the only two stories told in the third person, also seem to “attain intimacy and intensity”, as John Wideman has argued, “by being reflected tightly, exclusively through a single [male] consciousness in each story” (1987: 1), Sims in the former, and Eddie Starling in the latter. As Wideman has concluded, all the voices in Ford’s stories “are male. All white. All approximately 25 to 40 years old. Predictably, they speak about gaining, losing or holding on to manhood” (1987: 1). This applies as well to Ford’s The Sportswriter (1986). As its title indicates, the novel, which is set in the early 1980s, focuses on the life of an American sportswriter, Frank Bascombe, who lives in New Jersey and works in New York City. While Bascombe has an interesting professional life and a job that he likes, his personal life is marked by a number of painful events. The unexpected death of his son Ralph from Reye’s syndrome has been followed by his divorce. Moreover, Frank feels frustrated as a result of his failed attempts to win back his ex-wife X’s love, who has decided to move up to Connecticut with their two remaining sons, Paul and Clarissa. All these difficult experiences seem to have rendered Frank totally incapable of emotional commitment. In fact, Ford’s character, since he has lived alone, is undergoing what he describes as the “Existence Period”, a time of emotional isolation which entails the denial of affection for others. “Intimacy”, as Frank himself explains, “had begun to matter less to me” (1995: 96). Frank has come to realize that emotional commitment and love are indissolubly linked to pain and suffering. Love often entails suffering, for the beloved can suddenly disappear. Embittered by personal losses, Frank thus rejects as emotionally dangerous the possibility of living a life in relation to others and instead chooses a solitary life without such problems and complexities. In his own words, “a successful practice of my middle life, a time I think of as the Existence Period, has been to ignore much of what I don’t like or that seems worrisome and embroiling” (1995: 10). Following the main tenets of the ‘Existence Period’, Frank thus moves away from the world of emotion and affect. Even though he has girlfriends, such as Vicki and Catherine Flaherty, he avoids commitment to them. Believing that emotion might make him vulnerable to other people, Frank concentrates on his job as sports journalist and
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 41–55 ISSN 0210-6124 The Buddy as Anima? 49 avoids emotional engagements, both with women and other men. As Richard Ford scholar Elinor A. Walker has argued, “most disclosure between friends, full or not, scares the ‘bejesus’ out of him” (2000: 83). Despite his attempts to avoid human contacts, Frank establishes a few contacts with other men throughout the novel, perhaps most notably Walter Luckett, a friend from the Divorced Men’s Club to which both he and Frank belong. In his encounter with Walter, however, Frank becomes ‘the listener’ rather than the counselor. Since he tries to avoid all kinds of emotional attachments, Bascombe, as Walker (2000: 83) has noted, proves to be a reluctant confidant who hears confessions that are not particularly welcome. Above all, his encounter with Walter illustrates how Frank’s emotional disengagement is not only the result of his former traumatic personal experiences but also derives, as we shall see, from his traditional gender(ed) conceptions of masculinity and male homosexuality as a heterosexual man. Clearly, Frank’s relationship with Walter throughout The Sportswriter is marked by an evident lack of intimacy. As the novel begins, Frank is told by Carter Knott, another member of the Divorced Men’s Club, that Walter’s wife, Yolanda, left him for a water ski instructor, and that “it’d been a big shock”. However, Bascombe himself acknowledges that he knows little more about his friend (Ford 1995: 84). They have coincided in the same bars and cafes on several occasions, but they have always felt somehow uncomfortable in each other’s presence. For example, Frank remembers one occasion when they sat and stared at each other for several “horrible minutes” until Walter just got up and walked out without ordering anything or saying another word (1995: 85). Since then, they have just tried to ignore each other. Moreover, their (always sporadic) encounters have proved dispensable and impersonal. For, although the members of the Divorced Men’s Club go fishing together, one of the Club’s basic rules, as Frank himself explains, is that “we’re none of us much interested in…self- expression” (1995: 86). In Unreasonable Men: Masculinity and Social Theory (1993), masculinity scholar Victor Seidler has shown how, due to the works of Enlightenment philosophers such as Descartes, Spinoza and Kant, among others, reason has come to be defined in opposition to emotions, just as the mind has been set against the body and culture has been opposed to nature. Thus, emotions and feelings have been dismissed as forms of knowledge since they are considered to be ‘personal’ and ‘subjective’ as compared to the ‘objectivity’ and ‘impartiality’ of reason. Elaborating on that, Seidler (1994: 11-12) contends that the identification of reason with masculinity, which remains a defining feature of contemporary Western culture, has led to men’s emotional distance from one another. Moreover, the Enlightenment equation of rationality with masculinity had important consequences for both women and nonwhites. As men were associated with reason and the mind, women and ethnic groups were stereotyped as being closer to nature, the body and the sphere of emotions. Since they were seen as irrational beings, women and ethnic men were systematically silenced and excluded from the manly spheres of power and rationality, and had to prove themselves rational to be given access to mankind. While the Enlightenment equation of rationality with masculinity had a particularly detrimental effect on the lives of women and ethnic groups, such an equation
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 41–55 ISSN 0210-6124 50 Josep M. Armengol-Carrera also had a backwash effect on men, who have since been prevented from exploring and expressing their intrinsic emotional complexity. As Seidler himself puts it: As rational selves we [men] learn that we can only know ourselves through reason and that reason is the only way that we can guide our lives. We learn to silence our natures and so we also become deaf to the cries of others, learning to treat them as ‘emotional’ or ‘subjective’. (1994: 11-12, emphasis in the original) Disclosing one’s inner feelings entails acknowledging one’s emotional dependence and vulnerability. Since emotional self-disclosure, as Seidler (1994) notes, has been traditionally associated with women and effeminacy, it is no wonder, then, that in Richard Ford’s The Sportswriter the unspoken boundaries of conversation in the Divorced Men’s Club prohibit personal questions. The members of Frank’s Club, formed by heterosexual men, try to stay ‘rational’ and avoid any contact with each other that might be deemed effete or homosexual. Ultimately, then, it is homophobia that stands in between Frank and his friend Walter, preventing them from achieving a closer intimacy. As Elinor A. Walker has pointed out, “confessions of feelings are of course off limits between men such as Frank and Walter, who should be instead talking about the weather, sports, politics, anything but emotion” (2000: 87). Despite the strict rules of the Club, which prohibit emotional self-expression, Walter risks breaking the norms by confessing to his friend that he has recently had a homosexual affair. “I went in a bar in New York two nights ago, and I let a man pick me up”, Walter explains. “Then I went to a hotel…and slept with him” (Ford 1995: 92). Walter, who had always been heterosexual, insists that he feels pretty confused as a result and that he really needs to talk about this with a friend. Nevertheless, Frank is not interested in his friend’s story. Since he is utterly afraid of self-disclosure, he believes that things are better if you just let them be “lonely facts” (Ford 1995: 94). Between Frank and his friend one can thus see an inseparable gulf. While Walter explains that he needed to tell his secret simply because he does not like secrets and telling them makes him feel better (“Frank, I needed a context. I think that’s what friends are for” [1995: 94]), Frank accuses his friend of telling something he should have kept for himself, of disclosing an intimacy he absolutely did not have to disclose (1995: 98). If Walter insists on the value of friendship and describes Frank as his best friend in the world, the latter defines friendship simply as the amount of time you will squander on someone else’s calamities (1995: 94, 97). Taking into account Frank’s fear of intimacy with his friend, it is no wonder that Walter concludes that women make better friends than men do. As Luckett himself explains, “women are better at this kind of thing…I think women, Frank, sleep together all the time and don’t really bother with it. I believe Yolanda did. They understand friendship better in the long run” (Ford 1995: 94). Frank seems to remain equally distant from his friend over the course of their reunion in the eighth chapter of the novel. When Frank arrives home from work late at night, Walter Luckett is waiting for him. Even though Frank acknowledges that Walter looks really worried, Bascombe keeps relying on his manly code of emotional restraint, noting that Walter’s private life is an absolutely private matter, “which no one but him should be required to care a wink about” (Ford 1995: 183).
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While Walter is talking about his emotions to his friend, Frank does indeed appear to remain totally unconcerned. Moreover, he tries to justify his lack of interest on the basis of his little experience in listening to another man’s emotional experiences (Ford 1995: 183). When Walter asks him about his reactions when something worries him and cannot make it stop, Frank suggests different strategies, such as taking a walk, getting drunk or thinking “dirty thoughts” about women in bed (1995: 184). It seems particularly striking, however, that he does not mention the word friend at all. Unlike Walter, then, Frank Bascombe seems unable to ask for help and advice from a friend, sadly confessing that he has no real friend to confide in (Ford 1995: 87). Although Walter insistently declares that he feels “on display in this mess” and is “scared to death” (1995: page), Frank keeps avoiding dealing with Walter’s feelings, proving both unable and unwilling to understand his friend’s need for emotional release. As Frank confesses, “I am in no way interested in him…I’m simply performing a Samaritan’s duty I would perform for anyone (preferably a woman)” (Ford 1995: 184, 186, 187). Significantly, then, Frank’s words not only highlight his unwillingness to listen to a male friend, but also seem to confirm the idea that (heterosexual) men often associate emotional connection and intimacy with women and femininity, rather than men and masculinity. As Shamir and Travis have argued, gender seems to have been divided into two different traditions along the line of emotional expressivity: a feminine mode marked by effusion of sentiment and its representational conventions, and a masculine code, where affect is described negatively, “in terms of disavowal and repression or – in such instances where men ‘betray’ emotions – in terms of parody or ‘feminization’” (2002: 2). Despite the opposition from Frank, however, who insists that he is interested in the public rather than the private parts of a man, Walter proceeds to describe his affair with Warren, his homosexual date, whom he defines as a close friend. As Walter explains to Frank, “we’ve talked for three hours!…it was like a friendship, Frank…I was never closer to anyone in my life. Not Yolanda. Not even my mom and dad, which is pretty scary for a farm kid from Ohio” (Ford 1995: 188, 191, 192). Interestingly, Walter’s experience with his male lover seems to confirm that male friendship and homosexuality may prove confusingly proximate terms, although the continuum between homosociality and homosexuality in our contemporary society has, as Sedgwick (1992: 2, 3-4) has argued, been generally disrupted. Indeed, the only really close friendship between two men in Ford’s novel – namely, that between Walter and Warren – seems to demand a homosexual rather than homosocial relationship. Even as Frank continues to show little interest in his friend’s experiences, Walter eventually claims to feel much better after talking to Frank, giving Frank an extra key to his place in gratitude and kissing him. However, Frank’s homophobia re-emerges at once, rejecting Walter’s display of affection for him. “I shove him backwards and in one spasm of wretchedness shout, ‘Quit it, Walter, I don’t want to be kissed!’” (1995: 194). If Walter thus seems to (con)fuse male friendship with tenderness and intimacy, Frank is determined to keep a clear-cut distinction between the two. Actually, upon Walter’s departure, Frank finally decides to unplug the phone. “Don’t call, my silent message says, I’ll be sleeping. Dreaming sweet dreams. Don’t call. Friendship is a lie of life. Don’t call” (Ford 1995: 195).
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Walter will not call again. Unbeknownst to Frank, his friend is planning to commit suicide. And, unfortunately, he succeeds. For one thing, Walter proves unable to get over his divorce from Yolanda, which had been a big shock for him. For another, his relationship with Warren, which could have helped relieve Walter’s loneliness, is short- lived as well, which only adds to his intense feelings of loneliness and isolation. Facing this difficult situation, Walter decides to put his sadness to an end. Of course, Frank, who avoids any type of intimacy with men, completely fails to detect Walter’s feelings of despair. Frank himself confesses to his ex-wife X that he has no (male) friends, insisting that men simply feel things women do not (328, 329). Although here Frank seems to show off male individualism and self-sufficiency, we soon learn that he is just pretending. After all, he is quick to invite his ex-wife to visit Walter’s house with him, since it is clear that he is afraid of going there alone. Most (heterosexual) men, as Nardi (2004) has noted, tend to identify their wife as their closest friend and rely on women, rather than other men, for intimacy and emotional support. As Nardi himself puts it, true friendship is usually seen as something women are “more capable” (2004: 321-22) of offering and experiencing. Visiting Walter’s house with his ex-wife X, his best (and probably only true) friend, Frank realizes that, in reality, he did not know his friend at all. While Frank had assumed that Walter was not interested in him, he feels surprised, for example, to find a photo of the Divorced Men’s Club. It seems clear, therefore, that Walter valued friendship more than Frank does. This is confirmed when Frank realizes that on the night table there is a copy of his only prose fiction book, Blue Autumn, with the author’s picture face-up, Frank himself “looking remarkably lean and ironic” (Ford 1995: 333). On visiting Walter’s home, Frank Bascombe starts to reflect on the reason for Walter’s death. Unable to look for a better reason, he concludes that Walter killed himself because he liked to “sentimentalize” his life, which made him “regret everything” (Ford 1995: 334). Not surprisingly, of course, Frank attributes Walter’s death to his inability to control his emotions, to his tendency to “sentimentalize” his life, which is precisely what Frank has avoided doing all his life. Even after Walter’s death, Frank is described as a hard-boiled man, who remains faithful to the traditional definition of masculinity as emotional repression and self-control. In this way, he ends up declining any responsibility for Walter’s death. “‘Do you think you were supposed to help him?’” X (Frank’s ex-wife) says “…‘He should’ve helped himself’ is my answer, and in fact it is what I believe” (1995: 334-35). In his inside, however, Ford’s protagonist is fully aware that he could have helped Walter, or at least offered his help. “In a way, if it weren’t for me being his friend, he’d be alive” (Ford 1995: 350), Frank declares. Even though it is doubtful that Frank could have prevented Walter from killing himself, it is clear that he could have tried to do more for his friend. As Elinor A. Walker has pointed out, Frank rushes out of emotional situations, “terrified of the truth” (2000: 89). While Frank fails to help his friend in life, he does indeed attempt to help him after his death, probably to redeem his own sense of guilt. Walter leaves a suicide note for Frank where he asks Frank to look up his long-lost daughter. Frank will indeed look her up, only to find out that she does not, in fact, exist. Walter’s story about the illegitimate daughter shows how he has known Frank better than Frank has known him. Since Walter knows that Frank dislikes confessions and
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 41–55 ISSN 0210-6124 The Buddy as Anima? 53 self-disclosure, Walter tells his friend one final ‘secret’, sending him off to look for a truth, which, ironically, does not exist at all. As Frank himself admits: The whole goose chase was just his one last attempt at withholding full disclosure. A novelistic red herring. And I admire Walter for it, since for me such a gesture has the feel of secrecies, a quality Walter’s own life lacked, though he tried for it. (Ford 1995: 367) While Walter finally reveals his deep knowledge of his friend, Ford’s sportswriter thus remains equally contemptuous of full disclosure, emphasizing the value of ‘secrecies’. In his avoidance of self-disclosure, though, he remains emotionally alienated from his (same-sex) friends. As he associates male intimacy with homosexuality and emasculation, he avoids establishing any deep emotional relationship with other men. Homophobia thus prevents him not only from helping his friend Walter with his emotional problems, but also from exploring and expressing his own inner feelings. Because of his fear and hatred of male homosexuality, Ford’s protagonist thus ends up “missing the connection with men” (Walker 2000: 89).
4. Conclusions
From what has been argued here, then, one could draw some concluding remarks. First of all, even as the myth of male friendship has long pervaded (U.S.) cultural and literary history, it seems both possible and necessary to start to deconstruct it. After all, much recent masculinity scholarship has revealed, as we have seen, the precariousness of intimate friendships between (heterosexual) men, which has been explicitly linked to the birth of the homosexual as a social identity. Moreover, the emotional distance that often separates (heterosexual) men has also been explored in fiction, as exemplified by Richard Ford’s 1986 novel The Sportswriter, which not only deconstructs the classical myth of male friendship in American fiction but also illustrates, as has been seen, the role played by masculinity in the gendered construction of male friendship. Actually, this novel, in line with existing contemporary research work on masculinity as well as male intimacy and homophobia, illustrates Frank’s emotional estrangement from other men as deriving not only from former personal or individual traumas but also, and above all, from his socially learned conception of masculinity as the denial of emotions, his fears of feminization and emasculation and, ultimately, his blatant homophobia. Since men associate (same-sex) friendship and intimacy with the world of emotions, which have traditionally been considered feminine, they tend to link friendship to femininity and, therefore, to emasculation fears. Clearly, then, promoting male same- sex intimacy will imply questioning conventional ideas about masculinity (and femininity), challenging the traditionally reductive equation of emotions with femininity and, in the case of men, with feminization and emasculation. However, if, as it seems, male homophobia can prevent men from engaging in closer and richer friendships with other men, then changing traditional conceptions of masculinities and men’s friendships will necessarily entail undermining male homophobia, too. On the one hand, dispensing with homophobia will allow men to enrich their own emotional lives, which are often maimed and limited by the fear and hatred of homosexuality. Even Frank Bascombe in The Sportswriter can sometimes perceive and acknowledge the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 41–55 ISSN 0210-6124 54 Josep M. Armengol-Carrera limitations of the masculine code of emotional restraint, which keeps estranging him from his male friends. For example, while talking to his friend Wade Arcenault, girlfriend Vicki’s father, Frank himself realizes the emotional distance which male homophobia establishes between them: “I would like to hug him now…But I can’t. He would get the wrong idea and everything between us would be ruined just when it’s started so well” (Ford 1995: 240). Given the homophobic component of traditional forms of male bonding, it stands to reason, therefore, that increasing male intimacy will imply diminishing men’s fear and hatred of homosexuality. Just as reducing male homophobia will favor male intimacies, so the promotion of male intimacy will, hopefully, contribute to undermining male homophobia as well. On the other hand, and even more importantly perhaps, promoting male intimacy might also contribute to diminishing sexism and misogyny. After all, male homophobia, as Sedgwick (1992: 20) has skillfully noted, is also misogynistic, that is, it is not only oppressive of the so-called feminine in men, but also of women. It is already common knowledge that homosexual men have often been stereotyped as ‘feminine’ or ‘effete’ by heterosexual men. Of course, the main aim of this feminization process has been to annihilate homosexuals although, indirectly, it has been demeaning of women as well. In order to assert their superior masculinity, heterosexual men have recurrently tried to diminish homosexual men by associating them with femininity as a mark of inferiority. Since male homophobia thus reveals men’s fear and hatred of the ‘feminine’, fighting male homophobia by promoting male friendship and intimacy could, eventually, contribute to erasing sexism and misogyny, too. At the beginning of a new century, it becomes more necessary than ever, therefore, to continue the ongoing combat against (male) homophobia so as to try to re(dis)cover the lost intimacy between (heterosexual) men, which, however difficult, is far from impossible. As friendship scholar Drury Sherrod has concluded: By acknowledging their need for intimacy, and risking the pursuit of friendship, men can begin to achieve the kind of closeness that males have known in other times and other cultures…With commitment and persistence, men can learn to break through the bonds that confine them and rebuild the bonds that unite them. (1987: 238, 239)
Works Cited
Bem, Sandra Lipsitz 1993: The Lenses of Gender. Transforming the Debate on Sexual Inequality. New Haven and London: Yale UP. Crowley, John 1987: ‘Howells, Stoddard, and Male Homosocial Attachment in Victorian America’. Harry Brod, ed. The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies. Boston: Allen and Unwin. 301-24. Dellamora, Richard 1990: Masculine Desire: The Sexual Politics of Victorian Aestheticism. Chapel Hill: North Carolina UP. Fiedler, Leslie A. 1998 (1960): Love and Death in the American Novel. Normal: Dalkey Archive P. Ford, Richard 1995 (1986): The Sportswriter. New York: Vintage. Foucault, Michel 1984 (1976): History of Sexuality. Vol. I. Penguin: Harmondsworth. Freud, Sigmund 1955 (1914): ‘On Narcissism: An Introduction’ James Strachey, ed. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth. 67-103.
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––––– 1959 (1911): ‘Psychoanalytic Notes upon an Autobiographical Account of a Case of Paranoia’. Alix and James Strachey, eds. Collected Papers. New York: Basic Books. 3446-47. ––––– 1955 (1925): ‘Some Psychological Consequences of the Anatomical Distinction between the Sexes’. James Strachey, ed. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth. 241-60. ––––– 1955 (1912-13): Totem and Taboo: Some Points of Agreement between the Mental Life of Savages and Neurotics. James Strachey, ed. The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud. London: Hogarth. 1-161. Hammond, Dorothy and Alta Jablow 1987: ‘Gilgamesh and the Sundance Kid: The Myth of Male Friendship’. Harry Brod, ed. The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies. Boston: Allen and Unwin. 241-58. Hemingway, Ernest 1954 (1926): The Sun Also Rises. New York: Scribner. Kimmel, Michael 2000: The Gendered Society. New York and Oxford: Oxford UP. Melville, Herman 1996 (1851): Moby Dick, or the Whale. New York: Quality Paperback Book Club. Nardi, Peter M. 2004: ‘Friendship’. Michael Kimmel and Amy Aronson, eds. Men and Masculinities: A Social, Cultural, and Historical Encyclopedia. Santa Barbara: ABC-Clio Press. 321-24. O’Sullivan, Sibbie 1988: ‘Love and Friendship/Man and Woman in The Sun Also Rises’. Arizona Quarterly 44.2: 76-97. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky 1992 (1985): Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York: Columbia UP. Segal, Lynne 1997 (1990): Slow Motion: Changing Masculinities, Changing Men. London: Virago. Seidler, Victor J. 1994 (1993): Unreasonable Men: Masculinity and Social Theory. London and New York: Routledge. Shamir, Milette and Jennifer Travis, eds. 2002: Boys Don’t Cry? Rethinking Narratives of Masculinity and Emotion in the U.S. New York: Columbia UP. Sherrod, Drury 1987: ‘The Bonds of Men. Problems and Possibilities in Close Male Relationships’. Harry Brod, ed. The Making of Masculinities: The New Men’s Studies. Boston: Allen and Unwin. 212-39. Steinbeck, John 1974 (1937): Of Mice and Men. New York: Penguin. Walker, Elinor Ann 2000: Richard Ford. New York: Twayne. Watkins, John. ‘Romantic Friendship: Male’. Claude J. Summers, ed. GLBTQ: An Encyclopedia of Gay, Lesbian, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer Culture
Received 19 September 2008 Revised version accepted 21 January 2009
Josep M. Armengol-Carrera obtained his PhD at the University of Barcelona in 2006 and is currently Beatriu de Pinós Postdoctoral Fellow and Visiting Professor at SUNY. His research interests center on gender studies and American literature, in particular on representations of masculinity in contemporary U.S. fiction and cinema. Two recent publications of his are Armengol, Josep M. and Àngels Carabí, eds. 2009. Debating Masculinity. Harriman, TN: Men’s Studies Press, and Armengol, Josep M. (in press) The Fiction of Man: Re-Visions of Masculinity in Richard Ford’s Fiction.
Address: Center for the Study of Men and Masculinities, Sociology Department, State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, New York, 11794-4356. Telephone: 631 632 7700. Fax: 631 632 8203. USA.
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Planting Civilization in the Wilderness: The Intersections of Manifest Destiny and the Cult of Domesticity in Elizabeth Madox Roberts’s The Great Meadow
Constante González Groba Universidad de Santiago [email protected]
This essay explores the collusion of the domestic discourse and the imperialistic thrust of America abetted by the doctrines of Manifest Destiny in Roberts’s The Great Meadow. Roberts assigns a crucial role to domesticity in the project of civilizing the wilderness: despite her attraction to the frontier, the female protagonist, who controls those spaces traditionally assigned to women, makes the home and the hearth into essential tools for the cultivation of a new civilization. Roberts’s heroine is seen at the time when the house of America was beginning its imperialistic expansion. Domesticity, the sphere in which women exert moral influence, is here endowed with mobility, thus contributing significantly to the expansion of the nation. Diony is a female protagonist in the traditionally male plot of the outward journey, and her story of establishing a home in the wilderness combines the contracted space of the woman’s sphere with the hugely expansive one of the burgeoning American empire. Her journey into the wilderness is to plant the values of an exclusively white Anglo-Saxon American domesticity. Although we tend to conceive of the home as a stable center, domesticity becomes in Roberts’s novel spatially and conceptually mobile, capable of traveling to the new frontiers of the nation.
Keywords: domesticity; imperialism; Manifest Destiny; E. M. Roberts; frontier
Civilizando la tierra virgen: el Destino Manifiesto y el culto a la domesticidad en The Great Meadow, de Elizabeth Madox Roberts
Este artículo explora la relación entre la domesticidad y el impulso imperialista de los EE. UU. en la novela The Great Meadow, de Elizabeth Madox Roberts. La protagonista convierte el hogar en herramienta esencial para implantar una nueva civilización, justamente cuando la nación americana inicia su expansión imperialista. El ámbito doméstico, en el que la mujer ejerce su dominio moral, está aquí dotado de movilidad, con capacidad para contribuir a la expansión del país. En su intento de establecer un hogar en la tierra virgen, Diony combina el espacio restringido del ámbito femenino con el espacio expansivo del naciente imperio. Su viaje a las tierras salvajes de Kentucky tiene como objetivo implantar los valores de una domesticidad exclusivamente blanca y anglosajona.
Palabras clave: domesticidad; imperialismo; Destino Manifiesto; E. M. Roberts; frontera 58 Constante González Groba
Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way; The four first Acts already past, A fifth shall close the Drama with the Day; Time’s noblest Offspring is the last. (George Berkeley 1955: 373)
The Manifest Destiny of the nation unfolds logically from the imperial reach of woman’s influence emanating from her separate domestic sphere. Domesticity makes manifest the destiny of the Anglo-Saxon race, while Manifest Destiny becomes in turn the condition for Anglo-Saxon domesticity. (Kaplan 1998: 597)
A most popular writer in her day, Elizabeth Madox Roberts has not fared well on literary history’s roller coaster ride of critical opinion. Her first novel, The Time of Man (1926), was an instant success with readers and reviewers alike.1 It was praised by notable writers such as Sherwood Anderson, who said about it: “A wonderful performance. I am humble before it” (in Campbell and Foster 1956: 46).2 Ford Madox Ford signaled it as “the most beautiful individual piece of writing that has as yet come out of America” (in Slavick viii). The novel was chosen in October 1926 as a Book-of- the-Month Club selection and later published in England and translated into Swedish, German, Norwegian, Danish, Spanish and French. From the early 1930s onwards, though, sales of Roberts’s books fell dramatically, and her popularity plummeted further still following the publication of He Sent Forth a Raven in 1935. In the 1950s Roberts’s work enjoyed a revival, led by Edward Wagenknecht, who in his Cavalcade of the American Novel (1952) wrote that “her kind of poetic insight is the very thing that is needed to save the novel from its exhausted naturalism and sentimentalism” (1952: 396). Interesting reevaluations of Roberts’s achievement include Harry Campbell and Ruel Foster’s Elizabeth Madox Roberts: American Novelist (1956),3 containing valuable biographical information and extensive reference to Roberts’s journals and papers in the Library of Congress, and Earl H. Rovit’s Herald to Chaos: The Novels of Elizabeth Madox Roberts (1960), which remains the most insightful study of Roberts’s major works. One contributing factor to the renewal of interest in this Kentucky writer was the unprecedented fascination with modern southern literature by readers and critics. Willard Thorp reviewed her work extensively in the chapter ‘Southern Renascence’ in American Writing in the Twentieth Century (1960) and placed The Time of Man and The Great Meadow “among the classics of our literature” (1960: 240). In his introduction to the 1982 University of Kentucky Press edition of The Time of Man, William Slavick joined the ranks of Roberts’s admirers, asserting that this novel made her “the first
1 The research on which this paper is based was funded by the Spanish Ministry of Education and the European Regional Development Fund (project HUM2007-63438/FILO) as well as by the Xunta de Galicia (network 2007/145). 2 On reading the novel, Anderson wrote to Roberts: “My love of the book is beyond expression. . . . No one in America is doing such writing” (Slavick viii). 3 Campbell and Foster enthusiastically predicted that “The Time of Man and The Great Meadow will almost certainly endure as major American novels” (xvi).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 57–71 ISSN 0210-6124 Planting Civilization in the Wilderness 59 major novelist of the Southern renascence” (1982: vii), and expressed his confidence that renewed interest in feminism and southern art would guarantee its ultimate success. But so far none of these studies have had a lasting impact, and neither have their predictions proven true. The current relegation of Roberts to the margins of American literary history is even more surprising in light of the recent feminist enterprise of reclaiming and celebrating the regenerative and ritualistic dimensions of domesticity and traditional female culture, dimensions which are central to both The Time of Man and The Great Meadow, Roberts’s most successful works. The Great Meadow was Roberts’s fourth novel, but was first conceived of in 1915, even before she went to the University of Chicago to study English (Rovit 1960: 48). Set in the late-eighteenth-century settlement of Kentucky, the characters are intended to resemble the author’s own pioneer ancestors, who came to Kentucky along the Wilderness Road at a time when the West was free from the commercialism that would later assail it. The novel spans the years 1774 to 1781, the period when the lush region in today’s central Kentucky, called ‘The Great Meadow’ in the eighteenth century and later known as the Bluegrass, became a magnet that pulled thousands of people from Virginia and the Carolinas across the Appalachians to settle along the Cumberland and the Kentucky rivers. This ‘land rush’ was almost as powerful as the discovery of gold in California decades later. The settlement of Kentucky, which became the fifteenth state of the Union in 1792, involved a far more extensive frontier than any previous westward settlement, always contiguous with existing settlements. The trans-Appalachian emigrants suffered greatly from Indian attacks, much more so than the emigrants of the Overland Trail in the nineteenth century. During the Revolutionary War (1775-1783) the British garrisons around the Great Lakes were very generous providers for their Indian allies (Eslinger 2004: 65). Indian resistance to trans-Appalachian migration had all but disappeared by 1795. As John Murphy confirms, the plot of The Great Meadow derived from materials the author collected through traveling in her native Kentucky, from the archives of the Filson club in Louisville, and through the study of John Filson’s The Discovery, Settlement and Present State of Kentucke (1784), which contains ‘The Adventures of Colonel Daniel Boon’ and an account of the wars in Kentucky (1966: 110). The novel narrates the end of the adolescence of protagonist Diony Hall in Albemarle County, on the upper waters of the James river in Virginia; her marriage to the hunter Berk Jarvis; their journey to Kentucky in 1777 along the Wilderness Road through Camberland Gap; the trials and tribulations at Fort Harrod, where they stay before building their own house in the wilderness; the scalping of Berk’s mother, Elvira, by the Shawnees; Berk’s capture by the same tribe during his vengeful journey in search of Indian scalps; the Enoch Arden situation, created by Berk’s unexpected return after being given up for dead, by which time Diony had married another man, which forces her to choose between two husbands. The novel ends with the coming of peace to the frontier land and a hopeful outlook for Diony’s life in the new settlement. The Great Meadow has all the traits of a Western (movement westward, hunting men, Indians, buffalo, etc.) but the protagonist is not the mythic solitary American Adam, but rather a courageous ordinary young woman intent on finding herself and participating in the civilizing project. Annette Kolodny and other feminist critics have
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 57–71 ISSN 0210-6124 60 Constante González Groba denounced the traditional exclusion of women from the myth of the woodland hero which necessarily involves a male and “a quintessentially feminine terrain apparently designed to gratify his desires” (Kolodny 1984: 5). Daniel Boone, who appears briefly in The Great Meadow, is the myth’s earliest incarnation in his irresistible seduction by the virgin land of Kentucky. In the romanticized wilderness garden of what R. W. B. Lewis calls “the noble but illusory myth of the American as Adam” (1955: 89), an Eve would always be redundant. In spite of the adventurousness which impels her to leave her known parental world behind and follow the call of the wild, Diony repeatedly acknowledges that she is not the Boone type, defining herself most of the time within domestic spaces and through domestic activities. The purpose of the present essay is to explore the collusion of the domestic discourse and the imperialistic thrust of the nation abetted by the doctrines of Manifest Destiny and its antecedents. The beginning of the settlement of Kentucky coincided with the eight-year-old Revolutionary War. And the story of Diony, who is “past sixteen” (Roberts 1992: 15) when the novel opens in 1774, is intentionally set against the background of the Revolution. Thus the novel presents two major parallel movements: the growth and development of Diony as she tries to impose order on her internal world, and the westward movement of the new nation to bring order and civilization to the chaotic untamed wilderness. As Rovit observes, “both movements are characterized symbolically in the novel with images of birth and begetting” (1960: 49). The passage in which Diony tries on her mother’s dress signifies not only her discarding the fears of her approaching “adult being” and her identification with the “new self” (Roberts 1992: 61) she is in the process of accepting, but also the possibilities of the new nation for expansion. In fact, this is preceded by a passage about the initial skirmishes of the Revolutionary war: “There was war in Boston, the colony fighting the King’s men. Some said that all the colonies would snatch themselves free” (1992: 60). After she had agreed to wait for Berk, who returned to the wilderness to hunt and explore, “[n]ews came from Philadelphia in July: Congress had declared the colonies free” (1992: 90). Diony enthusiastically embraces Berk’s invitation to “go to the country behind the mountains and start a new world there” (1992: 110), at the end of Boone’s Wilderness Road. Berk is the frontiersman who returns in the spring to marry Diony, the man of the new season in her life. Thus Roberts deftly establishes a parallel between Diony’s movement to maturity and autonomy – by separating herself from her parents and place of birth – and the colonies separating from the parent country. The westward movement of this pioneer woman is the movement of a whole people into a new promised land or, rather, a new nation with an acute sense of its exceptionalist difference from the inherited history of the Old World. Diony challenges the authority of her father, who initially makes a futile attempt to forbid his daughter from leaving for the West, in the same way as the new independent nation challenged the authority and the greed of George III. Thomas Hall’s initial opposition expresses not only what Murphy terms “the inability of age to cope with progress” (1966: 112) but also the inability of the parent country to maintain authority in the colonies. The enterprise of migration, undertaken by men and women working side by side, was central to the shaping of the American national character and was, according to many, the moment at which the nation first began to be great.
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In The Great Meadow Roberts implicitly endorses Frederick Jackson Turner’s conception of the frontier which, according to Handley, becomes “a synecdoche for America and its exceptionalism that subsumes all stages of history and creates something new, that synchronically unmoors America from the history of the Old World” (2002: 60). Like Turner, Roberts emphasizes the significance of the frontier for all American history, and claims the West as the greatest force in American history and the shaper of American character. In a sense, her claim is that the true progenitors of the new experiment in world history were not the Founding Fathers, by establishing a nation in Philadelphia, but the western pioneers who forged a nation from the vast, implacable wilderness. Through the integration of fiction and historical fact, Roberts paints a picture of America in the process of being made simultaneously in the East (where the war is being fought) and out in the West; and she, like her heroine, privileges the latter, in an attempt to indicate that the idea of America is inseparable from the act of looking west, now that the New Jerusalem and the city upon a hill of the Puritans has given way to the promised land of milk and honey out West. Where Roberts departs from Turner, who made it clear that what was significant was also male, is in the assignment of epic seriousness to her female protagonist, and in allowing her full participation in what Rosowski terms “the epic ambition of articulating national identity” (1999: xi). The Five Oaks Farm, where Diony lives with her parents and siblings, is on the divide between the sophistication of the Tidewater and its amenities and the rawness of the frontier, at the intersection where “the tilled land and the unbroken forests touched their parts about Diony” (1992: 17). She is not only at the geographical intersection of civilized order and wild chaos, the divide is also within her very self. She acknowledges the refinement of her Tidewater relatives (her father’s side of the family) and is able to visualize “the life of brocaded gowns and powdered pompadours” (Rovit 1960: 51) that so intensely fascinate her younger sister Betty, who “denied any grace to this new country [Kentucky] that lay five hundred miles beyond mountain ranges and rivers” (1992: 67). Endowed with a creative mind, Diony feels that the West gives her the opportunity for moral influence and civilizing power. Uninfluenced by the fashion and artifice of society, she volunteers to act as handmaid in the task of rearing a nation in the wild of the West, where she hopes to find “a new country and a new way of being” (1992: 138). Her early exposure to the philosophy of Bishop Berkeley has instilled in her a strong desire for contact with the unordered infinity of the wilderness. Early in the novel she turns down a marriage proposal from the Tidewater gentleman Nathaniel Barlow, who offers a promise of elegance, gentility and a protected future. She is actually being pulled in the opposite direction: “Her whole body swayed toward the wilderness, toward some further part of the world which was not yet known or sensed in any human mind” (1992: 93-94). She prefers the freedom and the energy of the New World starting out in the wilderness, to the good manners of the old, with “folks that use all day inside of parlors and flower gardens and streets and such-like places” (1992: 74). In his largely mythical rendering of American history, Turner spoke of the growing resemblance between the Eastern border and the Old World, in contrast with the strength and the freedom of the new territories. In his essay ‘Contributions of the West to American Democracy’ (1903), he maintained that:
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European men, institutions, and ideas were lodged in the American wilderness, and this great American West took them to her bosom, taught them a new way of looking upon the destiny of the common man, trained them in adaptation to the conditions of the New World, to the creation of new institutions to meet new needs; and ever as society on her eastern border grew to resemble the Old World in its social forms and its industry, ever, as it began to lose faith in the ideals of democracy, she opened new provinces, and dowered new democracies in her most distant domains with her material treasures and with the ennobling influence that the fierce love of freedom, the strength that came from hewing out a home, making a school and a church, and creating a higher future for his family, furnished to the pioneer. (Turner 1998: 99) Diony wants to take part in the enterprise of creating a new nation, even a new race, through a more profound penetration by Americans of the wilderness of their continent. For Diony, progress is a matter of moving in a contrary direction to the conformity of Tidewater culture, of entering the wilderness that promises new, undreamed of possibilities for authentic regeneration. Roberts makes Diony an expression of the cultural mood of many who, like Jefferson and Jackson, identified the West with democracy and the East with the sterility of the privileged classes. They rejected the greedy commercialism of the Eastern seaboard in favor of a nation expanding through the appropriation and cultivation of new lands at exactly the time when a new nation of cultivators was replacing the mercantile commercial interests of the recent colonial past. As Kolodny observes, “[t]he wilderness was, after all, being claimed by those who pushed the agricultural frontier westward; and, both symbolically and historically, this implied the presence of women” (1984: 63). The female presence was indispensable for the propagation of the race and the cultivation of the orchards and gardens of the new world. In this context, the marriage of Diony to Berk Jarvis, the prototypical male hunter and fighter, could point toward a combination of the two impulses, or rather images, that according to Kolodny competed for prominence: one, present in the doctrine of Jefferson, that “embraced an expanding agricultural republic of small, family-sized farms” and required the female presence as cultivator and preserver of life, and the other, more anarchic and romantic, which “elevated to the status of heroic myth the figure of Daniel Boone as the solitary white hunter amid seductive and untouched virgin wilderness spaces” (Kolodny 1984: 62-63). Diony is a participant in an imperialistic enterprise which, in The Great Meadow, combines classical and American mythologies, the philosophy of Berkeley, and the rhetoric of Manifest Destiny as well as its historical antecedents. In spite of her quarrel with him, Diony remains Thomas Hall’s daughter throughout. He instills in her the love of words, of philosophical speculation and the intellectual ordering of reality. In a novel which depicts the creation of a new world, Roberts takes advantage of the resonance of Berkeley’s notion of creation through knowledge (esse est percipi). She describes Diony as “a creature of the mind, moving always more inwardly”, in contrast with Ellen Chesser, the protagonist of The Time of Man, who is “more a creature of the ground” (in Rovit 1960: 51) and, as such, she is always consciously motivated to impose form on chaos. Diony’s powerful desire to subdue the infinities of chaos that she faces in the wilderness makes her, as Rovit notes, “a fitting symbol for the American frontier experience; that is, she can be both pioneer and pioneering” (1960: 52). In The Great
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Meadow the meaning of the verb to know is remarkably dynamic and creative; to know is to impart order and design on that which lacks them. In her desire “to create rivers by knowing rivers” and “to make a world out of chaos” (Roberts 1992: 24), Diony is carrying the divine mission of the Puritans to create a ‘New Jerusalem’ in the wilderness and the creative urge of the Founding Fathers of the Republic one step further. If the reality which exists in the Eternal Mind is activated by the human mind, which creates through perception and thought, then Diony, as McDowell notes, “in essence creates that toward which she rides” (1963: 103), and by going to the wilderness she may uncover some aspects of the Divine Mind that she could not find elsewhere: “Countries stood forth then in Diony’s mind as having presence, there being many countries to be inhabited, each one different from the others” (Roberts 1992: 69). One of the justifications for colonization has always been the God-sanctioned impulse to take the light of civilization to those living in darkness, to give men with no recognized history the benefits and order of those who have enjoyed advances and progress. Diony’s father is a firm believer in the conquest and creation of the world through the expansion of the so-called superior civilizations. In his speech to his daughter he affirms that “Civilized Man is forever spreading more widely over the earth, historic Man bringing such men as have no history to humble themselves and learn their lesson. It’s a strong mark of the hidden purposes of the Author of all things” (Roberts 1992: 115). Roberts relates the imperialistic enterprise to Berkeley’s Great Design of an Eternal Spirit. Although Berkeley’s famous verse from the 1720s, “Westward the Course of Empire takes its Way” (‘Verses on the prospect of Planting Arts and Learning in America’ [Berkeley 1955: 373]) is not quoted in the novel, the idea clearly pervades the plot. In the 1840s the philosophy of Manifest Destiny conflated the sacred and the secular, and the idea of moving West attained a wider, indeed a world-wide, significance. In an article for the July 1845 issue of his United States Magazine and Democratic Review, the journalist John L. O’Sullivan argued that Americans had every right to settle in western lands, as far as the Pacific. He reasoned that God Himself wanted the country to expand westward, that it was the United States’ “manifest destiny to overspread and to possess the whole of the continent” (qtd. in Sonneborn 2002: 256). This idea, which was already commonplace in the eighteenth century, extended far back in history as translatio imperii. The medieval abbot and mystic Hugh of St. Victor wrote in De vanitate mundi that “everything that happened in the beginning of time took place in the East when the world began, while in the progress of the ages toward the end of time, which is the end of the world, all things come to an end in the West” (qtd. in Nordholt 1995: 9). The Empire of Greece had given way to that of Rome, only for northern Europe to take prominence after the fall of Rome, then the French and Spanish empires had dwindled as Britain’s power rose. Since the beginning of the colonization of America, many felt that Americans were fated to be the next to inherit this role. The achievement of American independence was immediately followed by the belief in a continental destiny which became one of the main factors in the development of American nationalism. In 1784 the Reverend Thomas Brockaway proclaimed that “Empire, learning and religion have in past ages been traveling from east to west, and this continent is their last western state . . . Here then is God erecting a
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 57–71 ISSN 0210-6124 64 Constante González Groba stage on which to exhibit the great things of his kingdom” (qtd. in Stephanson 1995: 19). This notion of a fated succession of world states and powers appears in The Great Meadow: When the hunter-explorer Nathan Jones describes the wilds of Kentucky at Five Oaks, the listeners express a conjecture which becomes a prophecy: “Such a country would breed up a race of heroes, men built and knitted together to endure. . . . A new race for the earth” (Roberts 1992: 13). Roberts strove to give mythic and epic resonances to her novels. In The Time of Man she made the Kentucky female tenant farmer a modern reincarnation of Odysseus; in The Great Meadow she makes Diony a modern-day female Aeneas who contributes in the advancement of civilization into the wilderness. One of the two books her father gives Diony for her journey is The Aeneid. He actually quotes the opening verses from this epic about the fated voyage of civilization from Troy to Rome: “I sing of arms and the hero who, fate driven, first came from the shores of Troy to Italy and the Lavinian coast, he, vi superum, by the power of the gods, much tossed about, multum jactatus, much tossed about on land and sea…” (1992: 121). Thus Diony’s journey is invested with the significance of that other mythico-epic journey to found an imperial nation, and her character exhibits the strength and the civic spirit of the Virgilian hero. In Roberts’s modern-day epic, she is the central figure who, with her endurance and her skilled performance of traditionally female activities, becomes a crucial agent of stability and order, taming the land and thus extending the dominion of civilization. Diony begins her journey with a strong sense of destiny and sees herself as part of the unstoppable progress of history, the agent of a plan, of the fate that has been impelling humankind from its birth, aware that she is taking her past into the future: “Suddenly . . . she knew herself as the daughter of many, going back through [her mother] Polly Brook through the Shenandoah Valley and the Pennsylvania clearings and roadways to England, Methodists and Quakers, small farmers and weavers, going back through Thomas Hall to tidewater farmers and owners of land” (1992: 138). For the mission to succeed, Diony’s husband, Berk Jarvis, is a necessary element. As a hunter and Indian killer, he subdues the primitive forces which have to be tamed or eliminated to make way for civilization. The role reserved for the Indians in The Great Meadow does not differ from that traditionally assigned to them in formulaic western novels and movies: the racial ‘others’ against whom the new nation constructs its identity. Both the philosophers of Manifest Destiny and Turner’s mythical version of American history made use of the binary opposition of savagery and civilization in order to justify the western expansion, and made Americanness an exclusive trait of the white man. In Roberts’s novel the only dissenting voice with respect to the Indians is that of Diony’s mother, who vehemently expresses her conviction that the land in Kentucky “belongs to the Indians”, that “[h]it’s Indian property. The white man has got no rights there” (1992: 104-05). Everybody else exhibits the inferior ethical standards of the day, sharing in the racist sense of ‘natural right’. For Berk the Indians are “a poor sort, under all their paint and war-noises” (1992: 107), and in the Harrod fort, in Kentucky, there is consensus that daring white males are “better deserving than they [the Indians] of a fine caneland” (1992: 226). The Indians are always violent intractable “savages” (1992: 100, 101, etc.), “a dunce race” (1992: 332) untouched by the light of reason, treacherous, even cannibalistic. It seems, indeed, as if there are no explicitly
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 57–71 ISSN 0210-6124 Planting Civilization in the Wilderness 65 presented American agents of violence in The Great Meadow, which coincides in this respect with Turner’s frontier thesis, as if the agency of American imperialism were put in the passive voice to preserve the sense of American innocence. The aggressors here are actually the Indians, who in a key passage kill and scalp Berk’s mother and come very close to killing Diony herself. The colonists are the saviors who bring the light of reason and civilization, and no one is to blame since they are agents of the inevitable, fated course of history. They are part of what David Minter calls “a story in which the dispossession and the deaths of Native Americans seem to be sanctioned if not by God at least by history” (1994: 14). Roberts had read Filson, who has the Indians say, “God made the white flesh masters of the world … and we all love rum”, and speculates that the Indians represent the remnants of a fallen or degenerated race. Filson sees the Indians as racially inferior to the white Americans and therefore as a people whom it is right to displace (Slotkin 2000: 275). If the frontier is “the meeting point between savagery and civilization” (Turner 1998: 32), the westward movement is easily legitimized by suggesting that white settlers were the bearers of civilization and progress. For the second Adam to begin its history in the new world of the frontier, the first Adam (the Indian) has to be expelled from his Garden of Eden. The Great Meadow is a heavily dichotomized novel, informed not only by the binary opposition between civilization and savagery but also that between male and female. The central issue is the role that Roberts assigns to woman in the project of planting civilization in the wilderness. Roberts’s conception of femininity is actually very traditional. She shares the gender stereotypes of the time – a set of interrelated roles for women and men – writing, as she was, long before the emergence of the notion of gender as a socially determined and culturally constructed system. A good example is this much quoted passage, during the harsh passage through the Gateway among the cliffs, which explicitly presents a dichotomous conception of gender roles: Together, men and women, they went slowly forward, the men to the fore, the man’s strength being in the thrust, the drive, in action, the woman’s lateral, in the plane, enduring, inactive but constant. They [men and women] marched forward, taking a new world for themselves, possessing themselves of it by the power of their courage, their order, and their endurance. (Roberts 1992: 168) The spaces Diony controls are those traditionally assigned to women. In spite of her penchant for the wilderness, she does not reject the idea of a womanhood devoted to the home and the hearth, but actually makes them essential tools in the task of planting civilization. Her longing for a home of her own is actually the spring that impels Diony to action all along. Early in the novel she realizes with dismay “that Five Oaks would not be her place”, as the land will go to her brothers and she will “have to marry to get a place” (1992: 18). Later she considers the possibility of going with Barlow to the Tidewater and imagines “herself settled, at home there, on land she owned for her own home” (1992: 65). But she feels that her real aim is to build her home in the wilderness. Thus the narrative of the journey is also going to be the narrative of her home. By creating a female pioneer Roberts deviates from the romantic tradition which requires solitary flight from family and community. The myth not only excludes women from this flight into the wilderness, but also casts them as the domestic
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 57–71 ISSN 0210-6124 66 Constante González Groba conservers from whom the heroic Adam figure must escape. R. W. B. Lewis describes the American Adam as the male hero “untouched and undefiled by the usual inheritances of family and race; an individual standing alone, self-reliant and self- propelling, ready to confront whatever awaited him with the aid of his own unique and inherent resources” (1955: 5). Americans have long celebrated this prototypical figure, to be found in the landscape of the American West but who never actually settled the West by himself, or even lived there in his glorious isolation. The Marlboro Man type is a social creation that embodies a profoundly asocial ideal which excludes female experience and has no appeal for the woman writer. What we find in Roberts, on the other hand, is the collusion of the ideology of imperialism with the cult of domesticity. The female is allowed mobility only after she is married and can follow along the male journey, because her role as grower, nurturer and housewife is necessary for the colonization of the wilderness. She is, after all, identified with the maternal qualities of the very land which is going to breed a new race of men. Kolodny observes that, “[l]ike their husbands and fathers, [pioneer] women too shared in the economic motives behind emigration; and like the men, women also dreamed of transforming the wilderness. But the emphases were different” (1984: xii). Women writers like Roberts make female pioneers the agents that bring with them the civilization which tames and orders the wilderness, following on after intrepid males such as Boone have blazed the trails. In his review of Owen Wister’s The Virginian (1902), Theodore Roosevelt praised the hyper-masculine western hero who exhibited “the great virile virtues – the virtues of courage, energy and daring; the virtues which beseem a masterful race – a race fit to fell the forests, to build roads, to found commonwealths, to conquer continents, to overthrow armed enemies” (in Faragher 2000: xii). But there is no way civilization can flourish in an exclusively male wilderness, and there are many who consider the pioneer women to be the true civilizers of a rough and tumble frontier. In her essay ‘Manifest Domesticity’, Amy Kaplan says that we should not think of domesticity as a static condition but as a process of domestication, which entails conquering and taming the wild and the alien. As she argues, “[d]omestic in this sense is related to the imperial project of civilizing, and the conditions of domesticity often become markers that distinguish civilization from savagery” (1998: 582). The development of domestic discourse in America is contemporaneous with the discourse of Manifest Destiny, and America was imagined as a home at the time when its geopolitical borders were expanding rapidly through violent confrontations with Indians, Mexicans and others. Roberts sets her heroine in a period prior to the heyday of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny, precisely at the time when the house of America was beginning its imperialistic expansion, and Diony Hall is one of the women who, although excluded from the grand exploits reserved for the Boone kind of man, exerted the moral influence (‘the empire of the heart’) in the domestic sphere, which would become an engine of national expansion. Thus domesticity not only draws boundaries between the privacy of the home and the outside world controlled by men, it also becomes “the site from which the nation reaches beyond itself through the emanation of woman’s moral influence” (Kaplan 1998: 586). In The Great Meadow, the home, usually conceived of as a restricted and rigidly ordered interior space, is in collusion with its apparent opposite, “the boundless and undifferentiated space of an infinitely
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 57–71 ISSN 0210-6124 Planting Civilization in the Wilderness 67 expanding nation” (Kaplan 1998: 583). Rather than a merely feminine counterforce to the male activity of territorial conquest, domesticity is endowed with mobility and thus greatly contributes to the expansion of the nation. Diony is the protagonist of a traditionally male plot of the outward journey, and her story of establishing a home in the wilderness combines the contracted space of woman’s sphere with the expansion of American empire. She makes her journey into the wilderness to plant the values of an exclusively white American domesticity. Although we tend to conceive of the home as a stable center, domesticity becomes spatially and conceptually mobile, capable of traveling to the new frontiers of the nation. Diony does not have the thrust of the male hunter, but she does have all the strengths of the female sex. She acknowledges that she is not the Boone kind, but she has a more sophisticated sense of her cultural and historic role than either Boone or her husband Berk. The latter’s strength and thrust are necessary to conquer the wilderness, but in the long run they would be futile without Diony’s tamer insight and influence. In her notes, Roberts wrote that “Diony represents ordered life and the processes of the mind, the mind life. She is not of the Boone kind. She feels lost in an indefinite universe. She wants ordered ways. She wants beauty and dignity and ceremony and the reasons of all things” (qtd. in McDowell 1963: 96-97). Diony takes active part in the creation of a new world out West; she actually “knew herself to be the beginning of a new world. All about her were beginnings” (Roberts 1992: 190). The fulfilling of this destiny in Roberts’s historical novel is not a matter of grand marches and fierce Indian fights. Her American Eve lays the foundations of the ‘new world’ through the simple everyday activities of spinning, weaving, sewing, cooking, cultivating a garden, and through the provision of those qualities that soothe and socialize the roughness of men and ensure social stability.4 According to Kolodny, for the American Eve the word paradise denoted domesticity, whereas for the American Adam it was “an invitation for mastery and possession of the vast new continent” (1984: 54), although this is perhaps to some extent another rigid, unrealistic dichotomy. Roberts is one of those women writers who, according to Helen Levy, “understand that the American nation was made up of little neighborhoods following in the wake of Daniel Boone’s fabled demand for ‘elbow room’, neighborhoods and civilizations formed out of family recipes, wedding quilts, faithful letters from the East, and carefully preserved rootstocks and herbal remedies from dooryard gardens” (Levy 1992: 228). Diony’s contribution to the preservation and advancement of white Anglo-Saxon civilization is made clear in the passage describing the gifts that her mother and father give her before she sets out for the West. From her mother she receives “cuts of wooden cloth, the blankets, seeds for a garden, a few vessels, knives and spoons”, whereas her father gives her “two books from those on the shelf” (Roberts 1992: 134).
4 Kolodny says that “women quite literally set about planting gardens in these wilderness places”, and that they “claimed the frontiers as a potential sanctuary for an idealized domesticity”. Rather than engaging in the typically male exploration and massive exploitation of the continent, “[t]hey dreamed, more modestly, of locating a home and a familial human community within a cultivated garden” (1984: xiii).
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A later passage, in the Kentucky part, makes clear how the novel fuses the chronicle of the personal development of Diony with the cultural myth of the development of American experience and a symbolic rendering of the progress of mankind. Diony has a long dream vision of “a new world, the beginning before the beginning”, in which the advance of civilization is presented as an unending series of new beginnings. It begins with “fields turned up by the plow”, in consonance with Jefferson’s ideal, and soon expands to “sheep sprinkled over a pasture or turned in on a hillside to crop the stubble and glean a fine rich eatage for themselves”. It then advances to include the beginnings of a civil society whose achievement required the collaboration of both the Boone kind and the Diony kind, with “stone walls and rail fences setting bounds to the land”, a land which “stands now, in vision, as owned, this man’s farm beside that man’s, all contained now, bounded, divided, and shared, and one sinks into the security and lies down to rest himself. Through the farms run lanes and well pounded roads, making a further happiness, ways to go to meet a neighbor at his own house”. Diony’s hopes are still innocent and her dream does not contemplate the violation of the peaceful garden or the disruption of the harmonious community by the need to turn nature into wealth. In the vision, the human mind imposes order on chaos and “[t]he wearying infinitives of the wilderness come to an end” (Roberts 1992: 207, 208, 209). This is related to the episode in which Diony, accidentally locked out of the fort, spends one night in the open and feels the frightening alien touch of the wilderness and “[t]he infinitives of life, . . . endlessly growing, [which] oppressed her, and she was afraid, less of the wolf-cries toward the south than of the indefinite earth” (1992: 273) and “[t]he indefiniteness of the outside earth, beyond herself, became a terror” (1992: 275). Diony never surrenders to the chaos around her, and she finds inside herself the power and the faith to carry on with life, and the civilization of which she has been such a powerful agent allays any fears of indefiniteness. Thus the novel merges the chronicle of colonization with one of Roberts’s major themes: the individual creation of order out of the chaos of sensation. It is as if civilization, with its potential for order and symmetry, were immanent in the wilderness, waiting for the Berkeleian human mind to know and thus create it. A rationally controlled environment will realize, through agrarian cultivation, nature’s inherent power to sustain civilization. In keeping with Roberts’s conviction that “the sovereign part of man is his mind” and her assertion that Diony is “a creature of mind” (qtd. in Rovit 1960: 61), the vision is crowned by the superior achievement of “knowledge, of wisdom brought under beautiful or awful sayings and remembered, kept stored among written pages and brought together then as books”, books in which one might “search the terrible pages, looking for beauty, looking for some final true way of life”. In those books “Man walks slowly down through the centuries, walking on the stairs of the years” (Roberts 1992: 212). The reverence for books as repositories of human culture that has characterized Diony all along is a powerful force that balances the anti-intellectualism of the American Boone-type male hunter represented in the novel by Berk. Diony’s vision of a civil society is actually an implicit justification of the colonization and repossession of the Indian territories. According to the white settler’s argument, only work and improvement confer the right to ownership, not previous ownership, or ‘stewardship’, as American Indians might perhaps have expressed their
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 57–71 ISSN 0210-6124 Planting Civilization in the Wilderness 69 own relationship with the land. The Indian, according to the white settler, has no right to the land simply because he was there first. The rightful owner is the one who converts wilderness into settlement and land into farms. This is the point made by Tocqueville at the end of the first chapter of his Democracy in America: Although the vast country that I have been describing was inhabited by many indigenous tribes, it may justly be said, at the time of its discovery by Europeans, to have formed one great desert. The Indians occupied without possessing it. It is by agricultural labor that man appropriates the soil, and the early inhabitants of North America lived by the produce of the chase. Their implacable prejudices, their uncontrollable passions, their vices, and still more, their virtues, consigned them to inevitable decay. The ruin of these tribes began from the day when Europeans landed on their shores; it has proceeded ever since, and we are now witnessing its completion. (1980: 26) By the novel’s end, Diony has already given birth to two boys, one by Berk and one by Muir. As Murphy says, “[h]er second marriage and the birth of Muir’s son, Michael, had successfully tapped the resources of her womanhood, resources precious to frontier life, which would have been wasted during the [three] years of Berk’s absence” (1966: 115). The white settlers needed not only to claim the land but to populate it and work it as quickly as possible, in order to hold onto it. The success of the settlements depended on the quick growth of populations there, and hence female reproduction became an essential component of the conquering of the land. The explorers and trail blazers like Boone made the physical move necessary for the initial establishment of settlements; for these same settlements to move forwards over time required marriages and descendants. Significantly, the novel closes with the image of Diony nursing her baby in her small outpost of civilization on the borders of the wilderness. The novel’s ending emphasizes once again the role of rational (that is, white) man in bringing order to chaos. It is another beginning in a novel pervaded by images of fertility and rebirth: “For a little while she felt that the end of an age had come to the world, a new order dawning out of the chaos that had beat through the house during the early part of the night. Her thought strove to put all in order before she lay down to sleep. She felt the power of reason over the wild life of the earth” (1992: 337). It was precisely reason, the “strong part” (1992: 338) of the individual, that allowed Berk to outwit the ‘wild’ men and avoid being cannibalized (he escaped from the Shawnee cannibals when he convinced them of the indestructibility of the reasoning part of his being). The same power later guided Diony to make the right decision when choosing Berk, who had had first claim to her. After three years as the Boone-type hunter and Indian killer, Berk is now stripped of his hunting shirt and moccasins, and ready for a new phase in the colonization, which will require a larger family and intense cultivation of the land. The new stage in his and Diony’s life, and in the life of the American nation, is symbolized by their house in the settlement. Berk says that “[i]t’s a very good house, … But it’s not the whole house I set out to build here. I’ll make another part equal to this and a fine wide passage between” (1992: 336). He seems to have come round to her way of thinking, which had opposed Berk’s revenge expedition: “I came to Kentucky to get … What did I come here for? I came to get a fine farm in the cane . . . . A fine high house, fields all about it” (1992: 244). The latest news from the East is that “George Washington had got the King’s army in a pocket at Yorktown” (1992: 335). The house
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 57–71 ISSN 0210-6124 70 Constante González Groba of America is indeed in the process of a dramatic expansion of its geopolitical borders. And for the building of this magnificent house, women like Diony, who raise the children and work at the spinning wheel or with the needle, and cultivate the gardens, are as necessary as the men who do the hunting and fight the battles. These women have always been precious and indispensable agents in the construction of the ever expanding edifice of America. This expansion necessarily involves the consideration of the native Indians as undomesticated aliens who are exterminated or subjugated so that the nation might be preserved as a protected domestic space. A colonization which embodies the feminine values of domesticity actually pursued the establishment of domesticity in America as exclusively white. The capacity for domesticity was thus considered an exclusive, defining characteristic of the Anglo-Saxon civilization. The Diony who left Five Oaks because she did not have the land to build her home there, now has her homestead on the frontier, and the ephemeral fragility of the wilderness is slowly giving way to the stable rhythms of farm and family. The horizontal plane of advance and exploration has given way to the vertical one of the kind of growth that depends on roots thrust into the ground. The frontier is no longer a line to arrive at but an area inviting penetration. After Diony has fulfilled her mission to transport female influence beyond her original home and beyond the nation’s original home along the Eastern seaboard, we witness a certain retraction of women’s sphere, which moves back within the domestic boundaries traditionally policed by woman to prevent the threat of the wild from both outside and inside the family unit. As the frontier becomes ‘civilized’, Diony will become sovereign of her home, at the cost of withdrawal from the outside world.
Works Cited
Berkeley, George 1955: The Works of George Berkeley Bishop of Cloyne. Vol. 7. Ed. A. A. Luce and T. E. Jessop. London: Thomas Nelson. Campbell, Harry M. and Ruel E. Foster 1956: Elizabeth Madox Roberts: American Novelist. Norman: U of Oklahoma P. Eslinger, Ellen 2004: ‘Introduction: Early Explorations’. Running Mad for Kentucky: Frontier Travel Accounts. Ed. Ellen Eslinger. Lexington: UP of Kentucky. 1-66. Faragher, John Mack 2000: Women and Men on the Overland Trail. 2nd ed. New Haven: Yale UP. Handley, William R. 2002: Marriage, Violence, and the Nation in the American Literary West. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Kaplan, Amy 1998: ‘Manifest Domesticity’. American Literature 70: 581-606. Kolodny, Annette 1984: The Land before Her: Fantasy and Experience of the American Frontiers, 1630-1860. Chapel Hill: U of North Carolina P. Levy, Helen F. 1992: Fiction of the Home Place: Jewett, Cather, Glasgow, Porter, Welty, and Naylor. Jackson: UP of Mississippi. Lewis, R. W. B. 1955: The American Adam: Innocence, Tragedy, and Tradition in the Nineteenth Century. Chicago: U of Chicago P. McDowell, Frederick P. W. 1963: Elizabeth Madox Roberts. New York: Twayne. Minter, David 1994: A Cultural History of the American Novel: Henry James to William Faulkner. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
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Murphy, John J. 1966: ‘Elizabeth Madox Roberts and the Civilizing Consciousness’. The Register of the Kentucky Historical Society 64: 110-20. Nordholt, Jan Willem Schulte 1995: The Myth of the West: America as the Last Empire. Trans. Herbert H. Rowen. Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans. Roberts, Elizabeth Madox 1992 (1930): The Great Meadow. Nashville: J. S. Sanders. Rosowski, Susan J. 1999: Birthing a Nation: Gender, Creativity, and the West in American Literature. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P. Rovit, Earl H. 1960: Herald to Chaos: The Novels of Elizabeth Madox Robers. Lexington: U of Kentucky P. Slavick, William H. 1982: ‘Ellen Chesser: A Journey of the Mind’. Introduction. Elizabeth Madox Roberts. The Time of Man. Lexington: UP of Kentucky. vii-xx. Slotkin, Richard 2000 (1973): Regeneration through Violence: The Mythology of the American Frontier, 1600-1860. Norman: U of Oklahoma P. Sonneborn, Liz 2002: The American West: An Illustrated History. New York: Scholastic Inc. Stephanson, Anders 1995: Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill and Wang. Thorp, Willard 1960: American Writing in the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Tocqueville, Alexis de 1980: Democracy in America. The Henry Reeve text as revised by Francis Bowen. New York: Knopf. Turner, Frederick Jackson 1998 (1903): ‘Contributions of the West to American Democracy’. John Mack Faragher, ed. Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner. New Haven: Yale UP. 77-100. ––––– 1998 (1893): ‘The Significance of the Frontier in American History’. John Mack Faragher, ed. Rereading Frederick Jackson Turner. New Haven: Yale UP. 31-60. Wagenknecht, Edward 1952: Cavalcade of the American Novel. New York: Henry Holt.
Received 29 May 2008 Accepted 24 October 2008
Constante González Groba is Professor of American literature in the English Department of the University of Santiago de Compostela, where he obtained his PhD. His main research interest is the fiction of women writers from the American South. He has published essays on Carson McCullers, Lee Smith, Lillian Smith, Kate Chopin, Elizabeth Madox Roberts, and others. His most recent publication is the book On Their Own Premises: Southern Women Writers and the Homeplace (Universitat de València, 2008).
Address: Departamento de Filoloxía Inglesa, Universidade de Santiago,15782, Santiago (A Coruña). Tel. +34 981563100 ext. 11894. Fax +34 981574646
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Salas y Quiroga’s Anglo-Saxon England: a Psychological and Sociological Portrait of Power
Paloma Tejada Caller Universidad Complutense Madrid [email protected]
The aim of this paper is ultimately to contribute new insights from current explorations of Englishness in Spain. More specifically, a selected narrative written by Jacinto Salas y Quiroga in 1846 is carefully analysed from a cross-cultural standpoint, taking into account the ideological and discursive bases on which nations are built. The article focuses on how A-S England is constructed in Salas’ book, as opposed to the image portrayed in other narratives of a similar nature, published in Spain during the nineteenth century. After the analysis of Salas’ textual, rhetorical and linguistic strategies, results show that in this original contribution, the expected Anglo-Saxons’ territorial and ethnic identity occupies only a background position, whereas the dynamic interaction of two conceptual types or characters, the powerful vs. the weak, is driven to the forefront. Through the use of heterodox schemes Salas deviates from the Spanish common cultural and historiographic practice, and completes a powerful and novel image of Anglo- Saxons, which performs a well-defined function in mid-nineteenth century Spain.
Keywords: Englishness; social identity construction; cultural discourse; otherness; reception of Anglo-Saxons; nineteenth century Spain
La Inglaterra anglosajona de Salas y Quiroga: la imagen psicológica y sociológica del poder
El presente artículo proporciona nuevas perspectivas al estudio de la identidad inglesa en España y más concretamente al análisis intercultural de las bases lingüísticas y discursivas sobre las que se van construyendo las identidades nacionales. El estudio se centra en la imagen de los anglo-sajones que proyecta un texto escrito por Jacinto Salas y Quiroga en 1846, en contraste con la que ofrecen otros textos de naturaleza similar publicados en la España del siglo XIX. Una vez analizadas las estrategias textuales, retóricas y lingüísticas del texto de Salas, se concluye que en esta obra singular la esperable identidad territorial y étnica de los anglo-sajones queda relegada a un segundo plano para hacer relevante la interacción dinámica entre dos “tipos” conceptuales y sociales: los poderosos frente a los débiles. Al apartarse de la práctica historiográfica habitual y utilizar estrategias heterodoxas, Salas nos ofrece una novedosa y enérgica imagen de los anglosajones, que cumple una función muy concreta en la época en que fue dibujada.
Palabras clave: Construcción de identidad; recepción de anglo-sajones; España; Siglo XIX 74 Paloma Tejada Caller
1. Introduction
The present contribution will be structured as follows. In the introduction, the figure of Salas will be revised and a necessary framework for the analysis of his book will be sketched, focussing on the historiographic trends prevailing in nineteenth century Spain and on the conventional image of Anglo-Saxon England constructed in other Spanish narratives of the period. Section 2 will be devoted to the analysis and discussion of the strategies used in the construction of a new image of Anglo-Saxon England and to the functions performed by Salas’ identifying narrative. Finally, in section 3 some relevant conclusions will be drawn from the previous analysis.1
1.1. An unacknowledged figure
More than one hundred and fifty years after his death, Salas y Quiroga remains a little- known figure both in Spain and abroad. However, the revision of recent publications on the subject suggests that after a long period of oblivion, only tempered by Alarcos (1943) and certain foreign literary critics, general histories of Spanish literature have begun to include Salas’ name in their accounts, mainly from the 1990s (Brown 1953; Varela 1951; Peers 1973; Ferreras 1980; Romero Tobar 1994; Urrutia 1995; Benítez 1997; Marrast 1997; Patiño 2002). In most books, Salas is acknowledged both as a romantic poet and as a forerunner of the so-called realistic novel of the nineteenth century. (Sebold 1992: 127, 2007: 142; Patiño 2002). A second sub-set of contemporary publications draws the reader’s attention to Salas’ journalistic activity. It is noticed that he founded several journals and newspapers, and contributed to many others. Finally, a third group of contributions focuses on Salas’ travels through Cuba and South American lands (González del Valle 2006) and, more particularly, on his description of foreign railways as an early witness of technological advances (Azorín 1912; Rodríguez Ortiz 2001, 2003). However, no publications seem to have been devoted to Salas’ history writing. His two volumes on the History of England and the History of France remain unanalysed, to my knowledge, despite the fact that Salas’ History of England is one of the few early Spanish publications on the subject and yields interesting results, as seen in the broader context of Spanish historical writings on England. Hence the interest of this contribution. Likewise, little is known of Salas’ life. Most critics emphasize the same facts, reproducing to a large extent the short introduction Eugenio de Ochoa devoted to his friend in 1840. Jacinto de Salas y Quiroga was born in La Coruña, on February 14, 1813, the son of a distinguished Galician magistrate. He studied in Galicia and Madrid, but was soon sent to Bordeaux, where he grew to be an ardent adherent of the Romantic literary movement through such authors as Byron, Lamartine and Hugo. In 1830 he set sail for America and settled in Lima. In 1832 Salas returned to Europe, lived in England
1Work for the present article was carried out under the auspices of the Research Project HUM2005-08221-C02-01, financed by the Spanish Ministry of Education and Science.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 73–90 ISSN 0210-6124 Salas y Quiroga’s Anglo-Saxon England 75 and France and published his first volume, Poesías, in 1834. In 1839 Salas returns to America to hold a diplomatic position. After he came back to his country, he devoted himself to his literary and journalistic activity. Salas died in Madrid in 1849. Most critics share the opinion that Salas could have been one of the most important Spanish representatives of the Romantic Movement (Alarcos 1943; Brown 1953; Patiño 2002). They also agree on Salas’ singular understanding of literature. In Patiño’s quoting of Peer’s words, Salas practices an ‘ethical romanticism’ (Patiño 2002). He unceasingly defends the regenerating power of literature, its didactic and leading role, its capacity to stimulate a collective moral renewal. Hence the writer’s social responsibility towards humankind. It is this ethical spirit and social concern that moved him to write his History of England, and that which inspired his portrait of the Anglo- Saxons, as will be seen later on.
1.2. History writing in nineteenth century Spain
The Spanish nineteenth century is known to be a period of high political tension and a striking isolation from Europe’s significant industrial and cultural enrichment. These facts necessarily determined the trends followed by Spanish history writing, in an age of utmost importance for the development of the discipline. (Pasamar and Peiró 1987: 4, 10; Peiró 1990: 108; García Puchol 1993). The 1840s is often quoted as a relevant period for an understanding of the evolution of history in Spain. According to Peiró and Pasamar (2002: 11), the effects of two civil wars, two exiles and a bitter persecution of ideas led to a break with eighteenth century traditions. From the 1840s the State and its elites became historians; history became a scientific discipline within a hierarchical system of academic institutions, and it was introduced as a subject in educational syllabuses. That is, from the 1840s, history (text)books came forward to popularize the account of the past among a wide reading public (Peiró 1993:39). Furthermore, they acquired political and social relevance, since history became a component in the socialization and national identification of future citizens (Pasamar and Peiró 1987; Peiró 1990, 1993; García Puchol 1993; Valls Montés 1999; Peiró and Pasamar 2002). These aims demanded on the one hand the construction of a national history and, on the other, an increasing number of larger universal histories, which spread historical images suitable to contemporary values (Peiró 1990: 116). As García Puchol puts it, history should “introduce young people to political education and instruct them in the body of moral, ethical and good-behaviour principles” (1993: 38).2 In addition, the ideological disputes which separated Spanish traditional Catholics from freethinkers and other more radical groups of dissenters grew more salient from the 1840s. It is by this time that the first serious attempts of institutional reform were introduced (García Puchol 1993), despite the fact that most of the advances failed and
2 English translations of original extracts are mine.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 73–90 ISSN 0210-6124 76 Paloma Tejada Caller the system remained anchored in religion and conservative standpoints up to the turn of the century.3 This Spanish confrontational background, political and ideological, together with the educational value conferred on history, favoured a close connection between politics and historiography. History became a perfect ground for the legitimating of ideologies, as Valls Montés (1999: 99) indicates. Competing historical discourses were sustained from the mid century, when a majority of Catholic or radical traditionalists opposed a liberal minority, who tried to affect the Spanish political and social structure through the gaps in the institutional system (Cruz 1999). Many implications derive from this fact, some of which must be remarked as relevant to our purposes. First, scientific contents underwent an ideological adaptation. Authors selected facts, value judgements and even the space devoted in (text)books to different historical moments and characters. (García Puchol 1993: 37; Peiró 1993: 41). Second, foreign authors and models exerted their influence on Spanish historians to a different extent. The new historiographical standpoints, favouring causal accounts, the social and economic side of history and the idea of civilization, were mainly followed by freethinkers, whereas more conservative authors seemed to be shut away from European models.4 Third and particularly relevant to our purposes, even the discovery of the Middle Ages gave way to different standpoints. It must be remarked that during the nineteenth century the Middle Ages stirred up the interest of both conservative and progressive sectors of Spanish (and European) society (García Puchol 1993: 160). For the former, the Middle Ages represented a period of highlighted Christianity, whereas for the latter it meant a transition stage between the ancient times and modernity (an idea introduced by historians like Thierry or Guizot in the 1830s). The Middle Ages became, thus, an important vindicative time for groups of competing ideologies, which aimed at controlling the popularization of the past among a hardly literate society. Under these conditions the Spaniards gained access to the knowledge of England. And it is also within this framework that the representations of the English Middle Ages should be understood, as well as Salas’ rendering.
1.3. A-S England conventional image in nineteenth century Spain
Anglo-Saxon England had relatively little importance in Spanish nineteenth century sources, as suggested by the notorious scarcity of (native) material retrieved, if only compared with the number of books on the modern period (Tejada 2007). Anglo- Saxon information was to be found in translations published during the 1840s, and to a lesser extent in Spanish books, most of them dating from the 1870s and 1880s.
3 Cruz (1999) abounds on the control exercised by the Church on culture and education throughout the 19th c. Victoria López Cordón, as quoted in Peiró (1990: 129) insists on similar arguments. 4 Anquetil, Blanqui, Chateaubriand, Fleury, Gallibert, Green, Guizot, Hume, Oncken, Ott, Saint Prosper, Macaulay, Thierry were all well-known authors in 19th c. Spain, as suggested by translations (Tejada 2007). See also Peiró and Pasamar (1987) on the Spanish dependence on European culture and introduction of new contents in late 19th c. history books.
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Moreover, most data were comprised in universal or general history books from the mid-century onwards, in which Anglo-Saxon England was dealt with mainly as part of the ‘Middle Ages period’. All this implies that Anglo-Saxon information was distributed in books dating from two politically different moments: the 1840s, a stage of consolidated liberalism and greater ‘freedom’ and the 1870s and 1880s, when liberties became once more restricted in all orders of life. In addition, as translations came first, a clear dependence of Spanish authors on foreign sources, mainly French, might be suggested. Finally, the fact that Anglo-Saxon information was primarily contained in history books confirmed on the one hand the construction of a political identity of the Anglo-Saxons against a literary or cultural one5 and, on the other, the granting of wider audiences to native textbooks devised for official educational programmes. Results in Tejada (2008) verified that in Spanish nineteenth century texts Anglo- Saxon England was represented as part of a wider English identity; its peoples were seen as the ancestors of the nineteenth century. English nation − which may derive from the fact that Anglo-Saxon England was known mainly because of the English after-power. The Anglo-Saxons themselves were conferred a national identity, defined by social and territorial boundaries. That is, the Anglo-Saxons were identified with their land and defined in terms of their difference from either Christian Celts, pagan Danes or foreign Normans.6 For this purpose, different strategies of cohesivation were applied, as the emphasizing of common features, the usual simplification of characters and the avoiding of the groups’ inner differences. This portrayal of the Anglo-Saxons as an ancient people, ancestor of the English, seemed to serve the well-known purpose of reinforcing nation-imagining myths. More specifically, through the Anglo-Saxon example, the Spaniards were taught that nations become legitimized and obtain dignity by being conferred a legendary anchorage in ancient times and the heroic nature of winners.
5 Tejada (2007) analyses ten books classified as literary, being either literary anthologies or books dealing with literary issues. Most dated from the 1875s onwards, but offered no information on Anglo-Saxon literature, except for Henrich i Girona (1881), whose author evaluated the Old English period as “scarcely important and difficult to understand” (1881:11). Therefore, the political Anglo-Saxon identity recognised in history books seemed to prevail over a further literary or more widely cultural one. 6 During the last two decades, a growing literature has emerged on the construction of an English identity in early times. On the complexities of the concept of medieval race, its constituents and relation to the idea of ethnicity, see Chester (1996: 515-18); on the discursive elaboration of an English identity before the Norman Conquest, see chapter 2 in Thomas (2005); Scragg and Weinberg (2000) offers different views on ideas of Englishness, race and nationality developed from the Anglo-Saxons themselves; from a personal perspective, Shippey (2000) discusses the notion of an English identity as suspect, sustaining that in the popular imagination the Anglo-Saxons are unknown. Identity construction also forms the heart of Frantzen and Niles (1997); on the rise and development of Anglo-Saxonism, Frantzen (1990) is a classical reference; both Lavezzo (2006) and Michelet (2006) focus on the emergent sense of English identity in relation to land and space. Interesting as well is Åström (2002) on identity processes and negotiations carried out by Anglo-Saxonists through the use of OE texts. For representations of the English as portrayed by non-English observers, contributions are scarce: see Bjork (1997); Fjaldall (2005) or the dissertations mentioned in Åström (2002: 22).
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But a more refined analysis demonstrated a more immediate and foregrounded social function of the texts analysed: the negotiation of future action. Scholarly representations of Anglo-Saxon England proved to be sites of action where traditions were selected to serve contemporary needs. The strange ‘other’ – the English past in this case – was controlled and Anglo-Saxon representations meant to shape contemporary thinking or future home events. Thus, the analysis unveiled the existence of competing discourses to be spread among the audience. The corpus confirmed the construction of narratives aiming at reinforcing radical Catholic standpoints, in the first place; secondly, the production of narratives justifying the official culture, aiming at the perpetuation of a prudish system of religious values; and finally, the presence of a minority of narratives claiming for the introduction of progressive political, social and educational polities. Broadly speaking, narratives differed in the selection of both topic and historiographical strategies, as expected. Thus, narratives targeted at reinforcing Catholic standpoints foregrounded the idea that Anglo-Saxon England was part of a Christian Europe, emphasized the existence of Anglo-Saxon biblical ancestors, justified their political unity and cultural development on the basis of Christianity and praised the religious behaviour of Anglo-Saxon kings and figures, down-toning their dubious actions. Narratives aiming at perpetuating the official culture placed their emphasis on moral instruction. Thus, rules of behaviour praising moderation, honour criteria, justice and other social or political virtues were foregrounded and defined through historical passages. Finally, narratives aiming at changing Spanish political practices used strategies “of transformation” (Wodak et al. 1999) to change the Anglo-Saxon barbarian image, strived to destroy Catholic myths and exerted a severe criticism on religious and political rulers, showing a clear concern about Spain in explicit references. The Anglo-Saxon singular superiority, as proved from the Germanic period, came to the forefront and their time was revealed as a golden age of free institutions, perpetuated through history. As for their selection of different historiographical practices, narratives seemed to differ mainly in the strategies used for the legitimating of authority.7 Features like the omnipresence of author as narrator, the absence of recognised sources, the lack of explanation and of explicit argument, axiomatic claims with little linguistic modulation, the plain cause-and-effect schemes or the simplification of characters, proved to be more frequent and larger in number in Catholic and official narratives and in passages of symbolic representation of figures. Liberal representations from the 1850s and 1860s in turn favoured the evaluation of historical processes, contexts and institutions; the rendering of events as developing processes with multiple temporality; a frequent mentioning and evaluation of sources; the use of evidentials and other modulating and
7 The role played by historians in ‘constructing reality’ has been studied from different standpoints, traditional or modern. The recent development of linguistic models derived from the fields of the Critical Discourse Analysis and the Systemic Approach (Appraisal Theory) makes the study of authorial voices even more daring and suggestive. See Wodak et al. (1999); Martin (2000), Martin and White (2005). For applied studies, see Oteiza (2003) and Ricento (2003).
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 73–90 ISSN 0210-6124 Salas y Quiroga’s Anglo-Saxon England 79 explanatory linguistic expressions; the hedging of assertions and an open interaction with readers.
2. Salas’ portrait of Anglo-Saxon England
2.1. A marginal point of departure
From the very outset Salas’ narrative displays a marginal nature. His portrait of the Anglo-Saxons is comprised in the first six chapters of his History of England, published in 1846. Both the specificity of its title and the date of its publication render Salas’ book uncommon.8 To this it must be added that his book was not conceived as an educational textbook, nor was it fostered by the Spanish administration. Rather, as asserted in his preface (1846: i-iii), it was the result of a personal enterprise targeted at a general readership, to encourage social change and the renewal of Spanish historiographical practices9. The singularity of Salas’ fabric is also reinforced by the author’s selected focus on the people as main character, as a likely result both of his adherence to new trends in history writing and his particular literary affiliation. Apart from a romantic representative, Salas seems to be a writer deeply involved in new post- romantic trends cultivated both in Europe and Spain around the 1840s. According to Brown (in Patiño 2002), 1844 signals the beginning of a post-romantic literary stage, when interest in historical themes begins to fade, a psychological turn is perceived and authors grow more concerned with a critical revision of social structure. The so-called Spanish costumbrismo corresponds to this new mood: writers of this emergent movement pursued the description of fixed characters as representations of social groups and highlighted contemporary life from the point of view of the common people (Estébanez Calderón 1999: 227). Salas’ contribution to the paradigmatic book
8 From a large sample of nearly 90 entries comprising information on Anglo-Saxon England throughout the century (Tejada 2007), only three books proved to be Histories of England as such, the three of them published between 1830 and 1850: Gonzalez Vara (1831); Gil de Zárate et al. (1843); and Salas (1846), object of this research. However, the first two seemed to be implicit or explicit versions of English books. 9 In his Preface, Salas (1846: i-iii) states his idea of history and expresses his aim to reveal the admiring development achieved by the English: “…es la Historia el manantial de todos los conocimientos humanos… Pero este bien que apetecemos para la humanidad, no podrá lograrse, ínterin la Historia sea una vana cronología de soberanos, una nomenclatura de pueblos, un hacinamiento de fechas. Es necesario salir del yugo de la rutina y remontarse al principio de las revoluciones, al origen de las dignidades, al fundamento de las creencias… Creyendo nosotros que carece nuestro idioma de obras históricas dictadas por estos principios, hemos concebido el proyecto de llenar este vacio, en cuanto de nosotros dependa… Daremos resultados, y en breves reflexiones formularemos nuestro juicio acerca de los hechos que narremos… Empezamos por la Historia de Inglaterra no como objeto de predileccion, sino como resultado de exámen y aun de cierta analogía. Parécenos que es asunto de suyo altamente curioso el análisis de ese poderio que tiene a la mitad del mundo por envidioso y a la otra mitad por vasallo; el averiguar cómo del caos más profundo de pobreza, de aislamiento y de barbarie, pudo la voluntad y energia de esos isleños convertir ese peñon en un emporio del mundo civilizado” (Original spelling maintained).
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Los españoles pintados por sí mismos now becomes deeply relevant.10 As for the new historiographic trends, the influence of foreign authors, prone to emphasizing the social side of history, would also fit this leaning.
2.2. Strategies used in the construction of a new image of the Anglo-Saxons
Despite Salas’ singular frame of reference, a first approach to his text offers a conventional rendering of the Anglo-Saxons. More particularly, the author adopts a chronological, dynastocentric standpoint11 from which the Anglo-Saxons are seen as a people, or group of peoples, inhabiting the English land, defending their territory and setting the bases for a civilized future, i.e. they are given a territorial and ethnic identity.12 However, hiding behind his conventional portrait, an original unconventional one is unveiled. Salas’ main focus lies on two conceptual types or characters, i.e. the powerful and the weak, and their dynamic interaction. Thus, divided into the powerful and the weak, the Anglo-Saxons are seen as subtly interacting with other powerful and weak groups of different races and lands. Salas achieves his purpose through the selection of specific content strategies and substrategies, realised in turn by means of rhetorical and linguistic resources, as will now be described. First, Salas offers a portrait of the Anglo-Saxons in which characters or groups are not oversimplified. For that purpose, three substrategies stand out as relevant: a) In line with other narratives of a similar nature (Tejada 2008), the Anglo- Saxons are often acknowledged to be a race or nation. However, in Salas’ account this Anglo-Saxon race is not ethnically stable, i.e. identified by reference to a common Germanic or pagan ancestor, but territorially defined. In a process of continuous redefinition of boundaries and allies, this implies a dynamic interpretation of the concept. Consequently, for Salas the Anglo- Saxon ‘race’ may exclude at times the Germanic Northumbrians, the Germanic and pagan Danes, or the Christian Bretons. Similarly, when the author refers to the Anglo-Saxon ‘others’, those races or groups from which the Anglo-Saxons acquire part of their identity, he makes an effort to distinguish between the Vikings settled on English land and “pirates” (Salas
10 Books of a similar nature were published in England and France in the 1840s. See, for example,( Philadelphia: Carey & Hart) Heads of the People or Portraits of the English (1840-1). 11 As in other works of an apparently similar kind, in Salas’ chronological account, different amount of space is devoted to Ethelbert of Kent, Egbert, Edmund of East Anglia, Alfred, Edward, Aethelstan, Edward (his son), Edred, Edward Martyr, Svein, Cnut, Godwin, Harold and William. Several other monarchs deserve Salas’ attention, though they remain unnamed, for reasons that will be explained later on: Egbert’s son, Æthelwulf (Salas 1846: 11), Eadwig, referred to as Edward’s (sic) son (Salas 1846: 16), Edgar Peaceable (Salas 1846: 17), Ethelred the Unready (Salas 1846: 18) and Cnut’s sons (Salas 1846: 22). 12 His discourse on the Conquest runs as follows: “Ælla and his sons arrived in Kent, and they soon founded the kingdom of Sussex; Cerdic... landed on the western coast and created that of Wesser (sic)… Finally, other invading hoards established themselves on the left bank of the Thames and founded the kingdom of Essex” (Salas 1846: 7).
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1846: 19); between Celts swept away by Anglo-Saxons and those who stayed; or later, between these and those unsatisfied Celts who joined the Danish against the English (Salas 1846: 10). b) The Anglo-Saxons are not systematically depicted as a monolithic succeeding group against their opposing ethnically-defined ‘others’. Different sociologically defined types, both of Anglo-Saxons and of ‘others’, emerge into the picture. It is the powerful of any group who behave similarly (see below). c) Salas’ characters are not limited to those of the monarch and his people. Subjects under a monarch are not metonymically rendered as a single individual, with an agentive and sentient capacity to act in unison.13 Agentive responsibility is specifically attributed and there are other intervening agents and patients, who may become agents in turn. This content strategy is realised through several linguistic tactics: a careful naming of agents14 and a selection of precise grammatical subjects through the enumeration of participants, complex or compound noun phrases, quantifiers like many, a few, or indefinite determiners. It is to be noticed that, when naming, Salas establishes a distinction between an outsider’s and an insider’s view. If seen from the outside, the Anglo-Saxons are usually referred to as the English or the Saxons – for instance, vs. the Danes (Salas 1846: 14, 23), vs. foreign peoples (Salas 1846: 18, 21), vs. the Normans (Salas 1846: 24, 27), or vs. the Papacy (Salas 1846: 30). However, if seen from the inside, as inhabitants of a land and constituting a race or a nation, a finer composition of the group is sought for and components are listed: “Saxons and Bretons” (Salas 1846: 19); “Anglo-Saxons, Bretons, Northumbrians and pagans” (Salas 1846: 15); “Angles, Danes and Bretons” (Salas 1846: 17), etc. Salas also seems to be concerned with an accurate attribution of responsibilities. Therefore, he frequently constrains the scope of the grammatical subject through various linguistic resources, such as quantifiers, appositive phrases, modifiers or coordinating conjunctions, as in “many bishops and priests” (Salas 1846: 9), “invaders, joined together unsatisfied Bretons to...” (Salas 1846: 10), “Saxons and Bretons” (Salas 1846: 19); “The invading Danes” (Salas 1846: 11), “many magnates, particularly from France” (Salas 1846: 14-15), “one of these [favourites]” (Salas 1846: 15), “the sovereign and his council” (Salas 1846: 17), “this does not imply that the Bretons were the only inhabitants of England” (Salas 1846: 2). Salas may also insert explanatory clauses to make clear that it is not one main character – usually the monarch – who achieves things alone; rather, he needs the concurrence of other agents. One example may suffice: “It was William’s misfortune to realize that the Pope’s will was not enough to get his cherished throne: money, soldiers, weapons, provisions and ships had to be gathered. In order to obtain these difficult assistants, the Duke convened an assembly of warriors, priests and merchants, the former highly reputed, the latter rich” (Salas 1846:
13 See, for example, Gaite, where the Anglo-Saxons are attributed the agentive capacities of individuality and volition, as in: “the Saxons got furious and decided to kill the Danes”; “the Anglo-Saxons helped Canute to conquer Norway” (1874: 257, my italics). 14 For the importance of naming in identity construction, see Foot (2002).
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30). It is to be noted that Salas’ emphasis on a precise description of agents ratifies his sense of individuality and his desire to convey a more accurate image of group identities, very much in accordance with his preferred explanatory standpoints. A second strategy is used in Salas’ portrait of the Anglo-Saxons. The author acknowledges a greater heterogeneity of social groups; he decides to give a prominent position to social structure and focus on the dynamics of power. Accordingly, participants in events are divided into the powerful, exerting control, and the powerless (or common people), two groups of whatever race, who dynamically interact in his narrative. The prominence conferred on these socially-defined groups is achieved from the outset through a parallel co-occurrence of characters belonging to either party; that is, through the parallel mentioning of powerful and powerless figures in adjoining sentences or in subject-object structures (agent/patient). And so the reader learns of “conquerors” acting against “hapless Bretons” (Salas 1846: 8); of “Norman courtiers” insulting “ordinary people” (Salas 1846: 25); of “sovereigns” alien to their “people” (Salas 1846: 11); of “humble monks” deprived of their goods by “usurper Danes” (Salas 1846: 15); of “the unhappy Elgive”, atoning for a fault her husband, the king, had committed (Salas 1846: 16). The powerful themselves constitute a heterogeneous group. Salas selects precise hyponyms or modified noun phrases to present a large array of dominant characters: monarchs and rulers, the invading Saxons (Salas 1846: 7, 8); the higher clergy of any religion (Salas 1846: 3, 8, 16); the Pope (Salas 1846: 9, 29); judges and counsellors (Salas 1846: 12, 13), the king’s favourites (Salas 1846: 15), the nobles, abusive ‘rioters’ (Salas 1846: 24); main citizens (Salas 1846: 28), pressure groups (Salas 1846: 16), prestigious merchants, rich warriors and monks (Salas 1846: 29, 30), adventurers thirsty for riches (Salas 1846: 31), courtiers (Salas 1846: 25), etc. This multifarious group will be further divided into the useful and the useless, as will be explained below. Likewise, the powerless or weak are precisely described and listed: the people under a ruler, of whatever origin and race, who must “endure the king’s mistakes” (Salas 1846: 23), the unhappy or hapless Bretons (Salas 1846: 8), humble monks (Salas 1846: 15), abused women (Salas 1846: 16), the defeated (Salas 1846: 23), mothers and widows (Salas 1846: 34), defenceless Danes under Aethelred (Salas 1846: 19), the people against the monarch and invading Danes, heterogeneous gatherings of dissatisfied people (Salas 1846: 20, 31), slaves (Salas 1846: 21), or wretched convicts (Salas 1846: 21). Finally, it must be noted that the powerful and the powerless interact dynamically. The powerless may become powerful and change role. A third strategy in Salas’ book is to be mentioned: the building of moral types. Moved by his ethical spirit and his faith in moral and social regeneration, Salas brings the nature and behaviour of these conceptual types to the forefront. Thus, he denounces power, defends the weak and promotes the figure of the reformer. As in previous occasions, a set of precise sub-strategies and linguistic resources may be identified. Salas makes a mindful selection of Anglo-Saxon figures and a recurrent judgement of their behaviour in the dynamics of power to obtain a piling-up effect of morally evaluated characters. Unlike most narratives of a similar kind, both the powerful and the powerless may be praised or criticised.
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Through Salas’ careful selection of meanings (nouns, adjectives, adverbs), which serve to evaluate human behaviour, people, policies and plans positively or negatively by reference to a set of institutionalised or desired social norms, the reader grasps some psychological and moral features of the two main character types. Thus, he learns that the powerful act in their own benefit (Salas 1846: 1, 18); show “unending covetousness” (Salas 1846: 6, 25, 27); “strip the defeated of their goods” (Salas 1846: 8); look for social and material privileges (Salas 1846: 8, 11, 16); “preserve vested rights” (Salas 1846: 8); seek social rise through bribery (Salas 1846: 18); kill their equals (Salas 1846: 21); look for help among their peers and help each other (Salas 1846: 27, 30, 31); are usually ignorant and arbitrary (Salas 1846: 3, 12); have a distorted vision of reality (Salas 1846: 21, 25); consider agreed-on decisions a hindrance to their plans (Salas 1846: 29); and persuade with the power of words (Salas 1846: 29, 31). The reader is taught that politics means dominance and punishment (Salas 1846: 2); that killing and robbery is “the dogma of power” (Salas 1846: 9); that power implies “arms and insolence” (Salas 1846: 25); that weak kings are usually controlled by the clergy (Salas 1846: 11, 16); or that judges may be “biased and corrupt” (Salas 1846: 12, 13). Although power is understood in both political and religious terms, as demonstrated by the examples above, Salas particularly inveighs against religion, its rites and outer symbols, its vacuous belief in miracles, its corrupt charity deals, the hypocrite and morally degenerate conduct of the clergy, as in the following examples: i. “This prince, mistrusting the influence of the clergy, more worried about their material interests than the spreading of faith …” (Salas 1846: 8) ii. “The sovereign, utterly controlled by the clergy, decided to pray instead of fighting. To obtain the clergy’s favour, he ordered that every landowner should pay his tithe to the church from then on … And feeling this was not enough, he set out for Rome as a pilgrim. Back in his country, he devoted himself to prayer…” (Salas 1846: 11) iii. “This was a sign his followers could not disdain, since in those times the clergy’s influence was decisive for the crown and for all kinds of power” (Salas 1846: 16) iv. “But as it usually happens that religious zeal turns into fanaticism, it soon became fashionable to make rich donations to the monks…” (Salas 1846: 17) Similarly, the reader gains knowledge of the values and attitudes exhibited by the powerless group. The weak have “brothers” and help them (Salas 1846: 19); must be defended; are forced to endure the king’s mistakes (Salas 1846: 23); they are not passive; on the contrary, they may react against the sovereign’s abusive behaviour (Salas 1846: 19) and evaluate, approve or disapprove of the king’s actions (Salas 1846: 21, 22). Yet, the reader is warned of some of their faults: the powerless may worship their kings, forgetting their abusive behaviour or fruitless actions (Salas 1846: 28), may hinder the reformer’s plans (Salas 1846: 12); and, even worse, may become powerful and change role (Salas 1846: 12, 23). However, not all members in the powerful group show deplorable behaviour. A further clear-cut distinction between useful and useless leaders is deliberately established. Terms from the semantic field of usefulness are recurrently used, as demonstrated by the description of Alfred’s reign as “useful” (Salas 1846: 13); Dunstan’s job is reportedly not “barren” (Salas 1846: 16); Edward’s (Aethelstan’s brother) reign
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 73–90 ISSN 0210-6124 84 Paloma Tejada Caller proves “fruitless” (Salas 1846: 15) and Edward Martyr’s reign is said to have disappeared without a trace (Salas 1846: 18). Usefulness is interpreted in terms of the character’s regenerating skill and defined through the portrait of Alfred and Dunstan, two most prominent figures, to whom larger space is devoted. To a lesser extent, other Anglo-Saxon rulers contribute to the symbolic building of the new type of reformer, namely Athelstan, Cnut, Edward Confessor and Harold. As in former cases of type-building, the reader is made familiar with the reformer’s values. A useful leader contributes to civilization (Salas 1846: 12, 16), justice and learning (Salas 1846: 12); strives for honour, knowledge and virtue (Salas 1846: 13, 18); looks for an honest administration of justice (Salas 1846: 12, 22); spreads culture, civilization, spirituality and commerce (Salas 1846: 14); must have a regenerating aim (Salas 1846: 13) and strive against corruption (Salas 1846: 15); governs for both rich and poor (Salas 1846: 21, 22) and relieves the oppressed of their taxes (Salas 1846: 23). His only aim must be to better his subjects’ condition (Salas 1846: 13) and procure their happiness (Salas 1846: 21). A reformer respects tradition and looks ahead into the future (Salas 1846: 21); respects and consults his Council (Salas 1846: 21, 22); respects the law (Salas 1846: 24); looks for peace (Salas 1846: 14, 18, 22, 23) and for common agreement (Salas 1846: 21); stops chaos and anarchy (Salas 1846: 13) and establishes order and regularity (Salas 1846: 21). Thus, he achieves and enjoys the people’s affection (Salas 1846: 13), gains his people’s love (Salas 1846: 21, 29), respect and veneration (Salas 1846: 15). The reformer is encouragingly depicted as an innovator, bound to succeed despite the difficulties he may have to overcome (Salas 1846: 13, 16) or the strong perseverance and effort he is often demanded, as coded in adverbials regularly (22), tirelessly (13), unceasingly (12), fervently (17). The following examples illustrate this point: i. Alfred, however, had to fight against… his subjects’ run-of-the-mill concerns, an ailment from which all innovators and men of elevated minds have suffered and will go on suffering unceasingly (12) ii. As every reformer who achieves his goal, he obtained more than he had sought (16) Moreover, despite a scarcity of open references to his native country, the reformer’s tasks deliberately evoke the structural deficiencies in Salas’ homeland through an insistent repetition of ideas: education and learning, a better public service and justice, respect for the law and institutions, peace and hard-working, non-abusive monarchs. Salas portrays Alfred and Dunstan as representatives of a class on which he pins his hopes for reform. In order to arouse the audience’s unmistakable rejection of or adherence to the Anglo-Saxon collective characters described, Salas makes a wise exploitation of linguistic devices. He not only selects meanings which serve to evaluate human behaviour, but also skilfully grades the intensity conferred on his value judgments. Consequently, he uses markers of a strongest force to describe either the reformers, mainly Alfred and Dunstan, or abusive power. Extremely negative and positive behaviour is indisputably signalled through nouns, adjectives or adverbials of perfective
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 73–90 ISSN 0210-6124 Salas y Quiroga’s Anglo-Saxon England 85 meaning or heavy moral load: ovation (9), dogma (9), utterly controlled (11), submission (9), stupid habit (18), despicable (19), depravation (13), so cruel (20), such an idiot (20), unreined (22), satisfied with (18), omnipotent clergy (22), wholehearted support (22), (immoral) thriving (18), heroic deeds (13), inexorable (13), any excess (13), solely (13). And most despicable leaders may be even deprived of their names, as mentioned in note 11, above. Conversely, Salas mitigates his evaluation when judging doubtful conducts by members in the weak group or less prominent people. In these cases a frequent use of hedging and lower values of evaluative meanings are found, as in (my italics): i. “but, his more than peaceful nature, often verged on weakness, and he frequently lacked the necessary strength to stifle the turmoil caused by his noblemen, who repeatedly abused his flexible and compliant mind” (Salas 1846: 24) ii. “this task of submission … was carried out to a large extent with the help of Anglo-Saxon missionaries” (Salas 1846: 9) iii. “Good King Edward died… and long time afterwards people still commented on his good nature, forgetting his weakness, and on his love for justice, forgetting the biased affection he had displayed towards foreigners” (Salas 1846: 28) In the configuration of types Salas not only relies on the cumulative effect of morally evaluated figures, the intensity of evaluative words or the insistent repetition of landmark concepts. Equally important are the explanatory paragraphs he inserts in his chronological account in order to clarify the usual behaviour of a particular collective. To that purpose he introduces lexical expressions and noun phrases of generic reference to characterise a sub-set of event participants, usually reinforced by usuality modals or tenses with an aspectual tinge, expressing habituality (as the Spanish so-called imperfect past). The following excerpts illustrate this point (my italics): i. “Then royal power was not an institution, or a right, but violence… In those barbarian days the monarchy used to have land ownership as its resource for strength…” (Salas 1846: xv) ii. “In those days of darkness sovereigns would consider themselves so much the owners of their lands as of their horses or goshawks, and consequently would play on one or the other …” (Salas 1846: 11) iii. “…since the clergy’s role in those times used to be decisive for the crown and for all kinds of power” (Salas 1846: 16) iv. “…priests would give themselves over to all kinds of excesses; dancing and hunting were their favourite occupations and adultery their habit” (Salas 1846: 17); v. “Up to that time magnates used to sell their female slaves or pupils’ hands…” (Salas 1846: 21) A final strategy should be underlined in Salas’ symbolic portrait of the Anglo- Saxons: the author’s desire for explanation. Unlike other nineteenth century writers, Salas strives to project a more complex depiction of events. To that purpose, he uses at least three content substrategies: a) Selection of non-human agents that may intervene in actions together with main political or religious figures. Non-human agents are advocated as concurring characters which may determine the course of social development. Among them,
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luck (Salas 1846: 3, 8, 32), weather conditions (Salas 1846: 32); diseases (Salas 1846: 15); popular fanaticism and religious zeal (Salas 1846: 17); linguistic and social prestige (Salas 1846: 24); the impact of public speech or the persuasive power of words (Salas 1846: 29, 31, 32). b) Likewise, Salas’ portrait of the Anglo-Saxons confers a prominent position to motivation. In his text, the breach between factual and psychological reality is highlighted and the reader learns that actions are usually backed by desires, thoughts and psychological responses. Therefore, a frequent occurrence of mental- state verbs is found, encoding motivations (intentions) desires, experiences, feelings or perceptions, or referring to beliefs and cognitive states. Spanish medial constructions such as “Se vio obligado a entregarse” (Salas 1846: 15) (He felt forced to give in) unfortunately lost in our English adaptation, also contribute to this effect: i. “Gregory the Great, mistrusting the clergy’s influence… sent a large number of monks…” (Salas 1846: 8) ii. “The sovereign, … controlled by the clergy, was content with mere praying” (Salas 1846: 11) iii. “… the prince, full of good intentions, found himself harassed …” (Salas 1846: 15) iv. “He persisted in considering him an usurper…” (Salas 1846: 16) v. “The sovereign … imagined he could buy …” (Salas 1846: 18) vi. “The Danes put their minds to …” (Salas 1846: 19) vii. “Siweyn… confident that he would win…” (Salas 1846: 19) viii. “One of those, resentful that…” (Salas 1846: 24) ix. “The people, tame and apprehensive, feared…” (Salas 1846: 24) x. “The English King intended to…” (Salas 1846: 27) xi. “After giving in to despair, he pondered...” (Salas 1846: 29) Furthermore, Salas’ choice of an explanatory stance is confirmed by his interspersing of explanatory paragraphs and his restricted use of a cause-and-event pattern. Causal, consecutive and complex sentences abound, which contrasts with the coordinating or juxtaposed structures common in peer narratives. A few examples may suffice to demonstrate our point: i. “Having learnt his lesson from 27 years of suffering and exile, Edward’s only desire was to keep peace” (Salas 1846: 23) ii. “The sovereign, moved either by his love of justice or his fear of discordance, felt it was enough to…” (Salas 1846: 26) iii. “Luck was so much on their side that they not only managed to establish a church in Canterbury, but...” (Salas 1846: 8) iv. “he was badly affected by a terrible and painful illness to the extent that he had to give in to …” (Salas 1846: 15) v. “since it must be noted that Norman courtiers, despite they did not have at their disposal the armies led by Danish warriors, favoured by royal protection…” (Salas 1846: 24-25) c) Finally, it is worth mentioning that Salas does not assert his authority on the Anglo-Saxons as an all-powerful writer, but shares his sources of information with
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his readers through a variety of resources. That is, he constructs an authorial voice more open to alternative or divergent viewpoints, through the indication of his sources of information and a sensible attribution of assertions and claims. In his Advertencia (Salas 1846: iv-x) he includes a list of the books consulted to make his claims and throughout his pages different reportative evidential expressions, whether quotative or hearsay, are found, as well as linguistic hedging and other mitigating devices to lessen the impact of an utterance. See, for example: i. According to a chronicle… (Salas 1846: 14) ii. Tradition says that (Salas 1846: 19) iii. Tempests, it was said, make the rover’s arm strong (Salas 1846: 10) iv. History does provide enough evidence for us to believe that… (Salas 1846: 3) v. “…it must be admitted that the Christian faith sweetened, to some extent, the harshness of these uses” (Salas 1846: 9-10) vi. “One of these, in particular, whose daughter Edward had taken as his wife…” (Salas 1846: 24)
3. Conclusions
The analysis of Salas’ text has proved that the construction of identities, self or other, runs invariably linked to ideological and personal standpoints. According to this historical and dynamic nature of representations, Salas’ portrait may be said to reproduce the author’s romantic ideals and his literary practices rooted in a social, psychological and critical framework. On the one hand, the text encompasses all romantic features: individualistic, vocational, idealist, universal, marginal and symbolic; on the other, it highlights Salas’ concern about the lacks observed in the Spanish contemporary system. The analysis indicates that this little-known vocational historian sketches a contrasting image of the Anglo-Saxons through a personal selection of contents and a skilful use of rhetorical, linguistic and new historiographical strategies. It is possible to state that unlike in other nineteenth century narratives: 1) The Spanish conventional image of the Anglo-Saxons is backgrounded. The Anglo-Saxons are not so much territorially and ethnically rendered, but socially defined. Little attention is paid to their political identity, which serves merely as a tool to spotlight social issues. Consequently, relevant data in other renderings, such as Anglo-Saxon continental or biblical ancestors, their legendary anchorage, their national virtues or their heroic nature as land winners are neutralized; fewer strategies of group coherence – such as the emphasizing of common features, the usual simplification of characters and the avoiding of inner differences – are applied; and the narrative’s function as a nation-imagining myth fades slightly away. 2) In Salas’ text a social and pragmatic function seems clearest: the Anglo- Saxon representation is meant to shape contemporary thinking or future home events. But unlike other narratives of a similar nature, Salas does not aim at the reinforcing of Catholic standpoints or at the perpetuation of the Spanish official culture. 3) The social focus in this narrative suggests its regenerating purpose, achieved through the destruction of Catholic myths, the severe criticism of religious and political rulers (praised in other accounts) and the reassertion of individuality and popular liberties. 4)
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The evidence from the study supports the idea that Salas streamlines the role of the common people in their dynamic interaction with political and religious leaders through the building of collective main characters or types. Various resources have been found to contribute to that purpose: the juxtaposition of powerful and powerless characters in adjoining sentences or subject-object structures; the listing of particular members integrating social groups; the recurrent evaluation of Anglo-Saxon figures with a cumulative effect; the repetition of landmark words, the uneven distribution of evaluative meanings of a strongest force to achieve the intended reaction from the audience; or the insertion of explanatory paragraphs expanding on the usual behaviour of social types. 5) The study confirms Salas’ deviation from the Spanish common cultural and historiographic practice. Unlike more conservative authors, Salas favours the explanatory and causal account, the social side of history and a less powerful speaker’s position. Finally, findings verify the importance of peripheral, apparently naïve, discourses in the construction of foreign identities. However, although cross-cultural perceptions of the ‘other’ are gaining ground among researchers, much work remains to be done on the images of Englishness elaborated by Spanish scholars.
Works cited
2002 (1843-1844): Los españoles pintados por sí mismos. Madrid: Visor. (Facsimile edition). Alarcos Llorach, Emilio 1943: ‘Un romántico olvidado: Jacinto Salas y Quiroga’. Castilla: 161-76. Åström, Berit 2002: The Politics of Tradition. Umeå: Umeå U. Azorín (Jose Martínez Ruiz) 1986 (1912): Castilla. Ed. Ana Suárez Miramón. Madrid: Plaza y Janés. Benítez, Rafael 1997: ‘Jacinto Salas y Quiroga’. Víctor García de la Concha, dir., Historia de la literatura española. Siglo XIX. Madrid: Espasa Calpe. 652-53. Bjork, Robert E 1997: ‘Nineteenth-Century Scandinavia and the Birth of Anglo-Saxon Studies’, in Allen J. Frantzen and John D. Niles eds.: 111-132. Brown, R.F. 1953: ‘Salas y Quiroga. El Dios del siglo. Novela original de costumbres contemporáneas’. Bulletin of Hispanic Studies 30: 32-40. Chester Jordan, William, ed . 1996: Dictionary of the Middle Ages. Vol. 14. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons. Cruz, Miguel Angel 1999: ‘Panorama del pensamiento español en la segunda mitad del siglo XIX’.
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García Puchol Joaquín 1993: Los textos escolares de historia en la enseñanza española: 1808-1900. Barcelona: Universitat. Gil de Zárate Antonio et al. 1843: Historia de Inglaterra. Puesta en castellano por Antonio Rosales. Madrid: Boix. González-del-Valle Luis T., ed. 2006: Jacinto de Salas y Quiroga, Viages. (1840). Santiago de Compostela: Servicio de Publicaciones. Gonzalez Vara, Manuel, 1831: Historia de Inglaterra. Madrid : Jordan. Henrich i Girona, Joaquín 1881: Ensayo sobre la literatura inglesa. Barcelona: Sucesores de Ramírez. Lavezzo, Kathy 2006: Angels on the Age of the World: Geography, Literature, and English Community, 1000-1534. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP. Marrast, Robert 1997: ‘La poesía. Otros poetas del Romanticismo español’. Víctor García de la Concha, dir. Historia de la literatura española. Siglo XIX. Madrid: Espasa Calpe. Martin, James Robert 2000: 'Beyond Exchange: APPRAISAL Systems in English'. Susan Hunston and Geoff Thompson, eds. Evaluation in Text. Oxford: Oxford UP. Martin, James Robert and Peter Robert R. White 2005: The Language of Evaluation, Appraisal in English. London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan Michelet, Fabienne 2006: Creation, Migration, and Conquest: Imaginary Geography and Sense of Space in Old English Literature. Oxford: Oxford UP. Ochoa, Eugenio 1840: Apuntes para una biblioteca de autores españoles contemporáneos en prosa y en verso. Paris: Baudry
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Sebold, Russel P. 1992: ‘La novela en su laberinto’. El Museo Universal. 127-31. ––––– 2007: El principio del movimiento realista: credo y novelística de Ayguals de Izco. Madrid: Cátedra. Shippey, T. 2000: ‘The Undeveloped Image: Anglo-Saxon in Popular Consciousness from Turner to Tolkien’. Donald Scragg and Carole Weinberg, eds. Literary Appropriations of the Anglo- Saxons from the Thirteenth to the Twentieth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 215-36. Tejada, Paloma 2007: ‘Nineteenth century Spanish Narratives on Anglo-Saxon England’. Plenary Lecture for the Internacional 2007 SELIM Conference. ––––– 2008: ‘Negotiating Future Action: Competing Discourses on Anglo-Saxon English Origins in 19th c. Spain’. Paper read at the Britishness, Identity and Citizenship Conference. University of Huddersfield. Thomas, Hugh M. 2005: The English and the Normans: Ethnic Hostility, Assimilation, and Identity 1066-c.1220. Oxford: Oxford UP. Urrutia, Jorge. ed. 1995: Poesía española del siglo XIX. Madrid: Cátedra. Valls Montés, Rafael 1999: ‘De los manuales de historia a la historia de la disciplina escolar: nuevos enfoques en los estudios sobre la historiografía escolar española’. Historia de la educación 18: 169-90. Varela Jácome, Benito 1951: Historia de la literatura gallega. Santiago: Porto y Cía. 193-96. Wodak, Ruth, Rudolf Cillia, Martin Reisigl and Karin Liebhart, eds. 1999: The Discursive Construction of National Identity. Edinburgh: Edinburgh UP.
Received 22 May 2008 Revised version accepted 16 December 2008
Paloma Tejada, Ph.D., is currently a Tenured Lecturer in the English Language and Linguistics Department at the U. Complutense de Madrid. Her research interests are: History of the English Language; Spanish Reception of Englishness, Culture, Language and Ideology, English-Spanish Contrastive Linguistics. Her publications on Englishness include: Tejada, P. 2005. ‘English Consciousness in 19th century Spain’. Cristopher Butler ed. The Dynamics of Language Use. Amsterdam: Benjamins. 369-92; Tejada, P. 2006. ‘La naturalización de lo ajeno’. Marta Carretero, M. et al. eds. A Pleasure of life in words. A Festschrift for Angela Downing. Cersa. 155-184; Tejada, P. 2008. Construcciones cambiantes de la identidad ajena: hetero-imagen inglesa en la RAE. III Congreso Internacional sobre Lengua y Sociedad. Blas Arroyo, J.L. et al. eds. Discurso y sociedad II. Nuevas contribuciones al estudio de la lengua en un contexto social. Castellón de la Plana: U. Jaume I. 415-428; Tejada, P. forthcoming. ‘Negotiating future action: Competing discourses on Anglo-Saxon English origins in 19th century Spain. Britishness, identity and citizenship: The view from abroad’.
Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa I, Facultad de Filología, Ed. A, Avda. Complutense s/n, 28040 Madrid, Tel. +34 91 3945392, Fax: +34 91 394 54 78.
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On There-Passive Participle Constructions
Concha Castillo Universidad de Málaga [email protected]
The main purpose of this paper is to criticise an analysis of (eventive) there-passive participle constructions (There were three people arrested) as regular passives, that is as constructions with an original [PrtpassP-DP] order, where DP occupies the so-called Thematization/Extraction position. I use evidence as based on (a) interpretive properties, (b) constituent extraction, and (c) the syntax of auxiliaries in order to show that there-passive participle constructions are existential constructions where DP occupies a more central position than the participle. More specifically, following the approach to expletive constructions provided in Hazout (2004), I argue that the DP is the core predicate of a small clause construct, and that PrtpassP occupies the position of adjunct predicate to the small clause. Eventive there-passive participle constructions are distinguished both syntactically and from an interpretive perspective not only from sentential passives, but also from non-eventive there-passive participle constructions.
Keywords: there-passive participle construction; eventive interpretation; non-eventive interpretation; standard passives; existential constructions
En torno a las construcciones con there expletivo y participio pasivo de la lengua inglesa
El objetivo principal de este artículo consiste en rechazar el análisis de las construcciones there- participio pasivo con interpretación eventiva (There were three people arrested) como construcciones pasivas, es decir como construcciones con un orden original [SintagmaParticipiopasivo- SintagmaDeterminante], donde el Sintagma Determinante ocupa el nódulo que se conoce como posición de Tematización/Extracción. Se defiende que las construcciones there-participio pasivo son estructuras existenciales en las que el Sintagma Determinante ocupa una posición más central que el participio, y para ello se apela a (a) propiedades semánticas o interpretativas, (b) hechos de extracción de constituyentes, y (c) propiedades sintácticas de los verbos auxiliares. Tomando como referencia Hazout (2004), se plantea la propuesta de que el Sintagma Determinante sea el núcleo principal de una estructura de cláusula menor, donde el Sintagma Participio ocupe una posición de predicado adjunto. Las construcciones eventivas there-participio pasivo son contrastadas tanto formal como semánticamente no sólo con las pasivas estándares o regulares, sino asimismo con las correspondientes construcciones con participio pasivo pero con interpretación no eventiva.
Palabras clave: construcción there-participio pasivo; interpretación eventiva; interpretación no eventiva; pasiva estándar; construcción existencial 92 Concha Castillo
1. Introduction
A structure like (1) has been frequently referred to in recent minimalist literature as an expletive passive, a characterisation that responds to an analysis where the DP three people is a direct object argument of the participle, as in (2): specifically, [DP-Prtpass] is argued to derive from [Prtpass-DP] by means of a process of DP-raising that is triggered either in core syntax through an EPP-property of PrtpassP (Lasnik 1995, 1999; Holmberg 2001; Rezac 2006), or otherwise in the phonological component, in a manner independent of the computational system (Chomsky 2000, 2001) – as is well known, the latter operation is labelled Th(ematization)/Ex(traction) in Chomsky (2001). Still another possibility is offered by Caponigro and Schütze (2003), where [DP-Prtpass] is also a derived order but one that, according to the authors, results from the failure of (English) passive participles to raise to a position higher than the position that objects must arguably raise to. (1) There were three people arrested
(2) [… ] [be [Th/Exthree people [PrtParrested t]] All cited approaches thus agree that (1) and the regular or standard passive (3) share a parallel derivation, which differs only in the presence of the expletive in the initial numeration for (1). Nonetheless, they also acknowledge the possibility that (1) be analysed as an existential structure proper, where the material to the left of be is a DP containing a reduced relative, as in (4). A crucial interpretive difference between the two would relate to the stative nature of the existential sentence as opposed to the dynamic or eventive status of the so-called expletive passive. (3) a. Three people were arrested
b. [three people [be [VParrested t]]]
(4) […] [be DPthree people [RLOp arrested t]] In the present paper I aim to refute an analysis of eventive there-passive participle constructions like (1) along the lines of (2), and argue instead that they must be treated as existential structures, though ones displaying a different configuration than the stative or non-eventive reading of (1) (see 4, above). More specifically, in section 2 I aim to counteract significant argumentation in the recent literature against an existential analysis of (1) basing my own argument on evidence from (a) interpretive properties, (b) extraction phenomena, and (c) the syntax of auxiliaries. Afterwards, in section 3, I propose a syntactic analysis of there-passive participle constructions that is directly based on the approach to expletive structures in Hazout (2004). I attempt to justify the relevant proposal by attending to differences of interpretation and to contrasts on constituent extraction existing between eventive there-passive participle constructions on the one hand, non-eventive constructions and regular or standard passives on the other. Due to space limitations, the sentence-type under analysis in this paper is exclusively the one showing the order in (1): the construction that is referred to in Chomsky (2001: 25) as the rightward variant of Th/Ex (There are expected to be caught
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 91–110 ISSN 0210-6124 On There-Passive Participle Constructions 93 many fish, There was elected a new candidate) belongs to work in progress, though it can be advanced here that this is expected to be analysed as the result of an extraposition process applying to a configuration like (1) above. It must be observed that there exist works in the recent literature that argue against a passive analysis for there-passive participle constructions, as is the case with McNally (1997), Law (1999)1 or Radford (2000): these are used occasionally throughout the paper in order to support the present approach. With regard to terminology, I would like to note that the sentence-type under analysis, which is here called (eventive) there- passive participle construction, is variously referred to in the literature as PEC or passive expletive construction (Rezac 2006), or NP-Participle-passive (Holmberg 2001). Further, a label like Th/Ex (participle) construction is clearly currently associated with Chomsky’s (2001) approach. Since Chomsky’s (2001) above-mentioned Th/Ex approach constitutes a fundamental background for any work dealing with existential constructions and with participle structures generally speaking, I will dedicate the remainder of this section to a brief description of the motivation behind it and to the criticism that it has evoked. Chomsky (2000, 2001) can be considered to represent a major step in the much- debated issue of existential constructions by succeeding in unifying the account of a sequence like (5a) and that of (5b) by means of a minimal set of operations: both (5a) and (5b) are argued to derive from a configuration like (5c) without resort to any mechanism of case-transmission (Safir 1987) or of partitive case assignment (Belletti 1988; Lasnik 1995). The material in brackets in (5c) is standardly identified as a small clause where the DP [a spy] is arguably a subject and the locative PP [on the corner] acts as a predicate (Hoekstra and Mulder 1990; Lasnik 1995, 1999; Chomsky 2000). (5) a. There was a spy on the corner b. A spy was on the corner c. T be [a spy on the corner] A widely-known potential difficulty for the assimilation between structures with and without the expletive there is represented by sequences featuring a passive participle: (6) [ __ were arrested three people] (7) Three people were arrested (former 3) (8) There were three people arrested (former 1) (9) *There were arrested three people As entailed by the operation Agree, the movement of the DP three people in (8) is unnecessary, and therefore arguably ungrammatical; on the other hand, the status of (9) is likewise unexpected, though for the opposite reason since, despite it being a
1 Actually, Law (1999) does not distinguish in a clear way between eventive and non-eventive there-passive participle constructions, and it is the case that most of his paper’s argumentation hinges upon a comparison between standard passives and non-eventive there-constructions.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 91–110 ISSN 0210-6124 94 Concha Castillo configuration where no unnecessary move seems to take place, the relevant construction is ill-formed. Chomsky (2001) provides a solution to the puzzle by positing the existence of a preparticipial position, the so-called Th/Ex (thematization/extraction) position, which can arguably be likened to the [Spec,Prt] position that is postulated in Lasnik’s (1995) analysis: see (2) above, repeated here with the same numeration.
(2) [… ] [be [Th/Exthree people [PrtParrested t]] There exists a relevant contrast between both approaches, nonetheless, since the attraction of the DP theme into [Spec,Prt] as triggered by feature-strength of English participles applies within core syntax, whereas Th/Ex is a phonological operation. As a matter of fact, several contributions to the literature in the field have criticised the phonological nature of Chomsky’s Th/Ex: one of these is Holmberg (2001), who, following Lasnik (1995), argues in favour of the movement of the DP into preparticipial position as a process taking place in narrow syntax. Within such a framework, the DP is argued to be attracted by a (syntactic) EPP–feature of the participle. Holmberg (2001) criticises the phonological stance of Th/Ex principally by appealing to the semantic impact that the presence of the expletive has on the lexical DP (the so-called Definiteness Effect). The phonological nature of Th/Ex is also argued against in Radford (2000), where the author claims that it is a threat to a model of syntax as based on one- level representations. Aside from the controversy about the syntactic or otherwise phonological status of Th/Ex, what matters for the present discussion is that an extensive part of the literature – which includes works like Caponigro and Schütze (2003) or Rezac (2006) – shares the premise that there-passive participle constructions respond to the original configuration of a true or standard passive, where the lexical DP merges as the object of the participle and is later moved to [Spec,Prt]. If, on the other hand, the lexical DP targets [Spec,T], then the result is a standard or regular passive – see (7), or (3) above.
2. In defence of an existential configuration for there-passive participle constructions
In 2.1.1 and 2.2 below I try to question the validity of arguments that works such as Caponigro and Schütze (2003) or Rezac (2006) assume from the preceding literature against an analysis of there-passive participle constructions as existential constructions.2 On the other hand, in 2.1.2, 2.3, and likewise in 2.2 I highlight properties of relevant sequences that oppose these to sentential passives.
2 Specifically, Caponigro and Schütze (2003) base their analysis on a comparison between there-passive participle constructions on the one hand and there-active participle constructions on the other, whereas Rezac (2006) deals with the issue of locative inversion structures.
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2.1. Interpretive properties
The first set of arguments for an existential analysis or [DP-PrtpassP] analysis of there- passive participle constructions relates to their interpretive force, which is claimed here to differ both from standard or regular passives and from non-eventive there-passive participle constructions.
2.1.1. Eventive meaning
Milsark (1979) is arguably one of the first to oppose the view developed in Jenkins (1975) that all there-sequences generally speaking are existential structures, a view that the present paper adheres to. Milsark (1979) emphasises the fact that sequences like (1) compare to regular passives, an idea that the author bases on the fact that they both describe an event. Milsark’s hypothesis is assumed by Caponigro and Schütze (2003: 303) and likewise by Rezac (2006: 686), who endorse the claim that for time adverbials like just or just now to be possible in (11) must be taken to mean that the relevant sequences are not headed by a DP but are instead true verbal structures headed by Prtpass: by contrast with (11), the adverbial elements are not allowed in the existential sentences in (10), whose core is arguably a DP. The reason why such adverbials should be so closely associated with eventive meaning would lie in their capacity to highlight telicity, that is, boundedness in time of a given situation.3 (10) *There’s just been a frog / *There was a frog just now (11) a. There’ve just been some men arrested b. There were some men arrested just now c. There have just been several fish (*which were) caught However, for both (11a, b) and the relative clause within (11c) to be ill-formed does not mean that all DP’s on a general basis lack the ability to denote eventive meaning: the existence of eventive nouns as in (12) is widely acknowledged in the literature, and even if it should be claimed that be of (12) is an eventive verb proper rather than an instance of existential be, that would be no argument against the availability of eventive DP’s. (12) There has just been an accident / There was a massacre just now The status of (10) confirms that not all DP´s can serve the eventive function in a given existential construction, which means that an approach that defends the existential nature of a sequence like (1) – the model structure under analysis in this paper – must necessarily explain how the relevant DP gets its eventive interpretation. It is not difficult
3 Along with time adverbials like just or just now, the use of certain tenses also contributes to the telic interpretation of a given predication. Such is the case with the present perfect – see (i) below – or with the simple past vs. the imperfect in a language like Spanish (see 2.1.3 below). (i) There have been three people arrested. (typically eventive)
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to guess the massive role that Prtpass must play in this, though the precise mechanism will be specified in section 3 of the paper. As implied above, such a mechanism must be different from that applying in a relative construction, despite that fact that the latter also features a Prtpass. (1) There were three people arrested
2.1.2. Agentive meaning
The purpose of this section is to argue that a class of subject-oriented adverbs, specifically agentive adverbs, gives evidence of a relevant contrast existing between there-passive participle constructions on the one hand, and regular passives on the other: see (13) and (14) below.4 (13) (Willingly), a volunteer (willingly) was (willingly) arrested (willingly) by the soldiers (14) (*Willingly), there (*willingly) was (*willingly) a volunteer (willingly) arrested (willingly) by the soldiers. Assuming the view that adverbs are base-generated as adjuncts to constituents that act as their arguments from a logical point of view, the occurrence of willingly to the immediate left or right of the form arrested in both (13) and (14) is a clear indication that the adverb is a logical predicate of the event denoted by the participle. However, whereas the standard passive in (13) allows for the adverb to be moved to higher positions within the clause, and even to the periphery of the latter, the there- construction in (14) does not, which is here taken to mean that the verb be is a different element in each sequence. Effectively, (standard) passives are agentive structures, which is corroborated by the fact that only verbs taking an external argument allow for a passive counterpart: be in (13) can therefore incorporate the agentive adverb as an adjunct, or act as a platform for the adverb to get raised to a position in CP (the above- mentioned peripheral position). By contrast, the inability of the adverb willingly to appear in any of the relevant positions to the left of the DP a volunteer in (14) indicates that be in (14) is not the passive auxiliary. In the present approach, be of (14) is existential be, and the ungrammatical sequences therein are explained because neither existential be nor the functional projection that is argued in section 3 below to act as its complement match the agentive interpretation of the adverb. No further details of the syntax of adverbs in the constructions under analysis are nevertheless provided in this paper for reasons of space.
2.1.3. The existential-eventive interpretation of there-passive participle constructions
It has been argued in 2.1.2 that the restrictions affecting the position of agentive adverbs in there-passive participle constructions suggest that these are not able to express
4 My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for helpful comments about the nature of adverb placement generally speaking.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 91–110 ISSN 0210-6124 On There-Passive Participle Constructions 97 agentive meaning, as opposed to regular passives. Only regular or standard passives like (3), and not expletive constructions like (1), appear therefore to be agentive sequences. In addition to the latter contrast, (1) differs from (3) in the present approach in a major way since (1) is considered an existential construction proper, which means that the core of its interpretive force is to denote the existence of an individual. (1) There were three people arrested (3) Three people were arrested Before offering in 3 below the configuration that is proposed in this paper for there- passive participle constructions, it is convenient to describe what it can arguably mean for an existential structure to be additionally an eventive construction. I would like to claim that the eventive meaning of (1) comes about in the following manner: the individual whose existence is denoted or asserted in there-passive participle constructions is additionally the target of some action or activity, as expressed by the passive participle. In this way, regular or standard passives like (3) express the taking place of an action or activity in a direct way, whereas passive participle constructions like (1) do so indirectly, through asserting the existence of an individual (three people in the case in hand) that is affected by the action or activity: (1) could thus be paraphrased as ‘There were three people such that they were arrested by somebody’. The syntactic analysis of there-passive participle constructions proposed in 3 below will entail a slight revision of the property or value of existence for relevant constructions, although one that does not affect the discussion at this stage. The aspect of the present approach to eventive sequences like (1) that I would like to highlight is that, despite the close synonymity existing between these and standard passives such as (3), the former are existential constructions proper that feature existential be and that respond to the properties of existential constructions generally speaking. I would like to suggest that a very close parallel can be found within the existential domain in a language like Spanish. Thus, (15a) below is near-synonymous with the standard passive (15b), though it must still be analysed as an existential construction proper. The reason that the use of the simple past in (15a) almost precludes a stative or non-eventive reading, which is the one that corresponds to (16) in a natural way, is that the simple past is typically a telic tense, as opposed to the imperfect. (15) a. Hubo tres personas arrestadas (typically eventive) there-werepast three people arrested b. Tres personas fueron arrestadas three people were arrested (16) Había tres personas arrestadas (typically non-eventive) there-wereimperfect three people arrested The approach to there-passive participle constructions as existential constructions that is proposed in this paper renders the cross-linguistic paradigm established in Caponigro and Schütze (2003) as an inappropriate one, since the Italian sequences that the authors
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 91–110 ISSN 0210-6124 98 Concha Castillo provide as counterparts to sequences like English (1) do not appear to be comparable to the latter. (17) There’ve been some men arrested / *There’ve been arrested some men (18) *Sono stati alcuni uomini arrestati / Sono stati arrestati alcuni uomini are been some men arrested are been arrested some men ‘Some men have been arrested’ (the author’s translation) (Caponigro and Schütze 2003: 293) In effect, on the present analysis, (17) are existential constructions (of the eventive type) whereas (18) are identified as regular passives. Caponigro and Schütze (2003: 304) observe that Italian completely forbids the expletive ci ‘there’ in standard or regular passives (*Ci sono stati arrestati alcuni uomini, lit. ‘there are been arrested some men’). However, from this fact it cannot be concluded that English (17) – or similarly (1) – are sentential passives: in other words, for Italian not to accept expletive passives does not entail that (18) is the counterpart of (17), even though they both share an eventive interpretation (see above in this section). In the remainder of this section I focus briefly on non-eventive there-passive participle constructions, that is on the non-eventive reading that is available for a sequence like (1). As observed in the Introduction, there is general consensus in the literature that these are existential constructions acting as a superordinate structure to a relative clause configuration (4), a perspective that is assumed here. In the present approach, then, both eventive and non-eventive there-passive participle constructions assert the existence of an individual, as all there-constructions do on a general basis (Jenkins 1975): the difference between the two lies in that the above-mentioned individual is identified in eventive expletives as the target of an action (see above in this section), whereas the individual in the non-eventive type is described as holding a certain state that is the result of previous action. That this is so can be shown by the use of the perfective auxiliary in the paraphrase of non-eventive sequences: the non- eventive reading of (1) would thus correspond roughly with ‘There were three people such that they were in the state of having been arrested’ or similarly ‘There were three people such that they had been arrested’.
2.2. Extraction phenomena
Extraction phenomena involving there-passive participle constructions can be used as arguments against a sentential passive analysis or [PrtpassP-DP] analysis of corresponding sequences. Both Caponigro and Schütze (2003: 303) and Rezac (2006: 686), citing relevant literature (Lasnik 1995, 1999; Chomsky 2001), consider the marginal status of extraction from PrtpassP of eventive expletive constructions as in (19) as a proof that these do not entertain the same configuration as non-eventive constructions. For the latter to feature a relative clause structure would explain, as is currently assumed in the literature, the full ungrammaticality of the A´-movement process. (19) ??How were there some volunteers arrested? (eventive structure)
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(20) a. There are two meetings postponed nonsensically on the agenda (non-eventive st.)
b. There are [DPtwo meetings [RelClOp postponed t nonsensically on the agenda]] c. *How are there [two meetings [Op postponed t t on the agenda?]] While adhering to the relative clause analysis for non-eventive there-passive participle constructions, I would like to suggest that there is one significant paradigm that must additionally be accounted for, where eventive there-passive participle constructions are contrasted with regular or standard passives. Thus, though (19) is not completely ruled out as a possible sequence in English, it is actually more restricted or limited than (21), a circumstance that must surely entail for Prtpass of standard passives to enjoy a different status than Prtpass of there-participle constructions. (19) ??How were there some volunteers arrested? (21) How were some volunteers arrested? A similar situation arises with regard to A´-extraction from DP, which again casts serious doubts on a regular passive analysis of there-passive participle constructions. It must be emphasised, nonetheless, that deciding over the grammatical or ungrammatical status of (22) is a real conundrum for the theory, and that lack of consensus among linguist speakers is quite high. (22) */?How many people were there arrested? (eventive there-structure) (23) How many people were arrested? I would like to note that, of the two proposals currently available in the literature on the contrast between (22) and (23), both of which assume an original [PrtpassP-DP] order and a Th/Ex operation (or an EPP-property of Prtpass), neither can be said to be fully satisfactory. On the one hand, Chomsky (2001) argues that Th/Ex is a process applying exclusively in the phonological component, which means that the DP is left without any phonological features at Spell-Out. The process of attraction into C (omplementiser)P(hrase) demanded by a sequence like (22) is therefore not a viable one, due to the inability of the DP to move in narrow syntax. Now, aside from the criticism that the phonological status of Th/Ex has received on various fronts (see 1 above), the relevant proposal does not seem to explain the A´-movement restriction illustrated in (19) or the one that is discussed in 3.3 below. Furthemore, it is interesting to observe that, while Rezac (2006) acknowledges the capacity of non-iterable Th/Ex to explain (22), he criticises its lack of efficiency to tackle certain restrictions affecting locative inversion sequences (Rezac 2006: 692). One other proposal that can be found in the literature with regard to the impossibility of (22) is Holmberg (2001), which assumes a Th/Ex (or EPP) position for the DP of there-passive participle constructions, but one that belongs to core or narrow syntax (see 1 above). Basing on Th/Ex as an operation of the computational system, Holmberg (2001) justifies (22) by appealing to the concept or notion of phase, a well- known mark of recent minimalist syntax. As is currently assumed, a phase is a kind of syntactic domain acting as a barrier for movement processes – specifically, Chomsky (2001) regards propositional vP and CP as typical phases, to which he later adds DP. By
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invoking the status of phase for English participle phrases (that is, for PrtpassP), Holmberg (2001) is able to disallow Wh-movement of DP from [Spec,PrtPpass] over the expletive there since the merge of the latter means for PrtpassP to be conformed already, and therefore to be impenetrable to further operations in the syntax. Nevertheless, Holmberg´s analysis appears to complicate the current notion of phase, since English participles lack phi-features, or otherwise P-features. In effect phases appear to be the locus of features, which are at the base of movement processes: above-mentioned vP and DP contain phi-features, whereas CP is associated with P- features or features of the peripheral system. On Holmberg’s account, therefore, Prtpass (or V-en) is a different kind of phase from vP (or, for that matter, DP or CP), which appears to go against economy considerations, and against the explanatory power that syntactic theory must attain. The proposal that will be sketched in section 3 of the present paper aims to explain the contrast between (19) and (21), and also that between (22) and (23), through resort to the concept of phase, though the task is to avoid modifying or adding to the existing notion of phase, an aspect which appears to be a weakness in Holmberg’s discussion (2001).
2.3. Chains of auxiliaries
After using certain interpretive properties of there-passive participle constructions (2.1) and restrictions on constituent extraction (2.2) as evidence against a regular passive account (or [PrtpassP-DP] account), my focus in the current section is on the sequential order of auxiliaries, specifically on the combinatorial possibilities exhibited by progressive be and passive be. (24) a. There are three people arrested every day now b. There were three people arrested c. There have been three people arrested d. There will be three people arrested e. There are three people being arrested at this moment f. *There are being three people arrested at this moment (25) Three people are being arrested at this moment
If a standard passive analysis is implemented on the above paradigm, with [PrtpassP-DP] as the original base order, then the only instance of be occurring in each of the examples (24a-d) is one of passive be: an EPP-feature of the participle (or a Th/Ex mechanism), whether syntactic or phonological, would trigger the movement of the DP three people to [Spec,Prt] in all above-mentioned sequences. By contrast with (24a-d), (24e) features two instances of be which, according to the cited pattern, must correspond to passive be (in the progressive form being) and progressive be (in the finite form are). In a similar fashion to (24e), the full or regular passive (25) contains both progressive be and passive be. The relevant aspect to highlight about the occurrence of progressive be in paradigm
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(24) is that (24e) is grammatical, but not (24f), despite the lexical DP occupying the same position as in well-formed (24a-d). Rezac (2006) tries to solve this apparent contradiction by postulating an iteration process that gets the DP attracted to [Spec,Prtpass] and then to [Spec,Prtprog], thereby opposing the Th/Ex phonological mechanism of Chomsky (2001), which cannot recur (see section 2.2 above). I would like to make the point that Rezac’s account of (24e) does not appear to be on the right track, since the EPP-property of the present participle in the relevant structure is not shared by present participles generally speaking: note the ungrammaticality of (26b). (26) a. They are sinking a boat b. *They are a boat sinking If, by contrast with the current trend in minimalist literature, there-passive participle constructions are analysed as existential constructions, then it is possible to account for the ungrammaticality of (24f) in a fairly straightforward way. In such an approach, which is the one followed here, the only occurrence of passive be in paradigm (24) is the progressive form in (24e), all other instances of be in (24a-d) being arguably identified as existential be. The ungrammatical status of (24f) is therefore not due to a failure of raising of DP, but to the aspectual oddity of the sequence [are being], where existential be occurs in the progressive.5
3. On the configuration of existential constructions
The main goal of the paper has been to propose a critique of the analysis of there- passive participle constructions as passive constructions, that is as constructions that feature an original [PrtpassP-DP] order, and to propose instead that these are existential constructions proper where DP is actually not the direct object argument of Prtpass. In 2.1.1–2.1.2 and 2.2, respectively, it has been argued that there-passive participle structures differ from true sentential passives in their inability to denote agentive meaning and likewise in the restrictions affecting constituent extraction (an issue that must still be accounted for), and in 2.3 the view that be of there-passive participle structures is existential be, which had previously been suggested by the constraints on agentive adverbs (above-mentioned 2.1.2), has been supported by an analysis of sequences featuring the progressive auxiliary.6
5 The use of existential be in the progressive is nevertheless not impossible: (i) below is an illustration taken from Radford (2000: 43), where the occurrence of an adverb like continually appears to be crucial. (i) There are continually being new treatments developed for cancer. 6 The argumentation provided in 2 against a passive analysis for there-passive participle constructions can be completed with reference to passive sentence-types for which there is no there-counterpart. The reader is referred to McNally (1997: 176-77) and Radford (2000: 11), where passives incorporating a relative clause and get-passives are discussed, respectively. On the other hand, the evidence in favour of the above-mentioned passive analysis as based on object
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The purpose of 3–3.2 is to suggest a plausible syntactic configuration for there- passive participle constructions which can be useful in solving questions or problems raised in previous sections: I must insist that the aim is to sketch out a plausible analysis for relevant sequences, and that further refinements on the proposal belong to ongoing investigation. Now, the present paper adopts Hazout’s (2004) approach to existential constructions as a model analysis for a study of there-passive participle constructions, and it does so based on a core aspect of the relevant approach, namely the status of predicate that is adjudicated to the lexical DP, which is actually inseparable from the issue of the site of merge of expletive there (see below in this section). The above- mentioned treatment of the DP as a predicate is argued in this part of the paper to be an adequate tool to explain the extraction constraints holding on there-passive participle constructions and the interpretive differences existing both between these and standard or regular passives, and between there-passive participle constructions of the eventive type and those of the non-eventive type. It must be noted that Hazout (2004) does not deal in any detail with the structural type under analysis in this paper (that is, there- passive participle constructions), but with English (and Hebrew) expletive there and it structures: however, as just mentioned, the author’s perspective appears to fit the view on passive participle constructions taken in the present discussion.7 On the other hand, Hazout’s approach is not without antecedents in the theory (see Government-Binding works like Williams 1984, or Safir 1987 for previous treatment of existential DP’s as predicates): nevertheless, as is well known, the common trend in the literature is to regard the relevant DP as a subject: see the simplified tree-diagram in figure 1 below, which corresponds to (5) in section 1 above.
Figure 1. Standard configuration for existential constructions
idiom chunks (Chomsky 2001) is neutralised by structures cited in Radford (2000: 14) from an alternative source. 7 Actually, Hazout (2004: 423) happens to entertain on one occasion a configuration for there-passive participle constructions that does not fully correspond with the analysis provided in 3.1 and 3.2 below. However, it must be emphasised that there-passive participle constructions are not the main thrust of his analysis, and that the author does not even aim at a distinction between eventive there-constructions on the one hand and non-eventive there-constructions on the other.
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After considering the syntax of predicate nominals and the availability of existential sentences featuring just one thematic constituent, the structure that is proposed in Hazout (2004) for a (simple) existential like (27) is the one in figure 2 below. (27) There are difficulties
Figure 2. Configuration for existential constructions as based on Hazout (2004) Hazout´s analysis of existential constructions draws heavily on Bowers (1993, 2002) in positing PrP (Predicative Phrase), whose head is liable to be the locus of both verbal and non-verbal elements, as the core projection. The lexical DP originally occupies the position of complement of the head Pr and later has its phi-features percolate up from this site onto the intermediate P´–level, where a (purely formal) subject-predicate relation is established between sister constituents, namely Pr´on the one hand, and the position occupied by the expletive on the other. PrP actually has a structure very similar to that of a typical little v projection, although, as mentioned above, it can be the site of both verbal and non-verbal elements alike: in 3.1 and 3.2 I will try to explain the massive significance of the licensing of DP as the predicate of PrP for the view on there-passive participle constructions taken in this paper. I would like to end this brief description of Hazout’s proposal by stressing the importance that the treatment of expletive there as the original subject of Pr has for the analysis of the DP as a predicate (instead of an argument), an approach that can also be found in Bowers (2002). For there to merge in [Spec,Pr] – or, the same, [Spec,v] – instead of [Spec,T] is a massive issue for the analysis of the structures in Hazout’s paper itself, and also for expletive unaccusative constructions like There have arrived some guests this morning, a structural type that is indirectly related to the discussion in the present paper. Despite the full significance of this issue for the theory of clause structure, limitations of time and space prevent me from dealing with it on this occasion.
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3.1. A proposal for there-passive participle constructions
In this section I suggest that the configuration proposed for expletive constructions in Hazout (2004) appears to be adequate in order to explain or justify both the interpretive properties of there-passive participle constructions that have been discussed in section 2.1 above, and the extraction restrictions described in section 2.2. Extraction phenomena are actually dealt with in 3.2 below. Both Caponigro and Schütze (2003) and Rezac (2006) – and also the influential works by Lasnik and Chomsky that these are based on (see 1 and 2 above) – posit a structure for (1) where the latter is a base-generated passive sentence featuring the order [PrtpassP-DP]. The corresponding tree-diagram would thus be something like figure 3. (1) There were three people arrested
Figure 3. Standard configuration for passive constructions By contrast with this approach, it is argued in this paper that (1) must have a hierarchical structure comparable to figure 2 above, where the DP three people figures as the predicate of PrP. This means that the DP is an element denoting not an entity or an individual (since it is not an argument), but a property that consists in the existence of an entity or an individual. Before showing the precise configuration proposed in this paper for a(n eventive) there-passive participle construction like (1), which trivially entails specifying the exact position of the participle or PrtpassP, it might be helpful to consider further the non-eventive reading of (1). As observed previously in the paper, the present discussion agrees with general assumptions in the literature about the status of relative clause of the constituent to the right of DP in non-eventive constructions. On the present account, a non-eventive there-passive participle construction would look like figure 4 below, where PrtpassP is the verbal element of the above-mentioned relative clause.
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Figure 4. Proposed configuration for non-eventive there-passive participle constructions
Now, the adoption of Hazout’s (2004) configuration makes it possible for PrtpassP of eventive there-passive participle constructions to occupy a place that is not an adjunct of D, as in non-eventive constructions, while at the same time figuring within PrP. The relevant position is adjunct to Pr, and the reason that it seems to be an adequate position is that it appears to correlate with interpretive properties previously discussed about (eventive) there-passive participle constructions. Figure 5 below is thus the configuration proposed in the present paper for an eventive there-passive participle construction. As will be recalled from 2.1.1, the constructions in question (eventive there-passive participle constructions) were argued to be sentences denoting the existence of an entity that happens to be the target of some action or activity. The identification of the postverbal DP as a predicate (instead of an argument) entails, as mentioned above, that it denotes an existential property; as for the participle (PrtpassP), it would name the very action or activity affecting the entity whose existence is predicated. Eventive there- passive participle constructions could therefore be plausibly constituted by a primary predicate denoting existence on the one hand, and a secondary predicate describing the actual taking place of an action, and thus contributing the relevant eventive interpretation. Eventive there-passive participle constructions differ from regular or standard passives in that these are not about the existence of any entity whatsoever, but
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 91–110 ISSN 0210-6124 106 Concha Castillo describe an action from the point of view of the affected entity: though both sentence- types are eventive, only regular passives are additionally agentive structures.
Figure 5. Proposed configuration for eventive there-passive participle constructions The interpretive contrast existing between eventive there-passive participle constructions on the one hand, and non-eventive constructions on the other must arguably correlate not only with the categorial status of PrtpassP for the former vs. the status of reduced relative clause for the latter but also, and possibly in a more relevant way, with the distinct position that PrtpassP and the relative clause each occupy with respect to DP: as argued above, the instantiation of the functional projection Pr(edicative)P(hrase) makes it possible for PrtpassP not to be an adjunct of D strictly speaking, but one of Pr, which would seem to correlate with PrtpassP being itself a predicate on a par with DP. In this respect, it is interesting to mention an approach like McNally (1997), where there-passive participle constructions are also argued to be existential constructions proper. By contrast with the present account, however, McNally (1997) provides a configuration consisting of simply an ordinary VP, that is a VP with no small clause construct within, the only positions available being the typical DP object position and further the adjoined positions to either V or the DP itself. While the author attributes a different categorial status to the participle in non-eventive constructions (a relative clause) vs. eventive constructions (an A[djective]P[hrase]), she locates both constituents as adjuncts of the lexical DP. As argued above, a structural type where PrtpassP of eventive constructions holds a position more independent from DP than the relative clause adjunct would seem to correlate much more appropriately with the interpretive properties of the construction. Further, the distinct behaviour of eventive vs. non-eventive there-sequences with regard to Wh-movement appears to demand a different location for PrtpassP in each case: see section immediately below. One other issue that needs to be considered in this section is why a (reduced) relative clause is not liable to express the eventive meaning that is naturally associated
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 91–110 ISSN 0210-6124 On There-Passive Participle Constructions 107 with eventive there-passive participle constructions. Now, the fact that the participle of eventive there-passive participle constructions heads its own projection (PrtpassP) without the assistance of any Comp position would seem to ensure that it is a predicate that is transparent to the temporal interpretation of the matrix verb (that is, existential be), a circumstance that would contribute to the close synonymity existing between there-passive participle constructions and regular passives: the time of the activity that affects an entity is shown to coincide with the time of the situation during which the property of the existence of that entity holds. By contrast with eventive there-passive participle constructions, the participle of non-eventive sequences is embedded under Comp, which would mean that it is a predicate with temporal properties of its own, though these are necessarily understood relative to the time of the main predicate, which is existential be in the main clause: in the specific case with non-eventive passive participle constructions, the participle describes a state of affairs that is located prior in time to the state of affairs denoted by the main verb.8 Let us recall, in this last respect, possible paraphrases for the non- eventive reading of a sentence like (1) There were three people arrested: namely, ‘There were three people in the state of having been arrested’, or also ‘There were three people that had been arrested’.
3.2. An explanation of extraction phenomena
In this last section I use the configuration postulated in figure 5 above in order to explain the constraints on constituent extraction that appear to affect there-passive participle constructions but not regular or standard passive constructions, a contrast that is argued in this paper to justify a different syntactic treatment for each structural type. See (22) and (19) in 2.2 above, repeated here with the same numeration. (22) */?How many people were there arrested? (19) ?? How were there some volunteers arrested? As will be recalled, reference was made in 2.2 to the criticism that the phonological status of Th/Ex in Chomsky (2001) has received on various fronts, which appears to invalidate the above-mentioned application of Th/Ex in the phonological component as an explanation for the marginal status of (22). In fact, one argument against the relevant account is its incapacity to explain the marginality of (19). An alternative explanation for (22) discussed in 2.2 was Holmberg (2001), where (English) PrtpassP is postulated as a phase despite its lack of phi-features, with the subsequent undesirable modification of common assumptions about phases. Now, the
8 Law (1999: 203) suggests that the reason why a relative clause is unable to express eventive meaning lies in the finite auxiliary be preventing V–en from being bound by matrix T. Though the author himself acknowledges that this is not a fully worked out account, I would like to observe that the relevant approach would seem not to be on the right track for two reasons: on the one hand, it does not explain why finite subordinate T lacks the ability to bind the necessary event variable; on the other hand, the analysis does not carry over to reduced relative clauses, which happen to share the relevant inability with full relatives.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 91–110 ISSN 0210-6124 108 Concha Castillo tentative analysis of (22) and (19) that I would like to propose in this paper is also a phase-based analysis but one that, as expectedly, does not entail adapting the concept of phase to the specific case with participle projections. In effect, in a configuration like figure 5, where DP is the head of Pr(edicative)P(hrase), postulating that Pr(edicative)P(hrase) is actually a phase does not entail the creation of a construct distinct from vP or DP (typical phase projections containing phi-features) since the above-mentioned DP is trivially associated with phi-features. Thus, whereas the focus in section 2 of the paper was on a critique of a [PrtpassP-DP] analysis of there-passive participle constructions and on the postulation of a [DP- PrtpassP] analysis, the status of predicate adjudicated to DP in the above-mentioned [DP-PrtpassP] analysis is claimed in the present section to be necessary in order to tackle there-passive participle constructions in an adequate way. This does not mean, however, that a full answer for the phenomena in (22) and (19) is provided in this paper – see immediately below. In effect, on Holmberg’s (2001) account, (22) is justified because PrtpassP is a phase and consequently the lexical DP cannot move over the expletive there, which belongs within a higher phase, despite the fact that the above-mentioned lexical DP occupies the Spec position of Prtpass. The merge of expletive there is not an obstacle for the present approach, since the expletive is argued to occupy Spec of Pr(edicative)P(hrase) initially in the derivation. The marginal status of (22) and (19) must therefore be argued to be the result of the impossibility of extracting material out of the domain of a head. The relevant mechanism would be as follows. As currently assumed in the literature, the head and edge (or Spec) of a phase are accessible to later syntactic operations, but the domain is not. This means that the status of (19)??How were there some people arrested? is accounted for in a straightforward way, since PrtpassP belongs to the domain of Pr(edicative)P(hrase). However, what is apparently not so clear is why the extraction from the head of a phase should result in a marginal sequence. That is, on the present phase-based approach to existential sequences, where the lexical DP is the head of the functional projection and there is merged in the Spec of the functional projection (that is, [Spec,Pr]), the marginal character of (22)*/?How many people were there arrested is unexpected. I can only suggest here that a possible explanation for (22) might perhaps lie in the oddity of detaching the core predicate that is DP from the secondary predicate that is PrtpassP. Some indication that this hypothesis might be on the right track is the grammaticality of there-passive participle constructions with a non-eventive interpretation, that is there-passive participle constructions where PrtpassP is the verb of a relative clause inside the DP itself, an account that is currently assumed in the literature and that has been endorsed in this paper (see figure 4). Thus, both the eventive existential (22) and the stative existentials in (28) share a movement process affecting the head of a phase – that is, the lexical DP. However, only (28a,b) appear to be acceptable, which further would seem to support an account like the present one against one like McNally (1997), where the participle is an adjunct of D in both eventive and non-eventive sequences (see 3.1). It is to be hoped that future research can throw more light on this specific issue.
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(28) a. [How many people arrested] are there (already) [t]? (non-event. struct.) b. [How many books already signed by their authors] were there [t]? (non-event. struct.)
4. Summary
It has been argued in this paper that eventive there-passive participle constructions cannot properly be analysed as standard or regular passives, which means that [DP- PrtpassP] is rejected as a derived order, whether it is implemented through a syntactic Th/Ex position or a phonological one. The evidence that is provided against the regular passive approach relates to (a) interpretive properties of the constructions involved, (b) extraction phenomena, and (c) properties of auxiliary chain formation. The restrictions affecting agentive adverbs and similarly the syntax of progressive be are claimed to point in the direction of existential be as distinct from passive be. [There be]-sequences are defined on a general basis as sentences that denote a property consisting in the existence of an individual. While granting that the interpretive force of eventive there-passive participle constructions on the one hand and that of standard passives on the other are very close to each other, it is suggested that the eventive interpretation of the former, but not crucially that of standard passives, is subordinated to the above-mentioned existential meaning. Eventive there-passive participle constructions are therefore characterised as both existential and (trivially) eventive, whereas standard passives are characterised as both eventive and agentive, and still non-eventive there-passive participle constructions are analysed as existential but stative, as is currently assumed in the literature. The syntactic configuration that is proposed for there-passive participle constructions is based on Hazout (2004), and in it the lexical DP figures as the core or primary predicate of a small clause construction (Pr[edicative]P[hrase]) whose subject is expletive there. The difference between eventive structures and non-eventive ones is argued to lie in the location of PrtpassP: whereas the participle of non-eventive constructions is analysed as the verb of a reduced relative clause that is adjunct of the lexical DP, the participle of eventive sequences is claimed to be an adjunct predicate of the small clause PrP. This distinction would appear to correlate with differences of interpretation, and also with contrasts regarding extractability of constituents, which are specifically tackled by invoking a phase-based approach to PrP. Nonetheless, no definitive solution is offered for the seemingly marginal status of a sequence like */?How many people were there arrested?
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Works Cited
Belletti, Adriana 1988: ‘The Case of Unaccusatives’. Linguistic Inquiry 19: 1-34. Bowers, John 1993: ‘The Syntax of Predication’. Linguistic Inquiry 24: 591-656. ––––– 2002: ‘Transitivity’. Linguistic Inquiry 33: 183-224. Caponigro, Ivano and Carson T. Schütze 2003: ‘Parameterizing Passive Participle Movement’. Linguistic Inquiry 34: 293-308. Chomsky, Noam 2000: ‘Minimalist Inquiries: The Framework’. Roger Martin, David Michaels and Juan Uriagereka, eds. Step by Step: Essays on Minimalist Syntax in Honor of Howard Lasnik. Cambridge: MIT UP. 89-155. ––––– 2001: ‘Derivation by Phase’. Michael Kenstowicz, ed. Ken Hale: A Life in Language. Cambridge: MIT UP. 1-52. Hazout, Illan 2004: ‘The Syntax of Existential Constructions’. Linguistic Inquiry 35: 393-430. Hoekstra, Teun and René Mulder 1990: ‘Unergatives as Copular Verbs: Locational and Existential Predication’. The Linguistic Review 7: 1-79. Holmberg, Anders 2001: ‘Expletives and Agreement in Scandinavian Passives’. Journal of Comparative Germanic Linguistics 4: 85-128. Jenkins, Lyle 1975: The English Existential. Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag. Lasnik, Howard 1995: ‘Case and Expletives Revisited: On Greed and Other Human Failings’. Linguistic Inquiry 26: 615-33. ––––– 1999: Minimalist Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell. Law, Paul 1999: ‘On the Passive Existential Construction’. Studia Linguistica 53: 183-208. McNally, Louise 1997: The English Existential Construction. New York: Garland. Milsark, Gary 1979: Existential Sentences in English. New York: Garland. Radford, Andrew 2000: ‘On Object Displacement in English Passives’. Essex Research Reports in Linguistics 33: 33-49. Rezac, Milan 2006: ‘The Interaction of Th/Ex and Locative Inversion’. Linguistic Inquiry 37: 685-97. Safir, Kenneth 1987: ‘What Explains the Definiteness Effect?’ Eric J. Reuland and Alice G.B. ter Meulen, eds. The Representation of (In)Definiteness. Cambridge: MIT UP. 71-97. Williams, Edwin 1984: ‘There-Insertion’. Linguistic Inquiry 15: 131-53.
Received 5 July 2008 Revised version accepted 26 November 2008
Concha Castillo, (PhD Málaga) is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the University of Málaga. Her research interests centre on the syntax-semantics interface, syntactic theory, diachronic syntax, Romance languages (in comparison with English). Her publications include: Castillo, C. 2001. The configuration of ECM structures. Studia Linguistica 55: 113-140; Castillo, C. 2003. English grammar for Spanish speakers: A comparative introduction. Berne & Berlin: Peter Lang; Castillo, C. 2004. English to- infinitive relative clauses. Folia Linguistica Historica XXV: 135-153.
Address: Universidad de Málaga, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Dpto. de Filología Inglesa, Francesa, y Alemana, Campus de Teatinos, 29071 Málaga. Tel.+34 952131793, Fax: 952 +34 131843.
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Voice-overs in Standardized English and Spanish Television Commercials
Barry Pennock-Speck Mª Milagros del Saz Rubio Universitat de València Universidad Politécnica de Valencia [email protected] [email protected]
Our aim in this article is to explore the paralinguistic characteristics of voices in voice-overs in a corpus of English and Spanish TV ads. Our underlying premise is that voice-overs, just like linguistic messages, images and music, convey information which is picked up by viewers whether at a conscious or subconscious level. In our analysis we attempt to find what patterns, if any, can be discovered in our corpus of voice-overs with regard to a number of parameters such as gender, accent, age and voice-quality. To this end we gathered data on our corpus of voice- overs through questionnaires completed by native English and Spanish informants respectively. The analysis we have carried out goes beyond previous research into voice-overs which either centres on one of the above parameters in isolation or which makes use of the intuitions of researchers using limited samples of TV ads. Our findings reveal that prestigious accents predominate in both the English and Spanish voice-overs. We also discovered that female voices are perceived to be younger than those of their male counterparts and voice characteristics such as pitch, breathiness, assertiveness and others also seem to correlate with the gender of the speaker.
Keywords: advertising; television; voice; gender; age; accent
La voz en off en anuncios televisivos estandarizados en ingles y español
El objetivo de este artículo es llevar a cabo un estudio de los aspectos paralingüísticos de la voz en un corpus de voces en off de anuncios televisivos en inglés y en español. Partimos de la creencia de que las voces en off, del mismo modo que ocurre con el mensaje lingüístico, las imágenes o la música en un anuncio, transmiten determinada información que la audiencia recupera a un nivel consciente o sub- consciente. Con nuestro análisis pretendemos discernir los diferentes patrones de voces que se usan en nuestro corpus de anuncios prestando atención a las variables de género, acento, edad, y calidad de voz. Para obtener información sobre estos aspectos hemos distribuido un cuestionario a hablantes nativos del español y del inglés. Con nuestro análisis pretendemos solventar las deficiencias que presentan estudios existentes, los cuales, o bien se han centrado en el estudio aislado de una de las variables anteriormente mencionadas, o bien se han basado en las propias intuiciones de los investigadores en torno a un corpus muy reducido. Nuestros resultados ponen de manifiesto un predominio de los acentos más prestigiosos tanto en las voces en off en español como en inglés. Del mismo modo, hemos corroborado que los hablantes nativos que forman parte de la investigación perciben que las voces femeninas pertenecen a individuos más jóvenes que en el caso de sus homólogos masculinos. Igualmente, características tales como el tono, la aspiración, la asertividad y otros parecen estar íntimamente ligadas al género de la persona que habla.
Palabras clave: publicidad; televisión; voz; género; edad; acento 112 Barry Pennock-Speck and Mª Milagros del Saz Rubio
1 Introduction
All the elements that make up television commercials, be they linguistic or otherwise, contribute to their overall goal which is ultimately to “sell something”, whether it is an idea or a product (Askehave and Swales 2001). However, it is the presence of extra- linguistic elements (Cook 2001) such as sound, moving images and paralinguistic elements like voice that set TV ads apart. A common trend in advertising practices nowadays (Cohen-Eliya and Hammer 2004) is to produce commercials in which what is implied is more important than what is explicitly stated. A consequence of this is that overt linguistic messages are becoming more peripheral and extra- and paralinguistic factors more central (Cook 2001: 37). This ties in with the main aim of this article, which is to compare the paralinguistic characteristics of voices in voice-overs in a corpus of English and Spanish TV ads. We believe that – just like images and music, which have been studied extensively in the context of TV advertising – the paralinguistic characteristics of the voices employed by advertisers in voice-overs are also of key importance as a means of conveying information to viewers and shaping their attitudes, at a conscious or sub-conscious level, about the products being advertised. As a result, they deserve to be analyzed in greater depth if we are to obtain a better understanding of how information is transmitted in TV ads. For that reason, our aim is to discover what information is conveyed to viewers through voice-overs in both English and Spanish TV ads and in what ways, if any, the characteristics of the voice- overs differ from one language to another. The parameters we will focus on here are the speaker’s gender, accent, age and other less tangible, but nonetheless important, characteristics such as his/her emotional state or personality. To carry out our analysis, given that it is unfeasible to ask every single viewer for his/her opinion, we were faced with two possible alternatives. The first was to use our own intuitions about voice-overs and the second to gather the insights of independent non-specialist informants. For greater objectivity, we have chosen the second alternative as we believe that what non-specialist informants pick up when listening to voice-overs will undoubtedly give us a more impartial and clearer idea of what the public in general perceives than the opinion of trained linguists. The structure of the rest of this article is as follows. In section two we present a brief overview of the existing research into the meanings that voices can convey and in section three we focus on the research into the types of voices used in voice-overs in TV ads. Section four consists of a detailed description of our corpus and how it was gathered, followed, in section five, by an account of the demographics of our group of informants, and an explanation of the methodology by which we gathered our data. In section six we detail the results obtained through the questionnaires completed by our informants. Section seven includes a discussion on the results for each language with special emphasis on the differences and similarities between them. Finally, we offer a series of concluding remarks that connect our findings with research into the ideological bias of TV ads.
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2. Voices as a carrier of meaning
In this article we are not concerned with what is undoubtedly the main function of voice-overs in TV ads, i.e. to transmit verbal messages which “mediate and establish ‘space’ between screen event and viewer” (Stigel 2001: 329). What we are interested in is that extra level of potential meaning embodied in the physical substance of voices in general and especially in voices employed in voice-overs. In face-to-face interaction, phone conversations or communication through other types of electronic media, we unintentionally supply those who hear our voices with information on our geographical origin, social class, gender, age, emotions or even our state of health. Wilson and Wharton (2006: 1561) call involuntary information of this kind a “natural sign” (cf. “informative signal”, Lyons 1977: 33). The acoustic data that tell us where a person is from or that he/she has a cold or is angry are not inherently communicative but “convey information by providing evidence for it” (Wilson and Wharton 2006: 1564). Natural signs stand in contrast to both “linguistic signals” proper, which encode conceptual meanings, and “natural signals”, which are “inherently communicative, and convey information by coding” as in the case of intonation and sentence stress (Wilson and Wharton 2006: 1564). It is, of course, possible to manipulate natural signs as in the case of a working-class person in England who ‘puts on’ an RP accent in an interview in order to have a better chance of getting a job. In such situations natural signs become communicative to use Lyons’ (1977: 33) term (cf. Laver and Trudgill 1979). Wilson and Wharton (2006: 1563) give the example of a woman saying “Jack is late” in an angry voice. The speaker would be interpreted as meaning not only that Jack was late but that she was angry about it. We argue that in TV ads, the conscious manipulation of voices, on the part of the producers of advertisements, also adds meaning to whatever message is being transmitted. In other words, it is impossible to divorce the message from the medium, that is, voice. For example, when a young male voice-over specialist is chosen instead of an older man, or indeed a woman, or when an actor is instructed to perform a voice- over with a deep breathy voice instead of using a more normal type of phonation, these are de facto cases of voice manipulation which, from our point of view, have been carefully designed to suit the advertiser’s message.
3. Voice-types in voice-overs in TV ads
Our analysis of meanings conveyed by voice-overs, which we describe in section six, builds on previous research in several fields including linguistics, gender studies, social psychology, anthropology, marketing and advertising. Following Laver and Trudgill (1979: 3) we will look at voice using the categories listed below: (a) those that mark social characteristics, such as regional affiliation, social status, educational status, occupation and social role; (b) those that mark physical characteristics, such as age, sex, physique and state of health;
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 111–127 ISSN 0210-6124 114 Barry Pennock-Speck and Mª Milagros del Saz Rubio
(c) those that mark psychological characteristics of personality and affective state. By far the greatest amount of research on voice-overs in TV ads has been carried out on gender bias. All the literature on this topic to date (Courtney and Whipple 1974; McArthur and Resko 1975; O’Donnell and O’Donnell 1978; Manstead and McCulloch 1981; Downs and Harrison 1985; Livingstone and Green 1986; Bretl and Cantor 1988; Furnham and Voli 1989; Mazzella et al. 1992; Furnham and Bitar 1993; Neto and Pinto 1998) points to the fact that “authoritative voices advising you what to buy are nearly all men’s voices” (Kimmel 2003: 165). The only exception to this general rule is to be found in the voice-overs for traditionally female products (Dominick and Rauch 1972; Courtney and Whipple 1974; Marecek et al. 1978; Kimmel 2003; Pennock-Speck 2006; del Saz-Rubio and Pennock- Speck 2008). Pennock-Speck (2006), for example, discovered in his corpus of English ads that products aimed exclusively at girls or women featured only female voice-overs whereas some products aimed exclusively at men did have female voices. Beyond the male/female dichotomy, very little work has been done on classifying voice-overs in TV ads. Most of it attempts to find a correlation between geographical/social varieties of English with different types of products. Thomas and Wareing (1999: 182) point to the fact that advertisers use “country accents to indicate the wholesome nature of food products, or more prestigious accents such as RP to promote financial services”. In a similar vein, Montgomery (1995: 73) states that products that embody expertise will normally feature an RP accent or in some cases an American one while other products, especially food, where the emphasis is on natural ingredients, will use regional and especially rural accents. Arden (2003: 107), referring to beer ads during the Super Bowl, states that women in the ads speak with no identifiable accent as the advertisers do not wish to offend male viewers. None of the authors above make it clear whether they are referring to voice-overs or the voices of the characters in the ads themselves but RP and its American equivalent – a regionally neutral accent – are seen by them to be the default voice for more prestigious or technologically complex products, while rural voices embody wholesomeness. This is an over-simplification often found in comments on voice-overs but in general terms tenable. Pennock-Speck’s (2006) analysis of the geographical/social factor in voice-overs is without doubt the most detailed to date as it involves the analysis of a corpus of 85 ads in English from three MTV channels broadcast in the UK and the rest of Europe, on the one hand, and 263 ads from several Spanish terrestrial channels broadcast in Spain. In his Spanish corpus only one of 263 ads used a regional voice-over. The situation was very different in the English corpus, where 56% featured RP followed by Standard American 20%, Estuary English 16%, and others 6%. Looking at the results of his analysis, it became apparent that to find correlations between geographical accents and product types, the age factor had to be taken into account (Pennock-Speck 2006: 975). His analysis showed that young RP voices were mostly encountered in mobile ringtone ads, skin care and CDs while RP voices overlapped with young Estuary English voices in advertising music and skin care products. Most of the Estuary English voice-overs – the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 111–127 ISSN 0210-6124 Voice-overs in Standardized English and Spanish Television Commercials 115 majority of which were younger voices – were heard in ads for mobiles, music and skin care. Of the rest of the accents in his corpus, Pennock-Speck (2006) found that American voice-overs were mostly male and of indeterminate age – neither overtly young nor old – and were heard almost exclusively in ads promoting films or DVDs. With regard to age alone in the English corpus, indeterminate voices made up the majority 51.2% while younger voices come a close second. Overtly older voices were extremely rare (Pennock-Speck 2006: 976). In the Spanish corpus indeterminately aged voice-overs were found in over 80% of the ads while there was a very small number of overtly older voices. However, young voices were predominant in female hygiene ads and in non-alcoholic drink and ring-tone ads (Pennock-Speck 2006: 977). There is very little research into voice-quality in TV ads or, to be more precise, in discourse analysis in general, possibly because of the great difficulty in identifying different voice types on the bases of phonetic criteria alone. In the field of linguistics, there is very little written on the significance of physical and psychological characteristics in voices and most of it relies on the researchers’ intuition. However, a sizeable amount of empirical work has been done in anthropology by using informants’ perception of voice-quality, especially on what types of voices are considered to be attractive. Having an attractive voice can be an asset. Hughes, Dispenza and Gallup (2004: 302), citing research by Zuckerman and Driver (1989), state that people “with attractive voices are perceived more favourably and as having more desirable personality characteristics” than those with unattractive voices. Deep male voices are frequently rated as attractive (Zuckerman and Driver 1989; Collins 2000; Riding, Londsdale and Brown 2006). Hughes, Franco Dispenza and Gallup (2004: 303) state that this may be due to the fact that a deep voice is “an important parameter of mate choice” from an evolutionary point of view – a point also made by Romáine (1999: 49). Females may, therefore, relate to voices at an unconscious level because they are predisposed to do so due to evolutionary processes. Deep voices, which are characteristically male, are also associated with dominance in both humans and animals (Ohala 1983: 7). A cultural correlate of dominance is authority, so lowness of pitch may be the objective acoustic trait underlying this subjective label. This might explain the prevalence of male voices in voice-overs, although Cameron (2000a: 16) mentions the case of one English ad featuring a female voice “whose low pitch and advanced received pronunciation marks hers as a voice of authority”. However, the very fact she singles this ad out suggests that it constitutes an exception rather than the rule. In general, Pennock-Speck (2006) found that in both his English and Spanish corpora deep male voices are much more common than deep female ones. For certain products deep male voices feature in practically every ad. This is the case with regard to TV ads for films and DVDs in his English corpus, where nine out of the ten spots featured voices of this kind. Most of the research into voice quality and gender acknowledges the fact that there are voice characteristics, aside from pitch, which are perceived as being stereotypically male or female. One kind which has been related to a female stereotype is the ‘smiley’ voice. According to Cameron in her study on call centres, women have the ability to “smile down the phone” (2000a: 118) and are chosen for that quality. Following Henley (1986: 171), she views smiling as a subservient behaviour and affirms that in the research
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 111–127 ISSN 0210-6124 116 Barry Pennock-Speck and Mª Milagros del Saz Rubio carried out in call centres women are “routinely expected to smile” (Cameron 2000b: 334). In fact, “smiling and using expressive intonation are symbolically feminine behaviours” (Cameron 2000b: 334). We understand that in this context symbolically is a synonym of stereotypically. Likewise, the breathy voice, which has traditionally been associated with sex (Henton and Bladon 1988; Cruttendon 1986; Graddol and Swann 1989; Salzmann 1993; Bate and Bowker 1997; Gobl and Ní Chasaide 2000), has also been stereotypically linked to women (Addington 1971; Berguall, Bing and Freed 1996; Bate and Bowker 1997). Pennock-Speck’s (2006) findings showed that both male and female breathy voices featured to a much greater extent in personal hygiene products than for other products. In his Spanish corpus Pennock-Speck (2006) found there was a higher proportion of breathy/deep voices in film trailers while all the perfume ads featured some kind of special trait, i.e. deep, breathy, sensual or foreign voices. The only two explicitly sex-related ads in the Spanish corpus featured ostensively sensual whispery voices. A whispery voice, which is closely related to a breathy voice, can be heard in both men’s and women’s speech and can occur “during sexual arousal” (Laver 1975: 298). Therefore, its use in ads of this kind is probably designed so audiences will infer some connection with sex.
4. Selection and Description of Corpus
The overriding criteria in gathering together our present corpus has been to select only commercials that feature voice-overs that meet the criteria laid out in Stigel (2001: 336), that is, voices which are “not visible nor synchronously anchored in a depicted speaking person”. Thus, during the selection of the corpus we found it necessary to eliminate some border-line cases which might be thought to involve a voice-over proper. For example, some commercials which, prima facie, might seem to involve voice-overs that fit Stigel’s definition (2001) constitute, in fact, the stream of consciousness of an on- screen character as is the case in the Johnson’s Baby Oil and Bourjois lipstick commercials. We have not included those cases either in which an on-screen character disappears into the background while his/her voice is still heard, even though they blur the edges of the distinction between the voice of a character and a true voice-over. Thus, if the owner of a voice appears, that voice cannot constitute a voice-over. To reduce the number of variables in our analysis that have little to do with voice we include only “standardized” TV ads (Whitelock and Rey 1998) in our corpus. Standardized ads are made for an international market and are originally broadcast in English in the UK or USA and dubbed into many other languages, including Peninsular Spanish. Following Whitelock and Rey, who analyzed English and French TV ads, we treat ads as standardized if they are identical or if the differences between the original and the dubbed version are “minor” (Whitelock and Rey: 1998: 264). For instance, if differences in a translation are due to different connotations in either language, we treat them as standardized. Whitelock and Rey (1998: 264) cite the French translation innovation, which they say has a more technological connotation in that language than the word new in the English version which has a much broader and less specialized
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 111–127 ISSN 0210-6124 Voice-overs in Standardized English and Spanish Television Commercials 117 meaning. Logically, the producers of standardized ads, which have to be translated into several languages, steer clear of difficult-to-translate idioms, similes, metaphors and plays on words during their creation. Whitelock and Rey treat ads which are shorter than the original as only “partially standardized” (1998: 260) which, according to them, has to do with a smaller target audience. However, we would argue that this cannot explain why, for example, most of the L’Oreal ads in our corpus are the same length as their English counterparts, except one – Glam Shine – and that the Gillette Venus ad is actually longer in Spanish than in English. We believe that ads may be shortened for any number of reasons we are not privy to but, as our criterion for including an ad in our corpus is that the dubbed version should be virtually identical to the original, we have decided to treat ads which are not identical in length as standardized and have therefore incorporated them into our corpus. Thus, seven of the eighteen dubbed ads in our corpus are shorter than the originals while one is longer. The shortening of the Spanish ads is mainly carried out through cropping scenes – not omitting them – leaving the visual narrative and messages intact. Only in the Sunsilk for Silky Straight Hair, in which three fellow workers basically tell a new girl that “her hair looks a mess”, is one of the scenes completely excluded. However, as all three characters say practically the same thing, the narrative line of the ad is not unduly altered. Our corpus can be divided into beauty products and hygiene products although the differences between the two are often quite blurred, that is, a dandruff shampoo is both a hygiene product and improves the way we look. Dividing the corpus on gender lines, there are just four products targeted at men: Gillette Mach 3 Turbo, Gillette Sensor 3, Head and Shoulders and Just for Men; and 13 for women: Clean and Clear, Dove Deodorant, Gillette Venus, Johnson’s Holiday Skin, L’Oreal Architechte, L’Oreal Couleur Experte, L’Oreal ElVive Smooth Intense, L’Oreal Glam Shine, L’Oreal Revitalift, Nivea Body Smoothing and Sculpting Cream, Sunsilk Styling, Sunsilk for Straight Hair and Tampax. The larger number of beauty and hygiene ads promoting products aimed at women – more than three times as many in this corpus – is not limited to standardized ads but is a generalized trend (Kilbourne 1999). All the products in our corpus belong to multinational companies which rank high in their spending on advertising.1 Proctor and Gamble, who produce Gillette, Gillette Venus and Tampax, are the biggest world spenders, followed by Unilever, the makers of Dove and Sunsilk. L’Oreal is in fifth place and Johnson and Johnson, who market Clear and Clean, Johnson’s Holiday Skin, are ranked in tenth place. The other ads promote products belonging to the Tchibo Holding company, which is in 37th place: Nivea Body Smoothing and Sculpting Cream; and finally, Just for Men, marketed by Combe Incorporated, a company just below the top one hundred. It is hardly surprising, therefore, that companies with the advertising clout of the above should make up the majority of the products advertised in our corpus. The preponderance of the L’Oreal ads in this corpus can be explained by the fact that although it is ‘only’ the fifth biggest spender on advertising world-wide, it is a company dedicated solely to beauty products, whereas the biggest spenders such as Unilever and Proctor and Gamble have a wide range of products.
1 Advertising Age's 20th Annual Global Marketers. http://adage.com/article?article_id=113350
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5. Methodology: administration of the questionnaire
In order to come to a description of the voice-overs in both the English and Spanish sub-corpora, we had twelve native English-speaking informants and twelve native Spanish-speaking informants fill out a questionnaire on the voice-overs while they listened to the sound track from the eighteen ads in our corpus in their respective languages. Our informants are both male and female with ages ranging from seventeen to over seventy from several socio-economic backgrounds. Our purpose in using a wide range of informants was not to carry out an analysis based on the social status, age or gender of the informants, but simply to base the description of the voice-overs on the judgments of informants, not on our own intuitions. The demographic make up of the English and Spanish informants was not identical, although these were very similar in age and level of education attained, as shown in table 1. The informants differ slightly more with regard to their occupations. English Spanish Age Age Up to 25 5 5 25 to 40 1 3 Over 40 6 6 Average Age 39 33 Education Education Post-graduate 2 4 Undergraduate 3 3 Secondary School 7 5 Occupation Occupation Skilled workers 3 4 Unskilled workers 1 2 Students 4 3 Pensioners 3 1 Housewives 1 2 Table 1. Informant demographics
The questionnaire was divided into three sections: the age of the speaker in the TV ad, his/her gender and a description of the voice-overs by using several labels. The informants were allowed to hear each ad as many times as they wished. In the age and accent sections the informants had to choose only one of the possible alternatives. Age, in both the Spanish and English questionnaires, was divided into three groups: up to 25, 25 to 40 and over 40. In the English questionnaire the descriptions for accents were RP, Advanced RP, American and other. We used the descriptors RP and American as we found that the majority of voice-overs in previous research (Pennock-Speck 2006) belonged to these categories. Advanced RP was included to designate the accent which includes recent innovations in RP instead of Estuary English, as in Pennock-Speck (2006), because unlike the corpus of ads in that article, many of which were taken from MTV, none of the ads in this corpus could be described with any certainty as Estuary English. Only the terms RP and Advanced RP were explained to the informants, as the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 111–127 ISSN 0210-6124 Voice-overs in Standardized English and Spanish Television Commercials 119 other two terms were clear. For Spanish accents we used the labels standard, regional and other. Following the findings in Pennock-Speck (2006), which showed that accents other than Standard Spanish are extremely rare, we did not feel it was necessary to use more labels. Before administering the questionnaire we decided on the descriptors for voice quality, phonation types and labels of a more subjective nature using terminology from previous research as well as our own (Pennock-Speck 2006; del Saz-Rubio and Pennock-Speck 2008) and the descriptions supplied by colleagues who had previously listened to the voice-overs in the ads. The complete set of labels we used was as follows: deep, breathy, husky, sensual, flirty, authoritative, assertive, aggressive, serious, cheeky, playful, happy, optimistic and neutral. Informants were instructed to grade only the voice qualities that they felt were relevant on a scale from one to five.
6 Results and Analysis of the Voice-Over Questionnaire
In this section we will look at the results for the English and Spanish corpora separately but we will leave a comparison between the two until section seven.
6.1 Results for English Corpus
The results for age in the male and female voice-overs in the English corpus are significant. For female voices the informants assign 30.5% to the up-to-25 age group, 63% to the from 25 to 40 age group and under 6.5% for voice-overs to the over 40 age group. These results are quite different when compared to those for male voice-overs with less than 10% for those up to 25 and the rest more or less equally distributed between the age groups ranging from 25 to 40 and over 40. The results for accents show an overwhelming ascendancy of the RP accent for both female and male voices (over 73%) followed by Advanced RP (21%), and around 5% for American and other accents. When comparing the results for the genders with regard to voice quality, women are marked, compared to men, for sensual, flirty, cheeky, playful, happy and optimistic voices, whereas men are marked, compared to women, for deep, breathy/whispery, husky, authoritative and assertive voices. Figure 1 below illustrates these results. Looking more closely at voice-overs and their correlation with specific products and brands, the first striking result is that the L’Oreal ads all featured male voice-overs alongside female celebrities. This contradicts the findings of the researchers reported above, who found that female voice-overs were the default choice in ads for products aimed at women. Moreover, the male voices in the L’Oreal ads were, on average, considerably deeper, huskier, breathier and more sensual than the male voices employed for products targeted at men. However, the male voices for ads promoting the four products targeted at men were more marked for the characteristics: authoritative, assertive, aggressive and serious.
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English: Voice quality for Female/Male Voice- Overs 40 35 30 25 F 20 15 M 10 5 0
Figure 1. Results for male & female voice quality in voice-overs in English commercials
As in previous research (Pennock-Speck 2006; del Saz-Rubio and Pennock-Speck 2008) the Tampax ad in this corpus featured a very up-beat and optimistic female voice-over which seems to be typical for this kind of product. Other ads addressing problems in female hygiene and beauty also used up-beat voice-overs: Clean and Clear, a spot remover; Dove Deodorant, a product which prevents skin chaffing and Nivea, which reduces the problem of orange-peel skin. Johnson’s Holiday Skin also includes a very up-beat voice-over but is more a beauty enhancer than a problem solver unless one considers paleness a problem. When looking at the results from the questionnaires, it is worth bearing in mind that there is a time dimension to TV ads. When observing the informants we found that they rarely listened to the recordings and then ticked the boxes but rather made their choices while listening to the ad. Although in some of the ads the voice-overs attempt to maintain one particular mood, others seem to be divided into finite sections depending on the communicative purpose of a particular excerpt, for example, the voice-over for the description of a problem in the Sunsilk for Silky Straight Hair is not the same as that of the solution to said problem (cf. Alcoba-Rueda and Poch-Olivé 2005: 41 for Spanish radio ads). This would also explain why in the Dove Deodorant ad the voice-over is described as husky and sensual and, on the other hand, optimistic.
6.2 Results for Spanish Corpus
For the Spanish corpus only 5% of the ads with male voices were deemed to be in the up to 25 age group, whereas 62.5% were in the from 25 to 40 group and 32.5%, in the over 40 group. In the case of female voice-overs, considerably more, 19%, belonged to
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 111–127 ISSN 0210-6124 Voice-overs in Standardized English and Spanish Television Commercials 121 under-25s, whereas 66.5% were judged to be between 25 and 40 and only 14.5% over 40. With regard to accent, the hegemony of a neutral or Standard Spanish is almost total: 99.6%, which confirms previous research carried out by Pennock-Speck (2006). The results for voice quality showed clear differences between the categories of female and male. Women are marked compared to men for breathy/whispery, sensual, flirty, playful, happy and optimistic voices, whereas men are marked for deep, authoritative and assertive voices (see figure 2).
Spanish: Voice Quality for Women and Men
45 40 35 30 25 F 20 15 M 10 5 0
Figure 2. Results for male & female voice quality in voice-overs in Spanish commercials
If we focus on individual ads in the Spanish corpus, the L’Oreal ads featuring male voice-overs and female celebrities are, as in the case of the L’Oreal ads in English, even more marked for deep, breathy, husky and sensual male voice-overs than the male voices in the ads for products targeted at men. As is the case with its English counterpart, the Couleur Experte ad, which does not feature a celebrity, has low results for deep voice. This probably indicates nothing more than a different strategy for this particular product, but the fact that this is also true for the ad in English is interesting. There are three ads which are marked for optimistic characteristics, Sunsilk Straight Hair, Sunsilk Spray and Tampax. The first two ads involve problems. In the first TV ad, we are shown a woman who wants to straighten her frizzy hair; the solution is effected almost literally through a deus ex machina figure whose gigantic hand holds the solution to her problem, a can of hair spray which appears in response to her exclamation: “Oh, God” in Spanish. The second features a woman whose poor hair condition is remarked on by several of her colleagues. As we have already pointed out in our analysis of the identical English Tampax ad above, up-beat voices may be employed to address issues which are felt to be problematic, such as problems as different as frizzy hair and menstruation.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 111–127 ISSN 0210-6124 122 Barry Pennock-Speck and Mª Milagros del Saz Rubio
7 Discussion
The comparison of the English and Spanish results reveals that it is only in the case of accent that real differences can be found between the two corpora. For the English corpus our analysis confirms previous research which shows that the predominant accent in TV ads in English is RP. It is almost a given in research into TV ads that a prestige accent like RP (Hughes and Trudgill 1996: 3) would be the accent chosen by producers of commercials given the authoritative framing role of voice-overs, although other accents are also used as we have seen in the research reported in section three. This is not true of the Spanish corpus where we have discovered that regional accents play an insignificant role in Peninsular Spanish ads. This might be because the standard Spanish accent is perceived as being the only one with authoritative characteristics. Another possible reason is that, apart from embodying the voice of authority as in the case of RP, advertisers believe that the regionally neutral Spanish accent used in voice- overs will not distract the viewer from the message.2 Our findings also seem to back up previous research with regard to the prevalence of male voice-overs compared to their female counterparts in both English and Spanish TV ads. We expected similar results for both languages here. After all, it would have been surprising to find that female voices were used instead of male voices or vice-versa in the Spanish ads. However, it is interesting to note that male voice-overs outnumber female voice-overs even in the case of products for female end-users, contradicting previous research which states that ads for products targeted at women generally feature female voices. This can be explained by the fact that the L’Oreal ads, which make up a sizeable part of our corpus, all employ authoritative male voice-overs combined with beautiful female celebrities. These results show that one needs to be extremely careful when generalizing about voice-overs as a particular advertising strategy might deliberately go against a general tendency to achieve a particular effect. Looking at the results for gender and age we found that the percentage of young female voices in the English corpus was three times higher than young male voices, while older male voices were four times more common than their older female counterparts. The Spanish results were similar, with three times more young female voices than young male voices and twice as many older male than older female voices. These results can be compared with those for 275 Spanish ads in Pennock-Speck (2006), in which it was found that young female voices were also much more common at 27.5% than young male voices at 9.5%. The differences between the genders, with regard to the perceived age of the voice-over actors, parallel the fact that young women appear significantly more often than young men in TV ads (Dominick and Rauch 1972; Courtney and Whipple 1974; Gilly 1988; Siu and Au 1997; Furnham and Mak 1999). It would seem that younger women, whether we are talking about their image or their voice, sell better than older women in both English and Spanish. In most patriarchal societies, the voice of wisdom is still today the domain of older men while women seem
2 In several web pages for Spanish voice-over professionals, a neutral accent is put forward as a merit, as are versatility and elegance. http://www.voice-over.ws/con_loc.asp?idioma=1
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 111–127 ISSN 0210-6124 Voice-overs in Standardized English and Spanish Television Commercials 123 to be more valued for their physical beauty. Our results show that this is also the case in the standardized TV ads in our corpus. Probably the greatest contribution to research on voice-overs in this article lies in our analysis of voice quality. Contrary to most of the insights into voice quality in previous research, which is anecdotal and based mainly on intuition (Karpf 2005; Thomas and Wareing 1999; Montgomery 2005), our results have been garnered from the analysis of informants’ perceptions of a corpus of ads which show that voice-overs are quite different in both the English and Spanish ads when we looked at the genders separately. The marked characteristics for male voice-overs, deep, breathy/whispery, husky, authoritative and assertive, seem to tie in well with stereotypical views of the male voice. Deep voices, as we have seen, have often been linked to voice attractiveness and authority in males and were much more marked for males than females. Our results for deep, breathy voices contradict what Karpf says about voice-overs in the 90s and beyond: The booming ‘announcer’s voice’ and the ‘dark-brown’ voice - a deep, smooth voice that makes every product sound like a sexual aid - have given way to a voice of the street. The advertising voice of today is more likely to be laid-back, and belong to a celebrity (...) or a stand-up comedian (2005: 252). Two informants from each of the language groups mentioned that some of the male voice-overs sounded as if the product being sold had something to do with sex. This may have been due to the proliferation in both corpora of male voices that combined the features: deep, husky and breathy/whispery because, as has been pointed out in previous research, these features, vis-à-vis voice, are sex related. Our results for breathy voices show that men are marked for this characteristic in the English ads but women are marked in the Spanish ones. However, taking into account that men’s voices are huskier in both languages, breathy phonation in general is more marked for male voices and may explain why informants from both language groups found some of the male voices sensual. In both the English and Spanish corpora, male voices were deemed by the informants to be much more authoritative and assertive than female voices. This fits in both with the traditional image of men and the key role of voice-overs as the authoritative last word and it might also explain why men’s voices are more common than women’s in TV ads. Most of the marked female voice-quality characteristics, i.e. sensual, assertive, happy and optimistic, also seem to fit in with the stereotypical images of women as sexual objects on the one hand, and subservient helpers on the other. Thus, women’s voices were deemed to be, on the one hand, more sensual and flirtier and, on the other, cheekier, happier, more playful and more optimistic than men’s in both the English and Spanish corpora. The only characteristic which does not fit in with the traditional female stereotype is assertive. However, this characteristic might find its explanation in the persuasive nature of commercials in general.
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8. Concluding remarks
Our research demonstrates that non-specialist informants in two languages are capable of discerning clear patterns in the utilization of accents in TV ads and that they coincide to a great extent in their perception of the age of the voice-over specialists and the types of voice quality present in their voices. Given the consistency of our findings we believe that it is more than probable that the public in general are also able to perceive similar patterns in voice-overs. We also contend that our results point to the fact that the producers of TV ads are aware that the meanings conveyed by voice are shared by society in general and can be exploited in the promotion and sale of their products. As Laver and Trudgill (1979) and more recently Wilson and Wharton (2006) suggest, it seems from our results that paralinguistic qualities of voice do provide the listener with information just as linguistic messages, images, music, sounds, etc. do and should be taken into consideration if we are to give a full account of meaning in TV ads. The question of whether viewers are actually manipulated by sounds and images is beyond the scope of this article. Nonetheless, we take the view that although viewers are not consciously aware of the messages transmitted to them through voice-overs, these messages are absorbed – albeit at a subconscious level. Research by Dietrich (1998), Cohen-Eliya and Hammer (2004) and del Saz-Rubio and Pennock Speck (2008) all allude to the conservative nature of TV ads and the use of stereotypes, among other strategies, to get their messages across. In this respect, the voice-overs in our corpus seem to conform to stereotypical characteristics with regard to gender: older, deep, authoritative male voices, younger, optimistic female voices, etc. As stated in the introduction, the objective of TV ads is to sell something and the producers of TV ads probably believe that the most efficient strategy is to tap into stereotypes held by viewers. We hope this article has contributed to the knowledge of one of the ways advertisers do this.
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Received 15 October 2008 Revised version accepted 26 February 2009
Barry Pennock-Speck (PhD Valencia) is a tenured lecturer at the Universitat de València, where he currently teaches English language and linguistics. His main research interests are discourse analysis, pragmatics, phonology, and more recently the role of voice in the mass media. He is the author of the book Re-entry Patterns in British Broadsheet Editorials and, more recently, of ‘A genre approach to goals and their implementation applied to a TV programme for the Virginia Farming Community’ published in Ibérica and ‘The spoken core of British English: A diachronic analysis based on the BNC’ published in Miscelánea.
Address: Departament de Filologia Anglesa i Alemanya, Facultat de Filologia, Traducció i Communicació, Universitat de València, Avenida Blasco Ibáñez 32, 46010, València, Spain. Tel.: +34 96 36864262; fax: +34 96 36864161
Mª Milagros del Saz Rubio (PhD Valencia) lectures in the Department of Applied Linguistics at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia. Her research interests lie in the field of Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis, especially in the areas of reformulation in English and Spanish, linguistic politeness and the discourse of TV advertising. She is the author of the book English Discourse Markers of Reformulation: a classification and description published in the Series Linguistic Insights (Peter Lang) and among her most recent publications are ‘Male and Female stereotypes in Spanish and British commercials’ published by Cambridge Scholars. At present she is engaged in the multimodal analysis of TV commercials in English and Spanish.
Address: Escuela Técnica Superior de Ingenieros Agrónomos, Dpto de Lingüística Aplicada, Universidad Politécnica of Valencia, Camino de Vera s/n 46022, Valencia, Spain. Tel.: +34 96 3877531; fax: +34 96 3877539
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Examining the Relationship between Receptive Vocabulary Size and Written Skills of Primary School Learners
Mª Pilar Agustín Llach Melania Terrazas Gallego Universidad de La Rioja Universidad de La Rioja [email protected] [email protected]
Receptive vocabulary size is an important component of lexical competence and has been observed to be instrumental for both reading and writing. The central purpose of this paper is two-fold: first, to assess the receptive vocabulary of 274 primary school Spanish learners of EFL after a total of 629 hours of instruction; second, to determine the extent to which measures of receptive vocabulary size are related to the quality of written compositions and reading comprehension skills. The study was carried out by administering two vocabulary size tests (1kWT and 2k VLT), a timed composition and a Reading Comprehension Test. The findings from this study prove that the receptive vocabulary size of Spanish primary school EFL learners is satisfactory. The correlation between receptive vocabulary size and essay quality is not very high, yet it is significant. Finally, results reflect the importance of receptive vocabulary size in reading comprehension.
Keywords: vocabulary size; VLT; quality; written skills; EFL; primary school
Examen de la relación entre el conocimiento de vocabulario receptivo y las destrezas escritas de los alumnos de primaria
El tamaño de vocabulario receptivo es un componente importante de la competencia léxica que resulta ser instrumental en la lectura y la escritura. El propósito central de este trabajo tiene dos vertientes. Primero queremos examinar el tamaño de vocabulario de 274 alumnos de primaria que aprenden inglés como lengua extranjera después de 629 horas de instrucción formal. En segundo lugar queremos determinar la naturaleza de la relación entre el tamaño de vocabulario receptivo y la destreza de compresión lectora y la calidad de la escritura. Para ello administramos dos pruebas de tamaño de vocabulario receptivo, una composición y un ejercicio de comprensión lectora. Los resultados demuestran que el tamaño de vocabulario receptivo de los participantes es satisfactorio. La correlación entre tamaño de vocabulario receptivo y calidad de la escritura no es muy alta, pero significativa. Nuestros resultados reflejan la importancia del tamaño de vocabulario receptivo en la comprensión lectora.
Palabras clave: vocabulario; VLT; calidad; redacción; Inglés como Lengua Extranjera; escuela primaria 130 Mª Pilar Agustín Llach and Melania Terrazas Gallego
1. Introduction
Studies devoted to lexis in second or foreign language acquisition have pointed out the importance of determining the receptive and productive vocabulary size of L2 learners in primary, secondary and university contexts. Vocabulary size refers to the number of words a learner knows and uses. This is a decisive parameter for evaluation, classroom intervention and instructor development as well as having tremendous implications for researchers, textbooks designers and language teachers. Furthermore, previous research has demonstrated a close relationship between vocabulary size and reading comprehension, and a clear interconnection between lexical quality and writing quality. However, this increasing attention to vocabulary size and its crucial relevance for both reading and writing in secondary and university education contrasts with the very few studies carried out with L2 learners of EFL in primary education. The present paper attempts to fill this gap by (a) surveying the receptive vocabulary size of EFL learners at the end of primary education in Spain, (b) analysing the relationship between receptive vocabulary size and written production of these learners, and (c) determining the relationship between receptive vocabulary size and the reading comprehension of these learners.1
2. Review of the literature
Previous studies have proved that knowing a large number of words in a language, regardless of depth of knowledge, is an extremely important factor in L2 learning (Nation 1990; Meara 1996; Laufer 1989, 1998; Read 1988). However, when L2 teachers intend to assess the number of words students know at different stages of their learning process in order to monitor progress, various conceptual and methodological problems arise. As researchers (Bauer and Nation 1993; Nation 1990; Meara 1996) have suggested, it is very difficult to define what knowing a word entails. Nation (1990: 31), for example, suggests an eight-item list of the different kinds of word knowledge that someone must master in order to know a word: namely the frequency of the word, the written form of the word, the spoken form of the word, the collocations of the word, etc. For her part, Laufer (2005) also comments on a number of aspects learners need to bear in mind when stating that they have mastery of a word: form, word structure, grammatical features, verb patterns, different meaning types, etc. The various facets of knowing a word call attention to the impracticality of testing students on all aspects of word knowledge. As Read (1988) suggests, it is important to realize what areas of lexical competence we, as researchers and language teachers, want to test. A number of tests are frequently used to measure knowledge of specific words. First, there are receptive vocabulary size tests like the Vocabulary Levels Test (Nation 1983,
1 This study was carried out under the auspices of a research project funded by the Spanish ‘Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnología’ and FEDER, Grant nº HUM2006-09775-C02-02/FILO. The preliminary version of this investigation was presented at the Tenth Biennial University of Seville Conference on Applied Linguistics (ELIA), 15 March 2007.
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1990), The Yes/No Vocabulary Test (Meara and Buxton 1987; Meara and Jones 1990), The Revised Edition of the Vocabulary Level Test (Schmitt, Schmitt and Clapham 2001) and ADELEX Levels Vocabulary Test (ALVT) (López Mezquita 2003, 2005) that are valid. Second, research has also designed productive vocabulary size tests like The Productive Vocabulary Levels Test (Laufer and Nation 1999), the LFP-Lexical Frequency Profile (Laufer and Nation 1995, 1999) and Lex30 (Meara and Fitzpatrick 2000) which have also proved to be extremely reliable for assessing students’ use of vocabulary. Critics agree on the usefulness of all these vocabulary size tests for placement and research aims, yet they also acknowledge their limitations; they test only one aspect of knowledge, that is, size. The present study describes the validity of one of these tests, that is, the receptive version of the Vocabulary Levels Test to profile the size of young Spanish learners of EFL at the end of their primary education. The VLT measures learners’ vocabulary size at five levels of frequency: 2000, 3000, 5000, the University Word List, and 10000 words. Students are asked to match three definitions to six words of similar meaning in ten blocks of six. The basis of this test is that the first 1000 most frequent words in a language, selected from graded frequency lists from Thorndike and Lorge (1944), Kucera and Francis (1967) and West (1953) will be the first to be learned, then the second 1000 most frequent words, and so on up to 10000 words. If students know some uncommon words, this means that they master the most frequent words first but not the other way round. In this study, we administered the VLT because it has frequent use and reference in the literature and therefore comparisons with data from other researchers and studies will be straightforward. In fact, as Jiménez and Terrazas (in press) explain: The VLT has been used for different purposes in a number of studies (Laufer 1997, 1998; Schmitt and Meara 1997; Cobb 1999, 2001). Research has also been devoted to the validation of this test (Read, 1988), the assessment of its adequacy for secondary school learners of English as an additional language (Cameron 2002), and the elaboration of new test versions (Schmitt 1993; Schmitt, Schmitt and Clapham 2001). Many studies have been devoted either to measuring the vocabulary size of L2 learners through use of the VLT or to qualifying the VLT's appropriateness for all types of learners. Most studies using the VLT have analysed the vocabulary size of secondary school students (Quinn 1968; Nurweni and Read 1999; Cobb and Horst 1999; Pérez 2005) and university students (Takala 1985; Cameron 2002; and López Mezquita 2005), yet only very recently have scholars estimated the vocabulary size of primary school learners and checked its reliability. After reviewing all this literature, Jiménez and Terrazas (in press) conclude: Surprisingly, the results obtained coincide in showing a rather low vocabulary knowledge on the part of the English learners investigated. Results speak of 1,000 words (Quinn 1968), about 1,200 words (Nurweni and Read 1999), 1,500 words (Takala 1985), the 2,000 most basic word families of English (Cobb and Horst 1999), and gaps and problems in the comprehension of the most frequent words in English (Cameron 2002). Within the context of Spanish secondary education, López-Mezquita (2005) reports an average of 941 words in 4º ESO (4th form), 1,582 words in 1º Bachillerato (5th form), and 1,855 in 2º Bachillerato (6th form). She also reports 3,174 words for first year university students of English Philology and English Translation studies. The figures reported in vocabulary size
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studies are low if we bear in mind that they have been produced after six or seven years of extensive study of English in high-school, and even, as in the case of Cameron’s study, after 10 years of education through English. Jimenez and Terrazas’ research reports a receptive profile of 737 words after a total of 419 hours of instruction from a highly homogeneous sample of 270 10-year-old Spanish EFL learners in their 4th year. In doing so, Jiménez and Terrazas (in press)) prove that the VLT is a quick, practical and reliable way of profiling the receptive vocabulary size of young learners, corroborating Cameron’s (2002: 167) findings that the Levels test may be widely applicable for use with school-age subjects at young ages, or to show development over time in this way. The present study attempts to complete their results by estimating the receptive vocabulary size of the same sample assessed by Jiménez and Terrazas (in press) at the end of the examinees’ primary education, and to further this investigation by analysing the vocabulary size of these students in correlation with their written skills.2 In the remainder of the section we will review the studies that have analysed such correlations; we will then deal with their characteristics and main results. Vocabulary size has been found to play an important role in writing. In this sense, vocabulary has been proved to be an important predictor of essay quality in the foreign language. Different measures of lexical richness contribute to enhancing the quality of the writing. High positive correlations are reported between essay score and essay length, i.e. total number of words (Jarvis et al. 2003), lexical diversity, i.e. ratio of different words over total number of words (Engber 1995; Mutta 1999; Grant and Ginther 2000, Jarvis et al. 2003; Lee 2003; Cumming et al. 2005; de Haan and van Esch 2005), lexical sophistication, i.e. use of low frequency words (Laufer and Nation 1995; Mutta 1999; Lee 2003); lexical originality, i.e. number of words not present in other peers’ essays (Mutta 1999), lexical variation including and excluding errors (Engber 1995), lexical density, ratio of lexical words over total number of words (Mutta 1999), and general vocabulary size (Saville-Troike 1984; Laufer 1997). In sum, lexical richness is often taken to be a reliable measure to assess the quality of a written text, because lexical knowledge is presumably the strongest predictor of writing quality (Santos 1988; Bacha 2001; Weigle 2002: 69). The richer and more varied the vocabulary used in composition, the higher the quality of the writing. Furthermore, learners have repeatedly mentioned the relevance of vocabulary in writing so as to rank it as the most important factor in academic writing (Leki and Carson 1994), to consider it as a crucial aspect in writing (Polio and Glew 1996), and to acknowledge the difficulties students have when writing about a topic for which they lack sufficient vocabulary (Tercanlioglu 2004). Many studies have concentrated on examining the number of words necessary for the comprehension of written texts because vocabulary knowledge is instrumental to reading comprehension, and the higher the vocabulary size of the learner, the better will be his/her reading comprehension skills (Hirsh and Nation 1992; Laufer 1989, 1992,
2 For further reference on Spanish primary school EFL learners’ productive vocabulary size profiles, see Jiménez and Moreno (2005); Jiménez and Moreno (2007); Jiménez and Moreno (in press); Jiménez and Ojeda (2008).
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1996, 1997; Coady 1997; Grabe and Stoller 1997; Qian 1999, 2002; Qian and Schedl 2004). Thus Laufer (1997) believes that a threshold vocabulary of 3000 word families, i.e. 5000 words, is necessary for general text comprehension. Learners with vocabularies below that size will have great problems in understanding written texts, since reading comprehension will be hampered by lack of word knowledge. Even highly skilled L1 readers cannot achieve the threshold of 70% reading comprehension if they do not have a solid lexical foundation and master a minimum of 5000 words (Laufer 1997). Several studies have found important correlations between vocabulary size and reading comprehension. Laufer (1992) measured the receptive vocabulary size of Hebrew and Arabic students using the VLT, and correlated this measure with reading comprehension, obtaining a significant correlation coefficient of r = 0.5 (p < 0.0001). In 1996, she repeated the experiment with respect to the relationship between receptive vocabulary size as measured by the VLT and reading comprehension of Israeli students. The correlation coefficient was still significant and somewhat higher (r = 0.71, p < 0.0001). Qian (2002) was also interested in examining the way in which the vocabulary size (VLT) and reading comprehension of his Korean and Chinese students related to each other. He obtained high correlations between these two measures (r = 0.78, p< 0.05). Cameron (2002: 151) reported that vocabulary test results have long been found to correlate with reading comprehension test results. These studies point to vocabulary as a facilitating factor in reading comprehension. According to Laufer “it has been consistently demonstrated that reading comprehension is strongly related to vocabulary knowledge, more strongly than to the other components of reading” (1996: 55). With these considerations in mind, in the present study we profile the vocabulary size of Spanish learners at the end of primary education and explore how their word knowledge relates to their written skills (reading and writing). Here we try to answer the following research questions.
3. Research questions
a. How many words do EFL 6th graders in Spain know as measured by the 1000 Word Test and the 2000 frequency band of the VLT?3 b. Is there any correlation between EFL receptive vocabulary size and the writing production of these learners? c. Are receptive vocabulary size and reading comprehension scores correlated?
3 See section 4.2.
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4. Methodology
4.1. Participants
A total of 274 learners of EFL participated in the study. They were attending 6th grade of primary school. The learners attended 11 intact classes of four primary schools in Logroño. They averaged 12.39 years and were all learners of English as a Foreign Language whose mother tongue was Spanish. The sample was homogeneous concerning students’ L1, social profile and type of instruction. They were middle-class, the type of teaching method used was communicative and most of the input they received came from formal instruction. By the time of data collection, the students had taken 629 hours of English courses.
4.2. Data gathering instruments
Students’ vocabulary size and written skills were assessed by administering four language tests: the 1000 Word Test, the 2000 frequency-band of the VLT, a timed written Composition task and a Reading Comprehension Test. All these tests were selected bearing in mind the age and language level of the participants. In fact, all these tests have been proved to be within the grasp of young learners such as those found in primary and early secondary education. Furthermore, the four tests were pre-tested in a pilot study with learners of the same characteristics and they all turned out to be appropriate for their language competence. To assess the receptive vocabulary size of our subjects we used the 1000 word test and the 2000 frequency-band of the VLT.4 These two tests consist of matching three definitions to six words of similar meaning in ten blocks of six. In the first test, participants had to match a target word with the corresponding Spanish translation. In the second test, the same format applied, but learners had to match the target word with its English definition. Students were given ten minutes to complete each receptive vocabulary level test. The maximum score candidates could achieve in each test was 30 points. Students were given thirty minutes to complete an English composition task consisting of writing a letter to a prospective English host family in which they had to introduce themselves and talk about their family, home town, school, hobbies and main interests. They were free to write whatever they felt like, but it necessarily had to be related to the topic of the composition. We used this timed written composition for the study as an elicitation procedure to obtain real language from the subjects.
4 Paul Nation himself sent us the 1000 Word Test and various versions of the Vocabulary Levels Test and asked us to translate the target words into Spanish under his supervision. The 1000 Word Test is not a standardised test, yet Nation chose the 30 prompts that comprise it from the 1000 most frequent words list. The resulting 1000 Word Test is known to have been used in several studies since then. We are grateful to Prof. Nation for his time and generosity.
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Finally, a reading comprehension test taken from the Key English Test 1, Cambridge UP 2003, was also used in this research in order to profile the proficiency level of our primary school EFL learners. They had ten minutes to read a text and answer seven reading comprehension questions of the multiple choice format with three options, but only one correct answer.
4.3. Procedures and analysis
Learners performed all four tests during class time three months before the end of their 6th year. Students were aware of the fact that these tests were not course exams. Before beginning each task, instructors gave students clear guidelines in Spanish orally and in written form, making sure that students understood what they were being asked to do. Data were collected through paper-and-pencil. The 1000 Word Test, the 2000 frequency-band of the Vocabulary Level Test and the timed written Composition task were done in the same sitting, whereas the Reading Comprehension Test was taken one week later. All tests were marked by hand by all members of our research team. In the case of the written compositions, they also were entered on a computer, and then corrected by two different examiners using The ESL Composition Profile designed by Jacobs et al. (1981). The Profile consists of five rating scales, which distinguish four levels of mastery: excellent to very good, good to average, fair to poor, and very poor for five scales: content, organization, vocabulary, language use and mechanics. The maximum score students may achieve is 100 and the minimum 34. Each of the scales is made up of a series of descriptors that focus on different linguistic and compositional aspects for their assessment, e.g. knowledge of subject topic, fluent expression, sophisticated range of vocabulary, use of effective complex constructions and mastery of punctuation conventions (Jacobs et al. 1981; Read 2000: 216-17). Content accounts for 30%, organization and vocabulary for 20% each, language use for 25 % and mechanics for 5%. Following Jacobs et al. (1981), compositions were read twice. In the first reading we tried to judge holistically whether the student’s composition transmitted the message. In the second, analytic evaluation according to the descriptors took place. Each scale obtained a single score, all five scores were then added to give the final total score. This final score was used in the correlation analyses. Two members of our research team rated the compositions in order to guarantee the internal validity of the measure. When there was a disagreement of more than 10 points, a third rating was implemented, in which case the score of the controversial composition was decided based on the majority opinion. Descriptive and inferential statistical analyses were carried out with our data. In particular, we performed a non-parametric test of means comparison (Wilcoxon signed ranks test) and non-parametric correlation analyses (Spearman-rho). We used the SPSS program version 14.0 to carry out statistical analyses.
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5. Results
The present section examines the data obtained. Thus table 1 concentrates on students’ overall test performance by looking at such measurements as the mean, the minimum and maximum scores, variance and standard deviation (S.D). Figure 1 shows mean scores for all three tests. 1000 words 2000 words Profile N 274 274 274 Range 23 28 73.50 Min. 7 0 18.00 Max. 30 28 91.50 Mean 21.38 9.28 66.29 SD 3.52 4.90 9.66 Table 1. Descriptive statistics for the 1000 and 2000 word levels and the Composition Profile
Mean scores for all tests
70
60
50
40
30
20 Percentages ofsubjects
10
0 1000 level 2000 level C. Profile
Serie1 21,38 9,28 66 Mean of scores
Figure 1. Mean scores for all three tests As can be seen, for the 1000 word test we obtained lower range limits than for 2000 frequency band of the VLT. Maximum and minimum scores were higher for the 1000 frequency band of the VLT. Likewise, mean scores were higher for the 1000 word test than for the 2000 frequency band of the VLT. Concerning the Composition Profile, we
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 129–147 ISSN 0210-6124 Examining the Relationship between Receptive Vocabulary Size … 137 observed that learners scored a minimum of 18 points and a maximum of 91.50 points with a range of 73.50 and a mean of 66.29. As the words containing the first two tests are taken from the most frequent counts, results show that our students performed relatively high for the 1000 word test and slightly lower for the 2000 frequency band of the VLT.
Frequency Distribution of 1000 word test scores
60,00%
50,00%
40,00%
30,00%
20,00% Percentages of subjects Percentages
10,00%
0,00% From 6 to From 11 to From 16 to From 21 to From 26 to From 0 to 5 10 15 20 25 30 Serie1 0,00% 1,09% 2,92% 31,39% 52,92% 11,68% Range of scores
Figure 2. Frequency distribution of 1000 word test scores (n= 274) Figures 2 and 3 show the rankings of percentages obtained by students in the 1000 word level test and the 2000 frequency-band of the Vocabulary Level Test. Students’ profile indicates that the overall receptive vocabulary of 6th primary school students is higher than 1000 words. Regarding the 1000 most frequent words, the results show that about half the students (52.92%) scored between 21 and 25 points (out of 30), 2.92% of the students scored between 11 and 15, 11.68% of the students scored between 26 and 30, 1.09% of the students scored between 6 and 10 points, and no student got the lowest scores (0 to 5). With regard to the 2000 most frequent words, the 6th Primary students’ mean is 9.28. As can be observed in Figure 3, 21.90% of the students scored between 0 and 5 points, 38.32 % between 6 and 10, 29.93% between 11 and 15, and 7.66% between 16 and 20 points, 1.82% of the students scored between 21 and 25, and only 0.36% of the students achieved the highest scores (from 26 to 30). The low scores achieved indicate that 6th primary students know few English words from the 2000 frequency band.
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Frequency Distribution of 2000 word test scores
45,00%
40,00%
35,00%
30,00%
25,00%
20,00%
15,00%
Percentages of subjects Percentages 10,00%
5,00%
0,00% From 6 to From 11 to From 16 to From 21 to From 26 to From 0 to 5 10 15 20 25 30 Serie1 21,90% 38,32% 29,93% 7,66% 1,82% 0,37% Range of scores
Figure 3. Frequency distribution of 2000 word test scores (n= 274) A decrease is shown in the mean scores achieved by students in both levels. The mean of 21.38 points obtained in the 1000 frequency level drops to 9.28 at the 2000 level. Since the data were not normally distributed, we decided to perform a non- parametric test of means comparison (Wilcoxon signed ranks test). The results of the Wilcoxon signed ranks test applied to the means of each frequency level gave us the following values: Z = -14.360. This value is significant at the p<.000 level. It can be concluded that 6th Primary school students know considerably fewer words from the 2000 than from the 1000 frequency level. The results confirmed that the average receptive vocabulary size of EFL learners at the end of primary education in Spain amounts to 1106 words.5 In other words, students know 713 words from the 1000 Word Test and 393 words from the 2000 frequency-band of the Vocabulary Level Test. These data imply that students know English words from the 2000 frequency-band of the Vocabulary Level Test. Table 2 shows the correlation between EFL receptive vocabulary size of these learners and their writing production and their reading comprehension skills.
5 In order to calculate the pupils’ receptive vocabulary size we applied Nation’s formula (1990: 76), which reads as follows: Vocabulary size = N correct answers multiplied by total N words in dictionary (the relevant word list) divided by N items in test.
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Profile Reading 1000 word level test 0.542** 0.155* 2000 frequency-band of the VLT 0.503** 0.156*
** Significant at 0.01. * Significant at 0.05. Table 2. Correlation coeficients for receptive vocabulary size (1K, 2K) and written skills After calculating the correlation between the receptive vocabulary size and written production of these learners with a Spearman test applied to the means of each score, results reveal a significant correlation r = .542 for the 1000 Word Test and r = .503 for the 2000 VLT. These values are significant at p< .01 level. The squared r’s reveal that the knowledge of the first 1000 words in English accounts for 29% of the variance of the total score of essay quality, and of the first 2000 words for 25%. This means that apart from receptive knowledge of the two thousand most frequent words in English, other factors are contributing to assessing essay quality (see Table 3). The final correlation between receptive vocabulary size and the reading comprehension of these learners was also calculated with a Spearman test applied to the means of each score. The results show a significant positive correlation between the reading comprehension and the 1000 Word Test and the 2000 frequency level: ρ = .155, ρ = .156 at p <.05, respectively. Knowledge of 713 words of the 1000 most frequent and 393 of second 1000 most frequent words accounts for only 2 per cent of reading comprehension (see Table 3). Profile Reading 1000 word level test 0.29 0.25 2000 frequency-band of the VLT 0.02 0.02 Table 3. R squared of the correlation coefficients
6. Discussion
Our evaluation of the receptive vocabulary size of Spanish primary school EFL learners indicates that 6th graders know English words from the 2000 frequency-band of the Vocabulary Levels Test. In other words, learners demonstrated knowledge not only of words belonging to the first thousand most frequent in English, but also of some vocabulary words belonging to the level of the second most frequent. Knowledge of words from the second thousand most frequent was less than that of the first one thousand. A possible explanation pointed out by one of the anonymous reviewers refers to the difficulty in comparing scores of both tests, so the lower scores of the 2K test might simply reflect the greater demands made by the test task. Compared with previous results, this is a satisfactory vocabulary size, especially, if one bears in mind that these students are still in primary education. Different studies which have examined the vocabulary sizes of learners with different language and
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 129–147 ISSN 0210-6124 140 Mª Pilar Agustín Llach and Melania Terrazas Gallego learning backgrounds found varied figures. For example, studies with university students from several countries found receptive vocabulary sizes ranging from 5500 words (Spain, Pérez Basanta 2005) through 4300-4500 (Chinese high intermediate, Cobb and Horst 1999), 2000-2300 (Japanese students after 800-1200 hours of instruction Barrow et al. 1999), 2000 (students from Oman after 1350 hours of instruction, Horst et al. 1988) to 1220 (Indonesian students after 900 hours of instruction, Nurweni and Read 1999). Studies conducted with high school learners showed similar results with averages from 7224 (Korean, Qian 2002) going through 6663 (Chinese learners, Qian 2002), 3500 (Israel after 1500 hours of instruction, Laufer 1998), 1680 (Greece, after 660 hours of instruction, Milton and Meara 1998), 1200 (German learners after 400 hours of instruction, Milton and Meara 1998) and 941 (Spanish learners in 4th ESO, i.e. 4th form, López Mezquita 2005) 1,582 (Spanish learners in 1st Bachillerato, i.e. 5th form, López Mezquita 2005) and 1,855 (Spanish learners in 2nd Bachillerato, i.e. 6th form, López Mezquita 2005) to 1000 (French students after 400 hours of instruction, Arnaud et al 1985). To date, no studies that we know of provide figures for receptive vocabulary size of primary school learners (but cf. Jiménez and Terrazas in press). The second research question sought to determine the relationship between receptive word knowledge and essay quality. Results revealed that receptive knowledge of words in the 1000 and 2000 frequency levels plays a role in assessing writing quality. In this sense, the more words a learner knows, the better the score his/her composition will receive. However, these correlations are not especially strong, which points to other factors influencing evaluation of writing quality such as errors/accuracy, fluency, syntactic structures, range of structures, mechanical aspects, content aspects, and so on. This result supports previous research which found that “the quality of a written text may depend less on the use of individual linguistic features than on how these features are used in tandem” (Jarvis et al. 2003: 399) (see also e.g. Grant and Ginther 2000; Morris and Cobb 2004). Moreover, this result is in line with the type of writing assessment instrument used for the composition. The Profile measures writing ability from the scores obtained in a series of scales of which vocabulary is just one type. Other scales evaluate content, language use, mechanics and organization of the writing. Therefore, it is not surprising that vocabulary knowledge, although being a crucial factor in assessing writing, is not the only relevant aspect in establishing quality of composition. Correlations are higher for the first 1000 words than for the second. These data may mean that learners use more of these words in their writing and that they are used more accurately. It seems plausible that apart from knowing more words from the 1000 most frequent, they also have a deeper knowledge of these words. In this sense, we may rather safely speculate that learners feel more comfortable with words belonging to the 1k level and use them more often in their essays. Hence the higher correlation coefficients. Furthermore, and in relation to this, moderate correlations could also mean that in compositions learners use words from other frequency levels and, therefore, their receptive knowledge of those words is not reflected in the tests of vocabulary size. Thus the moderate correlations found here between receptive vocabulary knowledge and essay quality may be due to the fact that learners use other words in their compositions
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 129–147 ISSN 0210-6124 Examining the Relationship between Receptive Vocabulary Size … 141 apart from those of high frequency. We tentatively argue that it seems very reasonable and logical that our learners may be using low frequency words, in particular words from Latin origin. These are easier for our subjects and they are low frequency words in English. This interpretation finds support in Pérez Basanta (2005), who put forward that Spanish university learners were especially competent in recognising words from Latin origin. Finally, we wanted to relate receptive word knowledge of the first 2000 most frequent words with reading comprehension. Results revealed a significant yet weak correlation between these two variables; this was surprising in light of previous research which found that vocabulary size was instrumental to reading, and strong correlations have been reported (see e.g. Laufer 1992, 1996; Grabe and Stoller 1997; Qian 2002). Several explanations may account for these surprisingly low correlations. First, the reading comprehension test may have been very difficult for our learners containing very difficult words from other frequency levels, which prevented successful reading comprehension. The reading test was also performed last in sequence. Thus learners may have been tired, bored, or lacked motivation, and guessing may have taken place. Another reason for learners’ low interest might have been that they knew that the reading test was not going to have any effect on their final scores. We may speculate that had the exercise been given the weight of an exam, pupils might have taken it more seriously and thus obtained better results. Moreover, to heavily reduce the chance of not answering or guessing wildly, students should have been told that blank and wrong answers would be penalized. The second explanation is based on the low performance of subjects. Laufer (1996, 1997) contended that knowledge of 5000 words is the threshold level for successful reading; below this level reading is very much hampered by lack of vocabulary. More specifically, Laufer comments that “a rich vocabulary of 5000 words means a good reading result in L2 irrespective of L1 reading ability; at the 3000-4000 level, L2 reading may or may not be affected by L1 reading ability” (1996: 55). What is more, as she continues arguing “the knowledge of 3000 word families (5000 lexical items) is the lexical threshold of reading comprehension in L2”. Comparing these data to ours, we agree with Laufer “that until learners have reached this level, reading in L2 will be hampered by an insufficient knowledge of vocabulary” (1996: 55). Bearing in mind that our subjects are still within the 2000 frequency band, it seems reasonable to believe that their reading comprehension is unsatisfactory and is affected by lack of vocabulary knowledge. Moreover, we may safely argue that low correlations between receptive word knowledge and reading comprehension in our data also point to other factors apart from word knowledge, which are influencing text understanding. Reading ability in the first language may be one of these factors. The young age of our subjects makes it reasonable to assume that they are not fully proficient in reading in their L1. Consequently, reading in the foreign language will be obstructed not only by lack of word knowledge, but also by lack of general reading skills. Still another factor influencing reading in the foreign language and accounting for the low correlations found in the present study may be a limited depth of word knowledge, especially of the words for which a learner showed receptive knowledge.
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Qian (1999: 299-300) believes that some aspects of depth of vocabulary knowledge such as collocations, core meaning and syntactical restrictions, may play a fundamental and substantial role in the relationship between vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension. When knowledge of these aspects of words is deficient, reading comprehension will be hampered.
7. Conclusions
The purpose of the present investigation was to profile the receptive vocabulary size of Spanish EFL 6th graders and to explore its relationship with written skills. Although no known empirical study has dealt with these issues, we believe that an estimate of primary school students’ receptive vocabulary size can provide a useful indication of their reading and writing ability. The receptive version of the VLT has been shown to be a reliable and valid measure of vocabulary size for our young learners. The present paper has demonstrated that the Spanish EFL primary school students in our study know words from the 2000 frequency band of the receptive vocabulary size test. Moreover, our results have revealed that a positive significant correlation between receptive vocabulary size and essay quality, and a slightly lower, yet significant, correlation between receptive vocabulary size and reading comprehension. Several reasons have been suggested here to explain this low correlation, such as the late administration of the reading comprehension test or its multiple-choice answer format that allowed for guessing. Furthermore, one anonymous reviewer suggested that low correlations may be due to the fact that the reading test and the Composition Profile are not measuring these skills accurately. In our view, these findings suggest that the testing of the receptive vocabulary size of EFL young learners using the 1000 word level test and the 2000 frequency band of the Vocabulary Levels Test is a fairly sensitive indicator of their language growth, which correlates relatively highly with their written skills. However, these results constitute only a small piece of a larger picture; further progress could be made if such vocabulary is assessed by using the aforementioned methods and if this is done in a consistent manner.
8. Pedagogical implications
The results of this study have wide pedagogical implications for the education of primary EFL students and the training of their teachers. As Laufer (1991, 1994) comments, it might be a good idea to teach vocabulary to these students in an explicit manner in the initial stages and beyond, since the effects of skilled intervention will be seen in vocabulary growth. Furthermore, as Coady et al. found “explicit learning of the 3000 most frequent words in English has a significant effect on reading comprehension because recognizing these words in a speedy and automatic manner provides more cognitive processing time” (1993, cited in Coady 1997: 283). Otherwise, learners might face the task of having to read in order to acquire the most basic words. However, for
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 129–147 ISSN 0210-6124 Examining the Relationship between Receptive Vocabulary Size … 143 effective acquisition to take place comprehension has to happen and this is only possible if learners master a threshold vocabulary of 5000 words. This is generally known as the beginner’s paradox (e.g. Coady 1997: 284). We may also try to practice and test vocabulary consistently and systematically, and insist on and reward lexical richness. Another valuable approach has been suggested by Cameron to “make sure through examples that students know how to choose answers and encourage them to work through to the end of the test without losing motivation” (2002: 167). Furthermore, if students learn a lot of receptive vocabulary, their productive vocabulary knowledge will no doubt increase. Thus we agree with Laufer and Paribakht (1998) that the more students practice non-frequent words, the more often their receptive vocabulary knowledge will be activated. A final implication for educators is suggested by Fan (2000: 118-19): instructors can also narrow the gap between their students’ productive and receptive vocabulary knowledge by asking them to look up words in the dictionary, guess the meanings of words from context, play word games and make a repetitive use of words by writing sentences, saying words, writing them down, matching synonyms and so on. Therefore, we believe that this varied assessment might emerge as a crucial factor that could influence learners’ performance.
9. Further research
We have not found any research that deals with the receptive vocabulary of a large sample of EFL young learners and the relationship between this variable and its influence on the quality of written compositions and reading comprehension skills. Consequently, the results of our study call for future research on: 1) Surveying the relationship between receptive vocabulary, written skills and individual differences such as gender, age and so on. 2) Examining the relationship between productive vocabulary knowledge and the quality of written compositions. 3) Exploring the relationship between receptive vocabulary knowledge and reading comprehension at higher proficiency levels and vocabulary size. 4) Analyzing the relationship between reading comprehension in the early foreign language learning of young students and their L1 reading skills. 5) Observing if writing quality improves with an increase in productive and receptive vocabulary size after systematic practice of words in the 2000 frequency band. 6) Comparing the receptive vocabulary score against the vocabulary component of the profile. 6
6 We express our debt to Rosa Mª Jiménez Catalán for her cogent suggestions for the improvement of our study. We also thank the members of our research team for their help in the scoring of the tests. We also acknowledge the helpful suggestions of the editor and the anonymous reviewers who contributed to the improvement of this paper. Finally, we are grateful to Scott McDonald for checking the text. Any remaining errors are all ours.
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Harrigton and Jane Sunderland, eds. Theoretical and Methodological Approaches to Gender and Language Study. London: Macmillan. 113-18. Jiménez, Rosa M. and Melania Terrazas in press: ‘The Receptive Vocabulary of English Foreign Language Young Learners’. Journal of English Studies. Kucera, Henry and W. Nelson Francis 1967: A Computational Analysis of Present Day American English. Providence: Brown UP. Laufer, Batia 1989: ‘What Percentage of Text-Lexis is Essential for Comprehension?’ Christer Lauren and Marianne Nordmann, eds. Special Language: From Humans Thinking to Thinking Machines. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters. 316-23. ––––– 1991: ‘Knowing a Word: What is so Difficult about it?’. English Teachers’ Journal 42: 82-8. ––––– 1992: ‘How Much Lexis is Necessary for Reading Comprehension?’. Pierre J. L. Arnaud and Henri Béjoint, eds. Vocabulary and Applied Linguistics. London: Macmillan. 126-32. ––––– 1994: ‘The Lexical Profile of Second Language Writing: Does it Change over Time?’ RELC Journal 25.2: 21-33. ––––– 1996: ‘The Lexical Threshold of Second Language Reading Comprehension’. Kari Sajavaara and Courtney Fairweather, eds. Approaches to Second Language Acquisition. Jyväskylä: University Printing House. 55-62. ––––– 1997: ‘The Lexical Plight in Second Language Reading’. James Coady and Thomas Huckin, eds. Second Language Vocabulary Acquisition. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 20-34. ––––– 1998: ‘The Development of Passive and Active Vocabulary in a Second Language: Same or Different?’. Applied Linguistics 19.2: 255-71. Jiménez, Rosa. M. and Melania Terrazas Gallego in press. ‘The receptive voaculary of English foregin language young learners’. Journal of English Studies Laufer, Batia and Paul Nation 1995: ‘Vocabulary Size and Use: Lexical Richness in L2 Written Production’. Applied Linguistics 16: 307-22. Laufer, Batia and T. Sima Paribakht 1998: ‘The Relationship between Passive and Active Vocabularies: Effects of Language Learning Context’. Language Learning 48: 365-91. Lee, Siok H. 2003: ‘ESL Learners’ Vocabulary Use in Writing and the Effects of Explicit Vocabulary Instruction’. System 31: 537-61. Leki, Ilona and Joan G. Carson 1994: ‘Students’ Perceptions of EAP Writing Instruction and Writing Needs across ahe Disciplines’. TESOL Quarterly 28.1: 81-101. López-Mezquita Molina, Margarita 2003: ‘La construcción de un instrumento de medida para la evaluación de la competencia léxica de los traductores de ingles al español’. Apuntes 11.4.
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Morris, Lori and Tom Cobb 2004: ‘Vocabulary Profiles as Predictors of the Academic Performance of Teaching English as a Second Language Trainees’. System 32: 75-87. Mutta, Maarit 1999: ‘The Role of Vocabulary in Language Learning: A Study of Entrance Examination Compositions’. Diálogos Hispánicos de Amsterdam 23: 333-48. Nation, Paul. 1983: ‘Teaching and Testing Vocabulary’. Guidelines 5.1: 12-25. ––––– 1990: Teaching and Learning Vocabulary. New York: Newbury. Nurweni, Ari and John Read 1999: ‘The English Vocabulary Knowledge of Indonesian University Students’. English for Specific Purposes 18.2: 161-75. Pérez Basanta, Carmen 2005: ‘Assessing the Receptive Vocabulary of Spanish Students of English Philology: An Empirical Investigation’. José Luis Martínez-Dueñas, Neil Mclaren, Carmen Pérez Basanta and Luis Quereda Rodríguez-Navarro, eds. Towards An Understanding of the English Language: Past, Present and Future. Studies in Honour of Fernando Serrano. Granada: U de Granada. 1-21. Polio, Charlene and Margo Glew 1996: ‘ESL Writing Assessment Prompts: How Students Choose’. Journal of Second Language Writing 5.I: 35-49. Qian, David 1999: ‘Assessing The Roles of Depth and Breadth of Vocabulary Knowledge in Reading Comprehension’. The Canadian Modern Language Review 56.2: 1-16. ––––– 2002: ‘Investigating the Relationship between Vocabulary Knowledge and Academic Reading Performance: An Assessment Perspective’. Language Learning 52.3: 513-36. Qian, David and Mary Schedl 2004: ‘Evaluation of an In-Depth Vocabulary Knowledge Measure for Assessing Reading Performance’. Language Testing 21.1: 28-52. Quinn, George 1968: ‘The English Vocabulary of Some Indonesian University Entrants’. English Department Monograph IKIP Kristen Satya Watjana: Salatiga. Read, John 1988: ‘Measuring the Vocabulary Knowledge of Second Language Learners’. RELC Journal 19: 12-25. ––––– 2000: Assessing Vocabulary. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Santos, T. 1988: ‘Professor’s Reactions to the Academic Writing of Non-Native-Speaking Students’. TESOL Quarterly 22: 69-90. Saville-Troike, Muriel 1984: ‘What Really Matters in Second Language Learning for Academic Achievement?’ TESOL Quarterly 18: 199-219. Schmitt, Norbert, Diane Schmitt and Caroline Clapham 2001: ‘Developing and Exploring the Behaviour of two New Versions of the Vocabulary Level Test’. Language Testing 18.1: 55-88. Takala, Sauli 1985: ‘Estimating Students’ Vocabulary Sizes in Foreign Language Teaching’. Viljo Kohonen, Hilkka von Essen and Christine Klein-Braley, eds. Practice and Problems in Language Testing. Tampere: Publications de l’Association Finlandaise de Linguistique Appliquée (AfinLA). 157-65. Tercanlioglu, Leyla 2004: ‘Pre-Service EFL Teachers’ Beliefs about Foreign Language Learning and how they Relate to Gender’ Electronic Journal of Research in Educational Psychology 5-3.1: 145-62. Thorndike, Edward and Irving Lorge 1944: The Teacher’s Word Book of 30,000 Words. New York Teachers College: Columbia U. Weigle, Sara Cushing 2002: Assessing Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. West, Michael 1953: A General Service List of English Words. London: Longman.
Received 3 January 2008 Revised version accepted 4 September 2008
María Pilar Agustín Llach (PhD in Applied Linguistics, La Rioja) is an assistant teacher at the Universidad de La Rioja. Her main research interests are second and foreign language acquisition, particularly vocabulary acquisition in a foreign language and the factors that influence this process. She has published in RESLA and Studia Linguistica.
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Address: Universidad de La Rioja, Facultad de Letras y de la Educación, C/ San José de Calasanz s/n, 26004 Logroño (La Rioja), Spain. Tel. office: +34 941299435, Fax: +34: 941 299419.
Melania Terrazas Gallego (PhD La Rioja) is lecturer at the U. of La Rioja. Her research interests cover Language Learning and Acquisition (vocabulary knowledge, size, gender), ESP; Early and Late Modernism, Satire in Contemporary American and English Literature, Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies, Gender Studies and Irish Literature. Her recent publications include Melania Terrazas Gallego. 2007. ‘Intricate Models of Conflict in Wyndham Lewis's fiction’ in Cunchillos Jaime, Carmelo (ed.) Wyndham Lewis the Radical: Essays on Literature and Modernity. Bern: Peter Lang. (109-136); Jiménez Catalán, Rosa Mª & Melania Terrazas Gallego (in press) ‘The Receptive Vocabulary of EFL Young Learners: data from Spanish Primary Schools’ Journal of English Studies 5, volume dedicated to Carmelo Cunchillos Jaime. Logroño: Servicio de publicaciones de la Universidad de La Rioja.
Address: as above. Tel.office +34 941299420, Fax +34 941 299419.
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REVIEWS
RESEÑAS
Alexandra Gillespie 2006: Print Culture and the Medieval Author: Chaucer, Lydgate, and Their Books 1473–1557. Oxford English Monographs. Oxford: Oxford UP. xiii+281pp, plus 38 black-and-white facsimiles. ISBN 978-0-19-926295-3
Jordi Sánchez-Martí University of Alicante [email protected]
Just as information technologies have in modern times transformed the processes of production, distribution and consumption of texts, the advent of the printing press in the fifteenth century changed the face of written culture in Western Europe by replacing the artisan production of textual artefacts with a mechanical one, thus making books available to a much wider public than hitherto. Eisenstein’s seminal work of 1979 contributed to lend significant cultural consequences to this technological development she described as the printing revolution. More recently, however, Eisenstein’s theses have been revised and qualified in various ways (cf. Johns 1998), and the book under review in part adds to that effort. Instead of favouring a teleological account of print culture as an agent of cultural transformation, Gillespie puts the emphasis on the fact that “changes we perceive as being in some way related to the newness of print ... cannot be detached from old ways of thinking about what it means for a text to be written, copied, or read” (16). That is, in order for the printing press to have the impact it is afforded, it had to come into existence under certain conditions that made the transformation possible, not as a radical change divorced from its cultural background, but instead as a gradual development, as now happens with the implementation of information technologies. In the introductory chapter of Print Culture and the Medieval Author Alexandra Gillespie defines the geographical and chronological limits of her study, circumscribed respectively to the literary culture of England – with special focus on the authors Geoffrey Chaucer (d. 1400) and John Lydgate (d. 1449) – and to the first century of printing in English – specifically from the publication of the first English book in 1473 to 1557, the year of the incorporation of the Stationers’ Company of London. But the period between these two milestones in the history of printing in England crosses the conventional boundary that literary scholars use to separate the Middle Ages from the Renaissance, thus contributing to prove the fertility of this kind of foray, as espoused recently by James Simpson (2002). While it is true that there was a general tendency in the printing of literary texts to display authorship, Gillespie argues that Chaucer and Lydgate are not names that figure exclusively in printed books, but were already visible in manuscript form, a reminder that “the author ... was a fully realized historical entity when Caxton started printing” (3). With the premise that the emergence of the author was the result of patterns already discernible in the medieval manuscript tradition and not a consequence of the advent of printing, this monograph explores the implications of the introduction of print for the concept of the medieval author of literary texts.
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The first chapter, ‘Caxton and Fifteenth-Century English Books’, examines in what ways the methods of production and commercialization of texts and manuscripts in late fourteenth- and fifteenth-century England may have served as a precedent to the first English printer, William Caxton, between 1473 – the year when he began his printing activities on the continent – and 1476–77 – the first year he was operating from Westminster. Gillespie notices that in contrast with the usual anonymity of preceding centuries, English vernacular authors from the Ricardian period and beyond show a tendency to name themselves, and she suggests that “the medieval author was a way to limit, mediate, and profit from the movement in vernacular books before Caxton arrived on the publishing scene” (29). These authors, besides, were aware of occupying a place in the public sphere and of their role in promoting the advancement of the English language, as Gillespie shows in the case of John Gower (d. 1408) and Lydgate, who associated their compositions with English monarchs. This authorial stance influenced Caxton in his paratextual explanation of Margaret of Burgundy’s patronage of his translation and first English publication, Recuyell of the Historyes of Troy. Significantly, Gillespie argues that Caxton also found a precedent in the London book trade and manuscript culture that in the second half of the fifteenth century had generally adopted fascicular methods of manuscript production. Using the fascicle or booklet as the basic codicological unit added great flexibility to the process of book production and commercialization, since ultimately it allowed buyers to customize the final product. Caxton, whom Gillespie connects with a number of fascicular manuscripts, wanted to replicate the same versatility of the manuscript trade for his printed goods, thus meeting the demands of his customers and improving the marketability of his publications. Proof of Caxton’s policy is that George Ferrers, a Tudor courtier and author, owned a tract volume that comprised Caxton quartos printed between 1476 and 1477 containing mainly Chaucerian and Lydgatean texts. As Gillespie states, “[t]he little books that Caxton printed in 1476–7 belonged to a world in which producers made books in pieces and let others worry about the links between them later” (53). Yet there is another aspect worthy of attention that Gillespie passes over: if she is right – and I have my doubts – in that the English manuscript trade was a bespoke one, it should follow that the merchant Caxton would in fact be the first English producer of books on speculation. This monograph is organized chronologically and so the second chapter is concerned with ‘Printing and Innovation after 1478’. Gillespie argues that Caxton’s presentation of his printed quartos as analogous to manuscript booklets was a sound decision that he later applied to the more expensive folio editions with enhanced paratextual devices. A good case in point is his 1483 edition of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, in whose preface Caxton explains his editorial practices and presents this text as superior to that of his first edition of 1476 (cf. Bordalejo 2005); in addition, Caxton’s explicit ascription of the work to Chaucer “is also part of a plan to describe links between some of Caxton’s wares” (74). Later on in 1483 Caxton published two other folio editions of texts known to be by Chaucer according to his Retraction, namely The House of Fame and Troilus and Criseyde; these three folio editions offered a great opportunity for customers to compile a Sammelband of Chaucer’s works. And so did the contemporaneous London mercer Roger Thorney, who assembled a volume composed of Caxton’s folio editions of the Canterbury Tales (1483), Troilus (1483) and
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John Mirk’s Quattuor sermones (1482–83), together with a manuscript copy of Lydgate’s Siege of Thebes. This tract volume “opens upon a fifteenth-century pen and ink frontispiece, professionally executed in a continental style” (77). In other words, Thorney’s volume is a product of the transition between manuscript and print culture that combines the traditional tasks of scribes and limners with the more novel ones related to printing, thus proving the natural co-existence of the two technologies. Presumably about 1494 Roger Thorney made his manuscript copy of the Siege of Thebes available to Caxton’s successor, Wynkyn de Worde, who used it as copy text for his quarto edition of Lydgate’s work. Interestingly this edition survives only in a tract volume bound also with other texts by Lydgate printed contemporaneously, The Assembly of Gods (1494?) and The Temple of Glas (1493?). By choosing the same image of a knight to decorate the title-page, De Worde, who is the first English printer to have made extensive use of woodcut illustrations, favours a connection between The Siege and The Assembly.1 While the printer “perhaps meant to offer his customers a selection of Lydgate’s texts, ... the author’s name is nowhere used to propose this meaning for the products of his press” (88), because to improve the commercial possibilities of his books De Worde preferred to rely on illustrations, title-pages and other devices rather than on authorship. It was not until his 1498 edition of The Assembly that De Worde made explicit the ascription of this text to Lydgate, and he did so in a colophon that, as Gillespie perceptively shows, replicates the phrasing of the one used in his edition of the Canterbury Tales of the same year, suggesting that both editions might have been marketed as companion pieces. The composition of this colophon suggests that De Worde “deemed it worth investing some effort to make the text a tribute to an English writer” (95). Chapters three and four discuss the publication until 1534 of texts respectively by Chaucer and Lydgate. Apropos of Chaucer Gillespie follows up a reference by the nineteenth-century bibliographer Thomas Dibdin (1812: 59–60) about the presence of the single copy of De Worde’s 1517 edition of Troilus in a tract volume.2 Whilst being aware that this volume “may represent the work of a much later collector” (115), Gillespie considers the relevance of its association with the other texts possibly bound with it. One can certainly look for links among the texts, published between 1500? and ca. 1540, in the hypothetical Farmer Sammelband in order to discover the consumer’s literary approach; yet to reveal the more significant attitude of the printer towards Troilus, Gillespie fails to examine a more obvious connection in the use of the same woodcut (111, fig. 14) to illustrate the title-page of not only De Worde’s Troilus but also his editions of The IIII Leues of the Trueloue (1510?), Stephen Hawes’s The Conforte of Lovers (1515), and Squyr of Low Degre (1520; cf. Lerer 1998).
1 This woodcut (Hodnett 1973, no. 214) was used for the first time by Caxton to represent the Knight in his second edition of the Canterbury Tales, included in the Thorney Sammelband. Gillespie might have further explored the possible implications of this coincidence and consider the reasons that explain this cut’s absence from De Worde’s 1498 edition of the Canterbury Tales. 2 This Sammelband was sold in the sale of Dr Richard Farmer’s library in 1798. It would have been preferrable at least to include the description given in the book-sale catalogue (Bibliotheca Farmeriana) instead of relying on the second-hand quotation from Dibdin’s book.
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About 1526 Richard Pynson published, as three separate bibliographical units, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, Troilus and The House of Fame. While the STC considers these publications to represent “the 1st ed. of Chaucer’s Works” (under STC, no. 5086) Gillespie rightly corrects that view and describes Pynson’s editions of Chaucer more accurately with the term “trade Sammelbände” (126), since, in spite of being distinctive books, they were marketed together. All the efforts to collect Chaucer’s poetical production both in print and in manuscript culminated with the publication in 1532 of his Workes, printed by Thomas Godfray and edited by William Thynne. For the first time the œuvre of an English poet was assembled in print, a trend that had started on the continent with the publication of the collected works of other vernacular authors such as Dante Alighieri and Alain Chartier. And the poems of Chaucer continued to be printed only as a volume of collected works until the nineteenth century. In the case of Chaucer, Gillespie has documented the gradual stabilization of this author’s poetical production, whereas in relation to Lydgate she reveals the political use that some of his texts were put to until 1534. Pynson’s 1511 edition of Lydgate’s Secrees of Old Philisoffres, a medieval mirror for princes, appears as a product of the desires of Charles Somerset, Lord Chamberlain of Henry VIII, already from the very title-page, which includes an illustration with his heraldic insignia (see fig. 23, p. 162). However, nowhere does the book stress Lydgate’s identity as the main author of this work; instead Pynson preferred to highlight his own position as king’s printer and the noble patronage of this printing. In 1513 Pynson issued the first printed edition of Lydgate’s Troy Book in which “[i]deas about authorship are subsumed within a paratextual framework that stresses the propagandistic and topical value of the author’s text and the work of printer and monarch in realizing its political potential” (166). Gillespie argues that the Tudor ruling class had become aware of the propagandistic power of the printing press, which they were willing to use for political purposes. In 1527 Pynson printed a new edition of Lydgate’s Fall of Princes that states the author’s name on the title-page but has erased the allusion to Duke Humphrey as initiator of his previous edition of 1494, because Pynson either “deem[ed] a distant and disgraced Lancastrian prince an unsuitable source of authority for this book, or ... intend[ed] that this text be loosened from its ties to a specific history” (172–73). In place of this outdated reference Pynson chooses to print a woodcut where the figure of Cardinal Wolsey is easily distinguishable on top of the wheel of fortune (see fig. 27, p. 174). Finally Gillespie discusses the publication of Lydgate’s religious writing in the context of the commercial relationships that some London printers had established with religious communities. The final chapter of this study, ‘The Press, the Medieval Author, and the English Reformations, 1534 to 1557’, analyzes how the new context for English religion affected the dissemination and reception of these two medieval writers, who obviously composed their works in more Catholic times. Gillespie agrees with other scholars that reformation printers gave us a Lollardized version of Chaucer’s texts. He was ascribed Lollard texts as early as 1536 with Jack Upland, printed by John Nicholson, although this is an octavo edition with no resemblance to the texts contained in the 1532 Workes. The same happened with The Plowman’s Tale, although this text was conceived to be integrated into the frame of the Canterbury Tales, as Grafton did in his edition of Chaucer’s Workes of 1542. In addition, Gillespie uses Grafton’s edition to illustrate more subtle ways of mediating between Chaucer and his reform-minded audience: next
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 151-156 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 155 to the unapologetic endorsement of pilgrimage in the Parson’s Tale, Grafton printed a note in a smaller fount that reads, “Thys is a Canterbury tale” (see fig. 31, p. 191). With this paratextual device Grafton alerted his readers that this passage should be considered a ‘Canterbury tale’, a term that in the 1540s was used to describe “fictions that were worthless, even perilous, distractions from the serious business of pious life” (193; cf. OED s.v. Canterbury n. A.1). As regards Lydgate, the Reformation had lasting effects on his early popularity in print, because from 1534 to 1553 only one edition of Saint Albon and Saint Amphilabus and one of Stans Puer ad Mensam were attributed to Lydgate. As Gillespie suggests, “[t]here was no reason in these decades to impress readers of printed books with the author Lydgate” (209). It was not until 1554, after Queen Mary’s accession to the throne, that the presence of the monk-author was restored with the publication of two attributed editions of The Fall of Princes. Lydgate’s Marian revival also included a new edition of Pynson’s Troy Book in 1555 by Thomas Marshe and three separate editions of Lydgate’s Songes and Sonettes in 1557 by Richard Tottel. Oddly, Gillespie chooses not to close her study with a conclusion but instead with a brief and unrelated afterword devoted to Lydgate’s tomb. Print Culture and the Medieval Author succeeds in proving convincingly that the process of generation of the idea of the vernacular author in England was a cultural phenomenon independent from the technological development that transformed the production and dissemination of the written culture. Gillespie does so in a commendable way, since the argument of the book advances on safe ground, always supported on hard bibliographical evidence – always so elusive and difficult to pin down – that she expertly interprets and contextualizes, making it available to the reader in the numerous high-quality facsimiles that illustrate the book. But this monograph achieves much more than that. This is the first book I know of to provide a comprehensive and detailed account of the transition of English medieval literary culture from script to print (cf. more recently Schoff 2007). Comfortably crossing the arbitrary categories of medieval/Renaissance and the incunabular period, Gillespie has written with scholarly rigour an important chapter in the history of the book in England that not only throws light on the printed afterlife of two central medieval English writers but also explains how historical circumstances impinged on print culture.3
3 I have noticed typographical errors when transcribing primary materials that should be corrected if and when the book is reprinted: when transcribing the colophon to De Worde’s 1498 edition of The Assembly of Gods (fig. 12, p. 98), Gillespie gives “this lyttyl moralized treatyse” (100) when the text visibly reads “this lytyll”; Grafton’s marginal remark on his edition of Chaucer’s Workes clearly reads “Thys is a Canterbury tale” (fig. 31, p. 191), not “This” (190). The quotation on p. 123 from one of the poems by Robert Copland is also inaccurate: “Bound” is given instead of “Bounde,” and “art” for “arte.” In addition, Hodnett numbers should always be provided when discussing the woodcut illustrations in early English printed books, and Gillespie fails to do so on p. 84. This review is part of a research project funded by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (ref. FFI 2008-02165), whose support is hereby gratefully acknowledged.
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Works Cited
Bibliotheca Farmeriana. A Catalogue of the Curious, Valuable and Extensive Library in Print and Manuscript of the Late Rev. Richard Farmer, D.D. 1798. London: T. King. Bordalejo, Bárbara 2005: ‘The Text’s of Caxton’s Second Edition of the Canterbury Tales’. Nila Vázquez and Juan Camilo Conde-Silvestre, eds. Editing Middle English in the 21st Century: Old Texts, New Approaches. Special issue, International Journal of English Studies 5.2: 133–48. Dibdin, Thomas Fragnell 1812: Vol. 3 of The Bibliographical Decameron. 3 vols. London: Bulmer and Co. Shakespeare P. Eisenstein, Elizabeth L. 1979: The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe. 2 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hodnett, Edward 1973: English Woodcuts 1480–1535. 2nd ed. Oxford: Oxford UP. Johns, Adrian. 1998: The Nature of the Book: Print and Knowledge in the Making. Chicago: U of Chicago P. Lerer, Seth 1998: ‘The Wiles of a Woodcut: Wynkyn de Worde and the Early Tudor Reader’. Huntington Library Quarterly 59: 381–403. OED: Oxford English Dictionary 1989: 2nd ed. prepared by J. A. Simpson and E. S. C. Weiner. Oxford: Clarendon P. Simpson, James 2002: Reform and Cultural Revolution, 1350–1547. Vol. 2 of The Oxford English Literary History. 13 vols. Oxford: Oxford UP. Schoff, Rebecca L. 2007: Reformations: Three Medieval Authors in Manuscript and Movable Type. Turnhout: Brepols. STC = A Short-Title Catalogue of Books Printed in England, Scotland and Ireland, and of English Books Printed Abroad, 1475–1640. First compiled by A. W. Pollard and G. R. Redgrave, 2nd ed. rev. and enlarged, begun by W. A. Jackson and F. S. Ferguson, completed by Katharine F. Pantzer, with a chronological index by Philip R. Rider. 1976–91. 3 vols. London: Bibliographical Society.
Received 18 September 2008 Accepted 24 October 2008
Jordi Sánchez-Martí, MA (Bristol), PhD (Cornell), is Lecturer in the Department of English Philology at the University of Alicante. His publications include articles on medieval literature, particularly on Middle English romance, in journals such as Philological Quarterly and Studies in Philology.
Address: University of Alicante, Dept of English Philology, 030080 Alicante. Tel: +34 965 90 3400, ext. 2575; fax: +34 965 90 3800
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 151-156 ISSN 0210-6124 Ursula Lenker and Anneli Meurman-Solin 2007: Connectives in the History of English. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins (Current Issues in Linguistic Theory 283). viii + 318pp. ISBN 978 90 272 4798 8
Cristina Suárez Gómez Universitat de les Illes Balears [email protected]
Clause connection has been of recurrent interest in the study of languages, but it has flourished most vigorously over the last 30 years, especially from the point of view of typological studies (Givón 1979; Haiman and Thompson 1988; Lehmann 1988) and grammaticalization studies (Hopper and Traugott 2003), the latter heavily influenced by the former, since they normally have cross-linguistic scope and investigate common paths of development across languages. In addition to these general studies, research on the evolution of specific types of connectives and individual connectors in the English language has also gained in momentum, the present volume being a good illustration of this. On adverbial connectives, particularly worthy of mention is König’s (1992) and Leuschner’s (2006) research on concessive and concessive-conditional clauses. The case of complementation in the history of the English language has been more amply analyzed (Warner 1982; Fanego 1992; López-Couso and Méndez-Naya 1998, 2001; Los 2005, etc.). As to relative clauses, they were a favoured object of study in the 1960s (e.g. Rydén 1966), again in the 80s (e.g. Romaine 1982), and have attracted interest once more, from the perspective of clause connection (Suárez-Gómez 2006). Connectives in the History of English contains 12 articles, most of which are revised versions of papers presented at the workshop ‘Clausal Connectives in the History of English’ at the 13th International Conference on English Historical Linguistics (Vienna, 23- 28 August 2004). This compilation continues the trend of clause combination which began in the 1980s, but introduces new theoretical perspectives and adopts more recent approaches. Kortmann’s comprehensive analysis of adverbial subordination (1997), a benchmark in the study of connectives, was clearly influential here. Previous studies on clause connection looked at the sentence as the major unit of analysis and concentrated on its internal structure. Current studies continue to take the sentence as the basic unit of analysis, but ask how it combines in order to form a coherent and cohesive text. The scope is not (or not only) morpho-syntactic, but rather text-linguistic (3). Clause combining is in this volume considered a multifaceted issue in which syntax, semantics, pragmatics and cognition work together. This volume is also an excellent example of corpus-linguistics, since most papers investigate the patterns of variation and change of specific clausal connectives through an analysis of several corpora. In the introduction, the editors explain that the challenge and main goal of the volume is to offer new theoretical perspectives (3) to the analysis of clause connectives, a highly polyfunctional and categorially fuzzy element; their aims are successfully achieved in this book. Clausal connectives of various types throughout the history of
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 157-163 ISSN 0210-6124 158 Cristina Suárez Gómez the English language are analyzed. The traditional types of subordination, namely complement clauses, relative clauses and adverbial clauses, are represented; however, it is the last of these which garners most attention. All the papers adopt a historical scope, in some cases diachronic and in others synchronic. The collection opens with María José López-Couso’s paper on the history of lest from an adverbial purpose subordinator ‘so that….not’ to a minor declarative complementizer used after predicates of fearing (26). López-Couso demonstrates that the evolution of lest represents a clear example of syntactic and semantic polyfunctionality, both within and beyond the domain of adverbial subordination. Lest evolves from the OE phrasal subordinator þy læs (þe) and is primarily confined to marking negative purpose, but developed a secondary use as a finite declarative complementizer used with a specific set of predicates, and confined to highly formal discourse. In the next paper, Bettelou Los deals with the history of to as a connective in the history of English, paying special attention to its status. Los proposes an alternative analysis to the traditional one, in which to is considered to be a preposition in OE (Traugott 1992: 242). She argues and convincingly demonstrates that the to-infinitive in OE can no longer be analyzed as prepositional and should instead be analyzed as clausal. The to-infinitive clause, therefore, started to be used in paradigmatic variation with a subjunctive that-clause with verbs expressing purpose and intention and verbs of commanding and permitting, and ultimately became the unmarked option in such environments, ousting that-clauses as early as early ME. The remainder of the book, with one exception, focuses on adverbial subordination. Matti Rissanen discusses research on temporal adverbial subordination, in particular the replacement of oþ (þæt) of OE by till from early ME onwards. Of interest in his study is the peculiarity of the change, which goes against the expected principles of language change. The first surprising fact is that a word – and of a grammatical nature – has been borrowed from another language, in this case Old Norse. The replacement usually involves a transitional period in which the old and new elements coexist, until the new element ultimately disappears. Here, however, an almost instantaneous replacement is described: till was borrowed in early ME, rapidly extended, and replaced oþ completely by the end of the thirteenth century. The most likely factor proposed for such a drastic change has to do with a process of homonymy in those cases where oþ was followed by þæt. Oþ þæt suffered a process of phonological weakening into oþþe and became homophonous with the conjunction oþþe ‘or’ or the contraction oþe ‘on the’, thus accelerating the change in order to avoid ambiguity. The next paper, by Laurel Brinton, presents a study of the rise of some adverbial conjunctions such as any time/anytime, each time/eachtime, every time/everytime ‘whenever’, associated with informal registers of the English language. In Brinton’s opinion, any time, each time and every time are adverbial conjunctions. They are derived from prepositional phrases, then recategorized as adverbial phrases, and from adverbial phrases reinterpreted as adverbial conjunctions. This analysis is reinforced by the fact that this connective does not have a syntactic function in the clause in which it appears. In my opinion, this final point is poorly argued and does not adequately explain the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 157-163 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 159 relative clause analysis, especially when one takes into account the existence of examples introduced by any time that and each time that (88-89), which reinforce the analysis of any time/each time as antecedents of relative clauses introduced by the zero relativizer. The following four papers are all concerned with adverbial subordination, dealing with the expression of concession/contrast in the history of English. The section opens with Rafał Molencki’s paper on the evolution of since in medieval English. In PDE since is used as a preposition or a conjunction indicating time, cause and concession. In OE the equivalent form siþþan was used most commonly as an adverb and less frequently as a conjunction, in both cases expressing a temporal relation. It was used with such a temporal meaning until in the ME period after, originally a locative conjunction and preposition in OE, was reanalyzed as temporal and replaced ME sithen. Instead of disappearing, sithen began to be used to introduce causal subordinate clauses, confirming Traugott’s theory of subjectification and Kortmann’s hypothesis of decrease in semantic polyfunctionality. The evolution of a less frequent concessive connective is reviewed by Elina Sorva in the following paper. She presents the evolution of the subordinator albeit in the history of English and also in Scots. The origin of this subordinator can be found in the phrase all be it (that) in the 13th century. Sorva convincingly demonstrates that although this conjunction has a native origin, it has been modelled on the Old French parallel phrase tout soit il/ce que.1 Nevertheless, it is not until ME that this combination univerbated, grammaticalized completely and became reinterpreted as a connective to express concession. In the 18th century, far from becoming an unmarked concessive marker, its frequency dropped dramatically. Instead of disappearing, however, it resurfaced again in the 19th century, used as a conjunction, an adverb and a preposition, frequently introducing small and non-finite clauses. The third paper on concessive connectors is Ana Isabel González-Cruz’s, and is concerned with the evolution of while from late ME onwards, using a corpus covering the years 1420-1710. This is the period in which while started to show semantic polyfunctionality. González-Cruz’s work aims at integrating pragmatic and semantic considerations in the study of adverbial clause connectives, so that their development is viewed as involving a whole construction rather than an individual item. Emphasis is put on the semasiological development of while in English from the (more) concrete domain of time to more abstract domains of conceptualization, thus resulting in “intracategorial polysemy” (Kortmann 1997: 89). She concludes that the semantic development illustrated by while is a process of subjectification from content-based temporal meanings to increasingly more abstract (or context-based) interpretations, namely contrast, concession and causal relations.
1 Something similar has happened with wh- pronominal relativizers in the history of the English language. They existed as interrogative words and free relativizers, but modelled on the influence of Romance languages, particularly French, started to be used as pronominal relativizers and have been representing the pronominal relativization strategy of the English language since then.
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Within this group of papers we can also include that by Carsten Breul on the evolution of locative/contrastive where/whereas. Breul applies Relevance Theory, a standard approach within modern pragmatics which is innovatively applied to the evolution of connectors. In his opinion, Relevance Theory provides an answer to some questions which have been left otherwise unresolved, in particular “how the individual interpretations that are the elements of the set of interpretations picked from come into existence” (173). In the case of where and whereas, it shows how a contrastive meaning gets detached from a locative one so that whereas is used without a locative implication and how a locative meaning gets detached from a contrastive one, so that where is used without a contrastive implication. Relevance theoretic approaches allow Breul to conclude that the evolution shown by where/whereas is the result of a reanalysis made possible by evidence from a number of ambiguous examples which allow for more than one reading (189). After concession/contrast, the next topic covered in this collection is the evolution of causal connectors in the history of English. Judging from the title, ‘Forhwi “because”: shifting deictics in the history of English causal connection’, what we expect in Ursula Lenker’s paper is a study on the evolution of forhwi as a causal connector. However, Lenker is in fact concerned with the change that the whole system of causal connectors – not only forhwi – underwent in ME and eModE. The main causal connector of OE is forþæm/forþy (þe), an ambiguous adverb/conjunction, polysemous and polyfunctional, used when the cause is external, internal or rhetorical (Traugott 1992: 252) and irrespective of whether the information in the causal clause is given or not. Unlike PDE, this central connector has a very deictic character, established by the presence of the demonstrative pronouns (þæm/þy). Corpus analysis here reveals that new connectors are developed once the deictic nature of forþæm/forþy is lost and follow the same deictic pattern (forþon, þy…þy, þæs…þæs, etc.). This pattern disappears in late ME and new coinages to express cause are based upon lexical means (because, since, etc.). The next type of clausal connective under discussion are conditional clauses in two specific genres of eModE, namely ‘politics’ and ‘science’. Although the field of conditional clauses is categorially very fuzzy, with a high degree of overlapping with concessive constructions, Claudia Claridge partially solves the problem by analyzing conditional clauses using a text-linguistics approach. She observes that the traditional notion of givenness associated with conditional clauses is incomplete, and instead focuses on the notion of polarity. She convincingly demonstrates that if-clauses open up a yes/no-polar framework or likelihood cline in the same way as polar questions. The information is uncertain (if intrinsically expresses doubt) and is open to negotiation by the writer and addressee(s) (239). Another element in her analysis is the position of the if-clause (protasis). According to Greenberg’s Universal 14 (1966: 111), the unmarked position is preposed. Her analysis demonstrates that if-clauses actually tend to precede the apodosis; however, there are also instances with either parenthetical or final if- clauses. Contrary to some traditional expectations, this is not related to the concept of length or embedding, but is rather related to how conditional clauses are used with both argumentative and interactive purposes. A minor criticism that might be levelled at Claridge’s analysis is that the two analyzed genres contain written discourse. It
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 157-163 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 161 remains to be seen whether her conclusions work in a less homogeneous corpus and whether they can also be applied to types of discourse closer to the oral level of language production. No book on clausal connectors could omit relative clauses, and these are discussed by Anneli Meurman-Solin. In her paper, Meurman-Solin analyzes the so-called ‘sentential relative clauses’, a type of relative clause very frequently ignored in studies of relativization for their peculiar syntactic and semantic behaviour. From a clause-based approach, the syntactic function of these structures is far from clear, but they are generally considered as peripheral dependants to the main clause. Applying a discourse- based approach, Meurman-Solin shows that these relative clauses establish some sort of anaphoric relation with a chunk of preceding text. Her analysis relies on a database exclusively of epistolary prose, a type of prose characterized by being unplanned and unedited. A similar criticism to that made of Claridge’s article above can be made here; a more varied corpus would probably result in different statistical findings. A minor note is that, as a reader, I would also appreciate a transliteration of the relevant parts in some of the less transparent examples, especially taking into account that the text dates from 1540-1708 and are drawn from Older Scots. The last paper in this compilation, by Thomas Kohnen, is a pilot study on ‘connective profiles’ in the history of English texts, paying particular attention to aspects of ‘orality’ and ‘literacy’. Kohnen introduces the innovative concept of ‘connective profiles’, described as patterns of “distribution, frequency and proportion of the major clause-connecting coordinators and subordinators” (289) which he uses as a diagnostic to determine the degree of orality/literacy of sermons and statutes, and which can be applied to text types in general. Traditionally, coordination is linked to ‘orality’ and subordination to ‘literacy’. In this study, sermons are associated with orality, and statutes with literacy. Therefore, the connective profiles of each text type are expected to be different. What is surprising is the fact that connective profiles are not only different in both text-types, but also diachronically different within each text type. That is, from a linguistic point of view, sermons have not been homogeneous throughout the history of the English language. This has always been assumed; however, the analysis in terms of linguistic profiles here reveals a decrease in orality in the 17th century, only to increase once more in the late 20th century. Description of texts into text types can thus be further refined with profiles similar to the one proposed here, which prevents us from treating text types as homogeneous units diachronically. Lenker and Meurman-Solin’s book is an excellent and comprehensive compilation of recent research on clausal connectives. Objections could be raised concerning the selection of the contributions, which, although all of a very high standard, in my opinion constitute an unbalanced picture, so often the case with compilations of this kind. With the exception of Los, Meurman-Solin and Kohnen, the remaining papers deal with what is traditionally known as adverbial subordination (temporal,
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 157-163 ISSN 0210-6124 162 Cristina Suárez Gómez concessive/contrastive, causal and conditional).2 Los’s and Meurman-Solin’s papers are, by contrast, thematically unconnected to the common thread of the remaining studies: Meurman-Solin’s paper is concerned with processes of relativization and a specific type of relativizer, and Los describes the evolution of infinitival to in the history of English, a clear case of a connective introducing complement clauses. A further criticism might be made of the inclusion of this latter paper in the volume in view of the fact that it is the only one on non-finite subordination, all other articles being based on finite constructions. Finally, Kohnen’s paper, although extremely interesting, is a very general paper on ‘connective patterns’ in genres and text types comprising both coordination and subordination, and hardly conforms to the scope of the other papers.
References
Fanego, Teresa 1992: Infinitive Complements in Shakespeare’s English. Synchronic and Diachronic Aspects. Santiago de Compostela: Universidade de Santiago de Compostela. Givón, Talmy 1979: ‘From Discourse to Syntax: Grammar as a Processing Strategy’. Talmy Givón, ed. Syntax and Semantics. Discourse Syntax. New York: Academic P. 81-112. Greenberg, Joseph H. 1966: ‘Some Universals of Grammar with Particular Reference to the Order of Meaningful Elements’. Joseph H. Greenberg, ed. Universals of Language. Cambridge: MIT P. 73-113. Haiman, John and Sandra A. Thompson 1988: Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. Hopper, Paul and Elizabeth C. Traugott 2003 (1993): Grammaticalization. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. König, Ekkehard 1992: ‘From Discourse to Syntax: The Case of Concessive Conditionals’. Rosemarie Tracy, ed. Who Climbs the Grammar Tree. Tübingen: Niemeyer. 423-33. Kortmann, Bernd 1997: Adverbial Subordination. A Typology and History of Adverbial Subordinators Based on European Languages. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. Lehmann. Christian 1988: ‘Towards a typology of clause linkage’. John Haiman and Sandra A. Thompson, eds. Clause Combining in Grammar and Discourse. Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins. 181-225. Leuschner, Torsten 2006: Hypotaxis as Building-Site: the Emergence and Grammaticalization of Concessive Conditionals in English, German and Dutch. Munich: Lincom Europa. López-Couso, María José and Belén Méndez-Naya 1998: ‘On Minor Declarative Complementizers in the History of English: The Case of but’. Jacek Fisiak and Marcin Krygier, eds. Advances in English Historical Linguistics. Berlin and New York: Mouton de Gruyter. 161-71. ––––– 2001: ‘On the History of if- and though-links with Declarative Complement Clauses’. English Language and Linguistics 5: 93-107. Los, Bettelou 2005: The Rise of the to-infinitive. Oxford: Oxford UP. Romaine, Suzanne 1982: Socio-historical Linguistics. Its Status and Methodology. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
2 To this major group, we could exceptionally add López-Couso’s paper, which deals with the evolution of lest from an adverbial subordinator to a complementizer and, therefore, still touches upon the field of adverbial subordination.
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Rydén, Mats 1966: Relative Constructions in Early Sixteenth Century English with Special Consideration to Sir Thomas Elyot. Uppsala: Almquist and Wiksell. Suárez-Gómez, Cristina 2006: Relativization in Early English (950-1250): the Position of Relative Clauses. Bern: Peter Lang. Traugott, Elizabeth C. 1992: ‘Syntax’. Hogg, Richard, ed. The Cambridge History of the English Language. Volume 1. The Beginnings to 1066. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. 168-289. Warner, Antony 1982: Complementation in Middle English and the Methodology of English Syntax. A Study of the Wyclifite Sermons. London: Croom Helm.
Received 28 May 2008 Revised version accepted 2 November 2008
Cristina Suárez-Gómez (MA Santiago de Compostela, M.A York) received her PhD in English Linguistics (European Doctorate) from the University of Santiago de Compostela. She lectures in English in the Department of Spanish, Modern Languages and Latin at the University of the Balearic Islands. Her main areas of specialization are English historical syntax, pragmatics, and grammaticalization theory. Other research interests include English dialectal variation from both a synchronic and a diachronic perspective.
Address: Dpt. Filologia Espanyola, Moderna i Llatina, Universitat de les Illes Balears Edifici Ramon Llull, Cra. Valldemossa Km. 7,5. 07122 Palma de Mallorca (SPAIN). Tel: +34 971 259765, Fax: +34 971 17 34 73.
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Judie Newman 2007: Fictions of America. Narratives of Global Empire. London and New York: Routledge. ix + 195 pp. ISBN: 978-0-415-33384-9
Paula Martín Salván Universidad de Córdoba [email protected]
The volume Fictions of America. Narratives of Global Empire by Judie Newman is an illuminating contribution to the field of contemporary American fiction from the perspectives of globalization and transnational literatures. It joins other critical treatises on those topics, such as Michael Valdez Moses’ The Novel and the Globalization of Culture (1995), Vinay Dharwadker’s Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture (2001) or James Annesley’s Fictions of Globalization: Consumption, the Market and the Contemporary Novel (2006). The book focuses specifically on the effects of globalization on American literature, so that it can also be said to be an interesting addition to the growing list of titles that relate national literatures to global processes, such as Nathan E. Richardson’s Postmodern Paletos: Immigration, Democracy and Globalization in Spanish Narrative and Film (2002), Lu Jie’s Dismantling Time: Chinese Literature in the Age of Globalization (2004) or Miguel López-Lozano’s Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares: Globalization in Recent Mexican and Chicano Narrative (2008), to mention but a few. Moreover, by favoring a reading of American fiction that stresses its global qualities, the author points in the same direction as other critics who have recently written on the effects of globalization on the reception of American literature (Dimock 2006; Dimock and Buell 2007). Newman’s book shares Dimock’s premise about the recent changes in the field of American studies, which have shifted the view of the United States “from a discrete entity into a porous network, with no tangible edges, its circumference being continually negotiated, its criss-crossing pathways continually modified by local input, local inflections” (Dimock and Buell 2007: 3). The book is structured into seven chapters, preceded by an introduction and followed by a brief conclusion. It includes a thematic index but no bibliography, as bibliographic references are given as endnotes. There is no claim to comprehensiveness or exhaustiveness as to its scope, so the author is free to focus on a corpus of very different texts and authors that covers a wide span of time and place. The fictions that articulate each of the chapters range diachronically from the nineteenth century to the present, although the stress is on works published from the 1980s onward. Geographically, the book covers narratives set in India, China, Greenland and, of course, the United States. Fictions of America offers readings of works by Bharati Mukherjee, John Updike, Emily Prager, Hannah Crafts, Zora Neale Hurston, David Bradley, Peter Høeg and Cormac McCarthy. The book’s somewhat loose structure, nevertheless, is held together by several motifs that recur in all the chapters, such as the imagery of circularity and return associated with global phenomena, the search for roots and family history or the image of the surrogate or transplanted child. These
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 165-170 ISSN 0210-6124 166 Paula Martín Salván topoi, according to the author, work as micro-foci, providing a suitable metaphorical field for the analysis of globalization (169). In her introduction, the author takes as her point of departure the concept of globalization, which is used as the main trope shaping the volume. Newman introduces her topic in a cautious way, noting how “globalisation suffers from an exceptionally fuzzy brand identity” (2). The term is on the way to becoming a cultural shibboleth and in this sense it may be noted that most authors dealing with it seem compelled to write an initial disclaimer for the inconsistencies and ambiguities derived from its use. James Annesley, for instance, states that “there is little doubt that globalization is a concept that is porous, unstable and increasingly overstretched” (2006: 4). In spite of her introductory warning against the vagueness surrounding notions of globalization and empire, Newman tends to use those two words indistinctly throughout the rest of the book, contributing to their terminological ambivalence. At times she seems to merge the notions of American imperialism and globalization into one undifferentiated notion, thus falling into the sort of terminological confusion Antonio Negri warned against in an interview with Danilo Zolo, talking about his book Empire (Negri and Zolo 2002: par. 15). After a succinct overview of the term and its history, Newman is able to overcome the terminological entanglement by arguing that “the vagueness of the definition is an opportunity as well as a danger” (3). She contends that the flexibility of the concept is the result of the way in which different economic, social and cultural practices associated with it have contributed to its transformation and expansion. The core of her argument, as she develops it in the introduction and in the subsequent chapters, is that global culture contributes to the understanding of globalization and its associated processes and phenomena, an idea which is also advocated by Annesley (2006: 5). Turning to the scope and method of her book, Newman’s approach rests on the assumption that literary texts are constituent of the worlds they narrate, acknowledging their critical capacity to question and transform reality in ways usually attributed to theorists and critics. This conviction was already expressed in her previous book, The Ballistic Bard. Postcolonial Fictions: “Texts bring with them moral, social and political questions which must be faced” (1995: 192). As Malvern van Wyk Smith noted in a review of this work, Newman’s approach highlights the hermeneutic and performative dimensions of literature, “whereby the cognitive imagination constitutes reality” (1997: 424). Similarly, Newman argues in Fictions of America: “The study proceeds on the assumption that American fictions have in themselves the interpretive power more commonly attributed to the literary critic” (6). Accordingly, her critical methodology is based on the close reading of the texts under scrutiny, allowing for their representation of cross-cultural complexities to emerge and foregrounding their specific textual strategies. This does not mean, however, that she refuses to use secondary or theoretical material. On the contrary, her use of theoretical sources is both pertinent and illuminating. The volume is highly informative on the issues under discussion in relation to each of the texts, offering brief preliminary surveys on topics such as transnational adoption, the role of translation in the global market or evolutionary theories and popular ethology, among others.
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The first chapter, entitled ‘Red Letters. Hester Prynne in India and Arizona’, is devoted to two contemporary rewritings of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter: The Holder of the World (1993), by Bharati Mukherjee, and S. (1988), by John Updike. Making use of dichotomies such as imagination vs. reason (30) or spirituality vs. economy (36), the author analyzes the ways in which both Mukherjee and Updike write back to Hawthorne’s text, considered as a token of “emblematically colonial discourse” (14). The chapter explores, in Newman’s terms, “the instrumentalisation of culture in the organisation of corporate and transnational workforces, the status of neohistoricist revisionism and the use of historical source material in the discussion of the ‘long chronology’ of globalisation in earlier imperial practices” (13). The author parallels Mukherjee’s exploration of imperial practices and their effect on the Western perception of India as the embodiment of ‘otherness’ with Updike’s parody of the appropriation of that ‘otherness’ for commercial purposes. According to her, both novels explore how cultural identities are transformed and manipulated to the advantage of transnational corporations, and they do so by means of a narrative strategy that foregrounds both the historical dimension of the problem and the cultural practices that contribute to it. A final interesting aspect of this chapter is the author’s discussion of both novels as part of a tradition of rewriting or re-visiting of canonical works that has as its main feature the illumination of those aspects that were obscured in the pre-text, problematizing the ideological and cultural assumptions underlying their particular narrative strategies. In the second chapter, ‘In the Missionary Position’, the author focuses on the thematic presence of China in two works by Emily Prager: the story ‘A Visit from the Footbinder’, included in the volume of the same title (1982), and Wuhu Diary (2002). In both texts, children and development are the two keywords for her reading, which is guided by a mainly sociological interest in the relationships between USA and China through transactions involving children. In her reading of ‘A Visit from the Footbinder’, Newman questions the tendency to categorize the story and the characters in terms of binary oppositions, such as innocent women vs. brutal men, symbolic East vs. functional West. This strategy proves particularly useful for her reading of Wuhu Diary, a text which resists binary categorization by playing with the ideas of development and underdevelopment, childhood and adult life in non-lineal ways. The author examines the issue of transnational adoption in connection to the Chinese process of modernization, showing the social and cultural price paid for development. More interesting still than the insightful sociological comment, however, is the author’s account of how new economic phenomena (transnational adoption in this case) force writers to create and experiment with new narrative genres. In this sense, the author’s reading of Wuhu Diary in terms of genre and narrative structure is one of the major achievements of this chapter. Chapter three starts with a similar narratological analysis, in this case of the American slave narrative. The title of this chapter, ‘Back Atlantic or Black Athena? Globalising the African-American Story’, points to the contemporary reception of slave narratives, as well as to the rewriting and re-appropriating of the stylistic, structural and thematic features of this genre on the part of several contemporary authors. Newman warns against the risk of losing sight of the local aspects of narrative in favor of what
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 165-170 ISSN 0210-6124 168 Paula Martín Salván may be called an allegorical use of slave narrative for the global market, and uses Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937) as an illustration of how “it is possible for a novel to be both specifically local (authentic in terms of the folk) and globally significant” (98). The author’s major concern in this chapter is the question of whether historical sources should be used by fiction to produce global literary models, unbinding history from its local specificity. The author refers to “neo-slave narratives” as part of the 20th century cultural tendency toward prosthetic memory, and associates it with the popular longing to “experience history” in a personal, even bodily way (78- 79). She tests her arguments on two contemporary novels, Joan Brady’s Theory of War (1994) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), which dislocate the racial issue or transpose it to generic terms. The fourth chapter continues along similar lines. Entitled ‘Local Life, Global Death. David Bradley’s Surrogate Stories’, it is devoted to Bradley’s 1981 novel The Chaneysville Incident (1981). Newman’s reading of this text is articulated on “the relation of slavery to modernity, particularly figured in communication systems and in the relation of local to global” (100). As in previous chapters of the book, she builds anthropological and sociological arguments on death and slavery around a binary opposition. In this case, global modernity is allied to death, while the local is described as “life-giving” (105). Newman seems here to accept the neat distinction between global and local without exploring the complex ways in which those concepts operate and interrelate in the novel, assuming that their interpretive potential derives from the prioritization of one over the other. The most brilliant aspect of the chapter, however, is the author’s examination of digression as a narrative mechanism deployed by Bradley in order to question a notion of history as a closed, factual referent. “The point”, she argues, “is that miscommunication, the wrong story, precedes the delivery of the right story” (102). Newman’s narratological analysis provides an illuminating explanation of the structure of the novel as a series of stories that displace each other. Bradley thus creates several narratives that may correspond to the incident mentioned in the title, contributing to the reader’s feeling that the historical referent it alludes to is unstable and endlessly deferred. The fifth chapter is the only discordant note in the book, for it deals with a novel which does not exactly fit in the field of American literature. In fact, Peter Høeg’s Smilla’s Sense of Snow (1992) was not even written in English, but in Danish. The international success of this novel leads Newman to discuss issues such as translation and its role in the creation of a global cultural market. The ‘American connection’ for the novel comes, in any case, from the fact that its plot is partly set in a US military base in Greenland. Newman uses the political and scientific background for this thriller as the basis for a rhetorical and anthropological analysis of pollution and the idea of the parasite. The theoretical sources in this chapter are mainly Michel Serres’ The Parasite and Mary Douglas’ Purity and Danger. It may be claimed, however, that her contention about the ambiguity of the host-guest relationship (126) is close to the deconstructive analysis of the same problem in J. Hillis Miller’s celebrated essay ‘The Critic as Host’ (1977). Another interesting aspect of this chapter is the analysis of different fields of imagery in terms of information theory: on the one hand, images related to interference and the interruption of the information flow are recurrent in the novel; on the other
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 165-170 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 169 hand, the symbolic value of snow is described in terms of emptiness and absence of information. Chapter six, under the title of ‘Southern Apes. McCarthy’s Neotenous Killers’, discusses Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) from the point of view of evolutionary theories and popular ethology. Newman contends that most readings of this novel have seen it as a critique of American imperialism, perceiving its depiction of extreme violence as a condemnation of Manifest Destiny ideology. In its belief in evolutionary, technological progress and determinism, she claims, Manifest Destiny may be assimilated to contemporary globalization. Her reading of the novel, however, avoids the imperialist debate, and focuses instead on “the exculpatory attraction of a genealogy of violence” (147). The author offers a sophisticated reading that traces the shifting hunter-hunted relationships between characters, displaying an outstanding knowledge of secondary literature on evolution and anthropology. Newman examines the interchangeability of hunter-hunted positions at different stages in the novel, which she considers to work as anthropological universals. She emphasizes, therefore, the global nature of predation over the historical specificity of the setting chosen by McCarthy to tell his story. The last chapter of the volume proposes an interesting reading of Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters (2002). The chapter opens with a reflection on the role played by narrative in a world of broadband internet connections and instant access to information: “Is there a use for the novel when primary myths have been superseded by internet connections and software writers?” (151). From this stance, Newman builds an argument on how globalization (and broadband technology as a metonymy for it) affects the way stories are told. In a world of increasingly competing narratives, a narrator has to struggle with many other potential narrators in order to deliver his or her story successfully to its audience. Family history, international terrorism, software programming or worldwide media are some of the competing narratives which Tara, Mukherjee’s narrator, has to beat in order to tell her story. The web becomes, in Newman’s reading, a trope to explain particular narrative strategies that bring forth issues of connectivity and simultaneity. Mukherjee’s novel, according to Newman, operates horizontally as a set of short passes from one story to a competing one: “the narrative passes from one controller to another, at times appearing to be misdirected or displaced, with the story moving forward through changes of direction, side-passes, misdirections and feints” (156). In her conclusion, Newman goes back to her argument on competing narratives in order to extend it to the global reception of the works she has analyzed in the preceding chapters. Global fictions, she claims, demand complex readings which take into account their multilayered structures and problematic connections with the traditions from which they emerge, and invite provisional interpretations, open up for future revisiting and re-reading: “The reader recognises him- or herself as a surrogate in an endless chain, not a ‘first reader’, perhaps, but emphatically not a last reader, either” (171). The book is undoubtedly a welcome contribution to the study of American literature in the wider framework of global culture, as it offers informative accounts of relevant phenomena in connection with globalization and the ways they are represented and discussed in contemporary fiction. Another of its strengths is definitely its attention
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 165-170 ISSN 0210-6124 170 Paula Martín Salván to narrative structure and technique, which results in brilliant analyses of the textual mechanisms used by authors in the works under scrutiny. The author’s insightful, substantiated readings of the chosen texts make it a valuable source for scholars interested in the issues of globalization and transnationalism in general, as well as for researchers on the work of the specific authors included in it.
Works Cited
Annesley, James 2006: Fictions of Globalization: Consumption, the Market and the Contemporary Novel. London: Continuum. Dharwadker, Vinay 2001: Cosmopolitan Geographies: New Locations in Literature and Culture. London and New York: Routledge. Dimock, Wai Chee 2006: Through Other Continents. American Literature across Deep Time. Princeton: Princeton UP. ––––– and Lawrence Buell, eds. 2007: Shades of the Planet: American Literature as World Literature. Princeton: Princeton UP. Jie, Lu 2004: Dismantling Time: Chinese Literature in the Age of Globalization. Singapore: Times Academic P. López-Lozano, Miguel 2008: Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares: Globalization in Recent Mexican and Chicano Narrative. West Lafayette: Purdue UP. Miller, J. Hillis 1977: ‘The Critic as Host’. Critical Inquiry 3.3: 439-47. Moses, Michael Valdez 1995: The Novel and the Globalization of Culture. Oxford and New York: Oxford UP. Negri, Antonio and Danilo Zolo 2002: ‘Empire and the Multitude. A Dialogue on the New Order of Globalisation’
Received 4 August 2008 Revised version accepted 26 January 2009
Paula Martín Salván is Assistant Professor in English at the University of Córdoba. She obtained her PhD in 2005 with a thesis on Don DeLillo’s fiction, written at the universities of California at Irvine, Toronto and Córdoba. She has published articles on the work of DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, J.M. Coetzee, Graham Greene and Joseph Conrad. She edited a collective volume on postmodernist fiction entitled Figures of Belatedness (U. of Córdoba P. 2006) and she is the author of a forthcoming monograph on Don DeLillo, Tropologías de la postmodernidad.
Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa y Alemana, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Plaza del Cardenal Salazar s/n, 14071 Córdoba. Phone: +34 957218765; Fax: +34 957218427
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 165-170 ISSN 0210-6124 Jonathan P. A. Sell 2006: Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560-1613. Aldershot: Ashgate. viii + 215pp. ISBN 0-7546-5625-X
Eduardo Valls Universidad Complutense de Madrid [email protected]
One of the commonest approaches modern criticism tends to use while dealing with early modern travel writing has to do with the correspondence of actual fact and the way it is coded in texts (see, for example, Martels 1994). These accounts usually exploit ideological critiques to expose ideologically biased modes of experiencing reality. This approach has grown almost to become a vice, due mainly to the all-pervading neo- positivist perspective which post-modern criticism has encouraged throughout the last decades. Even now, when travel writing criticism seems to be thoroughly engaged on issues of race, gender and class (Pratt 1992; Hulme and Youngs 2002) as well as on the way contemporary travel texts represents these realities (Hulme and Youngs 2002: 8-12; Hooper and Youngs 2004: 1-2), critics tend to overlook the difficulties post-modern criticism faces when they get to grips with old travel writing texts. Different ages require different sorts of readers, and any critical analysis – of any kind whatsoever – would be incomplete without this premise being considered. Travel writing criticism should then welcome Jonathan Sell’s Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560-1613 as an effective reminder of this critical circumstance, however naïve it may sound in the first place. Sell’s essay offers an alternative approach which arguably calls into question – if not overtly condemns – the critical obsession of “concentrating on ideology” (6)which modern critical corpora reveal. Moreover, the author carries out his task while articulating an in-depth yet quite eloquent analysis of the ways early modern readers understood travel writing in particular and rhetorical expression in general. Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560-1613 comprises five chapters crowned by an epilogue. The main argument spreads quite straightforwardly throughout the five chapters, the overall structure resulting in a well-balanced critical overview of travel writing rhetorical strategies in the Renaissance. The volume also provides a List of Illustrations, a Preface – rather, a letter of dedication – a comprehensive list of references which abounds in titles of the last two decades – especially the nineties – and a Select Index which might well have been qualified as Analytical, since it includes references to both authors quoted and subjects dealt with in the text. Sell’s book builds a very precise argument based, mainly, on the grounds of wonder as both guiding principle and chief means of creating meaning in the travel writing of that period. Sell contends wonder is a somewhat predictable hermeneutical space shared by authors and early modern readers alike. Contrary to modern, positivist travel texts, early modern travel narratives do not just give a plain, straightforward, seemingly scientific account of an empirical reality, but rather present the reader with an enactment of a cultural “consensus” (32) which favours “vividness” to “verisimilitude” (32). This ‘vivid’ element is central to understanding Sell’s point: his analytical model
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 171-176 ISSN 0210-6124 172 Eduardo Valls allows contemporary readers and critics alike to grasp the emphasis early modern traveller-writers placed on wonder through rhetorical means. This emphasis represents, actually, the starting premise of the book. In the Introduction (‘Wonder, Rhetoric and Travel’ [1-22]) Sell identifies the inextricable semiotic grounds defined by wonder, rhetoric and travel writing. Undoubtedly, wonder lies at the core of the experience early modern texts on travel convey, but then again, as the author cleverly points out: “it [would be] inconceivable that an English traveller- writer of the second half of the sixteenth century or the first half of the seventeenth would have written in any way but rhetorically” (13). Rhetoric depicts, represents and, ultimately, enacts wonder in a way contemporary readers and critics should not overlook, lest they lose the appropriate perspective to asses the kind of truth early modern traveller-writers (and readers!) were concerned with. In an age “when education from grammar school to university was synonymous with rhetoric” (12), the representation of truth becomes as important as the emphasis authors put on persuasion, thus making rhetoric an “effective ally of wonder” (4). The reason for this lies in the fact that wonder, in early modern travel writing, serves a double purpose: on the one hand, it enhances a somewhat emotive force in the text, and, on the other, Sell states, wonder constitutes “the handmaiden of cognition” (3), that is, a source from which many cognitive processes begin. Having stated this, Sell moves on to depict a prototypical reader whose response to travel-writing is structured through a very definite “hermeneutic expectation” (16) traveller-writers were quite familiar with. Present-day readers who fail to see this will not quite grasp the issues at stake in these texts, their assessment of the corpora being, necessarily, faulty. Sell is fully aware that the unavoidable key to this approach hides behind the question about the nature of Truth depicted through the early modern period. The faulty approach I mentioned before springs from the almost all-pervading postmodern critical attitude which assesses most travel-writing in terms of their factual / fictional quality, whether it is to prove a specific ideological stance or to debunk it. Sell cleverly avoids this method by ruling out the question about “what [travel writing is true] to” (2) and concentrating upon the very nature of truth represented by early modern travel texts. Hence, in chapter II (‘The Truth of Travel Writing’ [23-56]), Sell develops his theoretical framework from the notion of consensual truth. Taking Edward Webbe’s “outlandish bestiary of fabulous animals” (23) as instance, the author arranges a neo- historicist approach by positing the concept of consensual truth as the main functional realm of meaning within the corpora of texts he studies. Sell cleverly manages to set limits to the postmodern preoccupation concerning the fact / fiction dualistic approach present-day travel writing criticism seems obsessed with by defining common grounds of ‘hermeneutic expectations’ early modern traveller-writers created for their readers to decipher. These expectations constitute “a prime store and conduit of consensual knowledge and consensual communicative strategies” (30-31) made up by common beliefs and ideas shared by both authors and readers alike.
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Consensual truth represents then a basic ground of associative experiences whose validity has already been assessed by readers. Truth, in this way, does not rely on a one- to-one correspondence between discourse (i.e. fiction) and reality (i.e. fact), customary to the positivist approach, but on texts which are oriented to “win the assent of the community because they will be probable in terms of its body of resources” (28). A message becomes consensually true whenever it is persuasive enough to make the reader believe it functions as a sort of textual mark, that is, a device deployed to shape the sense of exoticism and wonder texts are expected to convey. Once this strategy is accepted, it should be no wonder (for present-day readers of travel-narratives) that “the rhetorical textbooks […] [advised] embellishment of the truth, or plain lying, by means of the insertion of fictitious elements in a description in order to lend it vividness” (32). On the basis of ‘consensual truth’, Sell develops an outstandingly coherent analysis of all cognitive bases that sustain the genre in a wider sense, even drawing, when necessary, on the origins of travel prose to establish the intellectual significance of the genre. Strategies derived from this analysis lead to quite eloquent conclusions about the way travel-writing in the early modern period should be tackled: The reader had not to map verisimilitude out of the text and on to some materially existing piece of reality, but needed to asses the probability of representation in terms of his own mental resources, chief among which were the topics, tropes and texts themselves of the memorized literary heterocosm and the emotional responses stimulated by the figures of affective rhetoric corresponding to culturally structured gestalts. The truth of the representations […] is not always, if at all, to the external world of objective reality, but to the relevant parts of the consensus as replicated internally in the mind of the reader, the zodiac of his wit. (32) In chapter III (‘Wonder Texts’ [57-90]) Sell gives a thorough, complex, very rich account of the different uses of rhetoric traveller-writers deploy throughout the period. Due to a proper arrangement of particular rhetorical elements, traveller-writers activate certain hermeneutic expectancies in the reader’s frame of mind in order to ascertain the afore-mentioned consensual truth, that is, the rhetorical space in and by which this sort of narrative functions. Sell’s concern, is, literally, “with how a text may use rhetoric, above all various topical cues, to put the reader in contact with the experiential gestalt of wonder as a first step towards achieving consensual truth” (57). To carry out this task, the author concentrates chiefly on the analysis of a particular rhetorical device, the captatio benevolentiae (literally, capture, seizure of good will). And examines it in different texts in order to compare, assess and discuss the common way some traveller- writers (Thomas Harriot, Edward Webb and, most notably, Sir Walter Ralegh) endorsed their own material. There arises another key notion in Sell’s argument: the idea of ethos as opposed to that of pathos. Drawing from Quintilian’s distinction of the two (59), Sell manages to locate the concept of ethos (a sort of ideological programme based on an already fixed ‘wonder gestalt’ [38]) at the core of the captatio, thus depicting the very strategy traveller-writers deploy in order to grade different levels of consensual truth. The way this strategy works is as follows: by relying on “standard” rhetorical “topics” (78), the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 171-176 ISSN 0210-6124 174 Eduardo Valls reader’s range of belief stretches in such a way that suddenly he or she is willing to harbour the less likely stories writers account for. In this context, Walter Ralegh’s account of his expedition to Guyana (1596) stands out among the texts Sell examines. Ralegh’s failure in his search for gold in Guyana, arguably a dishonourable feat, turns out forgivable in view of its relative likelihood when put in a milieu of rhetorical wonder. Thus, as a matter of fact, it is fair to contend that Ralegh’s embellishment of his narrative serves more structural than ornamental purposes: “Ralegh has put the Ewaipanoma [men whose heads do grow beneath their shoulders] in his text not to attest to his own belief in them or to invite the reader to believe in them, but in order that his tales of gold will sound comparably less improbable in a context of relativized wonder” (78). Once the captatio benevolentiae has established and exploited (albeit perfunctorily) the ethos of the genre, the narrative itself develops. In chapter IV (‘Inventing and Elocuting Wonder’ [91-134]), Sell concentrates on the analysis of Arthur Barlowe’s, Anthony Sherley’s and Edward Hayes’ narratives, all of which enhance a proper sense of wonder by carefully avoiding detailed descriptions. Viewed from a positivist perspective (let alone a post-modern one), the relatively unknown spaces those travellers explored arguably demand a much more thorough depiction than the account provided by the afore-mentioned authors (most notably by Arthur Barlowe’s account of his expedition to Virginia in 1584). The spaces dealt with in these narratives represented a “conceptual blank” in readers’ minds, “which required filling in” (92). And in order to fill in these blanks, Arthur Barlowe, for instance, drew on rhetorical strategies (which Sell traces back to Homer, Ovid, Chaucer or Spenser, to quote a few) that help him create the illusion of a seeming heavenly topos, that is a sylvan scenery readers could relate to by continually renewing their acceptance of the strategies used by the author during the process of meaning construction, i.e. the establishment of the ‘consensual truth’. In chapter V (‘Composing and Acting Wonder’ [135-80]), conversely, the core of Sell’s analyses shifts from the construction of meaning in narratives themselves to the means and methods used by traveller-writers in order to enhance the sense of veracity and verisimilitude conveyed through the experience of wonder. Travellers achieve the highest degree of persuasion, Sell contends, by posing their own scarred bodies as evidence of their experience of wonder (“a token of truth inscribed with the scars of encounters with new worlds beyond the consensually known and knowable” [146]). A writer like Ralegh had to “present himself to his readers as a travailed body” (149), for “In the absence of gold, all he [could] bring back from the other world to this one [was] his own body, on which that the new world’s impress might [have been] read” (149). Sell’s argument here takes a seemingly risky yet quite effective turn from the rhetorical- pragmatic analysis to an assessment of travel narratives of a performative sort. Traveller-writers had to perform three different tasks in order to build up both the consensual truth and the hermeneutic expectancies travel narratives embodied. That is, authors like Ralegh, Harriott or Webbe needed to be, at once, travellers (i.e. explorers of wonder), writers (i.e. rhetoricians) and actors (i.e. they had to enact the sense of wonder they tried to convey, that is, they must needs become physical evidence of their own experience): “the representation of new worlds relocated the site and source of wonder
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 171-176 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 175 from those new worlds to the body of the traveller, now reconstituted as the traveller- actor” (161). As I suggested before, the strategy Sell adopts here might appear risky at first, insofar as it seemingly stresses material evidence as corollary to the reader’s rhetorical frame of perception (the ‘hermeneutic expectancies’) Sell depicts in his analysis – an idea that runs contrary to, if not cancelling completely, his anti-materialistic approach to early modern travel writing. Judging Sell’s work in this way would be most unfair and, it seems to me, would only constitute an unwarranted attack to the reliability of his analysis. The author does not judge the material evidence provided by ‘travailed’, ‘scarred bodies’ in absolute terms, but rather as yet another rhetorical (albeit idiosyncratic) device with a specific function in the process of representing the experience of wonder. Sell contends that “only when rhetoric proved inadequate to the representation of the new worlds did the traveller-writer start to squeeze the body back in by making it part and parcel of the signifying process” (154) and goes on to argue a “relocation of wonder from the world beyond the traveller’s body to the traveller himself” (163). Nevertheless, such a shift somehow mirrors that “of rhetoric’s modus operandi from words to drama” (163), the cultural milieu branded by ‘consensual truth’ thus remaining unaltered under the same umbrella of rhetoric. In point of fact, Sell never abandons the rhetorical analysis, even though this ultimate approach may suggest the contrary. Still, the author is very consistent in this respect. Sell just wraps up his argument by articulating the way rhetoric shifted its mode from narrative to dramatic, but never actually leaves the rhetorical context. Verisimilitude (material proof, as it were), in Sell’s argument, does not constitute a value in itself, but a rhetorically graded principle. Those who might criticise such a line of argument should not overlook this conceptual distinction. Final evidence of Sell’s coherent stance arises in the epilogue of the book (181-92). There, the author presents quite an original reading of The Tempest, which he interprets as a dialectical field, that is, a realm of tension articulated between two bodies: on the one hand, that of Miranda, which largely embodies the metaphorical epistemology and, on the other that of Caliban, which enacts a new empirical, almost scientific, mode of perceiving and coding the world. Ultimately, Sell contends, the play sets in motion the slow waning process of the rhetorical mode of the understanding of travel writing and the arrival of a new, modern empirical way of travel narrative. In this way, Sell manages to put his argument in historical perspective, thus projecting the limits of his essay towards the boundaries travel writing criticism shares with other fields of literary studies, most notably, the history of ideas. All in all, Sell lays the foundations of a new critical approach to rhetoric in travel writing which, far from overlooking, stresses, rather, the real value rhetoric had in the early modern philosophical context. If only for this, Rhetoric and Wonder deserves, in its own right, a privileged spot in early modern travel-writing criticism.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 171-176 ISSN 0210-6124 176 Eduardo Valls
Works Cited
Hooper, Glenn and Tim Youngs, eds. 2004: Perspectives on Travel Writing. Burlington: Ashgate. Hulme, Peter and Tim Youngs eds. 2002: The Cambridge Companion to Travel Writing. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Martels, Zweder von, ed. 1994: Travel Fact and Travel Fiction: Studies on Fiction, Literary Tradition, Scholarly Discovery and Observation in Travel Writing. Leiden: E. J. Brill. Pratt, Mary Louise 1992: Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge.
Received 17 February 2009 Accepted 12 March 2009
Eduardo Valls (PhD Doctor Europeus, U. Complutense) also holds M.A, and B.A Honours degrees from Leiden Universiteit in English and American Literature and Culture. He is currently Junior Lecturer at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid. His fields of interest and research include: The History of Ideas, Nineteenth Century English Literature (Joseph Conrad and George Bernard Shaw), Modernism, Cultural and Comparative Studies (Music and Literature), Travel Writing. He has published in journals including Estudios Ingleses de la Universidad Complutense. His most recent publication is El perfecto wagneriano / The Perfect Wagnerite de Bernard Shaw. Edición Bilingüe. Traducción, Edición y Notas de Eduardo Valls Oyarzun. Madrid: Langre 2009.
Address: Departamento de Filología Inglesa II (Literature), Facultad de Filología, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, 28040 Madrid, Spain. Tlf. +34913945390, Fax:+34913945478.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 171-176 ISSN 0210-6124 Francisco J. Borge 2007: A New World for a New Nation: The Promotion of America in Early Modern England. Bern: Peter Lang. 234 pp + 4 plates. ISSN 1661-4720. ISBN 978-3-03911-070-4
Jonathan Sell Universidad de Alcalá [email protected]
Until the 1980s, the countless reports, logs, narratives, letters, classical odes, directions to travellers, instructions for colonists, guidebooks, sermons and autobiographical pot-boilers produced by mariners and merchants, adventurers and ambassadors, gentlemen rakes down on their luck, Puritans seeking the promised land, aristocrats seeking fool’s gold, paid hacks, penniless humanists, disgruntled settlers, tavern bores and oddballs with itchy feet between, say, 1500 and 1650 were textual regions that barely existed on the map of the literary canon and remained largely untrodden except by colonial or maritime historians and amateur antiquarians. But since the 1980s, “[s]tudies of travel writing, colonialism, and post-colonialism have moved from a virtually invisible periphery to the very centre of the humanities” (Hadfield 2001: ix). This sea change is due to a combination of factors: the postmodern expansion of the academic discipline of English Literature into Cultural Studies; the prevailing reverence for the politics of difference; the happy – in some ways inevitable – marriage between travel writing and postcolonial theory; and, as far as travel writing of the New World is concerned, the kick-start provided by the American Bicentenary of 1976 and the availability of a sound historical bedrock thanks to the sterling editorial and historiographical labours of a group of scholars during the 1950s, 60s and 70s, chief among them David Beers Quinn, generously cited in the book under review. Among the welter of scholarship, perhaps the two works which have most shaped the dominant theoretical approaches to early modern travel writing are Edward Said’s Orientalism (1978) and Stephen Greenblatt’s essay ‘Invisible Bullets’ (1989). The former argued famously that Western thought and writing from the late eighteenth-century has been constructed upon and over the ideologically driven postulation of the existentially spurious barbarism of the East. Orientalism’s insights into the ways cultures perceive each other and define themselves in terms of perceived otherness and difference, and the theoretical development of those insights in Tzvetan Todorov’s The Conquest of America (1984) and Michel de Certeau’s Heterologies (1986), have fuelled countless studies of travel writing (whether of the Orient, the Old World or the New) that have followed in its wake. At the same time, its implication that writing about the other is in fact writing about the self fits in nicely with the self-reflexivity of travel writing that, largely since Greenblatt, has been endlessly revealed by new historicist and cultural materialist readers of the literature who, as much as, if not more than, for what it might tell us about new worlds, read it as a barometer of the social and political pressures present in the old world.
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Francisco J. Borge’s monograph is an instance of this fusion, arguing grosso modo that early modern writing promoting the New World defined an identity for an emergent Protestant and imperial England posited on its difference from European colonial rivals (principally Spain) and, to a lesser extent, Native Americans and Irish. In addition to presenting prospective investors and colonists with representations of a desirable, easily available America and to convincing them of what Borge calls “their inescapable destiny: becoming an empire” (10), early modern literature promoting the New World “gave shape to a new national self on which a new English identity could be constructed” (17). There is nothing particularly new in any of this: forerunners of Borge in this regard include Richard Helgerson (1992) and Thomas Scanlan (1999), both of whom he cites, as well as Andrew Hadfield (1998), Bruce McLeod (1999) and Joan Pong Linton (1998). Meanwhile, Borge’s chosen category of writing, promotion or promotional literature, was first described by Howard Mumford Jones (1952: 15), as Borge himself acknowledges (45). What is new is Borge’s attempt to systematically apply to his chosen corpus of literature Hayden White’s conception of the way discourse constitutes the very objects it purports to represent objectively. This is the centrepiece of Borge’s book: occurring as it does in Chapter Four, an appraisal of its strengths and weaknesses shall be postponed while some consideration is given to the preceding chapters. Chapters One (‘The American Enterprise’) and Two (‘Richard Hakluyt and His Contemporaries: The Forerunners of England’s Colonization of North America’) deal respectively with the “historical and literary contexts in which the nascent English nation was constructed in relation to the New World” (12) and with “the names behind the literature” (13). Material which in another book might have been introductory here expands to fill a good half of Borge’s work. This is no criticism of the material itself, which provides a useful and lucid account of England’s mainly half-hearted or half- baked trans-Atlantic expeditions from 1485 to the 1620s, of the people who took part in or sponsored those expeditions, and of the principal texts that were written about them. Newcomers to the field will find these first two chapters a useful first port of call for getting their historical and bibliographical bearings. Above all, these chapters drive home the essential point that the success of England’s colonial or imperial enterprises was in inverse proportion to the welter of words printed to promote or celebrate them: as Borge writes, “Propaganda thus became the perfect substitute for material profit when trying to engage Englishmen in the American Enterprise [sic]” (45). As so often, written artefacts accomplish the prosthetic goal of repairing or enhancing a defective or deficient reality. More importantly for Borge’s purposes, the dearth of enticing or profitable res increased the onus on his writers to convince their readers and therefore to make maximal use of the rhetorical arts of persuasion. If one were to find fault with these chapters, it would be on two counts. Firstly, in Borge’s admirable efforts to synthesise events, biographies and texts spanning the best part of a century and a half, many interesting topics are raised only to be left tantalisingly undeveloped. The discussion, for instance, of Ralegh’s discursive construction of a desirable moral identity for potential English colonists (104-05) could usefully have been expanded, especially as one of Borge’s conclusions is that the New
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World was represented as a locus for the moral, spiritual and political regeneration of the English, which would “make them[selves] fit” the for “new” and “renewed” England (213). In this connection, an obvious comparison with Ralegh would be Thomas Hariot: his vigorous recrimination (which Borge [125] quotes later in another connection) of the sluggards and rakes who variously hampered or slandered the expedition to Roanoke is an indirect expression of the virtues of a muscular, protestant ethic of hard work and self-denial, as is William Crashawe’s vehement repudiation of “the calumnies and slanders, raised upon our Colonies … set abroad by idle and base companions” (also quoted later [125-26]). The second ground for criticism is paradoxically the consequence of one of Borge’s strengths: so comprehensive is his reading of the primary sources and so generous his quotations from them that secondary sources are often squeezed out. In connection with Ralegh, once more, the fascinating question of what exactly his representation of Guyana shows the reader has exercised the minds of many scholars, not least among them Mary C. Campbell, Greenblatt, Louis Montrose (all cited elsewhere by Borge, but not in relation to Ralegh) and Neil L. Whitehead (1997), whose important edition of The Discoverie is nowhere mentioned. After the synthesis of the first two chapters, Chapters Three and Four turn to analysis. Chapter Three (‘Authority, Style, and Self-promotion: Formal and Thematic Aspects of the New World Promotion Literature’) is concerned with “the authorial grounding of narratives” (14) and analyses how promotional writers tackled the question of authority by emphasising the experiential basis of their accounts and by drawing their readers’ attention to the plain style of their writing (the rhetorical plain style being the conventional medium for factual, or purportedly factual, narrative). Borge also makes the secondary point that in addition to promoting the New World, most of his authors were attempting to promote themselves through their writing. In this regard, he offers some interesting comments (130-32) on the way many of his writers exploited the semantic ambiguity of the word travail in order to garner admiration for their strenuous exertions, even if in the case of Haklyut the travelling was chiefly of the armchair variety. As remarked above, Chapter Four (‘The Rhetorics of Nation Building’) is the centrepiece of Borge’s work, advancing as it does his argument that his chosen body of literature obeys Hayden White’s tropological theory of discourse, as proposed in Metahistory (1973) and Tropics of Discourse (1978). As Borge puts it: From a naïve metaphorical apprehension of the new reality encountered and its surroundings, the authors of these promotional writings move towards a metonymic and synecdochic characterization of this reality, and then end up having to come to terms with the inadequacy of their enterprise [in White’s ironic phase] – they are forced to search for justification, legitimacy, and authority. (139) Borge therefore subscribes to the view according to which, as he himself baldly states it, “the main task of discourse, then, is one of domestication” (138; Borge’s emphasis), a task fuelled by the same ambition to contain and control the other which characterises processes of colonisation and imperialism. Predictably enough, this
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 177-182 ISSN 0210-6124 180 Jonathan Sell alleged affinity between discourse and colonialism was picked up long ago by ideological critics who posited the existence of a symbiotic relationship between the two, which Greenblatt converted into the dictum that “discourses of colonialism actually do much of the crucially important work of colonialism” (1993: xvi). A lot of water has passed under the bridge since White’s and Greenblatt’s heydays. With respect to metaphor, Philip Fisher (1998), among others, has convincingly argued that metaphorical cognition and its discursive transcription is not a one-way process, whereby a dominant subject may, through familiarisation, draw the sting of the strange; rather, it is a two-way process in which the familiar, after being brought into contact with the strange through analogy, may itself become estranged. Likewise, with respect to colonialism and imperialism, the static, one-way scheme advanced by Edward Said has been questioned by scholars such as James G. Carrier (1995), who has shown how East is just as adept as West at devising discursive straitjackets for the other, Richmond Barbour (2003) and Gerald MacLean (2005), as well as by post-colonial critics such as Homi K. Bhaba (1994), for whom, as for most anthropologists, cultures mutually interact and effect changes on each other in a two-way dynamic. Early modern fears of the risk of transculturation after passing through what Mary Louise Pratt (1992: 6) has termed “the contact zone” (an anxiety Borge mentions in passing in relation to the Irish [175]) are evidence of the symbiotic and mutualistic relationship between coloniser and colonised, and between their respective constructions of the other’s culture (Whitehead 1997: 38). Ralegh’s tobacco-smoking raised eyebrows in high places not for its harmful effects on his health, but for its erosion of a stable cultural identity. After an introductory section, Chapter Four is divided into three main sections. The first deals with White’s metaphorical mode and identifies a series of tropes through which the otherness of the New World might be represented. After a discussion of the Paradise trope (more, perhaps, of an allegory than a ‘metaphor’ [144]) and the related topics of abundance and gold, Borge turns next to the “process by which the new lands [. . .] were named” (151) – hardly a metaphorical process; then to what he refers to variously as the “conversion motif” or “argument” (155); then to the “metaphor of an English Empire” (157) (which, if it is a metaphor at all, has little to do with apprehending otherness); and finally to “another argument [. . .]: the providentialist metaphor” (160; Borge’s emphasis). Now in rhetoric, an argument is not a metaphor, nor are most of the items in his list of tropes. Borge’s shaky terminology is probably due to his over-insistence on applying White’s tropological theory of discourse, one sorry consequence of which is that a lot of interesting and useful material is shoe-horned into a scheme which it at times flatly contradicts. The same is true of the second main section dealing with White’s metonymic and synecdochic modes. After two brief examples of metonymy (166), Borge discusses hyberbole (166-67) – a trope, certainly, but neither metonymic nor synecdochal; “reasoning by inference” (167-70) – the backbone of rhetorical argumentation, but argumentation is part of invention, whereas the tropes belong to elocution; and “the feminization of America” (170-72) – more germane perhaps to the metaphorical mode. He then moves on to a lengthy discussion of “the discursive approach towards the natives” (172-90) which rather abandons the
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 177-182 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 181 disciplinarian application of tropological schemes. The final section restores us to White’s ironic mode, but withdraws us from a contemplation of American otherness to a survey of anti-Spanish sentiment, the Spaniard and Spain (and to a lesser extent the Irish and Ireland) being the effective others against which the Englishman could devise a new identity for himself and his nation. Once more, the material is interesting, at times stimulating; but while it is consistent with the self-reflexive turn in recent studies of travel literature, by shifting the focus of attention from the Native American other to the more familiar Spanish and Irish foes, Borge’s application of White’s tropology finally comes to nothing. The goal-posts have been changed two-thirds of the way through the match, so the final result is invalid. This is a pity. One cannot help feeling that most of the book’s theoretical and ideological moorings could quite safely have been slipped, and that Borge’s expository clarity and evident command of the primary sources would have been sufficient to let his material speak for itself and, with a little re-organisation, shape itself into a very serviceable and accessible companion to English proto-colonial writing. As it stands, the first two chapters may be recommended on the grounds stated earlier, while the final two whet the appetite for a deeper analysis of many of the thought-provoking issues that Borge raises but, due to the exigencies of his chosen mission, has little time to explore. Of those issues, perhaps the most attractive is the suggestion that America was figured as a territory which would “redeem” corrupt Englishmen, thus making them fit subjects for the new nation of England (210). As Borge admits, “this is a subject for a different book”.One hopes work on it is already in progress.
Works Cited
Barbour, Richmond 2003: Before Orientalism: London’s Theatre of the East 1576-1626. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Bhaba, Homi K. 1994: The Location of Culture. London: Routledge. Carrier, James G., ed. 1995: Occidentalism: Images of the West. Oxford: Clarendon P. de Certeau, Michel 1986: Heterologies: Discourse on the Other. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P. Fisher, Philip 1998. Wonder, the Rainbow and the Aesthetics of Rare Experiences. Cambridge, MA: Harvard U. P. Greenblatt, Stephen 1989: ‘Invisible Bullets’. Shakespearean Negotiations: The Circulation of Social Energy in Renaissance England. Oxford: Clarendon P. 21-65. ––––– , ed. 1993: New World Encounters. Berkeley: U of California P. Hadfield, Andrew, ed. 2001: Amazons, Savages and Machiavels: Travel and Colonial Writing in English, 1550-1630. Oxford: Oxford UP. ––––– ,1998: Literature, Travel, and Colonial Writing in the English Renaissance 1545-1625. Oxford: Clarendon P. Helgerson, Richard 1992: Forms of Nationhood: The Elizabethan writing of England. Chicago and London: U of Chicago P. Jones, Howard Mumford 1952: O Strange New World. New York: The Viking Press. Linton, Joan Pong 1998: The Romance of the New World: Gender and the Literary Formations of English Colonialism. Cambridge: Cambridge UP.
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MacLean, Gerald 2005: Re-Orientating the Renaissance: Cultural Exchanges with the East. Basingstoke: Palgrave. McLeod, Bruce 1999: The Geography of Empire in English Literature, 1580-1745. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Pratt, Mary Louise 1992: Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. London: Routledge. Said, Edward 1978: Orientalism. London: Routledge. Scanlan, Thomas 1999: Colonial Writing and the New World, 1583-1671: Allegories of Desire. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Todorov, Tzvetan 1984: The Conquest of America: The Question of the Other. Trans. Richard Howard. New York: Harper Collins. Whitehead, Neil L., ed. 1997: Sir Walter Ralegh, The Discoverie of the Large, Rich and Bewtiful Empyre of Guiana. Manchester: Manchester UP.
Received 12 December 2008 Accepted 6 February 2009
Jonathan P.A. Sell holds degrees from the universities of Oxford, London and Alcalá. Among his publications are Rhetoric and Wonder in English Travel Writing, 1560-1613 (Ashgate, 2006) and numerous articles on a wide range of authors and subjects. His recent research has explored the interplay of metaphor and intertextuality in the fictional construction of transcultural identities. He is currently working on a book introducing Spanish readers to Shakespeare.
Address: Universidad de Alcalá, Facultad de Filosofía y Letras, Colegio San José de Caracciolos, C/ Trinidad, 3, 28801 Alcalá de Henares. Telf.: +34 91 885 50 41; Fax: +34 91 885 44 45
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 177-182 ISSN 0210-6124 Elizabeth Russell, ed. 2006: Loving against the Odds: Women’s Writing in English in a European Context. European Connections 22. Bern: Peter Lang. 221 pp. ISBN 978-3- 03910-732-2
Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Universidad de Sevilla [email protected]
For over eight years the editors of European Connections have published studies in Comparative Literature in response to the increasing demand for cross-cultural approaches to literary texts, which – according to Peter Collier, the series editor – can no longer be studied in isolation from their cultural or formal context. Women’s writing has become one of these areas calling for interdisciplinary investigation, as critical, national and generic definitions have proved elusive when dealing with the complex experiences of female authorship and readership. In this light, the volume under review (the third within the series devoted to European intertextuality in women’s writing in English) acknowledges the existence of a European network of women’s writing, which, echoing Arachne’s web as a model for a feminist poetics, has articulated a plural female voice often repressed through history.1 And that must be the reason why the topos of the ‘web’ – in its different variations like ‘network’, ‘fabric’, ‘cobweb’, ‘tissue’, ‘embroidery’, ‘tapestry’, ‘texture’ or ‘threads’ – is repeatedly invoked by the authors of these articles, in their common attempt at adopting what Nancy Miller calls a “critical positioning which reads against the weave of indifferentiation to discover the embodiment in writing of a gendered subjectivity” (1986: 272). Intertextuality, the collection’s declared rubric, is effectively achieved at all levels. Although the focus of the articles is texts written in English, their influence, as Elizabeth Russell admits, has “travelled in all directions…through connections and links, solidarities and common problems affecting women” (11). And it is not surprising that, in line with this intertextual spirit, the authors have tried to establish a (more or less) successful dialogue between the English tradition and other national and cultural contexts such as Portugal, Hungary, Italy, Spain, France, Germany and Canada. In a similar vein, the diversity of genres, formats and styles explored throughout the volume seems to expand the conventional definition of literary text by including letters, biography, theatre productions or newspaper articles.
1 The myth of Arachne has been frequently appropriated by feminist discourse to convey women's re-envisioning of patriarchal cultural patterns. In ‘Arachnologies’, Nancy Miller's playful account of Ovid’s myth, Pallas Athena’s illustrations reproduce the patriarchal narratives of authority and power whereas Arachne's illustrations articulate feminocentric protest in showing scenes that contradict the goddess’s glorious fables of Olympian history and focus instead on arbitrary crime and abuse of women. In such a context, the weaver’s web becomes a powerful metaphor for aesthetic and political subversion which has been endorsed by many female authors.
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Given this variety of materials, the main editorial difficulty derives from the attempted organization of these fifteen contributions on disparate subjects (though falling mostly within the broad area of women’s writing in English) in a coherent way. Aware of this problem, the volume’s editor proposes a solution that, though well argued, is not entirely convincing, as she groups the articles into three sections: ‘Loving against the Odds’, dealing with female articulation of love and desire, which, as Catherine Belsey states, are inextricably linked to both narrative (after all, most stories in Western literature are love stories) and femininity (we should not forget that women were the first readers of eighteenth century sentimental novels, despised as ‘feminine’, irrational and overemotional) (1994: ix); ‘The Brontës’, a section exploring the textual and thematic parallels with the Brontës canon, because, as Russell claims, “[a] book on loving against the odds would not be complete without a mention of the Brontës”, whose characters have loved “against the odds of poverty, ill health, and even death” (15); and ‘Writing against the Odds’, including a group of essays concerning women writing against the official discourse of a male-centered genre such as theatre, which, it seems to me, is somewhat tenuously related to the general theme running through the volume and made explicit in its very title: love, women in love, and/or women writing about love. The first section is therefore the one exhibiting a tighter cohesion both among the different contributions and in relation to the volume’s subject matter. To a great extent, the eight essays included here seem to be inspired by the idea that love is inevitably an intertextual experience, always “allusive, derivative and citational”, as Belsey suggests (1994: 81), thus aligning herself with a postmodern view that demystifies love and desire as solipsistic phenomena to inscribe them within cultural frameworks. In this critical light, Stephen Kern, for instance, explores in The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns the literary pedigree of love, and affirms that “novels offer the most direct source for past ways of loving” (1992: 2), much in line with other historical accounts of love and desire like the already mentioned Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture (Belsey 1994) and Mitchell and Osland’s Representing Women and Female Desire form Arcadia to Jane Eyre (2005). Even Roland Barthes’s classic Fragments of a Lover’s Discourse (1990), depicting, in a typically structuralist fashion, a universal and anonymous lover, a simulated model offering the reader an empty discoursive site, draws evidence mainly from literature, as is reflected in the many references to Proust, Goethe, Nietzsche, Gide, Balzac or Flaubert annotated in the margins of the different entries. Taking into account this earlier criticism, the selection of texts analysed in this section illustrates that representations of female love change over time and place and their historical continuity or discontinuity reflect the malleability of love as an artistic subject matter. Annamaria Lamarra’s ‘Love and Be Damned: New Perspectives in Seventeenth Century Literature by Women’ is devoted to the works of Aphra Behn, Madame de La Fayette, Mademoiselle de Scudery and other French précieuses writing stories of daring and sensual female love where women transgress the social and cultural boundaries of normative femininity. These authors anticipate the modern subjectivity of the Bildungsroman by introducing a female point of view in literature and thus inscribing themselves in the great project of women’s sentimental education – a further manifestation of intertextuality, considering that “it is not life that provides
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 183-189 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 185 models for the life we live, but books” (21). Julia Salmerón examines in ‘Barely Saved from Drowning’ the love triangle Leonora Carrington-Max Ernst-Peggy Guggenheim through a comparative analysis of the protagonists’ memoirs, letters and short stories. But it is through a detailed observation of Carrington’s tormented writing that Salmerón gives us a better glimpse of the terrible experience of the mental breakdown which followed her splitting with Max Ernst. Starting from “a mood of fear, sadness and loss” (33), Carrington gradually descended into the abyss of abjection, which, according to Julia Kristeva (surprisingly missing here), enacts at the bodily level a sort of purge of the most troubling aspects of the self, and would thus explain the writer’s abundant use of excreta, decay, and other images of the grotesque body (1982: 3). The experience of separation, illness and physical deterioration is also explored by Valerie Sanders in her analysis of Katherine Mansfield’s love letters to John M.Murry written during her convalescence in France in 1918. In her anguished epistles and in three short stories produced during the same period, she articulates an erotic (and at some points, fetishistic) self in which reality – through the physicality of food and bodily symptoms – and fantasy converge to confront her own emotional landscape of isolation and foreignness. Foreignness is the thematic motif underlying three other essays in this first section. Elizabeth Russell’s article is a brilliant exercise on intertextuality as she discusses the importance of the postmodern city as the locus of love and desire, and depicts the urban architecture interacting with the complexities of the human psyche. She takes the comparative endeavour to the realm of cross-cultural relations in contemporary Europe, as the novels she selects (Lucía Etxevarría’s Beatriz y los cuerpos celestes, Leila Aboulela’s The Translator and Cauvery Madhavan’s The Uncoupling) feature expatriate citizens trying to find their way through a maze of differences, translations and encounters, but ultimately perceiving desire “as a language which is universally intertextual, connecting bodies, attracting people, transmitting intimacies between self and other, between self and things, self and the city” (64). Ana Zamorano chooses three authors (Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West and Violet Trefussis) reading and rewriting one another in their fictions and weaving what she calls “the fabric of the lesbian European intertext of the period” (77). Very aptly, Zamorano borrows her title ‘I Love You is Always a Quotation’ from Jeanette Winterson’s Written on the Body (1992), a novel which openly addresses the dilemmas of narrating a romance, once we admit that the entire language of love is so overused that it is almost impossible to write anything about the experience without falling back on the unavoidable clichés. So, the question (both in Winterson’s novel and in Zamorano’s article) is less love than the problems associated with describing it in narrative form. If this article explores an ultimate form of linguistic alienation, Jozefina Komporaly’s expands the notion of foreignness to the realms of gender and national identity. In ‘Transcending Boundaries’ she compares lesbian writing in English and Hungarian Modernism, and after examining the fiction of Virginia Woolf, Radclyffe Hall and Margit Kaffka, she concludes that, beyond their differing literary choices, the experience of sexual transgression and exile is a common perception for the three authors, who “[i]nscribing the androgynous and the homosexual figure into a cross-cultural environment …
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 183-189 ISSN 0210-6124 186 Carolina Sánchez-Palencia deliberately disrupt the canon of national representation … and successfully plead for the legitimization of fluid identities” (103). The blurring of identities is the thematic and structural motif underlying Jeanette Winterson’s The Powerbook according to Julie Ellam’s critical reading of the novel, a story of virtual love where lovers meet over cyberspace, along the shifting dimensions of a multiple reality. Assuming the poststructuralist notion of desire as that which is essentially constituted by a lack or absence, Ellam analyses the characters’ journeys through space and time, reaching always for what cannot be found, and wonders whether love is still possible in a scenario (the World Wide Web) that celebrates the fluid, decentered subject, one where the ‘you’ and ‘I’, lover and beloved, reader and writer, are made up of each other.2 In ‘Love, Pleasure and Old Age in English and Spanish Literature’, M. Socorro Suárez challenges the conventional association of desire with youth, beauty and health, by focusing on the fictional work of Doris Lessing, William Trevor and Marina Mayoral. These authors address what Simone de Beauvoir termed the ‘forbidden subject’, as they handle the effects of time passing on the mature woman’s self-conception in a culture where women are so often judged on their physical appearance. Suárez’s study is an interesting contribution to this recent critical field that focuses on the cultural meanings associated with age, ageing, generations, retirement and identity. The section ‘The Brontës’ highlights the impact of the Haworth sisters on different generations of women writing within Europe, who have created, as Russell claims, “a common agenda for women’s rights which crossed all kinds of boundaries” (16). Drawing on the idea of a female literary subculture explored by Anglo-American feminist critics such as Ellen Moers (Literary Women: The Great Writers, 1976), Elaine Showalter (A Literature of Their Own: British Women Writers from Brontë to Lessing, 1977) or Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar (The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, 1979) the authors of these four articles seem to devote their attention to the re-appropriation of the Brontës’s novels in different national and cultural contexts. Though the concept of a universal female identity articulated by the aforementioned early feminists has been long contested for proposing an essentialist and exclusionary view of women (see Toril Moi’s [1985] Sexual/Textual Politics and Mary Jacobus’s [1986] Reading Woman) and has proved itself no longer sustainable in the light of poststructuralist theories, for many women writing and reading in the last two centuries the belief in a common situation of female subordination and exclusion helped to create strong bonds among female author, female character and female reader (usually ignoring the complexity and deception inherent to textuality). This is the case of the Portuguese women’s novels analysed in
2 The intertwining of reader and writer is perceived by most critics as Winterson’s commitment to the postmodernist practice of questioning and eliding dichotomies, but Helene Staveley also sees in this aspect a feminist reversal of the patriarchal poetics: “In androcentric texts, terms like these could signal a victor-victim relationship of possession and consumption, but here the writing ‘I’ and the reading ‘you’ are equally possessing and possessed, consuming and consumed. By extension neither reader nor writer holds ultimate control over the text, which consequently remains a text in process” (2004: 126.).
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Margarida Esteves’s article, where she explores the influence of Charlotte Brontë´s novels in raising political consciousness about women’s rights and “in the consolidation of female identity through romance ... a genre notably aimed at a feminine audience” (141-42). As the archetypal proto-feminist Bildungsroman which has acquired a quasi- mythical status, Esteves values in Jane Eyre not only the love story, but the potentialities of romance in the (re)shaping of a female subjectivity, thus emphasizing the well- known association between sentimentality and femininity. In a similar vein, Márta Minier explores in ‘Living and (Re)Writing Against the Odds’ the reception and assimilation of the Brontës in the Hungarian canon, although she selects a rather non- canonical work as the object of her study. The play Brontë-k by Csaba Schlachtovsky and Zsolt Györei is a metatheatrical adaptation of the Brontës’s life and works endowed with the revisionary spirit inherent to all re-writings, one that fills in the gaps and illuminates the dark areas in the original. The unusual and complex gender behaviour of the characters (through cross-dressing or incest, among other unorthodox practices) thus becomes an ironic comment on Victorian ideas about sexuality, family and respectability. The same goes for the play’s historical parallels with Hungary’s national past, which the contemporary audience is invited to revise in a new and demystifying light. Patsy Stoneman re-examines the postructuralist notion of the ‘Death of the Author’ and claims that the very concept of intertextuality should not exclude the autobiographical narratives from the multi-dimensional space of the text. She argues that, far from being a ghettoistic and reductionary category, authorial experience is often illuminating in our interpretation of a given work and the historical conditions in which it was produced. Such is the case for Charlotte Brontë’s criticism where biographical reading is vital to an understanding of her fictional heroes (many of them inspired by her own love affair with M.Heger) and the ideological implications of her works (like the clash between English-speaking and French-speaking cultures, perceived during her own stay in Brussels). Stoneman’s is one of the many attempts made by feminists to reconcile the postmodernist erasure of the speaking/creative/individual subject with their desire to rescue women authors and vindicate a female signature. Eleonora Federici’s ‘An Inner Landscape of Obsessions: Jane Urquhart’s The Whirpool, Changing Heaven and The Underpainter’ is the last article concerning the contemporary rewriting of the Brontës, although, it has to be said, one wonders whether it really falls within the volume’s declared Europeanness, considering Urquhart is a genuinely Canadian writer, who, Federici admits almost apologetically, “recognizes the European inheritance” (153). That said, this is an interesting study on the echoes of the Brontë heritage, which in Urquhart’s fiction is re-shaped as a new landscape infused with the national symbolism of Canadian obsessions: nature obsession, weather obsession, art obsession, identity obsession. As it is the case in most postcolonial contexts, the invocation of the European inheritance – through the intertextual references to an imperial fatherly (or rather, ‘motherly’) text – is felt both as a tribute and as a ‘burden’, and cannot be fully assimilated into this new and different geography. While the aforementioned essays duly fulfill the promise of the book (expressed in the editorial introduction and in the back cover summary) the last section falls short of that promise, as the three articles fail to address the question of love and its articulation
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 183-189 ISSN 0210-6124 188 Carolina Sánchez-Palencia in women’s writing. Eva Thienpont’s essay is a comprehensive account of the official reluctance to stage women’s works in England, the Netherlands and the German speaking countries at the end of the nineteenth century and during the first decades of the twentieth century. This hostility was also reflected in the difficulties actresses had to face in the male-dominated world of the theatre, as Francesca Rayner illustrates in ‘Putting on the Destined Livery: Actresses Play Isabella’, where she analyses the intricacies of two Portuguese productions of Measure for Measure (in 1977 and 1997) by offering a behind-the-scenes examination of their social and political circumstances. This ‘writing against the odds’ of the Shakespearean canon and of the theatre as a patriarchal institution constituted a challenge and an excellent occasion for Portuguese actresses to redefine certain female roles in the light of contemporary issues. The last article in the volume does not really deal with the theatre, as it focuses on Elizabeth von Armin’s novel The Enchanted April (1922), though it has recently inspired a major film and a Broadway play, a story that deconstructs the image of Italy as the idyllic garden, a long-sustained myth in the British cultural Imaginary. By insinuating the sombre presence of Fascism, Claudia Capancioni suggests, von Armin aligns herself with other more politically committed female writers such as Sylvia Pankhurst and Winifred Holtby who held an explicitly feminist point of view of the Italian conflict in their denunciation of the Fascist ideal of womanhood based on domesticity and subordination. All in all, though the final essays seem to stand somehow apart, this is an engaging book where most articles reveal the passion that most feminist critics bring to the study of literature while maintaining a scholarly and serious approach. The articles – all of them solidly grounded on primary sources – invite a re-thinking of connections and cross-cultural relations and the whole volume is no doubt a rich resource and a stimulus for further investigations on European women’s writing. The authors’ ability to transfer ideas from context to context generates a satisfying intellectual exchange and is definitely one of the major strengths of this volume. As for the central subject matter, although it is true that ‘love is always a quotation’, this collection shows, with its rich variety of discourses and perspectives, that when it comes to love, there cannot be any scripted formula. Ranging from heterosexual to same-sex or triangular relationships, dealing with female desire in relation to ageing, sickness and even virtual reality, these articles offer a rewarding intertextual experience which resists closure, because it stays restlessly open to further links and associations, just as “desire remains finally uninscribed, in excess of its own performance” (Belsey 1994: 209).
Works Cited
Barthes, Roland 1990: A Lover’s Discourse. Fragments. Harmondsworth: Penguin. Belsey, Catherine 1994: Desire: Love Stories in Western Culture. Oxford: Blackwell. Gilbert, Sandra and Susan Gubar 1979: The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination. New Haven: Yale UP. Jacobus, Mary 1986: Reading Woman: Essays in Feminist Criticism: New York: Columbia UP. Kern, Stephen 1992: The Culture of Love: Victorians to Moderns. Cambridge: Harvard UP. Kristeva, Julia 1982: Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection. New York: Columbia UP.
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Miller, Nancy K. 1986: ‘Arachnologies: The Woman, The Text, and the Critic’. Nancy K. Miller, ed. The Poetics of Gender. New York: Columbia UP. 270-95. Mitchell, Marea and Dianne Osland 2005: Representing Women and Female Desire from Arcadia to Jane Eyre. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Moers, Ellen 1976: Literary Women: The Great Writers. New York: Doubleday. Moi, Toril 1985: Sexual/Textual Politics. London: Methuen. Showalter, Elaine 1977: A Literature of Their Own: British Women Writers from Brontë to Lessing. Princeton: Princeton UP. Staveley, Helene 2004: ‘“It's not power, it's sex”: Jeanette Winterson's Power Book and Nicole Brossard's Baroque d'aube’. English Studies in Canada 30.4:120-38. Winterson, Jeanette 1992: Written on the Body. London: Vintage.
Received 14 July 2008 Accepted 4 December 2008
Carolina Sánchez-Palencia Carazo is Senior Lecturer at the University of Seville, where she obtained her PhD in 1994. Her main areas of interest are in Gender Studies, Contemporary Literature and Criticism and Cultural Studies. Two recent publications of hers are: 2007. ‘Sexy Fragments of a Lovers’ Discourse: the Language of Romance Fiction’. International Perspectives on Gender and Language. Valencia, España. Universidad de Valencia. 636-651, and: 2006. ‘4.48 Psychosis: Sarah Kane's "Bewildered Fragments"’. Bells: Barcelona English Language and Literature Studies. 1-9.
Address: Departamento de Literatura Inglesa y Norteamericana, Facultad de Filología, Universidad de Sevilla, C/ Palos de la Frontera s/n, 41003 Sevilla. España. Tel.: +34: 954551557, Fax: +34 954551552
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Jean I. Marsden 2006: Fatal Desire. Women, Sexuality, and the English Stage, 1660- 1720. Ithaca and London: Cornell UP. viii + 216 pp. ISBN 9780801444470
Paula de Pando Mena Universidad de Sevilla [email protected]
Jean Marsden’s Fatal Desire is a thorough analysis of Restoration drama which comes to fill a conspicuous gap in literary studies. It is probably one of the most ambitious books in scope since Derek Hughes’s influential English Drama (1996), and it certainly supplements the canonical view of Rothstein (1967) and Brown (1981), as well as the more recent works by specialists such as Owen (1996) or Canfield (2000), who primarily centred on the political dimension of the plays. This minute analysis goes from the appearance of the first English actresses after the accession of Charles II to the first decades of the eighteenth century, and focuses on the representation of female characters in both comedy and tragedy. Its aim is to complement other monographs on the lives and social consideration of actresses on the English stage (Howe’s The First English Actresses [1992] remains an unbeatable reference) or the listing of productions, performances and their reception. Marsden does this by centering her research on the resemblances between the apparently dissimilar fields of Restoration practice and contemporary film theory. The reification of women in cinema and the importance of the image as object of the desiring gaze prompt a series of parallelisms with the reaction of seventeenth and early eighteenth-century audiences to the spectacle of women on stage. According to this theory, Restoration plays were based on the concept of scopic pleasure, which is the inherently masculine visual enjoyment of a passive object. Consequently, the victimization of the female heroine in contemporary plays responds to “the financially profitable arousal of passion stimulated by the presence of the actress” (3). Even though the scholar might not find many surprises in this approach, Marsden’s analysis finally systematizes a scattered body of work on Restoration drama. It therefore merits appropriate recognition. The book interprets the developments in the history of drama as a series of changes in the pursuit of scopic pleasure, from the moral dilemmas posed by comedy to the highly sexualized pathos of she-tragedy, ending with the didactic domestic drama of the early eighteenth century. Audience response to suggestive images, according to Marsden’s theory of gaze, is deeply ingrained in gender difference: for men, scopic pleasure is sparked by titillating scenes of threatened virtue; women, on the other hand, identify with the characters and sympathize with their misfortunes. Here is where we find the only significant flaw in her argument: male scopic pleasure is provoked by the visual consumption of the heroine, especially when she is unaware of that visual enjoyment. However, Marsden herself humbly points to the lack of a convincing explanation for the success of this kind of play among the female public, who in fact were the most enthusiastic recipients and the explicit target of many of these works. Even though the critic acknowledges the identification of women in the audience with
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 191-196 ISSN 0210-6124 192 Paula de Pando Mena the characters on stage (for instance, on page 25 she talks about the danger of high-class women identifying with the characters, although not with the actresses), she fails to explain the origin of this rapport. Marsden also points to the interrelation between the political and the domestic sphere: in Whig plays, plots of abusive parents or husbands symbolized the tyranny of the king; conversely, scenes of rape or incest encapsulated the disruption of social order that Tories feared. Had she expanded on the ideological reading of the plays, Marsden might have found an answer to the problem of women as spectators. Presenting her book as an alternative to recent criticism by Owen and other scholars interested in the interconnection of politics and gender partially explains her decision to avoid the subject; nevertheless, the reader feels that this very important side of Restoration drama is rather too succinctly covered. The book begins with a discussion of the impact of women actresses on the audience. Chapter 1, ‘Female Spectatorship, Jeremy Collier, and the Antitheatrical Debate’ (17-38), focuses on contemporary ideas about the effect of plays on women and the way lewd plots could encourage them to disrupt social order. The defences of and the attacks against the stage which dominated the turn of the century are analyzed in terms of scopic pleasure and its threat to social stability. After 1695, the monarchs supported the Whig preoccupation with decency and the reformation of manners advocated by “those very merchants and citizens who had been the object of ridicule in much Restoration comedy” (20). Their belief in a direct correlation between sight and sin explains the concern of polemicists like Collier about sexual scenes in plays sparking the audience’s illicit fantasies. Desire in a higher-class woman unsettles patriarchal society, since it blurs the distinction between the woman of quality and the whore (25). While the male gaze is “virtually ignored” (26), the emphasis lies on the possibility of women imitating the censurable behaviour of female characters in the plays. Subsequent defences of the theatre refuted Collier’s view by defending the didactic function of drama and avoiding references to women altogether. For Marsden, supporters of the stage “construct a gendered theory of the gaze”: in men, lust provoked by visual representations of desire helps prevent homoerotic impulses (36-37); for women, these scenes are educational since they show a model of conduct to be avoided, or else they simply have no effect because of the inherent modesty of Englishwomen (37). Marsden sharply suggests that the actual effect of Restoration drama on female audiences is almost impossible to know: since there are no first-hand written records of female playgoers, “we find ourselves confronted with a theorized spectator, a woman constructed through the writings of men” (19).1 The rest of the book is devoted to the special nature of these suggestive images in Restoration plays, their elements of repetition and cliché, and the evolution of their staging and symbolism throughout time.
1 Even notorious female theatregoers like Mary Evelyn and Elizabeth Pepys did not leave any written records of their theatrical experiences. We have to rely on the fragmentary information provided by their husbands in their diaries (see Roberts 1986: 49-65, 89).
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Chapter 2, ‘Women Watching’ (39-59), explores female spectatorship in comedy. Marsden discusses Wycherley’s The Plain Dealer (1676), where women’s desire is the main catalyst of the plot. The character of Olivia is active in the pursuit of her own desires; in the end, she is ridiculed as whorish. On the other hand, Fidelia is passive, representing the ideal of femininity. Thus, Wycherley destabilizes and then reaffirms the dichotomy active/ passive, masculine/feminine at the core of the patriarchal system. Vanbrugh’s The Provok’d Wife (1697) was even more polemical since it presents a sympathetic character trapped in the moral dilemma of being loyal to a loathsome husband or surrendering to her infatuation with her suitor Constant. For Vanbrugh’s Lady Brute, women’s modesty is a conscious construction by means of which they present themselves as appropriate objects of the masculine gaze (55). In the playhouse, women have to feign that they do not understand innuendos and must remain self- consciously silent among men: “[f]emale spectatorship [...] is simply another occasion for the commodification of women” (56). Lady Brute offers a dangerous example for women in the audience, as Collier and his followers feared, for her hesitation is justified. Her right to oppose an abusive husband destabilizes social and political hierarchy: as Marsden rightly contends, proto-feminists like Mary Astell would later take advantage of this correlation (58). These same issues would have a different treatment in serious drama, to which the rest of the book is dedicated. Chapter 3, ‘Falling Women: She-Tragedy and Sexual Spectacle’ (60-99), explores she-tragedy, a genre that would dramatically change the course of drama and the depiction of female characters. Marsden claims that “[t]he shift from the masculine drama of the Restoration proper, when Charles was king and rakes ruled the comedies, to woman-centered tragedy is one of the most remarkable in English theater and one of the most unremarked” (99). In the aftermath of the Exclusion Crisis, old expressions of honour and duty lost their validity in favour of a new dramatic model. Playwrights turned to the sentimental conflicts of female protagonists in order to enact the Corneillian dichotomy of love and honour, most of the times having in mind a certain political agenda. Antitheatrical writers did not find anything objectionable in serious drama, because comedies outnumbered tragedies and because female heroes met horrible punishments for offences they never intended to commit, making identification a painful issue (63). Nonetheless, when Marsden claims that “[s]he-tragedy reiterates gender as stable series of binary oppositions: male/female, subject/object and actor/ acted upon, oppositions that supported rather than threatened existing social structures” (63), she does not consider the main objection to the genre, voiced by Rothstein (1967) and Brown (1981) among others, regarding the blurred distinction between male and female. Rothstein, for instance, complained about the effacement of gender roles “which is at the heart of the heroic play” (96). Indeed, the she-tragedy is innovative in that it confers on women the moral stature of men, sometimes even transforming heroines into icons of English virtue, as Marsden herself points out.
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Another complication of she-tragedy is that heroines are typically “innocent and corrupt” at the same time (73): plots of incest and rape, often with political implications, are recurrent at this time. For Marsden, the passivity of the protagonist is a requisite of visual pleasure and, therefore. scenes where the woman is inadvertently spied are manifold. Rape, the ultimate expression of feminine defencelessness, becomes an effective political tool to signify the perils of abusive power or the breaking of social and patriarchal order. Marsden delineates the evolution of the she-tragedy from pioneers Otway and Banks to Southerne, Congreve and the eclectic she-tragedies of the 1690s. She points to Otway as the playwright who established the pattern of the new trend, reassessing his pivotal influence as a reference for his contemporaries, who sought a model of economic success and literary novelty: “it was The Orphan that became the prototype for the she-tragedy as well as the play by which the pathos or ‘distress’ of other plays was calibrated” (79). The Orphan anticipates the innocent yet sexually soiled heroine, making sexual thrill an essential component of emotional catharsis. She also acknowledges the importance of a convincing performance to move the audience: the outstanding talent of the pair Barry-Bracegirdle would enhance any plot (85). To be sure, excessive dependence on performance might partly explain present day neglect of Restoration drama, aside from our obvious detachment from seventeenth-century political and ideological concerns. Chapter Four, ‘Women Writing Women’ (101-31), deals with female authors of she- tragedy. Marsden examines the way in which Pix, Trotter and Manley among others come to terms with the “inherently misogynist conventions” of the genre (100). Mary Pix creates a writing persona that shares her protagonists’ helplessness and need of male protection, thus downplaying the potential threat of a female pen (107). In plays like Ibrahim (1696), she embraces the typically masculine voyeuristic reification of the female heroine in scenes of rape, pathos and masochistic suffering. In The Conquest of Spain (1707), however, the hero is still willing to marry the ravished heroine, a subtle yet meaningful departure from previous misogynist practice (111). Conversely, Catherine Trotter’s Agnes de Castro (1688) lacks all sexual titillation, turning instead to the depiction of a ‘romantic’ friendship between women portrayed in political terms (113-14). Delarivier Manley presents women actively pursuing her desires (The Royal Mischief, 1696) or defending their moral equality to men (Almyna; or, The Arabian Vow, 1706), but in any case displacing them from object to subject of the gaze, in control of their own sexuality. Marsden rightly discusses these women writers within the broader context of Restoration playwrights: they have in common their awareness of writing in a masculine arena, but they are also linked to a broader literary framework of which they were a part. In Chapter Five (132-67), Marsden tackles the second generation of she-tragedy led by Nicholas Rowe, already in the eighteenth century. The “growth of a pro-Whig mercantile class that defined itself as pious and ethical” (133), and the accession of Queen Anne in 1702, increased the emphasis on virtue, propriety and female domesticity. There is a change in the way female sexuality is represented, focusing instead on the tragic potential of female agency (135). Overt sexual desire and sensationalism are downplayed and, with this, the number of new she-tragedies
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 191-196 ISSN 0210-6124 Reviews 195 decreases (139). In Rowe, loss of honour and its moral implications are rendered in effective plays which were frequently staged well into the nineteenth century, giving the eroticized spectacle of fallen women a didactic dimension: “By emphasizing the horrors that await the fallen women, the stage can be a ‘school’ of virtue” (166). Passivity is thus replaced by a concept of agency which results in equally sexist denouements. The last section of the book (Chapter 6, 168-91) discusses the figure of Lady Jane Grey in the context of the Hanoverian Succession. After Queen Anne’s death in 1714, there was a general turmoil that ended in the 1715 Jacobite rebellion. Whig writers used the threat of Catholic absolutism, however improbable, in support of George I. While Jacobite propaganda tended to focus on male figures, Whig writers portrayed women as political symbols (169). Jane Grey, a recurrent icon of Protestantism in English literary tradition, acquired a new relevance in this period. Rowe’s The Tragedy of Lady Jane Gray (1714) portrays a character who has more of the zealous Protestant martyr than of the actual young girl in love and alien to political concerns. The ideological symbol eclipses the woman: Rowe “presents a new heroine, as political propaganda requires the erasure of female desire and overt sexuality-although not the woman’s role as object of desire – qualities that until then had been hallmarks of she-tragedy” (184). Jane becomes a “visual icon” of English virtue (189), channelling scopic pleasure through ideological grounds. The logical development of this dramatic tendency is that pure pathos, unqualified by gender or social status, becomes central in plays of the early eighteenth century: the sufferings of men and women alike, regardless of gender, are exploited for dramatic purposes. Moreover, “the performance of pathos becomes increasingly moral” (193), and the anxiety over women watching women on stage subsides. Fatal Desire is interesting, well written and ambitious. The scholar will be able to find in the line of argument obscure or minor plays which have been traditionally overlooked or which deserved only scattered attention in manuals as isolated or marginal phenomena. Its comprehensive bibliography covers the most relevant primary and secondary works, even if sometimes a more detailed discussion of some of them would have been desirable. The sense of unity and coherence that permeates the book is undoubtedly its greatest strength, and the thoroughness of Marsden’s approach is a welcome addition to existing criticism which makes her work an indispensable reference for future studies.
Works Cited
Brown, Laura 1981: English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760: An Essay in Generic History. New Haven: Yale UP. Canfield, Douglas 2000: Heroes and States: On the Ideology of Restoration Tragedy. Lexington: The UP of Kentucky. Howe, Elizabeth 1992: The First English Actresses. Women and Drama 1660-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hughes, Derek 1996: English Drama 1660-1700. Oxford: Oxford UP.
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Owen, Susan 1996: Restoration Theatre and Crisis. Oxford: The Clarendon P. Roberts, David 1986: The Ladies. Female Patronage of Restoration Drama. 1660-1700. Oxford: The Clarendon P. Rothstein, Eric 1967: Restoration Tragedy. Form and the Process of Change. Madison, Milwaukee and London: The U of Wisconsin P.
Received 28 October 2008 Revised version accepted 21 January 2009
Paula de Pando is currently a researcher at the University of Seville. She is engaged in writing a doctoral thesis on the Restoration playwright John Banks, in which she focuses on the interrelationship between gender and genre in the she-tragedy.
Address: Departamento de Literatura Inglesa y Norteamericana. Facultad de Filología, Universidad de Sevilla. c/ Palos de la Frontera s/n. 41004, Sevilla. Tel.: +34 954551551, Fax: +34 54551552.
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 191-196 ISSN 0210-6124 María José Mora, Manuel Gómez-Lara, Rafael Portillo and Juan A. Prieto-Pablos, eds. 2007: The Woman Turned Bully. Colección Textos y Comentarios, 10. Barcelona: Publicacións i Edicións de la Universitat de Barcelona. 211 pp. ISBN: 978-84-475- 3208-7
Jorge Figueroa Dorrego Universidad de Vigo [email protected]
The Woman Turned Bully (1675) is an anonymous comedy that has been described as “very Diverting” (Langbaine 1691: 556), “very amusing” (Baker, Reed and Jones 1812, 3: 418), “a capital comedy with some clever characterization” (Summers 1915: xxxvii, n. 30), and an “enjoyable” play with “[v]ivid characters, lively intrigue, and repartee” (Hume 1976: 303). Despite this, it has received little critical attention down through the years. It is not mentioned in the classical studies on Restoration comedy written by Dobrée (1924), Sutherland (1969), Brown (1981) and Bevis (1988) or in more recent important collections of essays, such as Quinsey (1996), Fisk (2000) and Owen (2001). Maybe these critics agree with Nicoll (1923: 204) that it is “an exceedingly dull comedy” hardly worth mentioning, or perhaps they did not have access to the text, as it has never been easily available. Fortunately, a fully-annotated, modern-spelling, critical edition of the play has just been published, for the first time, by a team of Spanish scholars from the University of Seville who are the core of the Restoration Comedy Project. One of the aims of their project is precisely to publish critical editions of Restoration comedies that are currently unavailable. They have already edited Joseph Arrowsmith’s The Reformation (published by the University of Barcelona in 2003) and Thomas Shadwell’s The Virtuoso and Epsom Wells (printed by the University of Seville in 1997 and 2000 respectively). In this new edition, the text of the play is preceded by an extensive introduction (15- 63) which includes detailed information and an interesting, authoritative discussion about the comedy’s dates of publication and performance, authorship, literary context, satirical elements, first cast and original quarto edition. This is followed by the play itself (65-199), which is presented in modernised spelling and with a large number of pertinent and useful footnotes that explain words, quotations and other cultural or historical references, as would be expected in a critical edition. The footnotes are particularly helpful here due to the important presence of legal jargon, colloquial language and citations from other plays in the dialogue. An appendix about the British monetary units alluded to in the play and a very extensive list of works cited (201-11) complete the volume. Few facts about the date and authorship of The Woman Turned Bully are known, so the editors have had to do a lot of research and guesswork, quite reasonable and pertinent given the sparse surviving data. They surmise that the premiere must have been before March 1675 and that, taking into consideration certain allusions in the text, the play must have been written no later than summer 1673 (17). As for its authorship, it
ATLANTIS. Journal of the Spanish Association of Anglo-American Studies. 31.1 (June 2009): 197-202 ISSN 0210-6124 198 Jorge Figueroa Dorrego has sometimes been attributed to Aphra Behn, for example by Sara Mendelson, who argues that the play “betrays Aphra’s authorship through numerous details of characterization and style, including lines which Aphra re-used elsewhere” (1987: 212, n. 72), and also that the female protagonist, Betty Goodfield, is “[e]asily recognizable as the young Aphra Behn . . . an example of [her] favourite female character: the bold, witty young woman who disguises herself and runs wild, fighting duels, making assignations, and occasionally proposing marriage. It hardly mattered what, so long as her behaviour was out of harmony with the code of female respectability” (1987: 141). Betty would thus have been paving the way for Hellena, the heroine of The Rover (1677). According to Mendelson, Behn opted for anonymity in this play in order to protect herself after the failure of The Dutch Lover (1673). However, most other Behn scholars have questioned that authorship. For Summers (1915: xxxvii) some parts may be hers, and “the whole conduct of the play is very like her early manner. Beyond this, however, there is no evidence to suggest it is from her pen”. Todd (1996a: xi-xii) agrees that there is no evidence to ascribe it wholly to Behn, but she may have collaborated in it, probably with Thomas Betterton. In her biography of Behn, Todd (1996b: 466, n. 19) insists on this idea and adds that this play has more Latin quotations and legal jargon than Behn normally used, and that suggests a lawyer author (or collaborator). Hughes (2001: 56) sees no grounds for the ascription “beyond the mistaken assumption that no other playwright could create a liberated heroine” and, moreover, “many features seem uncharacteristic of Behn”. The editors concur with the latter critics and conclude that either the author may be “a gentleman of the Inns of Court who decided to try his literary abilities” (28) or the piece may be a collaborative work involving playwrights working for the Duke’s Company. Whoever the author may be, s/he seems to have a very good knowledge not only of legal language and the Inns of Court, but also of contemporary drama and Derbyshire, since these three elements are prominent in the play. Like other Restoration comedies, The Woman Turned Bully blends wit and ‘humours’ with the typical comedic love plot in which young lovers have to outwit elderly characters who try to hinder their relationship prior to a happy ending consisting of multiple weddings. Siblings Betty and Ned Goodfield manage to marry Truman and Lucia respectively in spite of the opposition posed by their mother, Madam Goodfield, and Lucia’s uncle and tutor, Mr. Docket. As is often the case, such conflict is generated by arranged marriage and personal, financial interests. In Betty’s case, her mother has decided to marry her to a member of the wealthy local gentry at Derbyshire (a coxcomb aptly called Alexander Simple). As for Lucia, her uncle Docket refuses to let her marry anyone at all so that he can have control of her dowry. This confrontation between young and old characters is certainly a key motif in the play. The editors point it out but do not elaborate much on the subject; however, it deserves some further comment, because this conflict is not a conventional plot device but rather an explicit argument in the play. At the beginning of this comedy Ned Goodfield complains that his mother did not allow him to go with his friend Truman to the Inns of Court, because she considered London a place of corruption, and made him go to study at Cambridge. Moreover, in three months he will come of age and manage £800 a year. As we have seen, Madam
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Goodfield also arranges her daughter’s marriage, disregarding her wishes; and Docket not only blocks Lucia’s wedding in order to retain her dowry, but also keeps Truman’s estate under control with a heavy mortgage. Truman calls Docket “a covetous Jew” (1.1.149) and, when Ned is told of his mother’s plan to marry his sister Betty to Alexander Simple, he states: “The old people may please themselves in talking, but ‘tis the young ones must do in these cases” (2.1.22-24). Later, commenting on the possible match Madam Goodfield-Docket, Truman tells Betty: “’Tis a shame that young people should be outstripped in their amours by two such old creatures that have not known what love is, and the true ends of marriage, these twenty years. Let’s see who shall be married first of all us . . .” (3.1.306-10). So the whole action of the play is a kind of challenge between the young and the old, which the former manage to win. For that reason, when in the last act Madam Goodfield learns that her two children have married without her consent, she feels disappointed and defeated; similarly, when Docket discovers he has not married Madam Goodfield but her old servant Loveall, he complains that he has been cheated. Although there is the typical comedic reconciliation when Docket orders a dinner and some music to celebrate the weddings, Truman’s final words are a meaningful ending for the subject and the piece: “Gray heads may dote as their dull passions move,/ But only heaven and youth make perfect love” (5.3.172-3). Another important topic in this play is the dichotomy of town versus country. As in other comedies of the period, this duality is presented as a confrontation between the supposed moral corruption, poor quality of life and excessive openness to new, foreign fashions in contemporary London and the assumed innocent, healthy and traditional life in the countryside. Yet, the editors are right to notice that in The Woman Turned Bully this dichotomy does not apply to all the characters regardless of where they come from (37-38), because neither Ned nor Betty nor even Frank, her servant, voice any critique of London life, nor are their ideas or behaviour different from Truman’s, for instance. What is more, although sometimes outspoken, Lucia is not as witty and active as Betty; and both Docket and his clerk Dashwell pay lip service at least to the Puritanical ideas of the time as regards personal conduct and likes, ideas that are very far from the alleged debauchery of the town. It seems to this reader that this dualism may be to a large extent subsumed into that between the young and the old, because country life is mainly – though ambiguously – represented and defended by Madam Goodfield, her servant Loveall and her steward Truppeny, and the town is personified in some respects by Truman, Ned, Betty and Lucia, and in others by the above- mentioned lawyer and his clerk. It is important to notice, though, that none of the town representatives are epitomes of debauchery. Neither Ned nor Truman is a rake. They are witty and brave, but never bawdy or promiscuous. The prologue says it is an “innocent and unprovoking play” (line 9), and this time these recurrent prefatory words are not stock moral rhetoric. The young may challenge the elderly, the female protagonist may be independent, cross-dress and impersonate a bully, and her mother may drink beer and smoke pipes, but, as far as sexuality is concerned, the laws of decorum are never breached on stage. Hughes qualifies this play as “innocuously moral” (1996: 148).
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In the list of “persons represented”, Madam Goodfield is described as “[a] rich country widow, who drinks and takes tobacco, and can’t speak a word out of the country element. She detests the town, but comes up about an emergent law affair” (69). She hates London because she considers it “the very sink of all debauchery” (1.1.24-25), but she goes there in order to arrange her daughter’s wedding. This is allegedly the second time she has visited the city, and she complains about its noises and smells (which she thinks are produced by “the sins of your naughty city, that make it stink above ground” 2.2.120-21). Madam Goodfield likes only Derbyshire ale and Virginian tobacco rather than the Spanish variety (notice the chauvinism implied). She believes smoking “comforts the stomach, warms the heart, and cheers the brain”, and is good for rheum too (2.2.177-178). London ladies smoke too but hide themselves to do so, whereas she hates dissimulation and thinks smoking is not sinful but healthy. Her routines are very conservative: she always comes home before sunset and goes to bed early. Madam Goodfield is therefore a noteworthy character indeed. Her servant Loveall is also aware of the difference between country and city life, but she occasionally voices her preference for the latter, as when she comments on the serenade music, which she thinks “much better than our country harp and bagpipe” (2.3.28), or when she confesses that, if she knew there were so many men in London, she would not have stayed in Derbyshire for so long. In other words, she likes men more than country life. As for Trupenny, he also criticises London ale but it is easy to take him to a tavern and get him drunk. In act 4 he sings a song (“sung all wrong, in a drunken humour”) that meaningfully starts “O London, wicked London town!” (4.3.17). The lyrics invoke ladies to reform their lives and to pray instead of having sex, and entreat gallants to also repent and drink beer rather than sack. The town men who hear it comment that it is a foolish song sung by a drunken country fop. A third important issue in the play, and the one the title refers to, is gender crossing. Betty Goodfield comes to London in man’s clothes and in search of a “town gallant” (1.2.11). Being unacquainted with city life, she asks her experienced, witty female servant, Frank, for help on how to imitate a bully. Interestingly enough, the latter advises her to imitate plays because, “just as some raw poets borrow their scenes from the fop-company they frequent, in the same manner many raw gallants square their behaviour to their fop-scenes” (17-20). Betty has never attended any performance but has read many plays, so she feels confident to follow the advice and “discourse out of plays” (24-25). She does this by sprinkling her conversation with French words and literal phrases taken from recent comedies by Dryden, Etherege, Shadwell and Ravenscroft, all conveniently identified in the footnotes. On the one hand, as the editors indicate in the third section of their introduction, Betty’s stratagem makes The Woman Turned Bully offer an interesting counterpoint to Buckingham’s The Rehearsal (1672), which parodied the heroic drama of the time, because Betty engages in a kind of burlesque of the witty and often rakish gallants of contemporary comedies. But her impersonation must consist of more things than quoting from plays; she must be impudent, swear and curse when she talks with men, wake up late and come back home late too, always bribing or beating watchmen, breaking windows and serenading his mistress. That is to say, she must behave as rakish comedy heroes too, who are usually blustering, insolent and hectoring (hence bullies).
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The editors are also right to point out that “the theatre served . . . as a school of fashion from which playgoers – or readers – attempted to take their cue in behaviour and conversation” (40). Consequently, some texts of the 1670s censured the affectation and folly of those people who imitated stage heroes. No doubt drama was an important source of behavioural patterns that contributed to the self-fashioning of Restoration men and women. On the other hand, in this play this whole question is related to another common practice in contemporary comedy: cross-dressing. Like other comedic heroines of the time, Betty wears men’s clothes in order to hide both her identity and gender, so that she can meet young gallants freely and safely (see Pearson 1988: passim; Rothstein and Kavenik 1988: 168). Her impersonation raises interesting issues related to gender studies. Betty’s worry about how to pass for a town gallant obviously entails a reflection on what masculinity means in the Restoration period. But, obviously, the play also explores what femininity signifies at the time, the situation of women then, and the different strategies they devise in order to develop their own identities within that situation. It is interesting to contrast Betty to Lucia, who is not so active but who voices harsh complaints about her confinement. In conclusion, this is an entertaining comedy with a good plot and engaging characters, which deserves more academic consideration because it raises interesting issues related to genre, gender, society and culture in the late seventeenth century. Many of these issues are mentioned in the introduction of this edition, although I would have preferred to see some of them more elaborated than they are, instead of, for instance, so much information about the machinery, costumes and music necessary for a performance of this play, or so much guesswork about the possible cast of the premiere, with results that I find of doubtful relevance as they stand. Yet this disagreement does not intend to question at all the value of this edition, which I certainly consider courageous, original and scholarly. I would like to encourage the editors, as well as other colleagues and publishers, to continue unearthing fascinating works like this, because there are many interesting texts from the Restoration period still unavailable to the general public or without an easily accessible critical edition.
Works Cited
Baker, David E., Isaac Reed and Stephen Jones 1812: Biographia Dramatica; or, A Companion to the Playhouse. 3 Vols. London: Longman et al. Bevis, Richard 1988: English Drama. Restoration and Eighteenth Century, 1660-1784. London: Longman. Brown, Laura 1981: English Dramatic Form, 1660-1760. New Haven: Yale UP. Dobrée, Bonamy 1924: Restoration Comedy, 1660-1700. Oxford: Clarendon P. Fisk, Deborah P., ed. 2000: The Cambridge Companion to English Restoration Theatre. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Hughes, Derek 1996: English Drama 1660-1700. Oxford: Oxford UP: ––––– 2001: The Theatre of Aphra Behn. Houndmills: Palgrave. Hume, Robert 1976: The Development of English Drama in the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon P.
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Langbaine, Gerard 1691: An Account of the English Dramatick Poets. Oxford: George West and Henry Clements. Mendelson, Sara H. 1987: The Mental World of Stuart Women: Three Studies. Brighton: Harvester. Nicoll, Allardyce 1923: A History of Restoration Drama, 1660-1700. Cambridge: Cambridge UP. Owen, Susan, ed. 2001: A Companion to Restoration Drama. Oxford: Blackwell. Pearson, Jacqueline 1988: The Prostituted Muse. Images of Women and Women Dramatists 1642- 1737. London: Harvester. Quinsey, Katherine, ed. 1996: Broken Boundaries. Women and Feminism in Restoration Drama. Lexington: UP of Kentucky. Rothstein, Eric and Frances M. Kavenik 1988: The Designs of Carolean Comedy. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP. Summers, Montague 1915: ‘Memoir of Mrs Behn’. Montague Summers, ed. The Works of Aphra Behn. London: Heinemann. xv-lxiv. Sutherland, James 1969: English Literature of the Late Seventeenth Century. Oxford: Clarendon P. Todd, Janet 1996a: ‘Textual Information’. Janet Todd, ed. The Works of Aphra Behn. Vol 5 of The Plays, 1671-1677. London: Pickering. xi-xix. ––––– 1996b: The Secret Life of Aphra Behn. London: Andre Deutsch.
Received 30 July 2008 Revised version accepted 12 December 2008
Jorge Figueroa-Dorrego is Tenured Lecturer of English Literature at the University of Vigo. He obtained his PhD at the University of Santiago de Compostela in 1998 with a dissertation on Aphra Behn’s prose fiction. His main research areas are early modern women writers, Restoration literature, humour and gender studies. He is the author of various papers and monographs (such as 1999. Aphra Behn and 2002. Tecendo tramas, fiando ficcións), and co-editor of several collections of essays on those subjects (e.g. 2003. Re-shaping the Genres: Restoration Women Writers and 2003. Revisiting and Reinterpreting Aphra Behn).
Address: Universidade de Vigo, Facultade de Filoloxía e Tradución, Campus Universitario,36310 Vigo. Tel.:+34 986 812084. Fax: +34 986 812380
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Acknowledgements
The Editors wish to thank all those members of the Editorial Board of Atlantis who have generously contributed with their time and expertise to the preparation of this issue.
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